The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 1.

02 Wednesday Sep 2026

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Being, bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, consciousness, culture, History, knowledge, metaphysics, nature, philosophy, religion, spirituality, time

Fragment 228, Word count: 907.

Tags: history, philosophy, bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, time, religion, nature, knowledge, culture, Being, metaphysics.

Part 1.

In the long record of human worrying about and searching out the boundaries, possibilities, and peculiarities of existence as a person, a dominant feature noticed has been a stark bi-modality in the structure of experience. The duality is between, on one hand, an individual interiority of dramatic caring devoted to searching through marginally coherent sensitivities in aid of the improvisation of an arc of personal movement and agency; and, on the other hand, a vast impersonal externality constitutive of the whole enveloping setting that specifically locates and grounds every caring interiority. This fundamental duality has made possible and perhaps inevitable a quarrel over the identification of apex existence. Which of them was first, which the more impressive power? From the very early conceptions of deity in the traces of human lives it seems that the first identification of apex existence went to the creative power of dramatically caring teleological agency, but in an abstracted form free of the restricting localization of embodiment, so both like and unlike human caring, similarly self-aware and expressive but exaggerated in all ways: omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, an ultimate transcendence. Regrettably, this early assessment of apex existence featured forms of caring teleology gone wild and untethered from normal embodiment, not only in deity but also in flagrant over-personification of numerous things in nature that included examples of animism, disembodied spirits, magic, angels and demons, witches and wizards. In the context of a world full of teleology gone wild and untethered the caring interiority of regular embodied individuals seemed to be an inferior imitation, dismissible and insignificant.

Object Dominant Knowledge and Being

Probably there has always been a minority report, or a minority suspicion, that the brute actuality of enveloping nature is what really merits the title of apex existence. Nature has an implacability, a vastness of uncaring determinism, an infinity of extension and a solid core of stability that suggests eternity. Those impressions of infinite and eternal presence give the vast externality a plausible priority, a primordiality, and with it plausibility as the source and matrix of embodied teleology, of caring-ideality at the scale of the human individual, and so plausibility as the evident face of ultimate Being. The problem here is that our surroundings of brute actuality do not present any evidence of deliberation over options, of making choices expressive of marginal preferences or of desperation, not a trace of empathy or of enjoying the pleasure of improvisation, which is to say, no evidence of the power to be creative. This problem notwithstanding, the minority view has inspired the work of a ‘party of Nature’ which has much to show for itself, including the accomplishments of mathematics, useful discoveries of different categories of forces and substances, and of predictable regularities in the way certain important things exist and interact with one another.

The party of Nature goes so far as to dismiss entirely the creative input of caring-ideality from conceptions of reality. One effect of this, within the general effect of diminishing teleology gone wild and untethered from embodiment, is rejection of magical thinking and of once ubiquitous superstitions of angels and demons, witches and wizards,. However, it goes further and also dismisses the creative input of personal caring-ideality. In this way knowledge can be conceived without consideration of individual knowers. On that view knowledge is some kind of impersonal map or model of the externality, of objective reality. This transitions easily into a claim that features of Nature are more than happenstance contingencies but instead are primordial and in a certain sense transcendently imposed as fundamental Being. The move from a description of how something is to the assertion of its necessity is the creation of metaphysics. (Deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ was observed to be invalid by David Hume (1711-76).)

Eternal Necessities vs Agents of Ephemeral and Contested Futurity

Given the structural duality of experience, the choice of one side over the other leans into some particular metaphysics, which means it makes a claim about primordial or ultimate Being. In the case of caring-ideality, any claim of its effective existence as locally improvised interventions into the creation of shape in events contradicts the universal uncaring determinism of Nature-as-Being, and as such presents ideality as existentially anomalous and non-reducible in such a way as to require a separate set of descriptive concepts, including the concept of a radically unfinished world with an ever-opening edge at the coming into existence of an indeterminate non-actual future always largely still to be created but pre-conceived and made actual in certain of its fragments in teleological arcs expressive of the dramatic caring of individual agents. Teleology is a living in the future. On this view the material world is a stage-set supporting the ephemeral dramas of caring that make any of it matter, the caring-dramas of individually embodied agents of a contested future.

Either of two presuppositions make it impossible to recognize the unique creativity of individually embodied caring teleology. One is elimination of caring-ideality from conceptions of fundamental existence, as in materialism. The other is conceptions of caring teleology gone wild and untethered as in angels, demons, deities, and inappropriately personified items of nature. This alienation of caring-teleology from the only context in which it is experienced directly, in expressions of ordinary embodied individuals, is regrettably the universal norm, so that even in cultural settings which conceive caring-teleology as apex existence, ordinary individuals are not granted the dignity appropriate to that metaphysical status.

… To Be Continued.

The Intuition of Apex Existence

16 Sunday Aug 2026

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apex existence, caring-ideality, culture, drama, fearful unknowing, Fichte, History, hive-mind, inquisitive innocence, knowledge, Luther, Nietzsche, philosophy, science, spirituality, teleology, time, vast externality

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Fragment 227, word count: 2,091.

Tags: philosophy, history, fearful unknowing, apex existence, caring-ideality, inquisitive innocence, vast externality, teleology, time, hive-mind, knowledge, drama, Luther, Fichte, Nietzsche.

An interest in philosophy is inseparable from an interest in history because philosophy exists first within the fabric of drama in which people live and that we feel ourselves playing out day to day. ‘Philosophy’ here denotes a configuration of orientation, a culturally shared set of features that structure the subjective interiority of individually embodied future-opening caring personalities. This is ‘wallpaper’ philosophy, uncritically familiar as casual background encompassing ways of understanding what is foundational, primordial, and ultimate within the personal experience of human existence. There is also artisanal and ‘fine art’ philosophy, original questioning of orientation from inquisitive innocence, resulting in texts or utterances, personal voices expressing that questioning. Whereas there is a reliable market for normal fine art as investment grade items of luxury decor, the audience for artisanal philosophy is typically non-commercial and almost entirely scholarly. Artisanal philosophers mostly form academic guilds, clusters and streams of influence, homage, and conceptual cohesion, each stream with school-defining celebrities, methods, questions, and pre-approved conclusions. The thing to watch for is that philosophical conceptions sometimes burst beyond their niche of origin and change the cultural taste in wallpaper.

From this context, it is clear that the work and ideas of any inquisitively innocent writer must be considered in relation to the wallpaper ideology-of-reality at their cultural time and place, the ancient Greeks in relation to Greek mythology, or Enlightenment-era rationalists in relation to post-Reformation Christianity, aristocracy, and monarchy, for example. Greek philosophers often conflicted with their ambient culture of Olympian gods. Socrates was executed on the charge of introducing new gods. Again, during the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a politically radical philosophical movement that was officially persecuted. However, usually the philosophical ‘fine art’ tradition has accepted much of the ‘wallpaper’ embraced by politically powerful factions who benefit from and defend the dystopian culture of their violently stratified societies.

Existence as Caring-Ideality

The most common philosophical conceptions of specifically human existence, existence as embodied caring-ideality, have been diminishingly oversimplified, reflecting the requirements of ambient culture. In the context of Christendom, for example, it was mortally dangerous to propose a concept of human spirituality with anything but a minimum of creative freedom, for fear of seeming to rival deity. The shocking degree of this problematic self-denial or self-effacing in the legacy of human reflections on what is ultimate and primordial in our existence defines the core of philosophy.

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

Metaphysically Apex Existence

The only direct acquaintance anyone has of ideality is their own experience of living as a dramatically caring person embodied in the world, supplemented by expressions of bonding over shared caring by familiar people and other animals. It is clear from cultural constructs all around this that caring-and-creative-ideality is often enough intuited as an anomalous metaphysically apex existence. The materials of our surroundings overwhelmingly lack evidence of a complicated and peculiarly individual interiority of caring out of which they express well-being or ill-being, urgent intent, or discretionary attachments. They do not question, remember, or foresee their future. They present a specifically material nature that is already everything it can be. In relation to that material nature, the desperate vulnerability and power of foresight and effective agency in personal experience is taken to qualify as anomalous, with a different order of purposive outward reach, sensitivity, apprehension, conception, and ideation, a metaphysically apex existence. However, because of the vastness of fearful unknowing in human experience, and our genius for forming imitative attachments, there has been a collective unwillingness to accept the exclusiveness of this apex existence. The specific fear often preventing this recognition has been fear that accepting the status of metaphysical apex would enrage some other more powerful metaphysical apex and result in retribution in the form of punishment and destruction. In the common discourse of communities, the freedom and creativity of ideality has been conceptually and culturally alienated from humanity, exported to suppositional other beings, and replaced in ourselves by diminishing versions of determinism.

Fragment 216, October 2, 2025, Self Portrait as Spirit (Word count: 311) deity

Two additional reasons that have made it variably dangerous to acknowledge the full creative freedom of embodied ideality are coercive hierarchical politics and deterministic materialism. First it was politically dangerous to recognize too much inherent dignity and power in individuals universally because that would undermine justifications for the coercive top-down social control and human-on-human parasitism that hierarchical power arrangements manifest. When the demands of apex social factions began to be contested, there was a cultural turn to materialist explanations for everything, banishing all spontaneous personally discretionary teleology and insisting that the brute physicality of nature required everything to exists exactly as it was, is, and has to be, completely determined by mathematical cosmic laws. There is no room anywhere in this strictly scientific view for the dignity and discretionary power of individual creative freedom.

Even with conceptions of ideality distorted by these manifestations of fear, it still must be attributed in some form to ordinary individuals because we obviously care and impose our dramas of caring in arcs of teleology vectoring future-ward, but ordinary ideality is culturally required to be restricted to include only enough creative freedom to justify individuals being punished for certain actions, and otherwise overwhelmingly determined by forces beyond ourselves. In the process of being exported and alienated from individuals in the conceptual construction of communal cultures, the personal ecosystem of ideality as lived has been disassembled and reduced to subsets of its existence in versions of idealism. In Plato’s idealism, for example, there is an eternally unchanging primordial mind, the One, contemplating the complete set of Ideal Forms of objective existence. Personal discretion in the face of a risky and only partly predictable future has been removed along with the whole lived complexity of agency-in-time. An even more common form of exported apex idealism retains the creative improvisational spontaneity of ordinary ideality but completely removes the limitations of embodiment by conceiving the apex ideality as omnipotent, omniscient, and disembodied, resulting in the terrifying concept of deity.

Determinism

Determinism in various forms has been the official version of human behaviour and mental activity. The determining forces mainly fall into the categories of deity or brute nature, so either an external primordially apex teleology or a world of utterly unreflective materiality in which any identification of teleology is false, deceptive, a mirage. (Note that mistakes and illusions are exclusively features of ideality.) A third category of determining force sometimes separated off from the others is a universal human nature which imposes, from within every individual, urges, impulses, drives, and pre-conceptions which remove any profound freedom or spontaneous creativity from individuals even if their occurrence is so random or chaotic that predictability is difficult. The Freudian model of subjectivity represents the scientific requirement by attributing an individual’s self-sourced motivation (id) to animal biology, in a remodelling of the conception of human nature from feudal Christendom featuring enslavement by the inherited taint from the sin of Adam. Vicious motivation from inherent vice is taken to be easy to reduce to mechanisms, and so suited to scientific explanation.

Knowledge of the Vast Externality

Both Rationalists and Empiricists were focused on understanding knowledge. Mathematical science was showing great power and promise. In this niche intellectual culture there was considerable optimism about finally achieving an empowering certainty about the non-teleological vast externality that envelopes the human body, not ephemeral or localized but plausibly constitutive of eternal and universal Nature, a presence that earns some recognition as perhaps the actual apex existence, especially with recognition of the power of human ideality repressed and conceptually alienated. Rationalists and Empiricists each had a core conception of that ultimate object of knowledge, the vast externality to be grasped. Both accepted that their object of knowledge was elementally prior to and more important by far than knowers. For Rationalists it was their version of Logos, the underlying principle of math, language, intelligence, and material reality, at once interior and exterior to knowing individuals. For Empiricists it was the world of brute actuality, measurable and map-able nature comprising the whole cosmic setting of human lives, distinctly exterior to the knowing of individuals, and revealed only by objective perception.

Martin Luther as Philosopher:

The Metaphysics of Eternal Necessities vs

The Metaphysics of Creative Caring-Ideality

Luther merits considerable credit as a philosopher. So much of modernity derives from his assertion of “Justification by faith alone”, which translates directly into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I exist.” (Descartes’ dualism, featuring extended substance and thinking substance, was his inevitably awkward effort to combine all-determining mathematical ‘Logos’ partly revealed in clear and distinct perceptions, with the Lutheran subjective power to overcome the most profound doubt in a creative act of self-definition, all in the context of an ambient culture of an all-determining Catholic Deity.) “Justification by faith alone” also translates directly into Kant’s vision of the self-legislating moral agent, also into Fichte’s self-positing “I”, and into Kierkegaard’s self-sufficient inwardness. Fichte’s vision is completely congruent with Sartre’s existentialism featuring “existence before essence” as the heart of human existence. Luther’s assertion of an individual’s power of faith in the context of unanswerable uncertainty is pure metaphysics, a recognition of the anomalous creative power of individual caring ideality. As such, his intervention was crucial in the historic shift of influence between two great adversarial systems of reality, first, the metaphysics of eternal necessities, asserted by Plato, Christianity, and science, for example, here contested at last by the metaphysics of creative caring-ideality in embodied individuals.

Luther and those inspired by him were not focused on knowledge. Luther experienced profound uncertainty about what he considered most important in existence, the presence of God, creative and discretionary teleological caring-ideality as apex existence. That vast externality for Luther was a cloud of unknowing, unanswerable doubt, instead of knowledge. In the face of that uncertainty Luther turned to the creative power of caring ideality interior to each individual, the power to create and impose structure within the drama of living. To choose faith is to set the future shape of the personal drama of caring. What matters in the future-facing life of a person is not determined by any vast externality, since no externality includes or creates a person’s caring or the future opened by that caring.

Luther, Nietzsche, and Hive-Mind

“Justification by faith …” cashes out as: you can’t live in the world as a spiritual power of agency if you are expressing a culturally imposed hive-mind, doing conventional things such as ‘good works’ assigned conventional values. Instead, to own your apex existence (or in Luther’s case your likeness to apex existence) you have to go profoundly alone, to a personal interiority which no one else can surveil, judge, police, or stipulate. This rejection of immersion in the orientation of a human herd was something Nietzsche got directly from Luther.

Fragment 181, October 8, 2021, The Loneliest Un-Loneliness (word count: 913)

The Philosophical Turn From Knowledge to Drama

Nietzsche has been identified as a pioneer existentialist and as a Romantic (recall Wagner), expressing both of these conflicting but closely related visions of specifically human existence, each inspired by Fichte’s philosophical voice. Romantics and existentialists are not so interested in knowledge or any grand and ultimate objects of knowledge (remarkably, since Fichte’s big project was constructing a science of knowledge). Instead, they are focused on the dramas of living as a person embodied in the world, on the dramatic quality of personal experience. Drama was the new focus because drama is the temporal shape of any person’s caring, improvised among stakes and risks in the ephemerality of living, and as such caring-in-time is metaphysically anomalous as apex existence. Here is the epochal turn in western philosophy away from the metaphysics of eternal necessities and toward the metaphysics of subjective caring-ideality. The former is the foundation of everything politically conservative, whereas the latter leans into a profoundly different political future which is yet to be worked out, a post-hive-mind collective bonding. The looming of this unfinished business is the root of the current malaise of the polarized and aimless Euro-American cultural system.

Cultures of the past preserved ways of facing a fearful unknowing. It is perverse to cling to that condition. The very common impulse to preserve at all costs a legacy language, religion, or the charming trophies of a wealth class or other niche culture always leads to a repetitive dead end of violent exceptionalism, cruel repression, and disabling isolation. No communal bonding can ultimately negate the metaphysically anomalous creativity of every individual caring-ideality.

Fearful Unknowing and Hive-Mind Superego

14 Tuesday Jul 2026

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creativity, hive-mind, ideality, metaphysics, personal identity, pessimism, philosophy, religion, Romanticism, social hierarchy, spirituality, subordination, time, unknowing

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Fragment 226 (word count: 1,110)

Tags: romanticism, pessimism, subordination, personal identity, hierarchy, hive-mind, unknowing, creativity, time, metaphysics, ideality.

Legacy Pessimism

There is a foundational pessimism in human experience as a legacy of the fear that dominated people of our past. Embodied/ teleological existence as lived by individuals is ephemeral, fragile, and vulnerable in an often unhelpful and sometimes apparently hostile environment. In our vast unknowing of fundamental principles of nature and existence, there is a strong temptation to over-personify environmental occurrences, to interpret them as messages and expressions of judgment by disembodied caring powers who, like mysterious and unreliable parents, need to be appeased, placated, obeyed, and given gifts and tokens of adulation and acknowledgements of our inferiority, in hope of kindlier treatment in life and possibly after death. This has often been the best we can think of to understand and control the conditions upon which we depend for life. In this context, pessimism is based on a disparaging conception of what is essential to existence as an embodied/ teleological individual, starting with vast inferiority to unfathomable spirits moving nature, coupled with our apparent predisposition to displease and disappoint those same definitive judges of what is good and worthy in our actions, desires, and inquisitive subjectivity.

Within this ancestral background of pessimism and fearful unknowing, certain assertions of guiding heights, of supreme forces imposing shape on the caring and strivings of human life, came to be broadly accepted and culturally enshrined across many different communities: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, communal supremacy, and trophy supremacy. Although every one of these imposing forces was questionable, sometimes disputed, and always mysterious in its ultimate justification, the general experience of vast and fearful unknowing made acceptance of them practical as aids to survival. They formed a framework of personal orientation that was culturally distributed enough to establish a stable and predictable communal life. One main reason for the questionability of these particular guiding heights has always been that the supremacy of something means the subordination of something else, in this case the subordination of certain individuals by those asserting their own superiority as embodiments of natural and supernatural supremacies. Personal superiority becomes family superiority which in turn becomes elaborately stratified as a hierarchy of social classes on a descending scale of privilege and dignity. What was for a long time the sovereignty of a violent aristocratic class expressing masculine supremacy in alliance with patriarchs of religious life claiming knowledge of disembodied supremacy, developed, with the increased importance of markets and long-distance travel, into an ethos that could be called the romanticism of an aristo-commercial hive-mind. It is a founding feature of the informal ethos of romanticism to celebrate superiority and the freedom, power, pleasure, and deep sadness that come with it, sadness from the practical necessity of setting aside the question of ultimate justice. In the setting aside of certain questions of justice and injustice, romanticism is the willing embrace of dramatically engaging illusions as a shelter from the nihilism that its adherents believe follows from an unfiltered gaze upon human existence, which is to say, from philosophy. At its core, romanticism is a principled pessimism coupled with a consolation prize, with emphasis always on the thrill of the prize for those who win it.

It is not surprising to find the romantic ethos expressed, informally, in the central illusions of the aristo-commercial cultural hive-mind. The force of ‘supremacy’ in these illusions is an assertion of particular dimensions of subordination inherent in the existence of individuals. So, it is asserted, individuals have a need to accept some place of subordination in the most-masculine-first hierarchies of strength and force. Likewise, in this discourse, individuals need subordination to collective practices, judgments, norms, expectations, and assignments of personal identity. Further on the matter of personal identity, and in particular of personal value, worth, or dignity, individuals are subordinate to the value of trophies culturally stipulated as the uniquely legitimate objects of desire, competitive striving, satisfaction in possession, and definers of personal quality. Most of all, in many cultures, individuals are taught that they need subordination to the disembodied First and Greatest Teleology whose whim and limitless power is the source and engine of all existence, of meaning, purpose, and drama in existence, and in particular of what is good or bad behaviour and thinking, as declared by moral and religious patriarchs. Such assertions of individual subordination, when they are structural features of a developed communal culture, soon exist within the interior orientation lens of individuals as what Freud called a superego, the cultural mechanism that stipulates in every individual the particular shape of subordination demanded by the long legacy of community wisdom, as well as the shape of any particular individual’s legitimate aspirations, hopes, and dreams.

What makes such cultural assertions of supremacy and subordination illusions is that individuals have no inherent need of any of them. What is inherent to the sociability of individual caring-ideality does not include subordination or any essential needs for subordination. All forces of subordination originate outside an individual and are imposed on individuals because they provide asymmetrical benefits to a hegemonic faction. Nothing inherent to individual ideality opposes engaging with others always as equals. This is because what is really supreme is the inherent and individually sufficient creativity of embodied caring-ideality, the power of positing an ephemeral existence as future-existence in ceaselessly opening time, as a personally opening drama to be shaped from the interior of the individual in effortful engagement with exterior forces and structures including a surroundings of embodied caring idealities. Embodied ideality lives in the future, in the non-actuality that is the anomalous reality of subjectivity. Individuals are fundamentally self-defining in this way as a matter of anomalous metaphysical existence prior to external markers or the declarations of judges (natural or supernatural), and so also prior to markers of gender, whether cultural or biological.

Metaphysical creativity occurs entirely at the level of the embodied individual. There is no communal version, and so no inherently superior category of creativity with a possible claim to override individuals. The assertion of communal supremacy is based on fear, in the context of vast unknowing within a fragile and unreliable environment, and in the false hope of safety in numbers, in a dissolving into the herd. The costs to individuals of communal supremacy far exceed the benefits. The culturally implanted superego which shapes this subordination is the mechanism of hive-mind, and cultural hive-minds are a debilitating prison for human individuals. Hive-mind superegos always block awareness of the metaphysically anomalous creativity of individuals by broadly imposing a disparaging and false depiction of what is interior and inherent to human existence as embodied ideality. That is the foundational illusion of any hive-mind superego at all levels of the bonding of individuals into collective identities.

Related Fragments:

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 219, December 23, 2025, The Veil of Illusions (word Count: 2,841)

Fragment 220, February 21, 2026, De-Constituting Power (word count: 525)

Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

16 Monday Mar 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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aristocracy, books, creativity, culture, dominance culture, freedom, History, humanism, ideality, literacy, metaphysics, philosophy, politics, Power, theology, time, violence

Fragment 221, Word count: 2,971.

Tags: history, philosophy, theology, power, culture, aristocracy, dominance, violence, literacy, ideality, time, freedom, creativity, politics, metaphysics, humanism.

The spirit of two philosophical traditions runs through the Fragments of In The Blind-Spot. First is the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, a city on the south shore of the Black Sea into which Diogenes was born around 410 BCE. Diogenes was the original philosophical Cynic, elaborating the idea that social convention, culture, is an artificial lens of interpretation passing as elemental reality but effectively alienating individuals from the natural primordiality of their existence as human. Diogenes practiced a strict form of de-culturing in his shockingly unusual way of living, to be free of what he identified as false social reality. The Cynic tradition developed also in Epicureanism (“ignore the talk going around about gods”) and to some degree in Stoic self-possession, all exploring a distinct humanism in the ancient Greek cultural system.

Fragment 27, April 12, 2012, The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans (word count: 2,898)

Fragment 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (word count: 6,844)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is also in the vicinity of Diogenes but is partly disqualified by his devotion to the supremacy of “the general will”. Rousseau, proud citizen of Calvinist Geneva, did, on the other hand, present a critique of the mainstream culture of arts and sciences of his time, and generally wrote in opposition to the style of life supposedly envied and sought after by everyone and exemplified by Voltaire, a life of wealth, privilege, celebrity, high consumption, and patronage of the arts, inevitably accompanied by pride in social superiority and exclusive elite class membership.

The second tradition is clearly related, being arguably a development from ancient humanism, namely the modern Euro-American Enlightenment, but especially, within that broad cultural movement, the Lutheran spirit of Protestantism, which developed alongside a body of discoveries in mathematical science (building from strong accomplishments imported from the Islamic world and ancient India), all in the context of the Republic of Letters, a network of independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities, trained to be active in secular professions, it energized a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in the international language of scholarship, Latin, releasing an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of advanced literacy. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to get beyond and get free of the most dominating cultures and factions of Christendom: The Roman Church, aristocracy, and monarchy, a classic example of a tight working alliance between forces of dominance-by-violence and those of dominance-by-dread-of-the-supernatural, all grounded in a metaphysical ideology featuring a disembodied almighty will-to-power. Agents of the Church acted as indispensable mediators between the righteous wrath of God and helpless individual sinners. Within that entrenched dystopia a revival of ancient Epicurean metaphysics, notably in the effective materialism of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) enabled a radical critique of the Old Regime’s institutions of sovereign dominance and promoted a more strictly scientific world-view. Materialism undermined claims by the upper strata of society to be enforcing the will of the supernatural almighty.

Both science and Protestantism were intellectual revolts against the established religious edifice of knowledge guarded ferociously by the Roman Church hierarchy, although they expressed two starkly opposing metaphysical foundations. Lutheran protestantism rests on an identification of faith as a spiritual act of autonomous individual agency, eliminating any mediation between the individual and primordial reality. Any such external mediation, such as the Roman Church’s mediation between the individual and the Deity, is a portal for misinformation, illegitimate domination, and abusive exploitation. There has been a phenomenal philosophical evolution from Luther’s conception of the inherent spiritual autonomy of individual subjective ideality. The tendency of that evolution is to retain a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, first attributed to an almighty Deity, but increasingly to relocate that transcendence from the remote Deity to the individual intelligences of human personalities. We see this worked out by a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte. Fichte’s drift to a cosmic absolute self-positing “I” seems to flip the progression on its head, and that cosmic absolutism was taken in a nostalgic Aristotelian direction by Hegel, also Lutheran. The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – subjectivity is a monadic interiority; reviving aspects of Aristotle

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – moral agency is self-legislating, requires no sovereign commands, no externally sourced superego

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) – subjectivity has the form of a self-positing “I”, Existentialism’s dawning

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) – phenomenology of spirit, investigation of spirit in the shape of history, the Absolute connects Hegel to Fichte

Max Stirner (1806-56) – a version of self-possession universalizing Machiavelli

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) – “…an act of will in self-sufficient inwardness”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) – God is dead. Ubermench is beyond the reach of cultural norms.

In the Enlightenment energy system of Protestantism, the Republic of Letters, and Science, following the celebrated humanism of the Renaissance in which Medieval Christendom searched out the intellectual accomplishments of alien cultures that it recognized as more advanced, Protestantism was an engine promoting the spread of literacy beyond the professional scribal classes to the population at large. John Wycliffe inspired a movement for popular vernacular literacy in the 1380’s, promoting Bible reading as essential personal piety, an early expression of the spirit of Protestantism that highlights its origins in the culture of literacy. Science especially enabled the accumulation of an even vaster edifice of new knowledge. However, science never managing to replace the old metaphysics of Christian theology because its rejection of the concept of human spirituality was never convincing. These antagonistic culture-pools settled into a truce with each other and with the legacy of the aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence.

Fragment 163, May 11, 2020, A Western Project (word count: 750)

Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

John Wycliffe (1328-1384) – popular vernacular literacy, the Bible in vernacular languages

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) – the Earth is not the centre of the universe

Martin Luther (1483-1546) – individual justification by faith alone

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – the Earth moves

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – Cogito, ergo sum. anti-Aristotelian physics, mathematics, metaphysics

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – mass, distance, & the universal law of gravitational attraction

The French Revolution (1789-99) – sovereignty of the National Assembly

Culture Pools in the Historical Narrative

Already from this sketch of philosophical influences, it is apparent that a historical narrative, especially of the Euro-American cultural system, but with forays beyond, is a core interest in the Fragments, in which narrative the focus becomes the profound confrontation between an aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence (still dominant, still dystopian) and certain counter-cultures inherently antagonistic to it and partly stifled under its dominance.

Aristocratic Dystopia: The Culture of Dominance by Violence

Because of the ongoing ascendance of the aristocratic-violence culture focused on competitive masculine strength-testing with strictly limited empathy, current and previous ‘civilized’ societies have all been dystopian systems of top-down parasitism derived originally from the culture of animal herding on the Great Eurasian Steppe. For techniques of herd parasitism to be applied to human communities after violent conquest, effective stabilization of extractive practices required construction of a haze of popular illusions in which hierarchy is created by setting up commanding authority in certain persons who are credible as cultural icons of dominance, and as such become internalized by individuals as cultural elements of a superego. The human receptivity to authoritative superego figures is a spiritual vulnerability trained through the long childhood years of dependence on parents. Dominance culture consistently constructs an enduring type of culture-bound collective, effectively a human hive-mind, bound together by a set of culturally embedded illusions of the primal and ultimate supremacy of certain forces: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, and trophy supremacy, all reinforcing the hierarchical pattern of the dominant faction. Aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture first created the illusion of masculine supremacy in which rights belong to the strongest. Masculine supremacy sets up the most successfully violent persons as superego icons in aid of enforcing obedience and loyalty in a hierarchical social order: an all-inclusive food-chain of top-down command and value extraction, promoted as the primal and ultimate Great Chain of Being.

Disembodied supremacy culture developed into an edifice of authoritative knowledge of primal and ultimate things, largely non-evident or hidden things, claimed to be selectively revealed to the rare chosen prophet. (theology) Disembodied supremacy involves an imagined contrast and conflict between ordinary human embodied ideality and an ideality that is cosmically primordial and as such prior to all embodiment, unrestricted by embodiment, all-creative. Disembodied supremacy sets up certain charismatic persons as superego icons, persons asserting their special knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits, based on a claim of being divinely chosen to receive revelations of the otherwise hidden ultimate Truth. Behind those visible persons looms the imagined Deity within its cloud of unknowing. Disembodied supremacy culture exploits the human tendency to personify everything, an overuse of the ability of embodied ideality to recognize in external phenomena the alien dramas of separate emotionally engaged wills, to recognize evidence of external ideality expressing its personal caring, knowing, and intending. This ability is the portal to all-important sociability and empathy, but inappropriate recognition of this kind results in fear of powerful disembodied aristocrats (lords) in the sky and in nature, violently coercive forces of willful self-assertion with strong excitable intentions. Their having power implies strictly limited empathy, as is typical of supremacist masculinity, and their disembodiment implies power beyond the predictably physical. Such invisible power inspires a pervasive inescapable dread.

In the precarious life of human individuals within nature and among other humans, the illusion of collective supremacy is easily sold as a necessary condition for safety in numbers. Collective supremacy sets up certain authoritative/ powerful persons as superego icons, persons asserting their uniquely authentic expression of the collective as the transcendent home for its people.

A culture of trophy supremacy is acted out and projected by the life of looting aristocrats or oligarchs. As apparently the most delicious form of gratification, chosen by the strongest, it tends to be imitated universally, derived from masculine supremacy and culturally accepted as the universal measure of personal value. Trophy supremacy sets up envied celebrities with the most property or the best property as superego icons, role models.

Collective Drama

This set of supremacist illusions, sometimes with still others (such as family supremacy or language supremacy), tend to form a mutually supportive structure, such that masculine supremacy is supported by the assertion that divine will determines everything including social hierarchy and individual power. The aristocratic obsession with trophies tends to convince everyone that competing for celebrity status is inherent in human nature. Collective supremacy is proclaimed by the authorities of both disembodied and masculine supremacy to help bind their flocks of subordinates in an illusion of shard collective welfare. Effective hive-mind construction does not, however, require the whole set. Any one of them can bind a collection of people together by training all to share the same orientation up to a supreme guide declaring the direction of the collective drama.

Literacy and a Life of the Mind

The alternative culture-pool that has been most impressively confrontational against the standard supremacist configuration has been literacy/ scribal culture, scholarship, the graphic recording of voices in language, by which it is made possible to choose to either distribute the record of an individual’s thinking to an audience, small or large, or to preserve it privately as a personal reminder of an accomplishment from which to advance and build. Since literacy is the craft and skills of preserving and cultivating knowledge in the mode of language, it has often been treasured within organizations focused on the illusion of disembodied supremacy in their frantic speculations concerning primal and ultimate things. Literacy has thrived in such institutions and inspired many generations to create astonishing feats of research, imagination, and reasoning. The super-powers of scribal ideality, such as enabling development of a unique reading/ writing persona, a personal literary voice, along with easing the effort of prolonged mental activity, eventually became a force sufficient, as a non-property based source of value, to oppose and rival the culture of violence (war and other looting) in terms of personal gratification from beauty and beneficial effect, importance of accomplishment, and a socially recognized foundation of respect and dignity. The experience of having a rich and powerful personal interiority through literacy is the foundation of humanism, an original map of values re-defining the adventure of existence as human ideality.

Fragment 128, June 8, 2018, Politics is More than Nature (word Count: 867).

It must be recognized that the fact of human existence, generation after generation, establishes that the under-acknowledged but really dominant source of gratification for most humans is the focus of the mainly female culture of first-language-nurture, the mutual support and caring most often found in the protection and nurturing of children. This most essential counter-culture pool has persisted eternally in the closest and most difficult proximity to the trophy/ looting/ dominance culture. Feminism has become an important challenge to supremacist hive-minds.

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700). A survey of some main culture-pools

The Linchpin is always Metaphysics

The linchpin of the whole thing is that all the supremacist illusions divert attention from, and so hide and alienate, what is really supreme in the life of a human: personal ideality constructing suppositional time as the portal to expressive freedom. The literary gaze is inward, to the voices and conversations of personal ideality, the immediate experience of a private creative fountain of caring curiosity, ideas, and questions. Ideality is a fabric of suppositional non-actuality, which distinguishes it decisively from the brute actuality and determinism of nature. Personal ideality is metaphysically anomalous as a power creating freedom through the supposition of time structured as an opening for the personal expression of caring. The sense of the passing of time has two vectors. One consists of leavings and losses: things given up, slipping by, falling away into increasingly distant priority. The other vector is a dramatic leap into a suppositional future expected to have both grounding familiarity and surprising novelty. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjective spirituality. The very concepts of immateriality and transcendence are abstractions from the non-actuality of time as a dramatic construct, the indispensable grounding of not-yet and no-longer, the non-actuality of purposive caring in the shape of orientation. Above all, it is only the metaphysically anomalous caring in creative personal dramas that makes anything matter. Caring is always a drama, unfinished in the dual instability of suppositional time. An ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating wave-in-time, living in and through passing and arriving in time. Freedom must always be unfinished. The genius of ideality is turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to enduring existence in freedom made possible by constant flight through a personally suppositional time.

The Politics of Left and Right

Beginning from the Enlightenment era, and especially from the French Revolution of 1789-99, the political Left has been the effort to critique and oppose the entrenched legacy of aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture, with its standard structure of supremacist illusions. As such it must identify the crippling errors of that legacy at the same time as envisioning and promoting a preferable alternative, a political vision that represents the full scope and power of existence as a human and facilitates the general expression of that existence. This has made the left the party of bottom-up philosophies, of care and expression for the many instead of just the exceptional few. Historically, mistakes have been made in identifying such a political vision, for example in claims that the left is for bargaining within capitalism for a better deal for precarious wage earners, for the subordinated, proletarian labouring and serving class. Such efforts are crucial certainly but the political left must not limit its vision by accepting societies as permanent and inevitable structures of unequal classes, conceding the inevitability of the peculiar type of hive-mind polities forged by aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture. The left is hindered by an inability, so far, to replace the metaphysical foundation of hive-mind polities. The materialism of the Enlightenment, and of Marx, has proven insufficient to accomplish that essential task.

The Meaning of War

Of course the cultural system of the current world-order is stuck. Even after the whole drama of the history of literacy, it is still dominated by patriarchal veil-of-illusions hive-minds, ever ready for the vast killing and destruction of war. Its ancient and traditional metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, the guilt-ridden fear of some capricious external invisible almighty father-force has been challenged and partly replaced by the determinist nihilism of mathematical-materialist science. (Will-to-power is Nietzsche’s idea of the pure essence of personal existence, so also the mind of God.) Science is a straightforward refusal of metaphysics, so the choices left are the childhood terror of judgment from the cloud of unknowing that must be appeased in all things, or the despair of utter inevitability. In this ridiculous state it is only war that gives life meaning for far too many people.

What Matters and Why

A way beyond the increasingly fragile dystopias of the current world-order is conceivable, but it requires enough overcoming of the old metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, and also of determinist science, to find grounding in a humanist metaphysics that recognizes improvisational freedom at the level of embodied individuals, a freedom expressing deeply personal dramas of caring and attachment, the dramas that make some things truly and profoundly matter within the uncaring actuality of nature.

Metaphysics Dawns on the Edge of Creation

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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caring, creation, empathy, existence, expression, freedom, ideality, metaphysics, personality, philosophy, spirituality, time, value

Fragment 218, word count: 213.

Tags: metaphysics, caring, ideality, existence, creation, freedom, personality, empathy, expression, value, philosophy, spirituality, time.

The foundational distinction for metaphysics is between the world that doesn’t matter, (which is the vast material world of strict actuality, essentially complete but energetically rearranging in a sort of ceaseless falling) over against the existence of caring, shaped as the never-finished personal dramas of any embodied ideality sensing total and desperate vulnerability to a somewhat malleable and entirely suppositional future. The metaphysical presence is caring with its context of a future sensed as open for certain improvisations, for creative expression. Entities of caring-ideality matter because they care and have cares and their caring makes things matter. Nothing else does that. Only caring is suppositional, orienting in terms of non-actualities of its own creation. The experience of embodiment grounds the emphatically monadic existence of beings of ideality as individuals. To identify and become acquainted with the metaphysical dimension of existence is to construct a sharp focus on the starkly anomalous existence of individual ideality, some indefinite number of distinct “I”s, vectoring future-ward in our effortful self-improvising, drama-clouds intervening at the coming-into-being edge of existence. Individual subjective existence is the experience of spiritual intervention, intentional freedom via creative ideation of personal and non-personal futurity-as-opening in the strictly subjective context of the particular importance of this expressive agency, without forgetting empathy and aesthetic appeal.

Self Portrait as Spirit

02 Thursday Oct 2025

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embodiment, existence, Fichte, freedom, god, humanity, philosophy, religion, spirit, time, transcendence

Fragment 216, Word count: 311.

Tags: God, existence, humanity, spirit, transcendence, embodiment, Fichte.

God is a loving human self-portrait, laboriously crafted as an idea, but made so comprehensively superlative, so simplified by being disembodied, so necessarily the best, so elevated beyond comparison, that it stands distant from normal humanity. The idea of God is the idea of spirit, a drama-cloud of consequential caring-power, knowing, supposing, an improvising intentional will-to-act for initially non-actual but specific results. Caring exists in the context of a malleably open future, in that receptivity for creative expression. Spirits matter because they care and have cares and their caring makes things matter. Nothing else does that. Spirit is what human persons feel a need to assert as our mode of existence in the face of an overwhelming appearance of materiality as our primary existence. Gazing outward at objects we notice things with outlines and boundaries, separate and distinct manifest beings, stable and determinate object categories and structures. This overwhelming appearance of materiality, perhaps, dissuades us from embracing spiritual existence as truly and entirely our own, since we also love the pleasures of materiality, and we rarely want to abandon our embodied animal experience. An individual’s sensorium is structured as a personal animal body, experienced as a grounded object among others. As experienced, embodiment is an arrangement within ideality. Structurally stable objective reality is a main organizing principle of spirituality, just as the shaped body is. But that experience is also knowledge, empathy and attachment, sensitivity, felt needs, creative power, fore-planning futurity and a personally chosen particular future, actively reconfigured from moment to moment. There is the will and power to shape the future in specific personally pleasing ways, inseparable from a sense of moral rightness and sometimes aesthetic beauty. In other words, the idea of god is a portrait of the kind of existence lived-in by individual human persons. The indistinguishability of divine and human spirituality is clearly portrayed in Fichte.

Some relevant fragments:

Fragment 91, February 20, 2016, Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God (word count: 3,287)

Fragment 100, December 6, 2016, What’s Spiritual about Thinking? (word count: 1,562)

Fragment 178, June 28, 2021, The Edge of Existence (word count: 1,044)

Existence as Drama-Cloud

13 Thursday Feb 2025

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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anomalous existence, Augustine, Christianity, drama, Freud, Gnosticism, Hobbes, ideality, materiality, philosophy, Plato, primordial existence, religion, science, spirituality, time

Fragment 210, word count: 1,838.

Tags: time, gnosticism, Christianity, materiality, ideality, drama, science, Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Freud, anomalous existence, primordial existence

In any human assessment or general characterization of the overall situation in which we human individual’s find ourselves, the most consequential element is the concept of what is crucial and definitive of the human individual itself. Knowing with clarity the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement between self and not-self seems like it should be transparent, easy, and obvious. However, what is transparent in personal subjectivity is nothing obviously definitive but a vast complexity of fleeting impressions, recognitions, exertions, expectations, emotional colourings of wish and fear, attachments to others, realignments of direction, tentative plans at some point in arcs of enactment, a field of indefinite potential at some moment in ceaseless time, somehow always just new and emphatically incomplete, just arriving and adjusting a heading onward. This flowing cloud of complex potential is structured by drama, the stuff of personal ideality, a caring anticipation of future conditions and events, an anticipation that includes personal stakes and powers and uncertainty about personal harms and benefits. All this ideality occurs in a cloud-like cluster that has the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, a monadic totality of personal dramas which constitute an individual’s embodied life in the world.

As a consequence of the difficult indefiniteness of felt subjectivity, conceptualizing the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement has been culturally influenced, and in starkly unequal societies the political force of that influence has been to denigrate the existence-status of us personal drama-clouds to excuse inequality. Denigrating conceptions of the normal human teleological cloud, strictly located as a particular by embodiment, have always been intended to justify the injustices of the hierarchical social structure, invoking some high-level measure of control in a fearfully unpredictable world. Imagining that the world at large and in detail is the deliberate act of a supernaturally powerful thinking and caring agency, often capricious, perhaps sometimes reactively malicious, means that acting in a way that pleases or placates that force of mysterious agency (according to specialist authorities) will have the effect of turning the world into a more benign environment for those who qualify.

Gnostic Drama

There is a form of Gnosticism which tells that individual human spirits were exiled into time as a rebuke and as a final test by the highest supernatural power. This is not far off the standard Christian story of the great cosmic drama of existence (disgraced spirits struggling to regain presence with divinity). Augustine blames inherent human depravity on the original sin of Adam, but in the background is an assumption that it goes deeper and higher, that indeed it carries the taint of a rebellion by primordial beings, angels, against the highest power, before there even was a material world or a reason for it. In this conception, time is equated with materiality, plagued by decay and instability, so the exile of rebel angels is into materiality, the exact opposite of their original nature which is pure ideality. In this context ideality stands for eternal continuity, and materiality stands for ceaseless change and transformation: time. The gnostics who equated materiality with time held something like a Platonic idea of reality in which material objects are imperfect copies of imperfect copies of actually real things, such as Plato’s Ideas, and so lacked definite or stable being. They had only an attenuated claim to existence or reality, and time was the appearance of their flickering now this, now that, now nothing existence. Time was the dimension of this degraded reality, a low-end region of Being made of this indefinite nearly-existence, merely a piece of stage-setting for part of the great drama of existence which involved eternal beings, spirits. The individual subjects had a purely ideal existence prior to and independent of their hellish experience of materiality/ time in the world of actuality. The human individuals depicted here are victims of their own hubris and folly, as well as their horrible prison existence.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the people pioneering development of a mechanistic conception of the world at large, and people in his theory are atomic mechanisms driven by acquisitive and competitive self-interest but capable of a form of rationality in practical calculation of that self-interest (much of this via Plato). Although Hobbes was pioneering a secular conceptual system to replace the entrenched Christian ideology of inherent human evil and capricious divine grace, he continued the conception of human individuals as victims of their inherent flaws and inadequacies. His entire intent (like Machiavelli) was still to justify the main pillar of the political status quo: monarchy and aristocracy, under the concept Sovereignty. On this view, the individual personality is a dreamy vacuum of needs, wishes, and felt deficiencies, all striving to consume for pleasure but also to assemble an exterior avatar by taking possession of goods as trophies from the environment. Such activity inevitably brings it into conflict with other personalities in its vicinity. The striving to consume and the resulting conflicts determine the essential character of human existence on this view. Life is pervasively and inescapably violent because human nature glimpses fulfillment only by consumption and by winning the conflicts necessary to take the most desirable consumables. Competitions inevitably produce inequality, hierarchy, subordination, and human on human parasitism. Hobbes’ state of nature can be glimpsed in this metaphysics, the war of all against all, and inevitably it produces an ultimate champion to subordinate everyone else and impose his will as the sovereign giver of laws for orderly civil society. There have been different accounts of how someone qualifies to be the much needed superego. The religious view is that sovereigns are put in place by actualization of the divine plan. Hobbes, constructing a scientific account of sovereign-dominated society without an explicit appeal to divine intervention, saw the feudal champion being accepted rationally for the sake of peace and stability, an acceptance he thought amounted to a social contract. The political consequences of this belief system, in either the Christian or the scientific version, are viciously authoritarian, frankly based on brutal repressive force claiming to be justified by the evils of human nature.

Id and Superego

The whole tendency of a more scientific understanding of personal existence is captured in what might be called “the Freudian Model”. In the Freudian model of subjectivity the main vectors of force are the inherent id, lusts for ecstatic pleasure, sparkly things, power, and esteem (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, but on a scientific view interpreted as biologically compulsive drives), and the acquired superego, the representation of authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, clergy, police, and sovereign, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force confront and balance one another in every person, on this theory, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego, no independent spiritual existence. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures and accepted norms of behaviour. The existence of an entity of ideality, a personality free in virtue of creativity, is dimmed to the vanishing point. This is another iteration of the pre-Lutheran vision of human nature driven by inherent lusts and constrained to orderly conduct only by the scourges of Church and military-monarchical states.

Personalities are victims of two forces on this conception. The scientific requirement is that everything be explainable in terms of inexorable laws of nature, so that in the case of the experience and activities of human individuals, every movement or development must originate outside the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement between self and not-self. The individual is depicted as a victim (a product) of externalities, either biological or environmental. No serious weight is admitted to exist in the genius or spirit of the individual.

Such denigrating political conceptions of us personal drama-clouds have catastrophic consequences. The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed (acquisitive and competitive) outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no basis for proud personal self-possession from culturally dominant conceptions. There is no recognition that individual spiritual personality is improvisational, often playful and unpredictable because it is creatively original. however, if we abandon graphic representations of superstitious wishes and terrors, and get back to innocent self-experience, things are very different.

The Drama-Cloud Anomaly

The most striking and important thing about the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement between self and not-self is how anomalous it is with respect to the vast proportion of its environmental setting, the surroundings within which it moves. Those surroundings are very largely shaped masses which move and transition without any intent to bring about some personally satisfying particular future state of affairs, so which move without hope, care, or drama to decide the direction of force in their movements. Nothing matters to those things and they don’t matter to themselves. They make up the world that, in itself, doesn’t matter. The entire tendency of the scientific mode of understanding is to eliminate the special elemental force status of the personal drama-cloud by re-describing its works as products of the common environmental forces which do not pre-conceive and move toward a personal future, forces with no elaborate futurity shaped by currently non-actual states and arrangements of things. The personal drama-clouds, however, are anomalously playful, suppositional, caring, and creative in acting on purposes within their futurity. This personal drama-existence is not inherently a victim, but instead has autonomous agency via the conception of personal futurity. There is no reason to think that different categories of people are importantly different from one another in respect to their caring conception of futurity. This power is universally definitive of personality, human individual existence.

So, gnostics were wrong about the identity of time and materiality. The conception of time is the superpower of us drama-clouds, of every “I” entity of ideality. Any personal conception of time is shaped almost entirely of non-actualities, suppositions, pretences that things had arrangements they have no longer, that things will have certain new arrangements at some specific not-yet. Such a personal conception of location in a world structured temporally empowers the drama-cloud “I” to improvise acts accordingly. Only ideality (spirituality, intelligence, humanity/ personality) strives toward a specifically pre-conceived not-yet or non-actuality, which is definitive of creativity and so of freedom. What gnostics had right was recognizing persons as metaphysically primordial beings, in the sense that their presence in the whole of existence makes existence matter, confers on that existence the only drama it can ever have. These beings involve all existence in the drama which makes it meaningful, originally with every individual.

Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

19 Thursday Dec 2024

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

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aristocracy, arts-washing, History, ideality, philosophy, politics, religion, science, spirituality, time, value culture, violence

Fragment 209, Word count: 579.

tags: aristocracy, value culture, violence, science, religion, arts-washing, spirituality, time, ideality.

The culture of violence is a core element of aristocracy, out of whose practices in an earlier historical era emerged the forms of modern sovereign state governments. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from ‘bourgeois’ culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of consumption without the overt and personal use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations (true heirs of aristocracy) generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing. The culture of violence is inseparable from the aristocratic value culture of tangible rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive property wealth, trophy possessions, along with coercive power, and such a value culture still dominates popular aspirations and conceptions of personal success. A great deal of arts-washing has always been showcased to hide the viciousness of aristocratic venality and to manufacture an image of aristocratic glamour.

The Ultimate Left

Ultimately, the political left must be a spiritual alternative to the material treasures of violence-based wealth systems grounded in competitive property possession, but also to the great-spirit-in-the-sky religions of our dystopian past. The spiritual alternative is a matter of recognizing the anomalous existence of teleological orientation and bearing, ideality busily self-amending as an embodied “I” active in the creation and recreation of futurity. To say that intelligence is caring is to say that intelligence is an “I”, a personality, an embodied idiosyncratic caring. Caring expresses a very strict kind of particularity: of sensitivities in aid of felt dramas, of powers to recognize relevance and structural connections for interior model-world-construction as the framework and lens of perception within personal orientation, particularity of point of view, of quests and questions, of curiosity, of pleasures, of aesthetic gratifications, of energy, of the self-declaring voice. Perception is not an imprinting somehow made upon an innocent and passively receptive consciousness. It is an active intervention by an ideality, a reaching and taking hold, an interest-driven study that is performed in a vast echo-chamber of personal recollections and anticipations. The “I” of this discreet spiritual existence, this ideality, is appropriately followed by a name, indicative of a rich uniqueness: “I, Odysseus”.

Each such anomalous existence is one among a multitude of points and arcs of improvisational indeterminacy in existence, the existential opposite of a black hole, creating new reality all the time and experiencing value in creating. The inventive freedom of each individual ideality means that no form of social, economic, or cultural organization is strictly determined (say, by divine fiat or natural law) to be or remain as it has been. It follows from this that the scientific consensus on fundamental reality is decisively incomplete, and, as such, wrong, just as any previous religious consensus was. The fact of ideality’s metaphysical status as an anomaly (shining peak vs black hole) with respect to the brute actuality of nature, means that neither individually embodied instances of spirit nor their creations are subject to the two normal justifications for social hierarchies: decrees of capricious divine will and the deterministic laws that describe brute material actuality.

Embedded links:

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

Fragment 205, February 3, 2024, Our Dystopian Past (word count: 1,543)

Bonfire of Vanities

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class, culture, dystopia, god, Hierarchy, hive-mind, metaphysics, philosophy, Savonarola, self-possession, Spinoza, spirituality, time, value

Fragment 207, word count: 696.

tags: Savonarola, spirituality, self-possession, value, hierarchy, culture, class, time, dystopia, hive-mind, Spinoza, metaphysics.

There is a perennial conflict, including culture wars, between two tendencies of human motivation. The overwhelmingly popular tendency is based on acquisition, competition, display, and quests for approval and admiration. The other tendency derives from a personal experience of transcendent spirituality. From the spiritual point of view, many objects that are popularly valued seem like mere vanities. Vanities display a dependence on external validation, and an absence of acquaintance with the force of personally autonomous creativity as authentic spirituality. The term “bonfire of the vanities” is typically associated with the fifteenth century Dominican friar Savonarola who preached a fundamentalist Christian theology that emphasized the value of personal spirituality over wealth, status, and public displays of virtue and accomplishment. He famously organized a Shrove Tuesday bonfire in Renaissance Florence on February 7, 1497 into which were thrown all sorts of prideful distractions from his idea of a properly spiritual life. Items burned included, among other things, books, musical instruments, and works of art, all precious to the hearts of the envied, propertied, and highly cultured classes. Savonarola’s specific justification for his bonfire, namely a certain type of Christian theology, was certainly misconceived and, as itself an ostentatious display, its own forum for vanity. It had a warped and malevolent conception of spirituality and transcendence in the human situation. Savonarola was not completely wrong though. He was keenly aware of the perennial conflict noted above.

It is true that everybody needs some stuff and there is such a thing as innocent pleasure, sometimes aesthetic pleasure in the particulars that help make a livable environment and an interesting life. Even so, the capitalist valuables list really does contain a hefty portion of vanities, and not harmless ones either, but vanities which are laying waste to Planet Earth. The legitimacy of hierarchy and of the cultural markers of status must be disputed on the basis of spirituality. There is something more important than nature’s food chain interpreted as a Great Chain of Being decreed by divine or cosmic fiat, and the more important reality is the metaphysically anomalous existence of individual creative spirit, not the religious conception of an external almighty to whom mere humanity is vastly inferior and utterly in debt, but instead a conception which recognizes individual human time-creation as the radiant transcendence.

The World-Lens of Personal Ideality

There is a kind of experience that invites comparison with Spinoza’s “under the aspect of eternity” as a personal encounter with transcendence, but Spinoza’s emphasis on eternity is all wrong. The idea of eternity is a false transcendence. Actual transcendence is the personally crafted sense of the ceaseless opening and passing of time, deliverance from the deadening weight of the Eternal Now via the anticipating living will, the context-bearing gaze that picks out value and novelty by perceiving and acting through a construct of inward ideality, a personally gathered, interpreted, and organized lens-world in living action to understand and inhabit the public world. As storms of ideality, we plunge into a future which is unknowable and malleable, expecting certain features of geography with enough probability as a frame of reference for now. We manage a balance between energy sources and costs in effort, between anxiety and pleasure. It is possible to face full acquaintance with ourselves as human without being overwhelmed by dread, anguish, and complete absurdity.

There is nothing wrong in itself with pursuing delights, and possessions can be authentic resources, tools, and guides in the desperate spiritual adventure. However, the enjoyment of life should be approached with full awareness of the transcendence of spirit over things, even things that are excellent works of spirit, and with recognition of the deceptions of hive-mind constructs meant to normalize for everybody that there is nothing better than to ape people with the most or most stylish possessions, and that nothing can be done about the resulting dystopian society. If, respecting the dignity of persons and understanding the reality-distorting effects of dystopian cultural legacies, a person takes delight in some possessions or cultural products, there is room for this, so long as the enjoyment isn’t the foundation for an affectation of serious personal or group superiority.

Our Dystopian Past

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, University

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Christendom, culture, hive-mind, humanism, justice, literacy, modernity, philosophy, progress, religion, science, sovereignty, time

Fragment 205, word count: 1,543.

tags: Christendom, modernity, literacy, justice, progress, religion, science, sovereignty, hive-mind, time, humanism.

The conception of social organization in feudal Christendom identified three Platonic functional groups stacked as a power pyramid. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and the lowest stratum. Baronial fighting families formed the next level up (a big step up) and were far fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land, natural resources, and often workers, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed, in theory, the high point of the pyramid. The clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. They also claimed to be God’s agents on Earth. The baronial aristocracy disputed this way of understanding things to some extent but could not maintain their position of parasitic dominance without the authority that came from the culture and organization of religion.

The two power-factions asserted the necessity of an eternal stability in the order of society. Both aristocracy (of which monarchy is just a feature) and the theocratic hierarchy of the Christian religion planned with fervent determination to keep the arrangement of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power exactly as they had arranged it for their own parasitic benefit. There was a Platonic influence here as well since Plato declared that reality was strictly unchanging. The passing of time was an illusion for Plato. However, there was a way in which some change and continuity were reconciled, and that was by something like Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”. Seasons change, but in a continuously repeating cycle that expresses a circle, an eternally closed loop. The vast majority of the general population accepted metaphysical determinism in the social order and found it a theme of common discourse. They were taught by the parasitic power factions to be afraid and to feel dependent. Notwithstanding this intent and practical control, nothing like complete stability was ever realized. Medieval horizons* expanded profoundly, and yet, there were blind spots, directions in which horizons did not expand. The general parasitic hierarchy of society persisted and still does.

In Christendom the core ideas of religion included universally inherited guilt coupled with supernatural surveillance for the purpose of moral ledger-keeping on every person’s thoughts and deeds, all leading toward an inevitable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, that made the ever-looming prospect of death terrifying, and the Church proclaimed itself as essentially God-on-Earth, the only way out. Just as the coercive power of aristocracy resulted from its culture of violence, the power of the Church depended upon its monopolistic culture of sacred knowledge, the Revelation it claimed to possess concerning the Divine drama involving every individual’s fate after death. As for the aristocracy, their iconic form was as armed men on horses, claiming everything as their property and asserting that claim with practiced violence toward anyone unable to resist with equal violence. These are the cultural niches which conceived and put into practice the form of human organization which would mutate into the sovereign state. Sovereignty was focused on securing the ownership of private property by force but also on religious mystery-cult insistence on group belonging and conformity (communal hive-mind). Patriarchs of religious pageantry were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still cultivated the scribal culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable in their role as advisers and administrators for aristocrats, keeping records of contracts, costs, products, properties, distributions, income, and consumption. However, in monastic libraries and after 1088 in increasing numbers of universities, they also kept alive surviving vestiges of ancient pagan literary culture. The rediscovered texts of philosophy, science, and mathematics from ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Islamic east were recognized as profoundly more complex and advanced than anything native to Western Christendom, containing knowledge and courses of thought that opened vast horizons.

Although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with top-down imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and proximate people, from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. Time as experienced in the process of personal writing untethered from commonplace conversations opens in the direction of discoveries and creative opportunities and as such is progressive (modern) and starkly different from the cyclical repetitive time as normally represented in traditional conservative community discourse. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces the assumption of stable continuity. Humanism, as an exploration of the independent voice untethered from common discourse, is the expression of the individualistic experience that develops from moving through that portal. Ultimately, the humanist project of self-cultivation through reading and writing, expresses a claim about the fundamentals of human living, including individual freedom and creativity. It points toward a philosophy of living spirit that has never been articulated. (Although Existentialism could be a humanism in this sense. Thank you, Sartre.) Individualism was always the core of Humanism, based on the privacy of the written voice. This individualism was created by literacy, and so was not an invention of the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had an ancient flowering long before the Enlightenment and before the also famous Renaissance flourish.

By contrast with medieval and old regime devotion to stability, the idea of progress is what defines modernity, and it emerged from the experience of literacy. This culturally transmitted idea of progress includes the certainty that justice requires progressive change in the ordering of society, that justice is impossible without a different organization of property, status, knowledge, and power. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being as well as for justice because the past has been revealed as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, violent oppression, misogyny, tribalism, monotony, poverty, and conformity imposed by fear-based myths of safety in numbers. To various degrees in different places, those dystopian conditions are still normal, but now often recognized as reasons for improvement. Modernity has embraced the idea of future justice through progressive change in the social order, but it has no clear vision of how to overcome the forces that benefit from established injustice. The French Revolution** of 1789-99 was a major effort at government by and for the majority but it was subverted and descended into the Reign of Terror and the imperialism of Napoleon. Marxism was another major effort at justice through equality, but it became a cult of inevitability about the laws of history, highly dependent on a central sovereign power exercising death-grip control by violence, and so could never approach genuine equality. The conservative backlash against these essays in general justice that failed has almost discredited the very idea of progress.

Humanist Individualism: The Third Way

Humanism does not present itself as an authoritative edifice of knowledge, even though it specifically contradicts both religion and mechanistic science, which certainly do. Humanism celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality, but it doesn’t assert an original conception of human existence in nature that advances an individual-sourced power that can overcome the objections of mechanistic theory from science and deterministic religious conceptions such as original sin, Karma, or divine command and judgment. Humanism has declared human freedom and originality by practicing those powers via individual self-cultivation in the medium of literature, reading, and writing. It thrives because the mechanistic vision derived from science is fatally counterintuitive as a representation of living as experienced by a person. Materialist/ mathematical science misses the self-aware agency that explodes from the conception of time as a personal opening. Religions also lose credibility by separating personality, the restlessly unfinished and incompletely defined existence as experienced by a person, from ordinary embodiment and then aggrandizing it to infinity. In doing that, religions cast strictly embodied personality as inferior, secondary, and derivative in relation to some wildly speculative and implausible original. Both of those authoritative systems in effect leave the ordinary self-experience of the individual out of their picture. So, even now, in this age of knowledge, what it is to be a living human person is profoundly misconceived, and the result is dystopian society. Humanism, though, is still developing, and the way we people of modernity know and live in time has the project of progress inherent in it.

* Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6.

** The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, written by Robert Darnton, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books (2023), ISBN: 978-0-713-99656-2.

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Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

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