Tag Archives: time

Spirit Weaves Time into Freedom

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Fragment 194, word count: 90.

tags: spirit, time, freedom, supposing, existence.

Spirit is the existence which supposes, and in supposing weaves time into freedom. Spirit supposes actualities lost and fading, others at hand dependably, and still possible novelties, decreasingly remote and variously probable, approaching actuality. This decreasingly remote approaching but not-yet actuality is a supposition of the world unfinished, unbounded with a raw edge expanding void-ward. Spirit is the existence which, anchored in actuality, desperately asserts its personal non-actual and unfinished existence by moving void-ward, shaping the unfinished world and personalizing it with caring interventions: freedom.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Spiritual Self-Possession

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Fragment 193, word count: 1,093.

Tags: culture war, property, spirit, time, metaphysics, violence, sovereignty, creativity, self-possession, values, ideology, power.

There has been a cultural uprising raging in the Euro-American social system from the time of the European Enlightenment (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and even well before that, with, on one side, a culture with property possession as its prime value and, on the other, cultures emphasizing the primacy of spirit at the level of the embodied individual, often with an intellectual focus. This opposition is the deep foundation of the political division between right-wing and left-wing. Right-wing political conservatism is the champion of property possession as primary value and is anti-intellectual because intellectual achievement has threatened the cultural primacy of property possession. The political left and the political right are not equivalent in the culture war 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 not yet managed to be clearly specific about its prime value, but a good characterization would be something like: spiritual self-possession. History includes many examples of artists and ‘thinkers’ who overtly value personal creativity more than possessions. The real prospect of universal literacy was the fundamental dignity conceived by the Enlightenment, developed out of Wycliffe’s project of having everybody capable of reading the Bible in vernacular translations.

Trophy Property is Core Conservative Value

Property possession as a means of self-definition and personal evaluation is ideologically foundational for political conservatism, and property possession is meaningless without institutional readiness for violence to protect it. Possession of property is inherently precarious, vulnerable to the point of being socially destabilizing. Private property owners are terrified their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Property can be taken by force or trickery, and so requires a vast system of protection involving personal weapons, organized readiness for violence, an ‘us against them’ conceptual system, elaborate legal/ police systems, and overemphasis on authority and forceful sovereignty. Property owners assert the authority, through police and army, courts, prisons, and the hangman, to protect their possessions. The “haves” project their obsession with property onto everyone else and are terrified of losing their stuff to the underclass. The more property a person has, the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of loss, which means they depend on as much as can be arranged of the power that comes from the barrel of a gun, the machinery of armed violence in the form of the “right hand” of sovereign government: police, military forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as sovereigns always do. Law and order is so prized by conservatives because it is the only way to protect the security of property possession. Such sovereignty also implies the whole dystopian apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of mass subordination to patriarchal power. From that stream of cultural tradition comes the demand for everyone to conform to a strict set of beliefs, behaviours, gender and persona types. Cultish hive-minds of patriotism are a social construct for the protection and enlargement of the value and privileges of property possession. Conservatism is based in an essentialist and violence-ready fear and outrage at the arrogance of anyone meddling with the traditional hierarchy of wealth and privilege.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with the conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant system. Right-wing personal interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego representing sovereign authority.

The Primacy of Spiritual Self-Awareness

Spiritual self-possession involves, as a matter of metaphysical knowledge, self-recognition as spirit. Spirit is the personalizing principle of world organization, a questioning push directing a gaze at the world in aid of acts which are effective personal expressions of a caring, knowing, and supposing intentional agent, continuously creating a specifically relevant suppositional world that is opening in time. Spirituality is the sense of time passing in this embodied life, featuring fear of the future. Time is the active existence of creativity. Creativity is impossible without a reality which is profoundly incomplete, with time into which to suppose possibilities, probabilities, and impossibilities. Without a supposition of the absolute vacuum of futurity then creativity is impossible. Without creativity there is no time. Meaningless Being exists without time, with only a warp of instability, its instant of momentum, falling. The awareness of time is not a perception, not passively receiving the imprint of a stimulus. Sensing the passing of time involves active suppositions and abstractions to fashion a framework of bearing into the empty opening of a future, searches expressing curiosity as well as desperation, and questions that reconstruct a framework of directional orientation. There is an interior suppositional sense of active positioning relative to the shape of exterior surroundings, updated continually in detail by perceptions of features: ground and sky and passages of accessibility with dramatic portent. The dramas of personal agency integrate learned expectations with a poise for interventions that actualize previously conceived and presupposed acts, new reality in the opening of time. Any gaze of consciousness is a gaze at nature from a particularly embodied drama, and also a creative act in the drama, a move forward that matters personally, integrating personal purposes and questions, suppositions (knowledge), and an arc of interventions.

Spiritual Self-Possession

The spiritual value orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. In this understanding the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a situation in which the best case is as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence) and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

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Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 172, January 7, 2021, Dissent by Metaphysics (word count: 680)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

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.

What Knowing Is

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Fragment 184, word count: 198.

tags: existence, reality, drama, physics, metaphysics, spirituality, time, transcendence.

Spirituality has nothing to do with immortality, eternity, or qualifying for immortality. Instead, spirituality is bringing drama to existence, so, knowing the passing of time.

Awareness of the boundless world of enduring structures and processes, cycles repeating within cycles, a world that doesn’t matter to itself and doesn’t care, discover, or regret but goes on existing and shape shifting, structured and complex but just falling through the ways of least resistance: physical reality! Any beholding and knowing such physical reality expresses and demonstrates an order of existence which is different and higher than physics, an order of existence which does care and which questions, discovers, supposes, and contextualizes: the order of existence which is ordinary subjective spirituality. The physical universe cannot identify you and me, but we identify the physical universe. The physical universe can’t care what happens. It doesn’t wonder or fashion a demeanour expressing curiosity or determination. In no sense can it identify and remember the features of a context for initiatives, a framework of orientation and purpose. Metaphysical reality is exactly the power to construct some understanding of the system of physical reality, to construct an appreciation of the existence of a world of objects.

Another step:

Fragment 182, November 4, 2021, The Thrill of It (word count: 335).

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Existence and New Reality

28 Saturday Aug 2021

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Fragment 180, word count: 505.

Tags: actuality, creation, learning, supposing, intending, time, ideas, Plato, eternity.

There are only two explanations for there being something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and supposing intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. This second explanation is a variant of materialist determinism. Neither of these two conceptions should be ignored, because ordinary experience combines both, and they stand in a special relation to one another. The cascading instability of actuality has only an exclusively single-state instantaneous existence, but that existence is an instability, a particular wave shape just arrived from a completed arc of other individually exclusive shapes utterly vanished and gone, and yet still bursting at the incomplete bursting edge of existence toward another arc of merely possible shapes and more or less probable shapes. Within that bursting-forth, instantly vanishing, vast cascading unstable actuality, we fragile monads of sentience endure by continuously aggregating a personal orientation from since-vanished shapes that we noticed and learned because they matter to our dramas of survival and attachment. Vanished and possible arcs of the nature-wave have current existence only as ideality in the ever-refreshing orientation of particular sentient intentional monads living an embodied life within actuality. With our orientation and our effective embodiment and our dramatic vectors of care we create intentional interventions, novelties, spur-of-the-moment new reality. Monadic sensibility/ intentionality is always on the point of arriving from playing out dramas within a learned shape of circumstances, still continuing to burst forth into hopes, quests, possibilities, and probabilities, with intent to continue a specifically personal mark. Momentary and always re-shaping features of actuality are personalized in the curation of every particularly embodied sensibility/ intentionality. The dramatic poise of a monad is entirely distinct from deterministic actuality through its just-created directionality.

The only straightforward way of conceiving a sentient intentional monad oriented for an intervention with intent to create new reality requires the monad to be already oriented within some state of actuality. This disqualifies any impulse to project intentional intervention universally as the original matrix of all existence. It leaves us with the inexplicable random cascading instability as a pre-condition for intentional acts by any sentient intentional monad, such as ourselves.

In cultures under the influence of Plato, ideality (spirituality) is identified with immortality and eternally stable and unchanging existence, but that is exactly not the experiential presence of ideality, which is always bearing into and enlarging into the incompleteness of ephemeral suppositions, pushing into ideas as the world falls. Aliveness, the living of life, living personhood, is inextricable from the ceaseless opening and passing of event-full time, and every living person is a co-creator of that opening of new reality.

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Fragment 177, May 31, 2021, The World that Matters (word count: 450)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Knowing is Caring

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Fragment 179, word count: 621.

Tags: caring, knowledge, learning, sensibility, phenomenology, sensation, time, representation, evidence, Edmund Husserl.

Caring is more important than sensation in the perception of anything, and caring is personal. Knowledge is always dependent on and derived from someone’s caring. It is always an elaboration, specification, and development of caring. Knowing is a personal effect and consequence of caring. That means that perception, as a means of coming to know, is also an application of caring, a personal act of anchoring care in certain particular actualities presenting as phenomena. Caring and what it is that cares are not adequately presented by a description of the most immediate actualities to which this caring is anchored. You can’t get anywhere near understanding the richness of a moment of personal caring (the living moment of a sensibility/ intentionality*) by mapping the most evident actualities it is conscious of. Phenomena don’t count as anything without being identified within the context of a perceiving sensibility. Larger dramatic vectors of personal caring are necessarily involved. Not only is the gaze of consciousness a gaze into nature from a particularly embodied drama, it is also a creative act in the drama, a move forward motivated by personal drama, and meaningful because of the essentially dramatic integration of knowledge and personally intended interventions. A perceiving and learning gaze is a personal drama in the act of building and playing out, of extending itself by going on living in the world.

Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), a definitive move of philosophical Phenomenology is to remove any suggestion of deriving from perception any knowledge of a Kantian “thing in itself” as absolute reality, so, bracketing off the question: does this experienced appearance represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?. What is bracketed off is the question of the representation of phenomena, the question of whether or not they represent, depict, or disclose some existent object which is independent in its reality of being perceived or not being perceived, being cared about or not. In this context, phenomena are technical objects of consciousness definable with maps of sensations, positioned quanta of sensory stimuli with specific qualities. They are impersonal arrangements of appearances (sense data) that may suggest an internal integrity. “To the things!” declare Husserl’s phenomenologists.

However, instead of putting attention on what might or might not be on the ‘far side’ of phenomena as given in sensations, it is decisively more important to deal with what is on the ‘near side’ of phenomena, the source of caring that is reaching future-ward through its sensory display. No matter what uncertainty there might be about sensory appearances as true depictions of impersonal actualities that lie beyond, there can be no doubt that the shape of caring in phenomena truly represents a personal sensibility and intentionality*.

Fragment 123, February 8, 2018, Brentano’s Gift (word count: 999)

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

In spite of the fact that the technical definition of phenomena excludes the personal, there is a sense in which actual phenomena must always represent a person, by a kind of backward representation. A personal ideality is always the matrix of phenomena. Whatever definitions might be imposed on phenomena, they are primordially experiences, and experiences are always acts of an experiencing sensibility, a person living a particularly embodied life. The most important representation by phenomena is a person, what it is that cares and brings caring to this existence. Caring is personal, a complex personal vector of drama within a willful sensibility. It isn’t possible to reveal what it is that cares and constructs a life of dramatic movements of caring by using descriptions of phenomena that bracket off the desperate ephemerality of what is personal. Although what-it-is-that-cares is never a phenomenon, the existence of phenomena is necessarily the existence of a unique dramatic ideality that is expressing its caring in its engagement with these phenomena.

  • ‘Intentionality’ in the sense of a pre-conceiving of future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Edge of Existence

28 Monday Jun 2021

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

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Fragment 178, word count: 1,044.

tags: existence, metaphysics, time, creativity, freedom, caring, drama, agency, empathy, science, religion, politics, patriarchy, civilization, malaise.

The difference made by recognizing a bit of metaphysics, specifically a certain conception of ideality, is a much needed and long overdue disruption of two canonical but failing universal explanations: religious personification of nature and the materialist fatalism of science. Thinking of ideality as embodied (discontinuous and discretely located) points and arcs of creative intentionality* opens a way to recognize human-scale freedom and creativity as real without wildly speculative and implausible personifications. Human reality is a beach where a personal interiority of ever-reshaping dramas made of caring and ideas (expectations and hopes, questions, aspirations, and intentions) gush out in deliberate activity and wash actuality. Features of brute actuality can be shaped into culture by these actions. Culture in this sense is any product of intentional craft, any effective application of purposive ideality to the merely natural material of actuality: the carved wood, the ploughed field. Freedom is real in this tumbling co-existence of gushing creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of existence (both ideality and actuality) as witnessed in the endless passage of time. Any serious conception of freedom requires enduring points of ideality actively living, forming actuality, at the incomplete edge of existence, continuously actualizing a stream of spontaneously invented intentions within a personally learned and learning context of expectations. Knowledge is always an elaboration, specification, and development of personally created dramas of caring.

Since the European codification of mathematical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after nearly a millennium of theocratic Christendom, the most innovating civilizations have been stuck with a dysfunctional codependence of scientific materialism and immaterial angels and demons. Both religion and science have ongoing appeal, science from rapidly developing commercial applications, especially communication and data processing technology (innovations in entertainment with advertising), vaccines of course; and religion from a most primitive reflex to personify the world, which is to suppose that purposive intentionality creates everything. But the binocular culture which perceives with the materialist lens in one eye and the world-personifying lens in the other is spectacularly unsuccessful delivering peace and justice in its political and governance arrangements, and no wonder. Science and religion have in common a fundamental legitimation of patriarchal hierarchy as core social organization. To be clear, this is top-down human-on-human macro parasitism, various forms of the master/ slave relationship. Religious personification asserts that such organization is the eternal divine plan (divinity is the primordial master), and scientific fatalism that such a food chain is made inevitable by immutable forces of nature. These are both conceptions of existence as profoundly complete, without any possibility for the creation of real novelty. In that context governance is a matter of imposing on everyone an orientation up the hierarchy for a sense of direction derived from an overarching culturally stipulated drama.

Culture in this sense is the complex system of imitative, repetitive, and normative human activity that expresses and sustains a collective’s sense of unity and identity. This is the sense in which culture, in the context of patriarchal parasitism, imposes a hive-mind on its participants. This has produced and maintained dystopian political regimes poisoned by the history of war culture abetted by religions that demand irrational credulity and fervent expressions of reverence and supplication upward, situating deity at the apex of human hierarchy. Outsourcing the determination of reality to a God, impersonal Platonic Ideas, or even just nature denigrates human ideality by alienating the creative work of conceptualization actually required and accomplished by individuals orienting ourselves in the world. It represents human interiority as a passive recipient of a pre-completed world, including the social and political world, and has the effect of cementing individuals into a mass mythology of inadequacy and dependence. Science further denigrates personal interiority by reducing it to biologically pre-determined lusts and reactions to external stimuli, and religion denigrates it as an engine of error and misery, completely hopeless without the controlling intervention of some more perfect and powerful personification.

Individual ideality, however, is profoundly more active and creative than religion or science can recognize. The primordial act of self-creation by every ideality is the supposition of time. Ideality is the non-actuality which supposes. Every ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating time-wave, living in and through a constant flight through time. A time-wave is a dramatically-propelled progressive change of suppositions. One vector of this flight consists of things slipping by and falling away, and the other vector is a dramatic personal leap into a supposed future. Time is a personal dimension of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality in which, oriented with knowledge, expectations, and questions abstracted from a supposed ephemeral past, an intelligence creates specific intentions to project itself with a degree of creative freedom into an ever-newly-opening not-yet or future. This being-in-time distinguishes ideality from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the opening of freedom-from-nature at the edge of existence and as such the transcendence that spiritual interiority brings to the beach of reality. With an appropriate sense of this interiority the personal importance of competitions and appearances falls away. The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles, personal hero story) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant conceptual system.

The political difference made by recognizing persons universally as metaphysical engines of spontaneous creativity, exploiting a precarious position at the edge of existence by improvising a desperately caring drama of sensitivity and personal expression, is a flattening of the political landscape. There is no justification here for master/ slave social organization. There is no general disrespect or denigration of humanity/ personality inherent in this conception. The political imperative changes from imposing control via belligerent us-against-them hive minds to cultivating and encouraging autonomous creativity and person-to-person interconnections shaped by empathy.

The often lamented malaise of civilization is the result of extreme cultural denigration of humanity/ personality combined with a romantic overestimation of the explanatory power of mathematical science. These have killed off innovative thinking involving metaphysics, but only a certain metaphysical reconceptualization can amend the currently toxic cultural legacy.

Note

* ‘Intentionality’ in the sense of pre-conceiving future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Absolute Incompleteness

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Fragment 173, word count: 202.

Tags: spirituality, time, agency, care-drama, existence, eternal recurrence, effort, embodiment, consciousness, freedom.

Spirituality has nothing to do with inherent guilt or fear and love of a higher power or supreme Being which is removed from the desperate care-drama and agency of living an always incomplete existence. Spirituality has everything to do with awareness of the passage of time because the personal drama of caring depends on ephemerality to extend, shape, and renew itself, opening its ongoing by intentionally inventing acts based on expectations and suppositions learned and abstracted from a career of caring and effortful engagement with the world around. Any moment of consciousness is loaded with abstractions that frame and locate an immediate effort. We have to disconnect understanding time from cosmic loops and circles, the apparent paths of stars and planets that have been observed and identified from eras immemorial by people watching the sky. Theirs was a vision of completeness in eternal recurrence. Instead, time is the asymmetrical continuity of context that consciousness supposes in orienting its desperately creative plunge into freedom that is its enduring incompleteness and the incompleteness of the world. The intentional ongoing of individually embodied consciousness constitutes spiritual (subjective) reality, and spiritual reality connects irremovably to absolute reality. The personal exists as absolutely as the cosmic.

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Fragment 169, October 25, 2020, Wildcard Time-World Idealism (word count: 1,230)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

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Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

At the heart of Romanticism is the cultural perspective of aristocracy, essentially a pessimistic fatalism, definitive of the political right-wing, in which the brutality of master/ slave social organization is taken to be inevitable, decreed for eternity by nature or God. In that dystopia, only reveries of magic, beauty, and masculine heroism provide the precious little light in the tragically inescapable gloom. However, nothing in human affairs is really inevitable because human affairs are constructs of multiple idealities, and idealities, persons, are fountains of spontaneous novelty, of original interventions into the situation of a moment, fountains of freedom. Conceptions of this freedom are forms of idealism.

A way of distinguishing one kind of idealism from another is by the extent each understands ideality as creatively projecting novelty into otherwise predetermined actuality conceived as in standard materialism: utterly devoid of purpose. For example, there is no novelty of a willfully creative and spontaneous kind in Plato’s idealism, although some accidental novelty might occur randomly in the illusions experienced as ordinary appearances. Plato’s idealism, and generally the muted idealism at the core of rationalism, builds on a reverence for mathematics by speculating that the perfection of mathematics reveals an immaterial, timeless, and primordial reality from which is projected (imperfectly) the eventful world we experience. In the context of understanding human affairs, mathematics is a short road to dystopia.

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

Recognition of time as the primordial context of individual human existence is the portal to an idealism that is relevant in the dystopian political and cultural context as a countervailing force against the declarations of natural or divine determinism (the perspective of aristocracy) which are crucial features of dystopian world-system concepts.

The problem with logical argument as a technique of inquiry into things as experienced was pointed out by Bertrand Russell: Logical argumentation is not how original insights are discovered. Using other means, people come upon claims they judge to be important and worth defending and then search for premises and arguments that produce them as logical conclusions. Philosophical insights are first generated by something like phenomenology, an innocent curiosity about lived experience and agency. So, the primary technique of thinking philosophically, the technique that brings us to the crucial idealism, is engaging with experience from innocent curiosity, a curiosity that has been de-cultured and so released from normal bias and prejudice.

Phenomenology is always an effort to bring ideality into some degree of conceptual focus. It is never a scientifically measuring object-ology. It is explicitly a description of experience as ideality, objects as taken in and made sense of by a questioning, knowing, interested, and caring subject. So, all phenomenology is phenomenology of spirituality, plausibly the only way to quest for knowledge of spirituality. Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), the definitive move of phenomenology is bracketing off the question: does this appearance accurately represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?, so to remove any suggestion of defining knowledge of a “thing in itself” as objective reality. And yet, even in Husserl and his massive legacy there remains an emphasis on objects and objectification.

The problem with phenomenology has been that sensory impressions are taken as the elemental evidence, taken in a way that is already objectified. They are conceived as patches of colour, an auditory pitch, a feeling of roughness or pressure, a scent or taste of coffee, all removed from the context of a personal dramatic purpose-in-time which brings someone to notice them. There is the usual assumption that time is not primordial, but instead a superstructure to be put aside in describing the basic phenomena from which everything else, including time, will be assembled later. However, the thinking subject, a questioning future-ward-leaping will-to-learn and will-to-express-itself, cannot be assembled from the passive excitations of sensory impressions, or from the objects they make available for discovery and identification. Sensory impressions or the objects they locate cannot be made into care, cannot be made to construct an interest in themselves. Caring is prior, and primordially a leaping future-ward, using knowledge of the time-world as personal possibility.

None of the phenomena of receptive sensations can combine to construct the desperate future-ward leap of curiosity, the drama of a questioning will to gaze, to search, to leave a personal mark and make a personally gratifying life. Sensory perception cannot assemble whatever questioning sensibility is expressing the vector of such drama in an act of perceiving, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of searching curiosity. You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your life-drama. The sensibility performing a perceiving cannot be an object of sensory perception, and requires a conception of its presence different from perceived actuality: primordially purposeful ideality.

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

Humanity/ personality, as ideality, is the creation of freedom by supposing the possibility or impossibility of multiple personal futures, and so freedom through creativity is fundamental and universal to individual personalities. We individually create a supposition of decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer as an imprint on the newness and open incompleteness in which we act, a primordial context of time in which we intervene in brute actuality as purposive, dramatic, agents. Personality supposes (posits as ideality) a context that enables its agency in a personal drama, a time-world of personally specific approaching futures, both possible and impossible non-actualities, a mutable opening in the fabric of reality. Ideality is what leaps ahead, a leaping that makes the world matter. That ideality is empathic is crucial to its personal drama, and along with empathy comes the drama of good and evil. Good is acting with the purpose of expressing empathy, evil is acting in contradiction, denial, or refusal of empathy.

Wildcards

Ideality leaps into an opening of its own supposing, as a vector of time which plunges future-ward with a specific spur-of-the-moment creative will to inject spontaneous (not random) novelty into actuality at the location of personal embodiment. Such a will-to-create a personally suitable future is obviously not nature, which always just falls predictably according to laws of inertia and entropy, a vector of time in which everything is slipping away. The vector of time which leaps toward a future of its personal devising transcends nature by its personal injection of unpredictable creativity. Creation of the world is unfinished, undecided, continuing through the agency of a multitude of embodied wildcard idealities. We are more time-waves than particles of any kind, individually self-shaping waves through time.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

Fragment 19, February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era (word count: 1,101)

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Time-World

24 Thursday Sep 2020

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Fragment 168, Word Count: 480.

Ideality is a desperate engagement with the passing of time, a moving shape of caring that feels, anticipates, and fills the passing of time. It is a person actively living a particular embodied life in the time-world. Decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer is the primordial context for every person’s dramatic agency, for personality, humanity, spirituality, intelligence, sentience. Ideas are acts of opening and connecting in the dramatic edifice of orientation which is a sensibility, a preparedness for carrying on, having learned, searching and going further, opening future-ward in expression of a personal peculiarity of creativity, newly launching an expression for this moment. Ideality is the spontaneous vector in the passing of time, the creatively aspirational vector, expressing freedom. Freedom is the moment to moment originality of the creativity of ideality. Every person’s living is a developing drama conferring a shape of relevance and importance on its envelopment of inertial/ entropic nature. In that way any and every person enchants the entirety of existence, makes it dramatic, makes it matter, some parts more than others, crucially different for every individual.

A monadic centre of agency, spinning out a personal drama which is a continuously located movement in the time-world, is defined by a seeking gaze, a questioning, curiosity from an ever-learning poise of orientation and bearing-further, readiness for surprising discovery and empathic encounters acknowledging other dramatic agents. Language* competence is a complex edifice of readiness, of knowing and empathy. Knowing the taste of Chardonnay isn’t an image, but a vigilant readiness to recognize sensations. Sensibility is everything a person is looking for, centrally and peripherally, both what is expected and what would count as surprisingly good or surprisingly bad, an active poise of sensitivities from ever-greater accumulations of increasingly remote acquaintances. The crucial intervention of a personal sensibility is to bring to any here and now all the learned context, in the form of vigilant readiness and an intentional direction of effort, that gives the moment meaning and sense. Sensibility is an individual’s expectations and personal intentions engaging every moment of sensitivity as a lens through which sensations transform into features of a coherent world that is stage setting for the personal drama but especially for what’s next in the drama. The centre of agency is reading sensations through the interpreting lens of a knowing, caring, and actively aspiring sensibility, already shaping what’s next.

In ceaselessly passing time and without an otherwise fixed essence, personality, as a point and arc of agency, has an inherent imperative to create (and power to do so, moment by moment) an ever revising personal presence and passage through an unstable and temporally discontinuous actuality. To anticipate and act with intent is to dwell in the personal tilt or bearing-further beyond now and no-longer, into the unformed not-yet which is freedom.

* Fragment 140, January 25, 2019, The Most Important Event in History (word count: 1,077. See subsection: Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.