Tag Archives: time

Welcome to Metaphysics

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 121, word count: 1,312.

Metaphysics is part of the framework of orientation within which any individual operates. Everybody has some metaphysical framework or other, typically learned from ambient culture at an early age without recognizing that it might be questionable, thinkable. The way in which a person’s framework of orientation deals with the incongruity between subjectivity and objectivity is its metaphysics, as both subjectivity and objectivity have been asserted as a revelation of what is uniquely and exclusively real in the cosmic whole, and they are starkly different from one another.

Subjectivity is remarkable due to its ideality, the personally interior experience of living a particular bearing of sensitive teleology in a life in the world. Ideality is the source and origin of the idea of transcendence since only ideality (spirituality, intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creativity and so of freedom, stunningly beyond the insensitive lumps and structures of objectivity, and as such a clear transcendence of nature. This makes personal engagement in the passing of time, a tilting into and toward an openness of time to come, fundamental in subjectivity and in the transcendence of nature. With subjectivity there are no eternal necessities, no finality. Everything is a tentative construct for navigating into a non-actual futurity, a strict ideality guessed at but unknown, questing (desperately) for opportunities to construct shapes and works, interventions within lumpen actuality, along the way. The bearing-into-futurity of subjectivity is a questioning that changes continually with experience and learning. Its whole conceptual framework of reference markers can change from internal reconsideration. Since personal subjectivity is not publicly measurable it has been characterized as inward, and so inwardly we have an ever-questing orientation, a directionality of caring at some moment in an embodied life in the world, a directionality which is the spiritual construct, representing an increasingly remote personal no-longer or previousness, of an interpretive context (immediate expectation, readiness, and bearing of intervention) for present experience.

On the other side of metaphysics is a universalizing of objectivity (on the model of “medium sized dry goods”), a conception of hard-structure forms, enduring, definite, final (“real”), determinate, self-subsisting concrete material objects in configuration, energy field structures gliding in an eternally pre-determined fall shaped by mathematical necessities such as inertia and entropy, categorically excluding the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality. Overall, it is the timelessness of objectivity, the finality of objects and their entirely predetermined arc of changes, manifesting eternal mathematical necessities, that stands out in claims placing objectivity as exclusively and uniquely real.

Subjectivity, and so transcendent ideality, is multiple rather than unitary, occurring in separate embodied and mortal persons clustered and scattered over the surface of planet Earth (that we know of). The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary subjectivity, has been considered such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism (metaphysical claims placing ideality in some form as primary in reality as a whole) have just evaded admitting the identity of ideality and subjectivity! Plato’s Ideal Forms, for example, are a mythological mashup of materiality and ideality, taking ideas of types of objects as essentially united with the objects. Existing separately from any person’s life in the world is a feature of objects that Plato ascribed to Ideas. Abstraction is entirely an operation of individual intelligences, but in Platonism the abstract categories of things are ultimately causal in the existence of every ephemeral particular of objective actuality. This announces one of the jaw-dropping surprises in the history of formal metaphysics, that what seems the most obvious and common sense occurrence of transcendent ideality in ordinary embodied individuals has gone conspicuously undocumented.

Creationist monotheism is a metaphysical dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (intelligence) who created the objective material world in a unique episode of exuberant divine caprice. It is normally considered that, within this created material world, humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created as images of the creator, fundamentally similar to the divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality. In that version of dualism the divine principle of creation, and so ideality more generally, is, as it is in Plato, primary and dominant, making it idealist even though not a declared idealism. Again, however, it is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of transcendent temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It was always the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of a senior transcendence at far cosmic horizons. There is no other direct experience of ideality.

Given the dramatic differences between subjectivity and objectivity, anyone’s metaphysical framework of orientation will be a conception of reality as a whole that either includes or excludes the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality (spirituality) with its freedom and transcendence of nature. A strict metaphysical objectivism (materialism) can remain coherent only by denying transcendence completely. (One problem with that is the implausibility of deriving ethically sensitive intelligences from insensitive lumps.) A metaphysics of transcendent ideality can remain coherent without denying the existence of objects by accepting a dualism of multiple embodied subjectivities each living a particular life as spirituality intervening in brute actuality.

Can the World be an Idea?

Contrary to Plato, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, for example, the world can’t be only and entirely an idea because ideas are features of a personal orientation of some embodied individual in a particular life in the world. It has been claimed that the world is an idea in the mind of God, but the idea of God goes far beyond a particular embodied life in the world, and so is not strictly coherent. The way in which the world is an idea is that what is known of the world is always the construct of personal experiences of the world. The world is an idea for any and every individual, and individuals have been sharing ideas about the world with one another and have constructed various cultural ideas of the world. In any individual’s life, the world is an idea, largely learned from some such ambient culture. However, to use Kantian terminology, the world “in itself” can’t be only and entirely an idea.

We can say two things about a world with transcendent spirituality. First, it is not entirely pre-determined by anything. Its fate in detail is mutable, strictly indeterminate, with possibilities for novelty at any moment. Second, anyone’s ideas of the world, and any culturally transmitted ideas of the world, are also mutable, not etched into the blueprints of the cosmos, not final or essential elements of reality, but rather tentative abstractions, subject to revision or abandonment with the assimilation of more experience. Ideas of the world are typically cultural constructs originating from multiple contributions from various individuals’ experience and creative thinking.

The effective activity of creative transcendence at the level of the individual has important political consequences, especially in support of egalitarian and mutually nurturing systems of sociability, the opposite of patriarchy. It means that social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas. Ideas are openings into a mutable future. An authentic idealist metaphysics is a metaphysics in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of novelty created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics in which there is active transcendence with effects in brute actuality, a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come. Political conservatives either just deny transcendence completely and interpret the world as mere physics, entirely fated or random, or adhere to something like the Platonic or monotheistic idea of transcendence, a unique supernatural expression at some far horizon which determined how things will be forever.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 118, word count: 1,656

Post-modernist theory rejects the mental autonomy and creative agency of the individual that Enlightenment era philosophy introduced into modernity. It’s also the universality insisted upon by philosophical claims that post-modernists reject and deny. Implicit here is the post-modernist claim that individual identity is inseparable from an ambient cultural hive mind made up of specific ‘discourses’. That individuals can move their personal orientation beyond an ambient hive mind (cultural discourses), beyond an ethnic identity, and reorient into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally, and so engage in thinking with a peculiarly philosophical universality and autonomy, is rejected by post-modernists. The claimed necessity of ethnic identity is the theory behind a postmodernist imperative to refrain from criticizing cultures, to respect the peculiarities of all cultures because criticism is always from some ‘colonizing, imperialist, alien cultural perspective’. The fragmentations of identity politics follow. Without philosophical universality you can’t criticize patriarchy or patriarchal superego. This is our point of dispute.

It is not controversial that individual people universally share both consciousness and embodiment. The question is this: is there enough that is inherent in only consciousness and embodiment for an individual to have a viable identity able to enact an exit from hive minds? Part of the post-modernist claim is that there is no coherent person, subject, or agent without the input of particular cultural norms encountered and learned from ongoing interactions with other people within an ambient community. This claim has essential common ground with the claim of David Hume (1711-76) that there is no continuity of interior subjectivity.

Hume’s Phenomenology

Hume’s phenomenology of subjectivity as a “bundle of impressions and ideas” in which he could identify no enduring self or person, emerges when experience is pre-conceived as passively receptive and determined exclusively by the bombardment at every moment of a manifold of stimuli from surrounding objects and events. Such a pre-conception is typical of empiricists with their idea of consciousness as a “blank slate” that exists only as the sensory stimuli and afterimages that appear there. That model is inaccurate, however, because consciousness doesn’t work passively. A person comes to each moment as an agent, searching, reaching, and delving as an interpretation of a personal past. Such temporal depth and agency is exactly subjective continuity since responses to lessons learned enacted as a personal vectoring into futurity are acts of a subject. Knowing is nothing like a mental photocopy of facts, not the ability to recover an afterimage of words or images from a stack. When something is known it has been made a fixture of a person’s orientation, embedded in a personal sense of context and bearing, an overall sense of where you are, where you are coming from, and where headed: the personal context for making sense of anything sensed or perceived. Knowledge isn’t afterimages but instead a rich directionality of flight, a poise or bearing. Any consciousness is already agency expressing a subjectivity whose particular identity is formed very much by embodiment but also by spiritual individuality, an individual peculiarity of sensitivity, point of view, questioning, impulses to make a personal mark, individuality of voice. Embodiment gives us the personal identity of a particular shape and placement; mobility, experience of moving and shaping other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effort and effect. What persons have in common universally as consciousness and embodiment are dimensions of individual identity.

Discourses Don’t Think (Only Individuals Think)

When “thinking” is mentioned it might still suggest an outward gaze, an opening through sensitivity to objects in the surrounding world, maybe contemplated after the fact with retained impressions or from reading or hearing spoken reports. There is much to think about in the tumultuous, terrible, and wonderful world, from dinner to politics. However, there is also much to think about concerning thinking itself, the action of a personal sensibility that brings to any sensitivity all the context that gives it meaning and sense, a sensibility that delves sensations for confirmations of expectations and opportunities for personal aspirations. The directionality of any human gaze is so guided by what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) to what can only be characterized as a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Spiritual agency isn’t an object or a substance, has no completed outline or appearance, but it still has plenty of identity.

A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity which includes a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring (a marker of spirituality). Each spirituality is characterized by its own interiority of such temporally structured non-actuality, bearing into the openness and freedom of an indeterminate future with the force of curiosity, questioning, accumulated discoveries, an impulse to self-declare, to make a personal mark, and of empathic sociability. Personal acts of caring both express and keep constructing the most personal newness and incompleteness. In that way time is a structure of caring which uses impressions of entropy physics (of embodiment and its working: muscle knowledge and kinaesthetic-metabolic knowledge) in a construction of expectation and directionality.

For such a sensibility, time is something about now, specifically the personal context-in-flight brought to bear upon now as the portal to creating a personal future. The sense of time to come, of passing into time to come, is a glimpse of the freedom of ideality, of the ongoing (never finished) self-construction of sensibility. In a certain sense we exist entirely in our spiritual reach into not-yet in the context of lessons interpreted from no-longer. Only spirituality (intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and that is the essence of creativity. Teleology of creation is another identifier of spirituality, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive gestures or voice. Consciousness, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea-of-a-life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself through the world, is a fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating openness in an otherwise inertial and entropic world. In such a world, consciousness can recognize its temporal bearing as transcendent in its outreaching sensitivity, its caring and curiosity, its ever renewing ideality, its freedom and power of embodied intervention within the shape of brute actuality. In the strictly inertial and entropic world, this very limited freedom is shockingly transcendent.

The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of nature, transcending its own embodied particularity by always tilting into an indefinite beyond-itself, projecting active construction and expression from interior non-actuality. Nothing defies particularity outside spiritual creativity, and the peculiarity of spirituality is in being both particular and utterly beyond particularity. Evading particularity means asserting spirituality, making sure that a manifest expression is actualized, enacted, but of a kind that includes incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion. Instead of having any definitive personal particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality, namely freedom, time to come as freedom into which a possible future extension of self, of life, is projected, a personal metaphysical non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by enacting interconnections with others. The flight of ideality creates a special sensitivity to other fountains of unforeseeable possibilities, other conscious agents. In such sociability we have: empathy, the comfort of companionship and sharing, co-operative bonding, community, ethics, morality, culture, and conversation.

The agency inherent in consciousness, particularized and empowered by embodiment and yet made transcendently open and creatively indefinite by spirituality, establishes that personhood, viable identity, is not fundamentally a construct of cultural norms. We can judge and criticize patriarchy, patriarchal superego, and any other cultural norms from the perspective of the inherent agency of individual consciousness which is always outside a hive mind orientation. Not only that, but the personal transcendence in spirituality is a guiding beacon in a process of thinking that judges (and discards) culturally assigned labels, categories, and evaluations of personal identity which contradict and deny personal transcendence. We still have an inherent sensitivity to other conscious agents and good reasons to re-invent empathic interconnections.

There certainly is a requirement of sociability, and we construct our sociability initially by learning, conforming to, and using the norms of interaction on display around us. Individuals imitate and twist the norms of interaction we encounter. The imitation of such norms of identity is pragmatic role-playing, constructing a sort of costume or mask which can become habitual and obsessive and yet always removable in principle. The original agency is not replaced or destroyed. The identity markers assigned by culture depend on the inherent agent to make them work, are in fact parasitic on the inherent agent, and agency remains when an individual moves personal orientation beyond a cultural hive mind or ethnic identity and reorients philosophically into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Postscript to Superego

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

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Anyone familiar with this blog will know that it is an ongoing meditation on thinking, the life of ideality or spirituality, and the potential for creative freedom present in the world through the agency of the individual person. Since every person is a self-thinking idea, then in that sense we are nothing but thinking. As the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world, the power to think is the really transcendent power, but thinking has vulnerabilities which normally result in a socially acquired self-blindness. Since interpretations of experience and the individual’s reach into futurity are typically colonized by an ambient social control structure, effective subjectively as a personal superego, there is another sense of thinking in which to think is to identify and disrupt that superego, using an original voice of curiosity to follow through on its own questions. Beyond the superego, thinking is the process by which consciousness comes to recognize and assert its creative freedom. Spirituality or intelligence is not any kind of substance, but instead, is a transcendent interiority, the interior of a person’s teleological time.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Spirituality, Time, and Ideas

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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Spirituality is ideality, but contrary to the classical Platonic conception of ideality as the perspective of eternity, radically removed from time, in fact ideality is inseparable from the personal sense of the passage of time. Ideality is the spiritual creation of transcendent freedom in teleological time. A spiritual person as an idea carries lessons (ideas) interpreted from no-longer and with them creates a personal reach into not-yet.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Irritation Alert!

21 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Freedom, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Tags: time, spirituality, metaphysics, idealism, religion, civilization, interconnectedness

A certain philosophical position is being developed in these blog postings, and it is likely to be irritating to almost everybody. At the core is a certain metaphysical claim about time, freedom, intelligence, and transcendent spirituality. Time is taken as a spiritual reality although not an objective actuality. This involves a claim that a somewhat novel idealism is required for understanding time, which will be nonsense to people devoted to materialism, realism, empiricism, and the application of those notions in science. However, the account of spirituality rejects disembodied caring, cosmic moral ledger keeping, original sin, a cosmic plan, faith in mysteries, and the relevance of eternity, most of the key features of religions, and so will be distasteful to adherents of religion, both eastern and western, antique and New Age. This philosophical position supports the optimistic claim that the best days of humanity should be in the future, and so will disappoint those who long for a return to the wisdom of ancient, medieval, or other pre-modern cultural systems. In common with an important stream of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, it finds dystopian features in what is called civilization, in all existing cultural systems including the post-feudal and post-colonial Euro-American regime of investor supremacist capitalism. (These dystopian features are crucially linked to questions of philosophy and yet are unrecognized by historians and social scientists.) That line of exploration will be just noise to supporters of market solutions to social problems such as liberals, corporatists, investors, and most academics. The account given here of the human interconnectedness denies the importance of the masculine virtues of strength, kinetic action, and competitive spirit, and so will be distasteful to sports fans and generally to males in traditionally masculine sub-cultures and occupations. It rejects the importance of the symbols and the pageantry of communal unity and transcendence, of superiority and inferiority, including property accumulation, and so will be opposed by traditionalists, social pragmatists, communitarians, and symbolists. It rejects the legitimacy of sovereignty, and will therefore be distasteful to monarchists, conservatives, communists, and meritocracy enthusiasts. However, it takes human interconnectedness and sociability so seriously that it will be distasteful also to gun and property-focused libertarians. Yet, it is a kind of metaphysics of individual autonomy and supports the universality of individual human dignity as conceived in the Enlightenment, so alienating post-modernists. It rejects the tragic view of life and the spiritually ennobling effect of stories, music, fine arts, and monumental architecture, so will be distasteful to romantics and opera fans. It asserts philosophical thinking, rather than journalism, as the way to hold power to account. Many of the postings may feel long and troublesome to read, with unexpected progressions. However, if you really want the “red pill” experience, then, as Cypher said to Neo: “fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is going bye bye”.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy with a Whiff of Mysticism

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Tags: thinking, creativity, freedom, philosophy, spirituality, transcendence, mysticism, logic, history of philosophy

The School of Athens

In the centre of the fresco “The School of Athens” (by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, painted between 1509 and 1511 in the Vatican, Apostolic Palace) Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right are gesturing their disagreement, each pointing to what he takes to be the most important focus of philosophical curiosity and thinking, and in doing so setting the agenda of western thinking generally for a couple of thousand years. Plato points skyward, asserting his metaphysics, which features the cosmic dominance of otherworldly and timeless Ideal Forms, anticipating Christian spirituality. Aristotle has his hand extended horizontally, palm open and facing downward, indicating that it is more important to understand the concrete world as encountered in ordinary living, anticipating science. Regrettably, they were both wrong. The focus revealed in the key question What is thinking? is the power of spirituality on a strictly personal-scale.

The intense spiritual effort known as mysticism is based on a conviction that there are profound spiritual features of the human situation which remain generally unrecognized either because they are metaphysically remote from the ordinary circumstances of human living (as in the metaphysics of Plato, for example), or else they are somehow hidden in plain sight, occupying an unidentified blind spot in human perception, especially as that perception is guided by normal cultural influences. Part of the claim and program of any mysticism, of course, is that those unrecognized features can (and should!) be disclosed and explored with certain special techniques. In the case of philosophical thinking on the question What is thinking?, the techniques available are familiar enough: questioning, self-questioning, and re-conceptualization. However, even such philosophical thinking can carry a whiff of mysticism in acknowledging a shocking strangeness lurking within the ordinary, a strangeness concerning human spirituality, and that appropriate acquaintance with spirituality has a transforming effect on experience generally.

Existenz*

To say that spirituality is personally ‘interior’ is to say nothing more than that it is not an actuality among things, but is still the marker of what is most local for any particular person. In the work of Martin Luther, such subjective interiority was called inwardness. In Stoicism, as well as in the work of Luther and Immanuel Kant, freedom was recognized as an important reality but entirely limited to that personal inwardness, and everything overt and public was conceived as completely pre-determined either by divine plan (logos for Stoics) or by material cause/ effect, so by God or nature. However, all of those ways of thinking were guided in what they conceived by ideas of cosmic hierarchy, in which the power of the almighty eternal was so comprehensive that no ephemeral and finite force could divert it in any way. Such ideas of cosmic hierarchy are unjustified.

The creative freedom that is personal spirituality is not a formless nothing, and is much more than passive consciousness ‘of’ something. It is teleological time: an interventionist bearing into actuality conceived as open futurity shaped by the personal specifics of anticipation, aspiration, and evaluation, including pre-actual anticipations of alternative discretionary interventions. Freedom has the form of time as open futurity constructed of non-actual and increasingly remote possibilities and probabilities, incorporating lessons learned, all in continuity with the most local actuality of embodiment. That the actuality of the present state of affairs categorically and specifically excludes and negates the actuality of all other states of affairs (temporal discontinuity), means that the existence of other states, which is required for the existence of time, can only be existence as non-actualities ‘interior to’ some living person. This spiritual ‘interiority’ is an individual’s ever-present embodied orientation in a time-structure of non-actuality (the non-actual future, the non-actual past). As freedom-empowering non-actuality, teleological time is the form of transcendent spirituality. A very elaborated orientation and directionality of interventionist bearing is certainly ‘in here’, continuously self-building with a streaming force of original questioning, creativity, and basic sociability, along with variably intense anxiety, desperation, and gratification. 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 this spirituality at the level of the embodied individual.

That Whiff of Mysticism

The idea of metaphysical transcendence (effective non-actuality or immateriality), of course, contains a whiff of mysticism, suggesting ideas about what is supernatural, typically conceived as divinity, and about how humans should bring ourselves into an appropriate relationship to the supernatural. However, what is encountered in recognizing the personally interior non-actualities in freedom and time, although transcendent, is emphatically embodied, not all-knowing or all-powerful, and certainly lacks universal jurisdiction, so is not divine in any usual sense. This transcendence suggests a scattered multitude of equals instead of “something than which nothing can be greater”. Here there is nothing to be known about how to evade oppressive astral powers on the path up to divinity, no divine messages or powers in letters, words, numbers, events or images, nor anything else that could be cultish. This is transcendent spirituality without the dissolving of personal individuality which is typical of mysticism. There are no glimpses here of an almighty provider, legislator, and enforcer. This transcendence involves no debt, and so no guilt or gratitude, and has no involvement of any kind with disembodied intelligent entities. This transcendence is without the “all is one” or cosmic consciousness, without the supreme-source or cosmic moral ledger keeping and final day of reckoning. There is only this whiff of personal creative freedom which is not a thing. Perhaps the surprise is that spirituality and transcendence are still recognizable as such without the more grandiose features of mysticism.

Still, the personal use of thinking (on the question: What is thinking?) as a gateway to the experience of spirituality carries a distinct whiff of mysticism. For one thing, there is the recognition that working up a theory of spirituality is insufficient. In this thinking, the task at hand is not the construction of conceptual or abstract knowledge, but instead a personal experience, an encounter with and recognition of ‘interior’ non-actuality as transcendent spirituality. It is more a re-orientation to a grounding in that transcendence than any word-based knowledge or model-building. This is a personal and practical re-orientation as opposed to critiquing and tweaking the logic of theories and intervening in theoretical puzzles, which quite properly make up the important substance of academic work. This is personal in ways that theory never is. Nobody does this for money, but for intrinsic value, just as with mysticism. This alone is enough to put such thinking at the outer fringe of philosophy, where it should be unable to cast an unwelcome light on institutional philosophy, already considered fringy enough with respect to scientific knowledge.

Thinking and Time

To think is, sometimes, to question (doubt) in a way that is profoundly different from requesting information from a catalogue, such as people do with internet search engines or in the student – teacher interaction. This different kind of questioning or curiosity is not something with definite linguistic form. It is to have personal orientation progress outside previously habitual markers, categories, rules, and boundaries. It is a sense of unknowing and vigilant curiosity which specifically rejects established patterns. Questioning is a dissolving or failing of previously stable elements of subjective orientation: expectations of identities and relationships. They dissolve frequently in the process of an individual’s developing orientation. To think is to be vigilant to that dissolving, and so to unleash the gushing interior stream of alternative possible reconstructions: new and incompatible ‘propositions’ to be considered. This thinking as the movement between questioning and re-conceptualization is done in the context of both a person’s interventionist bearing, and the simultaneously expanding overall orientation at this moment of flight into actuality toward the openness of futurity. So, thinking is re-making the provisional stability of futurity, the personal specifics of anticipating, aspiring, evaluating, planning and executing interventions: re-conceptualization. There is no modelling or representation of this mental operation in logic theory, neither in inductive or deductive logic. The whole spirit of formal logic is to be coldly rule-governed and determinate, but re-conceptualization is indeterminate and warm, which is to say, creative. The active presence of a scattered multiplicity of embodied spiritualities, intervening as individuals into local actuality, makes the whole world indefinite, indeterminate, not yet a completed particular. Time is the incompleteness of everything. Thinking is a way of being in an indeterminate world, a world of possibility, a way of making such a world. This isn’t psychology, but rather the metaphysics of time.

Descartes was Right

If there is to be an event of questioning (thinking on the way to re-conceptualization) there must be an oriented bearing of intervention, anticipation, aspiration, evaluation, and so a thinking subject in flight between past and future. The inseparable combination of the temporality of thinking and the subjectivity of time establishes that Descartes was right about “Cogito, ergo sum.”.

Missing Spirituality

In an era when the decline of spiritual ideologies from antique religions is no longer seriously lamented, potentially clearing the field for better guides, the vacuum was filled instead by the modern ideology of competitive materialism, celebrated relentlessly in mass media and aided and encouraged by science in its role as dominant intellectual discourse. Thoroughly secular people still inclined to have spirituality in their lives, and there are many, often do so by involvement with the arts, cultivating appreciation of art and beauty. It is a positive thing that there are still so many determined to keep a sense of spirituality alive. However, ascribing spirituality to beauty directs attention outward toward some eternally mysterious source, remote and unattainable. Contemplation and appreciation of art and beauty, as a way of being spiritual, invokes a kind of Platonic idealism in which beauty represents a transcendent world which is otherwise inaccessible, almost perfectly alien to individuals. In such a context, the human connection to spirituality is occasional, passive, unreliable, and dependent on treasured properties for possession of which the most wealthy compete. This is a misconception of transcendence. The top-down metaphysical orientation re-enforces the hierarchy that is typical of arts culture, largely overlapping the hierarchy of competitive materialism.

The promise of philosophy reclaiming the metaphysical question of transcendence as its historically essential issue, even with its whiff of mysticism, is to open a more appropriate experience and discourse of spirituality. Regrettably, reputable philosophy has made itself as science-like and un-spiritual as possible, and so unavailable as a source of spiritual discourse. However, there is plenty of spiritual discourse in the history of philosophy, some of it cited above. Spiritually relevant philosophy comes of personally making something important of the question: What is thinking? What thinks is spirituality, a flight of creativity and so of indeterminacy, projecting creativity into actuality. Such a conception of spirituality upsets the Platonic-scientific sense of the world (including the social world) as a rigidly furnished bundle of structures waiting to be discovered, with all essences already finished and in place, and so where everything is as it must always be. As an act of creation, thinking is the reality of freedom at the level of the embodied individual, and keeps open the indeterminacy and incompleteness of the self and the world. Emphasizing thinking as spiritual power also shifts the sense of human wellbeing in a way that upsets the ideology of competitive materialism. Thinking itself is the best and essential achievement, self-conferred. Tapping the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence), and bringing creations into the world is the way to fulfillment for both individuals and collectives.

Note:

* Some observations in this posting are responses to points made in:

What is Existenz Philosophy, written by Hannah Arendt, published in Partisan Review 8/1 (Winter 1946): pp. 34-56.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

Fringe Philosophy: Thinking Transcendence

02 Thursday Jun 2016

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

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

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

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

Existenz Philosophy

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

Embodied Spirituality as a Grounding in Transcendence

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

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

Notes

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

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

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

 

The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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tags: Platonism, idealism, spirituality, metaphysics, mathematics, PHI, beauty, eternity, hierarchy, embodiment, time, freedom, Christianity, knowledge, Sartre, existentialism, individuality

Ideal Forms, Ideas, are at the core of Platonic metaphysics. The Ideal Forms are archetypal objects and structures: immaterial, profoundly static, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so, easily associated with (the interiority of) some divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the association of eternally static Ideal Forms with transcendent (immaterial) spirituality or intelligence is far removed from the capricious personality of ordinary subjectivity, and yet that association is there, as discussed below. The Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of the metaphysical world-structure, a hierarchy of descent from a divine One-ness-of-all-beings at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of embodied human experience. Each increment of that descent from divine One-ness is a kind of imperfect self-portrait created by the stage immediately higher, a self re-creation that is progressively reduced in perfection, distorted at each step by the loss of some stability and accuracy, so that, where we live at the bottom, reality is unrecognizable, represented by utter illusions, flickering shadows of sketchy models of reality (the Cave parable in Republic). That structure of descent taken altogether is the primal hierarchy, as each successive stage down is defined as completely dependent on the power of the stage above, and the structure as a whole is eternally unchanging, as are the archetypes of objects and the divine One-ness at the top.

This may seem a slightly cartoonish presentation of Platonism, tilting to the NeoPlatonic or even Orphic end of Platonic visions of reality, but it has the virtue of presenting in a brief and straightforward way the features of Platonism which are enduringly influential and most problematic: absolute sanctification of what remains eternally unchanged, assertion of the sovereign power of that eternal Being in determining a rigidly top-down hierarchy, and finally, disparagement of ordinary human embodiment. This conception of reality, ruled by the sacred eternal (stasis, stillness, immutability), stands as a core counter-force to any philosophy of freedom, regardless of the rationalist features in Platonism.

Mathematical Idealism

Plato’s type of top-down grand scale metaphysical idealism emerges from a mathematical inspiration. Mathematics has been one of the most powerful inspirations for philosophy, and especially for metaphysical idealism and rationalism. Philosophy has attracted a lot of mathematicians who admire changeless abstractions, and their opinions have had decisive influence: Pythagoras, Al-Kindi, Descartes, Leibniz, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell. Mathematics suggests a set of perfect and eternally stable objects: geometrical forms, numbers (the number PHI)*, functions, and operators, which are recognized in a multitude of different structures and situations, in a way that suggests their existence separate from, prior to, and far more permanent than, any particular instance. Mathematics shares that quality with experiences of beauty. Beauty has a force of impression that suggests an invisible higher world where beautiful forms exists forever in radiant glory. The normal world is a place of continual change, of brief novelty and passing away rather than eternity, but beauty (often associated with works of art) seems to raise an object above the ephemeral material stratum and giving it the look of eternity, perhaps because it is especially memorable and inspires a wish that it last forever just as it is. Also, there are direct overlaps of math and beauty in the mathematics of musical harmony, for example, and the mathematics of architectural beauty, and of course in what was called the music of the spheres. Language as an impersonal structure of rules has also inspired speculation about this mathematical mode of being. Objects of mathematical knowledge and the forms of beauty seem to have a pristine, crystalline existence that is immaterial, revealing some mode of being beyond the laws and forces of material existence. In philosophical thinking, mathematics, logical forms, linguistic forms, and instances of beauty have all been interpreted as glimpses of transcendence and immateriality. (* For an introduction to PHI, see Chapter 20 of The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.)

Christian Platonism

The dominance of the hierarchical force of Platonism was sanctified and made legally mandatory by Christianity as it became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 324, because the previously developed and widely familiar language of Greek philosophy had been used to construct the Christian message. The process continued after the Romans abandoned their western provinces, and Christian institutions had to re-launch within the ruins, a patchwork of rural baronial turf holdings, eventually becoming powerful enough to re-claim the old imperial domain as western Christendom from around 800. (The deeply Christianized trunk of the Roman Empire continued uninterrupted in the eastern provinces, where Greek culture, including Platonic ideas, had been dominant for centuries.) In that second coming of organized Christianity to the west, the crucial interpretation of doctrine by Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo, was a Christianized version of NeoPlatonic metaphysics. Having thus established from ancient times its dominance in the European system of cultural reality, Platonism has been the most important metaphysical vision by far, and the inescapable form of idealism. Before Christian Platonism and NeoPlatonism, there was pre-Platonic Orphic metaphysics with a similar vision of divine cosmic hierarchy. The conceptual system of reality embraced by medieval alchemists had the same sources: ancient Greek Orphic mythology and the philosophical work of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Nineteenth century Romantics still mused on a variant of the same vision.

As an illustration of how Platonic metaphysics applied in practice, the medieval theory of social order identified three functional groups which combined in a sort of human pyramid. Those higher in the pyramid controlled and supervised (often owned) those below, by divine design. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and lowest stratum. Baronial fighters formed the next level up and were much fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land and natural resources, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce the effectiveness of that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed the highest point of the pyramid. This is a clear application of Plato’s Republic. The medieval agricultural peasants were Plato’s appetite driven workers. The military baronage were Plato’s spirited fighters. The priestly clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. Orientation to that kind of social hierarchy is still familiar.

The nature and meaning of knowledge was also conceived in terms of Platonism. The official Christian doctrine on knowledge was NeoPlatonic via Augustine: God wills a special illumination within human minds which enables those minds to recognize instances of Ideal Forms. So, knowledge is enabled by a special act of illumination by God in the revelation of something like a universal form, an uncovering of the universal character of what is sensed at a particular time and place. The ultimate object of knowledge is an eternal permanence, the Ideal Form. There was speculation that God created the world by uttering the names of the Ideal Forms, bring them into being, and making language intrinsic to knowledge and to the structure of reality.

On those foundations, Platonic metaphysics looms as a central conceptual pillar in the reality construct of Euro-American culture, foundational even now in the orientation of modern people. It isn’t often recognized as such, but Platonism is there in a mathematical eternity to the conception of the world as a rigidly furnished bundle of things waiting to be discovered. Although the more mystical features might seem alien to modern people, Platonism reveals its ongoing presence as a privileging of stability and fixed structures in the general notion of, and the cultural value projected onto, abstract knowledge as a human accomplishment, a privileging of the perspective of eternity. In addition, not all of the mystical features are alien. For example, Platonism is our source of an assumption that an invisible power is the source of the world we inhabit, that there are super-sensible origins, sources, and explanations for objects and situations we deal with, and so, on that supernatural basis, that creative power, agency, greatness, authority, and legitimacy flow from above and beyond us, from high abstractions. This orientation inspires and provides legitimacy for a striving after hierarchical centralization, for imperialism, in social, economic, and political arrangements. This is how imperialism became, through cultural assimilation, the basic and largely unconscious shape of expectation and aspiration even in modernity.

Separating Spirituality from Embodiment

Platonic metaphysics was an attempt to understand transcendence, and, as such, it is the inescapable idealism, a model of the incongruity between spirituality and embodiment. In Platonism, the transcendence of human spirituality is defined as a mental grasp on what is eternal, based on a sensed affinity or essential sameness of ordinary human intellect or mentality with the immateriality of eternal Being. At the same time, it is an attempt to explain transcendence by appeal to something (eternity) outside normal experience, because normal experience is so emphatically embodied, and bodies never stop changing, and all their changes soon bring them to the end of their brief existence, to death. According to Plato, the body is a tomb, and what Plato wanted from transcendent spirituality was a decisive exit from the tomb. (For Augustine also, the body is the problem.) That is the context of the Platonic attempt to understand transcendence by appeal to eternity. The Platonic hierarchy is a way of constructing both an elaborate separation and a slippery connection between pure spirituality at the top and material body at the bottom, presenting individuals with a picture of the consequences of choosing to concentrate their energies in one direction or the other.

Platonic Heaven, the Immaterial Stratum

The mathematical inspiration of Platonic metaphysics can obscure the fact that even this idealism is a model of spirituality. Ideal Forms are spiritual objects, forms in a divine, higher order, mind, or projections from such a mind. The very concept of immateriality is always some abstraction from the non-actuality of subjective orientation, of a person’s directionality in teleological time, and so essentially an abstraction from the immateriality of time itself. Any removal from tangible materiality is some kind of invocation, projection, or allegory of the non-actuality of subjective interiority. (The only current existence of past and future is as a non-actuality, interior to individual spiritualities as a force of bearing or directionality.) The mathematical perspective of eternity suppresses the temporality of spirituality and so creates the (false) impression of a kind of static spirituality, a simple and pure consciousness or being, and then goes on to assert that such a mythical being is somehow more elevated than, and superior to, ordinary spirituality which is the ongoing construction of futurity, of temporality. The appeal to eternity is a way of editing spirituality (time) out of reality without recognizing what was done, by imagining ordinary objects with the spiritual quality of immateriality, which is only encountered experientially in the always-new and always-incomplete openness of personal spirituality. The perspective of eternity sucks temporality out of ultimate reality, and so sucks out the life. In the ideal world of mathematical abstractions there are no free agents, only objects with complete-destiny-included. It is a world where everything is already finished, with all changes both external and internal to objects simultaneously present in the transcendent object-set. Nothing is happening or being created in the perspective of eternity, and so the spirituality presented, typically presented as transcendent and divine, is really impoverished and effectively dead, fully furnished and complete. There is no exit from mortality here.

Freedom and Time

Metaphysics as an account of spiritual transcendence does not have to seek the perspective of eternity. Freedom is the essential issue of metaphysics, and recoiling from mortality to an imaginary eternity is exactly the wrong way to understand transcendence, spirituality, and freedom. It isn’t a grasp on eternity that makes us transcendently free, but instead our continual and discretionary re-construction of our force of bearing into an indeterminable future. It is exactly our engagement with time, our projecting and imposing teleological time onto nature, which is our freedom, and that force of engagement is inseparable from personal embodiment. Plato’s whole package of eternity, hierarchy, and disparagement of embodiment was wrongheaded and self-defeating.

Sartre’s existentialist description of individual personhood as “existence before essence”, or, to go one better, existence without essence, is a pretty good definition of personal spirituality. Time is the clearest case of existence without essence. Existential non-appearance applies to personal orientation, but that non-appearance is a gusher of creativity. The only way something can exist without essence is by being something other than an actuality, by being an ever reconstructing (re-inventing) bearing out of a no-longer-actual past and into a not-yet-actual future.

The transcendence of spirituality is not found in timeless eternity, but in its creating the non-actuality of time, and by doing so evading the brute and final particularity of actuality, of nature. Far from being a mere illusion or simply trivial in a description of ultimate reality, temporality (change, continual re-orientation) is the most fundamental spiritual reality. Spirituality or transcendence is exactly an attenuation of the particularity of actuality, a flight into increasingly remote possibilities and probabilities: living in time. The point of life is transcendence, but not an imaginary transcendence of lifeless, uncreative, eternity, but instead the transcendence of existence without essence. The point of life is life itself, the flight that is spirituality.

Platonism is not the necessary form of idealism. Any recognition that spirituality as such has to be included in the survey of reality is some kind of idealism. In Platonism, a conception of transcendent spirituality that depends on and follows from disparagement and rejection of normal human embodiment inspires a rigidly top-down hierarchical orientation because the source or matrix of spirituality is removed from individuals and placed in a remote central unity above everything. That limits the conception of freedom to an escape into the stasis and non-agency of the elevated spiritual unity. However, that purported freedom is complete unfreedom. The perspective of particular embodiment is exactly the condition of effective freedom in teleological agency. The force of a spiritual bearing that holds and projects the transcendent non-actualities of time and creativity just disappears without the perspective of embodiment. There is no hidden oneness of all spirituality, because embodiment defines and grounds the plurality and essential separateness, and the spirituality, of human individuals. The individual embodiment of a multitude of separate instances of spirituality, every one granted an essential place in our survey of reality, results in an idealism with a new horizontal configuration. Without privileging the eternal, transcendence reverts to the level of individual embodied spirituality, where the freedom of time and non-actuality are constructed. That completely eliminates the primal metaphysical hierarchy. Without eternity as the source and origin, the anchor of hierarchy disappears. Spirituality is a horizontal multiplicity: any spirituality is, by embodiment, a peculiarly separated individual among a multitude of others. We build interconnections, but we have to connect via our specific embodiment.

Selected Sources and References

The Republic of Plato, translated, with notes, an interpretive essay, and an introduction by Allan Bloom, published by BasicBooks, a subsidiary of Perseus Books, L.L.C., (second edition, 1991), ISBN 0-465-06934-7.

Aristotle and Other Platonists, written by Lloyd P. Gerson, published by Cornell University Press (2005), ISBN-10: 0801441641, ISBN-13: 978-0801441646. (Especially see Chapter One: What is Platonism?, pp. 24-46; and p. 32 for observations on “bottom-up” materialist atomism.)

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Ewald Osers, published by Harvard University Press (1991), ISBN-10: 0674792769, ISBN-13: 978-0674792760. (Especially see Chapter Sixteen: The Great No, pp. 223-237, and specifically p. 224 for Plato: the body is a tomb.)

What Is Ancient Philosophy?, written by Pierre Hadot, translated by Michael Chase, published by Belknap Press; (2002), ISBN: 0674007336.

The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, published by Allworth Press (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036. (Especially see Chapter Seven: Plato, Orphics, and Jains, pp. 197-204.)

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

A Pitch for Horizontal Idealism

25 Friday Mar 2016

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

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

 

Imperialist Culture and Self-Possession

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

It Isn’t a Question of Knowledge

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

Knowledge, Orientation, and Personal Incompleteness (Freedom)

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

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

Horizontal Idealism, with Homage to Kantian Idealism

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

Spirituality: Time is a Structure of Caring

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

This openness of being alive, as we humans are alive, is exactly our spirituality. A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity, including a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring, an expression of spirituality. Personal acts of caring both express and keep constructing the most personal newness and incompleteness. In that way time is a structure of caring which uses impressions of entropy physics (of embodiment and its working: muscle memory and kinaesthetic-metabolic memory) in a construction of expectation and directionality. Each spirituality is characterized by its own interiority of such temporally structured non-actuality, bearing into the openness and freedom of an indeterminate future with the force of curiosity, questioning, accumulated discoveries, an impulse to self-declare, to make a personal mark, and of sociability and empathy.

Idealist metaphysics is more or less always about the incongruence between spirituality and embodiment, or, in other words, between the supra-actuality of spiritual transcendence and apparent actuality. The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of embodiment in nature, transcending its own particularity by always tilting into an indefinite beyond-itself, projecting active construction and expression from interior non-actuality. Nothing defies particularity outside spiritual creativity, and the peculiarity of spirituality is in being both particular and utterly beyond particularity. Evading particularity means asserting spirituality, making sure that a manifest expression is actualized, enacted, but of a kind that includes an ever-constructing incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

Freedom, Surfing, and Physics

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.