The Most Important Event in History

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Aristotle, Calvinism, David Hume, empiricism, History, metaphysics, personality, religion, science, teleology, Thomas Aquinas, transcendence

Fragment 140, word count: 1,077.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived as a living Being, personified. The innermost reality of all existence was sensed as an expressive voice, creative personality, willful teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the essence of creation. However, that conception of teleological personality was structured weirdly, as bimodal, with a divine version and a strictly subordinate human version. There was a recognized sameness of transcendence between human and divine personality since both produce coherent utterances and acts expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, unlike inanimate nature. This bimodal personality informs the religious view of the purpose and meaning of life and existence. (In Aristotle’s minority opinion there is yet another version of teleology, final cause, a minimalist bundle of impulses in every individual object, not so dissimilar from his stripped down conception of divine personality in celestial spheres. Aristotle’s instances of final cause are so minimal that they seem almost mechanical, lacking spontaneity. Remarkably, those object essences were incorporated into the Christian conception of nature through the work of Thomas Aquinas.) The point is: for by far most of human cultural history the foundational and clearest kind of existence conceived was the living of vectors of ideality, the teleological vectors of caring we call personalities, known primarily in everyone’s personal experience of caring and of familiar interactions with other beings who express caring. Caring is an ideality at the heart of the transcendence of personality. Things matter to personalities as caring beings. The conditions of our living within a variable world are important to us. Without caring personalities nothing has any importance, nothing matters.

So, considering the question “What should we make of the existence of personality (teleology)?”; we note that what religion makes of it is the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but most truly at home at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, part of a weird denigration of human personality by comparison, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of a cosmic master situated as divine judge and tester of all, a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over everything less powerful. That patriarchal conception of teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical top-down societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic teleology to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.

The scientific Enlightenment pitched a new idea of fundamental reality, arguably the most important event in history, ridding humankind from oppressive superstitious dread and leaping beyond previous physical limitations through a deeper engagement with nature. It did this by abandoning personification in a transition to an inertial/ entropic conception of events, nothing less than the complete elimination of teleology from the thought of reality. What science makes of teleology, then, is nothing, proposing to interpret all apparent instances of teleology as mechanical structures, pre-set responses triggered by random stimuli. Note that this amounted to an even worse denigration of individual human personality than the weird bimodal religious conception. Materialist science claims the elimination of metaphysics since any idea of transcendence is excluded. However, science presents its ultimate mystery of space/ time/ mass/ energy, Nature, as a distinctly sovereign transcendence, omnipotent and predestining events forever in an extreme version of Calvinism. The novelty is that the scientific mystery is a dead thing, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in the absence of teleological persons, absolutely doesn’t matter. As such, the scientific revolution was the cultural expression of a metaphysical speculation which unfortunately served exactly the same sanctifying function for existing patriarchal political structures as the weird idea of divine personality.

Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics

An attack, widely considered persuasive, on the idea of personalities as coherent and fundamental realities is David Hume’s empiricist survey of his experience. Like the self for which Hume (no stranger to Calvinism) searched his subjectivity in vain, language competence is also nowhere to be discovered in the “bundle of impressions” that Hume identified. Introspection of the kind described by Hume reveals nothing like a sophisticated linguistic competence, elaborated over a long period of social interactions, but such competence is certainly and crucially present in the whole framework of adult orientation from which any individual makes sense of immediate sensations which arrive and pass as Hume described. Hume was skeptical of the continuity (and so the existence) of a subject, a personality, but linguistic competence does not flit in and out of an individual’s subjectivity like an atomic impression of red. It endures and is built upon, learned and reinvented over a lengthy and complex experience involving the creative arc of developmental continuity of an enduring personality making and integrating insights. Linguistic competence is also very personal, expressing a reading history, for example, as well as regional peculiarities of dialect. (Individual voices exist independently of language and always apply pressure on language-culture to suit their particular ideas of expression, clearly accomplished in the case of William Shakespeare.) Linguistic competence is a complex elaboration of an individual’s orientation in a life in the world, importantly different from a bundle of sensory atoms or impressionistic imprints.

General acceptance of the scientific metaphysics did not eliminate dystopian patriarchal societies devoted to war, but merely put stronger energies, more massively destructive weapons, into the hands of their controlling minorities. Those factions gained new entitlement as instruments of omnipotent nature, above reproach since morality and empathy do not apply to people as mechanistic structures. The root problem in both metaphysical speculations considered here, religion and science, is the perverse denigration of ordinary human personality. As untidy as it might be, the only hope for release from the straight jacket of superstitious dread and the straight jacket of nihilism in the face of all-predetermining Nature is a recognition of two coexisting mysteries: brute uncaring nature and, within it, a vast multitude of localized individually caring personalities of the ordinary kind, transcendent vectors of ideality, creative fountains of novel teleological ideas for their future in the world.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

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Why Politics isn’t Science

Tags

consciousness, curiosity, human nature, ideas, metaphysics, personality, politics, Power, science, teleology, transcendence

Posting 139, word count: 793.

Politics is the competition for power, for effective ownership and control of lives and property, but there is also a countervailing movement against power that is inherent in politics without being part of the competition for power. This countervailing force expresses the underdog side of the historical quarrel over transcendence. The dominant side of that quarrel is the idea of a cosmic teleological force to be feared and placated, an external sovereign transcendence who promotes local operatives to impose the universal structure of supremacy and hierarchy. That idea of transcendence is a sanctification of power, normally coupled with a depiction of ordinary embodied personalities as envious and grasping. These are in the background of every person’s upbringing. On the other side of the transcendence quarrel is the idea that the only transcendence is each embodied individual’s teleological processes, each individual’s ideas, ordinary consciousness itself, and that is the resistance to power.

There is a third option, a repudiation of any and all transcendence. Materialist science claims to assert this but presents its ultimate mystery of mass/ energy/ space/ time as a distinct sovereign transcendence, a dead one, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in itself, absolutely doesn’t matter.

The reason that politics can never be science is precisely ideas and ideality. The past and present of political actuality, dominated by hierarchical power, do not determine the future because ideality is unpredictably creative and utters conceptions of change in social, economic, and political cultures. Such changes always face predictable efforts to stifle them by conservative factions dedicated to preserving systems of hierarchy by both lethal force and the grotesque ideas of sovereign transcendence cited above. The scientific attitude that everything is determined by inflexible law, and so must always remain much as it is (a metaphysical idea), is indistinguishable from the conservative effort. Science has no help to offer in our political predicament. However, realty as experienced has two foundational constituents. One is actuality and the other is ideality in the form of a multitude of embodied personalities fountaining ideas. Every individual is an idea, the self-thinking idea of a particular life in the world, a particular idea of freedom, and ideas are not intrinsically hierarchical. Ideality is the transcendent being of personality at the level of the embodied individual, and ideality can effectively override in actuality what may seem to be givens of nature. In our being as fountains of ideas, people impose original events on the brute fall-lines of nature. A fountain of ideas is an imposer of change, and not a passive receiver or victim of time. (Here is the teleological structure in the sense of the passage of time.) Materialist science is not equipped to conceive personalities as fountains of teleological ideas, but an understanding of politics must do so for the chance of improvement in our longstanding dystopia.

The Question

The foundational status of ideality in experience, that is, in the world that matters, lands us squarely in metaphysics rather than science, and the whole of metaphysics rests on a single question: What should we make of teleology? ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which we know as consciousness? It is standard to present teleology in a stripped-down form to make it seem consistent with a mechanistic stimulus-response model of behaviour, separating it from how it is encountered in ordinary experience, namely as embodied personality. However, teleology really is personality. There have been attempts to show that purposive action can be reduced to automatic mechanisms pre-set to be triggered by specific stimuli. Such attempts are thoroughly political because if people are mechanisms it doesn’t matter how they are treated since morality and empathy are inapplicable to machines. So, denying ordinary consciousness as transcendence, as a fountain of teleological ideas with a creative arc of developmental continuity, that is, as personality, has the intent and effect of legitimizing the deception and manipulation of groups and individuals by people in culture pods enacting a fetish for power and trophies.

Teleology isn’t as simple as programmes of specific pragmatic operation, but also includes various creative postures bearing into futurity including curiosity, wondering, seeking and discovering original ways to make sense of things, existential questioning, and expressing all this in a personal voice. As thinking beings who use ideality for freedom by anticipating and imposing the novelty of original ideas on brute actuality, we are all in an immediate position to know that the bleak conservative story of human nature as a pit of appetites and envy is false! Liberation comes simply from declining to believe the default cultural teachings because the truth is plainly different.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Underdog in the Transcendence Quarrel

Tags

eureka, personality, philosophy, religion, teleology, thinking, transcendence

Posting 138, word count: 560.

In the year 1277 the Bishop of Paris published a condemnation of 219 propositions being taught in philosophy classes at the University of Paris faculty of arts. In that condemnation the arts masters “are specifically proscribed from asserting “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy”…” *. Apparently the Bishop and his intelligence analysts recognized this proposition as an existential threat.

It may not appear so at first glance, but the proposition “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy” was and is incendiary for mainstream ideology. It denies the primacy of property possession, for example, along with the validity of the rights, trophies, and glamour of the strongest. It also asserts the underdog side in an ancient quarrel that was crucial for any Christian Bishop.

From ancient times there has been an ongoing quarrel over transcendence. On one side is the idea of an external sovereign transcendence to be feared and placated, a cosmic teleological force who chooses local agents to impose the universal pattern of sovereign dominance and hierarchy. On the other side of this quarrel is the idea that the only real transcendence is in each and every individual’s teleological processes simply as such. A case can be made that the transition from religion to philosophy is the movement from the first to the second. The mental movement that is philosophical thinking reaches a eureka! of self-recognition as a thinking being, as ideality, with a very special sort of absolute self-sufficiency in thinking. Martin Luther is an example of someone with a clear sense of absolute autonomy as a thinking being (in spite of his belief that the specifics of divine predestination cannot be known). For philosophy to be possible it is necessary for an individual to evade the default enculturation of a personal value-identity assigned by an ambient hive mind, and the norms of social pragmatism based on trust of authority, a superego, sovereignty. The act of philosophical self-recognition is always an individual’s questioning, searching on a principle of relevance intrinsic to a sense of wonder. The philosophical answer is the questioning itself: self-recognition as the sort of being who questions spontaneously, a fountain of original ideality. The way of being of personality is fundamental because that way of being selects and shapes any possible experience.

Thinking, Waking, Self-Possession

Fichte asked: How can an act of thinking wake you from pragmatic getting along to the discovery of yourself as ideality, a creative subject rather than an object? ** A related question is this: Is there some specific thinking that can reliably bring a person to self-consciousness as creative teleological ideality, or is it always just luck or an accident?

Having to make an effort to think about thinking means that pre-philosophical thinking activity is often performed un-self-consciously. To think about thinking is to direct a certain unsatisfied curiosity at curiosity itself. It is to question both questioning and intuitions of what is relevant at a certain moment, and to consider the spiritual condition of readiness-to-recognize something new, how something is learned, to wonder about acts of changing the sensed framework of orientation by which effort is exerted teleologically in a chosen direction. It is to wonder at the teleological structure of the sense of the passing of time.

Notes:

* The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, written by Jonathan Lyons, Published by Bloomsbury Press (2009), ISBN: 978-1596914599. (p. 195).

** Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4. (p. 42).

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Life after Hive-Mind

Tags

craftsmanship, gratification, human nature, identity, macro-parasitism, nationality, nurture, patriarchy, personality, property, Romanticism, sovereignty, thinking, value, war

Posting 132, Word Count: 1,454.

It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of liberal influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; theatrical ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred and obscure “us against them” mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such things are not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story line, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda and censorship.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature as having no intrinsic need for sovereign authority is now an old idea, the real core of liberalism, and it always went against the conservative dogma, from religion, that everyone needs supervision structured within the symbols, pageantry, and authoritative superego of collective solidarity and belonging. The historical endurance of the state as sovereign authority shows that the enrichment of the idea of human nature from the Enlightenment was effectively smothered by that pre-existing culture. That pre-existing culture of authoritative supervision was an entrenchment in institutions of the traditional rights of the father, an overt expression of the principle that the strongest has sovereign rights over everyone else, rights to the property of the weaker, rights to the lives of the weaker, generally the right to be parasitic on the weaker. These cultural assumptions grow from the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The Enlightenment and liberal conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices, and that is what accounts for the hive-mind efforts of modern states.

It is now clear, however, that there are multitudes of people with very elastic and insubstantial attachments to collective entities. For example, the globalization of capital has fostered an internationally educated and mobile professional and business class. Academics, engineers, medical practitioners, business and financial professionals are all educated in an international context and trained to have a cosmopolitan outlook, quite detached from any specifically national or territorial master narrative which is the normal core of hive-mind. Additionally, the loyalty and national belonging of the investor class generally evaporates instantly upon election of a socialist government, so is always largely a pretence. Yet, these groups and individuals conduct lives they find meaningful. They are not without a cultural framework of orientation, but it is more a culture of trophy property as primary value. A focus on possession of property always includes fear for the security of possession, requires protection by at least the readiness of force, and so includes a culture of reverence for intimidating strength and power, control of taxes, laws, and war, the organization of violence, all still core features of patriarchy. Obviously this property-based cosmopolitan framework still has a stake in maintaining the institutions of nation-state sovereignty, especially police, military, and intelligence agencies, but strictly as service providers, supplemented or replaced by private suppliers when convenient.

The cosmopolitan perspective of these factions shows that there are experiences of gratification, identity, and meaning, which make identification with a national collective completely unnecessary. Gratification from symbols and pageantry of collective identity, embedded in the narrative of national peril and exceptionalism, is not necessary for a meaningful life, as demonstrated by the contented lives of the masses of people with scant engagement with such things. Gratification from property possession is still part of traditional patriarchal culture, inextricably invested in organized force, and by far the most culturally dominant and celebrated gratification experience, but there are others. Nurturing children (or nurturing animals, even plants), socializing them into the linguistic community and having ongoing conversations with them as they develop is inherently gratifying. This nurturing sociability is an independent non-property based source of profound value, meaning, and sense of identity, in fact the most important source for most people, although studiously unrecognized as such. Still another realm of gratification experience is thinking, often in the form of ‘scribal’ ideality. Philosophers have frequently asserted that the greatest human pleasure, the most fun, is thinking. A great deal of human fulfillment is derived from following personal curiosity, learning, reading, writing, and synthesizing ideas, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity. This gratification is individually interior, the model of spiritual autonomy, although always with some important relationship with sociability, communication, and human interconnectedness. Yet again, craftsmanship is another source of value experience, expressing and performing creativity, knowledge, and skill in working with tools and materials, actualizing a previously conceived shape in observable objects. There can also be pleasure in experiencing any skillful power of the human body, but assigned donkey work is boring, dirty, sweaty, energy sucking, exhausting and that is why a ‘working’ class does not have an independent culture of value experience, whereas ‘homemakers’, certain kinds of scribes, and craftspeople certainly do.

The culture of property possession as primary value is part of a conception of human nature as a painful emptiness craving to be filled, a sucking pit of needs for definition and gratification from outside itself, a deficiency that grasps for acquisition, consumption, and competition; determined by biological and material laws. However, the importance of gratification from nurturing, from performance of creative craftsmanship, and from scribal ideality clearly refutes the claim that human nature is a consuming emptiness. The ubiquitous practice of nurture shows human nature as a fountain of empathy and compassionate caring. The intrinsic gratification in practicing craftsmanship shows creativity in projecting shapes from personally interior ideality into material actuality. Intellectual activity, a cultivation of ordinary thinking, is a fountain of personal curiosity, questions, directed impulses for relevant exploring, researching, learning, discovering, original conceptualizing, writing, reading, and synthesizing ideas. Every personality is a fountain of such goods, of spontaneous creation of curiosity, questioning, inspiration, and caring, a gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others. These self-sourced experiences of value are profound enough to build lives upon, and many people do exactly that. In this light, each personality is a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world. This recognition of human nature as self-creating from interior ideality eliminates the primacy of competition and conflict, as well as hierarchical rankings and trophy collections derived from competitions, crucial features of possession of property as primary value. It also means that individuals do not have any inherent dependence on experiences of belonging provided by hive-mind sovereign states or any similar collective entity.

The entire conservative conception of the human predicament, featuring an intrinsic grasping emptiness of human nature, property possession as essential identity definition, inevitable competition and conflict for scarce goods, celebration of strength and violence, the necessity of a sovereign authority to dampen the lethality of conflict (civilization), and the rights of the strongest to be sovereign and parasitic, all supposedly pre-determined by natural law, is a bogus and toxic cultural legacy, a mythical metaphysics to make the world exciting for aspiring heroes in their romantic dreams of a cosmically ordained struggle for dominance. This old mythology is a dystopian nightmare for most people. The way out is cultivating the gratifying activities which express personality as a fountain of ideas for interventions-in-actuality. That creates the alternative experience, acquaintance with a human nature that can trust itself in the complete absence of authority or any vestige of patriarchy, in the absence of any controlling hive-minds projecting sovereignty of the strongest, with no need for the kind of identity and meaning assigned by a controlling collective. There is a far better life after re-orienting outside nationalist hive-minds and also outside any other rat race for symbolic markers of self-worth and identity. Hive-minds make war and are made for war.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is More than Nature

Tags

culture, hive mind, ideality, metaphysics, nature, patriarchy, politics, STEM, subjectivity, value

Posting 128, Word Count: 867.

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

The Mission of the Interior Individual

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Decolonization is Defining Left-Wing Politics

Tags

decolonization, human nature, imperialism, left-wing politics, patriarchy, right-wing politics, sovereignty

Posting 127, Word Count: 139.

A refined understanding of the political left-wing is needed to distinguish it clearly from any form of patriarchy, the political right-wing. This develops the position in posting 125 that the philosophical origin of the political left is a recognition of human nature as not intrinsically requiring sovereign supervision (also an insight motivating those previously colonized to decolonize themselves). Patriarchy is structured on two crucial claims: that the strongest has the right to exercise sovereignty over the less strong (founding claim of imperialism), including the right to use lethal violence; and that human nature is such as to require sovereign supervision. Both of those claims are false and rejected by any legitimately leftist politics. That means that the communist regimes of the twentieth century were not expressions of genuinely left politics, since they were all very distinctly patriarchal.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Quick Notes on Nature

Tags

Copernican Revolution, dualism, Hierarchy, ideality, merit, nature, sovereignty, transcendence

Posting 126, Word count: 229.

Merit

There is an equivocation in the word and notion “hierarchy”, especially in the combination “natural hierarchy”. This equivocation is often exploited by ideologues of the political right-wing. The fact is that ability ranking does not imply command or supervisory legitimacy. Neither competence nor merit of any kind carries special rights to sovereignty. Superior ability or giftedness does not confer any kind of ownership of other people or the work of other people. There is no legitimate way for any gradient of competences to become a chain of command, which morphs so effortlessly into a food chain.

Copernican Dualism

The Copernican Revolution highlights a basic dualism in experience. Not only does the cosmos not revolve around us but it also has no other specific accommodation for our sensitivity, consciousness, freedom, or teleology. Objective actuality does not care, respond, or prepare. Subjectivity, which is to say, spirituality, is not determinative of objective actuality as a whole or on the grand scale. Considering the dire fears of social authorities at the time of the Copernican revolution, it is remarkable that it is no longer taken as a devastating idea that the objective world of actuality would roll along quite unaffected in the total absence of our presence as spiritual ideality. This highlights the transcendent peculiarity of caring sensitivity and consciousness and of the teleological freedom in our preparing and responding.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

Tags

Enlightenment, History, Immanuel Kant, imperialism, interiority, Marxism, metaphysics, patriarchy, philosophy, politics, scribal ideality, transcendence

Posting 125, Word count: 1,799.

The current idea of the political left-wing features struggles by organized labour for greater benefits within investor-supremacist capitalism, raising working class consciousness about structural inequalities in wealth and power. Historically, that view of the meaning of the left developed from the Hegelian/ Marxist idea of economic determinism, the idea that social classes defined by economic conditions are the units of a pre-determined progression of human societies along a course of dialectical historical stages. The idea that there is a natural large-scale structure to change in human societies was profoundly appealing in the middle of the nineteenth century because disruption of traditional social hierarchy had become alarming, in a process that began soon after the launch of overseas European imperialism in the sixteenth century, with wealth looted from other peoples pouring into Europe to financial speculators and commercial and military opportunists. Previously, tradition and custom in Old Regime Europe, the fabric of its rural-agrarian system of wealth and power, kept popular patterns of thinking quite rigidly in thrall to monarchy, aristocracy, and Church. Notwithstanding the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, eighteenth century Europe was still a largely Christian institution, pervaded by patriarchal Christian control at all levels. Disruption of the old hierarchies of wealth, work, and circumstances of living resulted in struggles over power, and broke apart the “order” that had been sacred to the patriarchs of the Old Regime. In the shattering world of new money-wealth, lost attachment to land and locality, and desperate uncertainty for masses of people dependent on industrial employment, the old system of belief and ways of thinking lost contact with reality, and people generally needed new markers by which to reorient. There was a widespread sense that individuals were caught up in forces that were far beyond their powers to control or understand. The forces at play were in fact the competitive greed and racism of the leading factions of European society, expressing the macro-parasitism inherent in their patriarchal culture. Marx’s claim that there were scientific laws of historical change gave hope to a segment of Europe’s intelligentsia, the educated heirs of the Enlightenment era, who saw this claim as a message they might use to reorient the proletarian masses being treated on their native ground in the bestial and dehumanizing ways developed to maximize profits to investors from overseas imperialism and commercial exploitation. In Europe this was still novel and startling, engineered by newly powerful social factions, beyond any custom or tradition that might blend it into an appearance of natural order.

The idea of a predetermined pattern of social and cultural change, arcing inevitably toward justice, has lost all plausibility, especially since the collapse of Marxist regimes in eastern Europe, leaving a fatal ideological void for the most popular conception of a political left-wing. However, the collapse of that idea does not undermine entirely the force of left-wing politics because there was a previous and original “left” movement before the grandiose Hegelian metaphysics took hold. That original leftist movement was the party of philosophy itself rather than the party of organized labour. Specifically, it was the party of a secular philosophy of cultural Enlightenment, and it represented what had become known as the Republic of Letters, independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities created a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in Latin, the international language of eduction, marking an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of ideality. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period. Philosophy was then, and not for the first time, the innovative force against ossified patterns of thinking, and as such it placed primary emphasis on the individual’s power of rationality, a message often difficult to sustain in the context of the vicious campaigns of race and class assault and propaganda that constituted European imperialism.

The Enlightenment

The core innovation of the Enlightenment was not so much an assertion of individualism as it was a secular concept of human nature which changed the meaning of the individual. In the still dominant Christian view, human nature had an absolute need of external sovereign supervision due to the inherent taint of original sin, declared inescapable by Church father Augustine of Hippo. Christianity reinforced Augustine’s idea with Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, both visions of top-down cosmic hierarchy, perfect models for supporting the Church in exercising the sovereignty it asserted to be necessary and beneficent. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment countered patriarchal Christian ideology with two innovations (which eventually proved to be heading in incompatible directions). One replaced the cosmic hierarchy from Aristotle and Plato with an approach that flattened the basic cosmic structure, namely monistic materialism inspired by the metaphysics of Spinoza. More important, the left was the political party of philosophy because it brandished a secular view of human nature emphasizing innate rationality and excluding any inherent flaws and taints, and as such, a human nature not inherently dependent on any sovereign supervision. That was the crucial point, and it put the Enlightenment left in opposition to basic patriarchal cultural mythology, in which the strongest have the (divine/ natural) right of unlimited sovereignty, an assumption still discernible in the idea of ‘meritocracy’, and one that was asserted enthusiastically at the time to justify the most brutal imperialism. This stream of Enlightenment was already and always an anti-imperialist force, the foundation of claims for individual human dignity and rights, equality, secularism, and cosmopolitanism. In a world of people with no need of sovereign supervision, the patriarchal assertion of sovereign rights is naked human-on-human macro-parasitism, vicious and criminal.

European imperialism had given patriarchal dominance-culture unprecedented power both economic and cultural, especially in the hands of new commercial factions. The materialist side of Enlightenment was not a problem for them and in fact was a helpful frame of reference. Mechanistic materialism was making impressive advances in understanding objective nature and delivering new machines for the benefit of large scale industry and commerce. Under the banner ‘science’, claiming to represent strict mathematical rationality, it was acquiring ever-increasing prestige, at the same time realigning with patriarchal assumptions of natural hierarchies, and giving up any claim to flatten the fundamental structure of nature at large. This was the side of Enlightenment that rode the triumphant wave of imperialist wealth and power, but there remained a stubborn minority report: the basis of the political left.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature drew on a history of development that included the campaigns for universal literacy from the time of John Wycliffe (1331-1384), as well as the Lutheran emphasis on a personally interior relationship with divinity in a free act of faith. From that history, Enlightenment human nature was an inherent richness of individual interiority: curious, creative, empathic and sociable, and a rational learner and eager user of language (spoken, written, printed) in engagement with others, deriving fulfillment from mutual support and engagement with others. Cultures are crucial to individual human development, but cultures are bottom-up systems, as illustrated by ever-mutating language, not a gift from on-high, nor dependent on colonial masters or any other sovereign power. In the later part of the eighteenth century, within the milieux of Enlightenment culture which was already a force against imperialism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant worked out a sort of phenomenology of spirit (interiority) in which human individuals are understood as inherently self-legislating, and so, again, not dependent on outside sovereignty. This idea was the unacknowledged pinnacle of long centuries of cultural development in Europe, a minority report presenting an alternative vision for post-Christian society. It means that the decisive theme of western history, what makes the Euro-American cultural system interesting, is the contest playing out there over the legitimacy of sovereignty.

Kant’s philosophical work was arguably the best expression of Enlightenment ever produced, a considered advance beyond Spinoza’s materialist monism. There was room in Kant’s vision for both objective empirical science and for an individual interiority that was truly transcendent in its creative freedom. The problem was that, in the context of the mesmerizing frenzy of race and class violence in the era of high European imperialism, nobody was ready to digest the idea of human subjectivity free of an inherent dependency on sovereign power. In spite of that, the enriched conception of human nature had deep historical and cultural roots in this increasingly literate society, flourishing in the Republic of Letters and embryonically in Protestantism, far too embedded to be dismissed. This made a deeply divided cultural landscape that included patriarchal Christianity with its long-established ideology of sovereign power; newly triumphant money-wealth culture, heir apparent to patriarchal macro-parasitic top-dog-ism; scientific materialism as the servant of money-wealth culture; and a vision, contested by all those other cultural forces, of individual interiority as the fountain of creative freedom. The other cultural streams have strong and separate reasons for fearing and loathing the radical Enlightenment idea of the individual. Science can’t abide the existence of creative freedom as a transcendence beyond its laws of determinism; and even the new patriarchal hierarchies can’t abide the prospect of loosing their controlling grip on the work and consumption of the masses, a grip they conceive as power. Those forces have done their best to suppress the radical Enlightenment insight, and have had considerable success working cooperatively.

The Marxist conception of the political left is surely dying, but that is not a decisive loss for a politics of the left, and should be a benefit. Marx’s dialectical materialism and its laws of history show how materialism quickly goes to strict determinism, unfreedom, and the disappearance of transcendence into meaninglessness. In addition, the introduction of Marxist ideas in the nineteenth century revived, in a new form, the pre-Enlightenment assumption that collectives are the primary independent human entities exercising legitimate rights over individuals, traditionally by means of monarchy, aristocracy, and the hierarchy of the Church, but also by means of police, military service, civic pageantry, censorship, and mass propaganda. Marxist party leaders took over that fundamental idea of authoritarian sovereignty, and in doing so decisively deflected leftist development away from its original trajectory. Some philosophy consistent with the radical Enlightenment insight, a secular vision of rich individual interiority, transcendent in its creative freedom and as such the basis for community, cultural development, and fulfilling human interconnection, must be the perennial core of any politics of the left, its taproot as the party of philosophy.

Recommended

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text, written by Alexis de Tocqueville, Edited and with an Introduction and Critical Apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, Translated by Alan S. Kahan, Published by University of Chicago Press (2004), ISBN: 0-226-80530-1.

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

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, written by Jonathan Israel, published by Princeton University Press (2014), ISBN: 978-0-691-16971-2.

A History of Western Political Thought, written by  J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The World that Doesn’t Matter

Tags

culture, ethics, hive mind, ideality, intelligence, meaning, metaphysics, objectivity, subjectivity, time, transcendence, value

Posting 124, word count: 750.

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Ethics in the Philosophy Project

Tags

agency, ancient philosophy, divinity, eternity, ethics, freedom, imperturbability, knowledge, time, transcendence

Posting 122, word count: 1,483.

The historical thinking project of philosophy was the cultivation of an alignment between a personal spirituality (orientation, bearing, poise, or condition of mind) and the world at large in its most profound being, thought as a transcendence which confers meaning on the world. This relational duality of focus was fundamental, and defines the philosophical origin of ethics. Ancient Greek philosophers were so impressed by mathematical abstractions such as numbers and geometrical axioms that they conceived a transcendence of universal and timeless “truths”, eternal necessities which would be the source of absolute knowledge. They elevated the dignity of such abstractions very far above particular objects and common subjectivity, placing them at a commanding height atop a hierarchy clearly modelled on the patriarchal and military society of their time. Timeless abstractions at the top of the hierarchy set up an opposition with the ordinary landscape of changeable material objects at the bottom. In stark contrast to the supposedly incorruptible immateriality (and so eternity) of ideal abstractions, the material particulars of common experience were considered unstable, ephemeral, in an endless state of either growth or decay, always transforming into something else, and so useless as a source of knowledge. Philosophers were obsessed with rising above the turmoil of ephemerality in which crowds of the poorest and least educated humans construct eventful lives, and so time itself was relegated to the category of unreality, illusion, metaphysical nothingness, as distinct from ideal Being. Plato’s Ideal Forms illustrate the importance of eternity in ancient thinking. In that classical metaphysical scenario, certain features of concrete objects were cherry-picked and bundled with features of mental abstractions to construct what seemed the best of worlds, a world that would be transcendent over common things as a patriarchal ruler is transcendent over his people. Concrete objects supplied distinctness of image and outline, of form and quality, and abstraction supplied ideal universality and immateriality conceived as a transcendent purity of being, beyond corruption or extinction, a refined and magical state invoking the mysterious existence of ghosts and divinity, radiant with the glamour and mystique of power, status, and authority.

Since the mental efforts of an individual do not change the world at large in its most profound being, the mental effort of philosophy was to decide on and achieve the personal bearing that best expresses the most profound being of a person in relation to the world. Issues and questions of spiritual bearing were the elements of ethics: the best way to live. For a long time in the ancient world, the personal condition to be achieved was conceived as imperturbability. The charge is sometimes made against ethics in ancient philosophy that it is an expression of the self-absorption of the thinking person, apparently concerned only with personal happiness. However, context is crucial here. Stoics and Epicureans, for example, each in their way, considered events in the world to be predetermined by eternal necessities: Stoics by Logos (everything happens for a Logos), Epicureans by atoms falling in the void. The Epicurean conception of a “swerve” which enables human freedom is pretty much limited to an interior mental freedom, like the Stoic freedom to assent to fate, or not. In relation to an almost completely predetermined world, the diligently thoughtful poise to cultivate was identified as a kind of spiritual invulnerability.

In an ultimately predetermined world, change, and so time, is an illusion, a triviality when put against the perspective of eternity, which was thought of as what the consciousness of gods (or the providential Logos) would be. Philosophical thinking (love of wisdom) was a way to live a human life most like the life of gods by achieving that ethical poise at the core of the project. Seen in that light, an ethical life was cultivation of a personal alignment with transcendence as it was conceived in that era. The framework for transcendence was the inferior reality of change and time, as experienced in ordinary events and activities, and the ultimate reality of the perspective of eternity. Within that conception of the philosophical thinking project, metaphysics, understood as the identification of transcendence, was the indispensable guide for ethics. The personal aspiration to achieve imperturbability followed from what was identified as transcendent, namely eternity, or in other words, ethics emerged directly from metaphysics.

We people of modernity no longer find eternity convincing as a transcendence that confers meaning on the world. Except for Epicureans (whose transcendence was arguably individual rationality), the ancients thought that the high eternal abstractions were alive, sensitive and teleological in some important sense, mothership senior intelligences. For Aristotle, it was nested heavenly spheres in motion around the Earth that were such intelligences. It was specifically the aliveness of those remote intelligences that seemed to confer meaning on the world and the lives of individuals. It gave the remote transcendence creative purpose and power, and aligning a personal bearing with that transcendence expressed the sense of a kinship or commonality between the spirituality of the individual and a sovereign aliveness. The gradual accumulation of a more scientific view of the world has made those ways of thinking seem bizarre. Since we no longer accept the idea of a cosmos that is personified as a whole or on a grand scale, it strikes us that in the perspective of eternity there is just nothing but frozen rigidity, nothing happening, no life and so no fountain of meaning. However, just as in the ancient conceptual systems, it still is life which confers meaning on the world: sensitivity, consciousness, caring about, aiming for, and actively moving into a future with some openness for discretionary creativity, for inventive construction, for freedom. It’s the creative freedom of intelligence that is transcendent, now as then. There is no freedom in eternity because there is no time in eternity, and so the ancient idea of a sovereign aliveness at the far cosmic horizons, the consciousness of gods, doesn’t make sense. The idea of freedom arises from a specific sense of ongoing time to come, into which novelty can be projected deliberately. Since we no longer accept the plausibility of disembodied consciousness and caring, what confers meaning on the world now is the agency and creative freedom of ordinary embodied individuals.

Identification of transcendence has been largely banished from respectability by scientific materialism, but ethics makes no sense without freedom, and freedom is transcendent in relation to an inertial and entropic nature. Ethics is a framework of orientation for free agents acting through time. If we have not been convinced that identification of transcendence is illegitimate, or that transcendence is properly identified in a patriarchal father God or some other personification of the cosmos at large, nor yet in the eternal Being that some have conceived at the far horizons of things, then we might find life yet in the conception of philosophy as an alignment of personal bearing, way of life, with a more modest transcendence. The obvious approach is to change the direction of the gaze, and so to stop gazing outward for transcendence. The focus instead is on looking itself, not on what is seen but on seeing. There is no consciousness, looking or seeing, without a transcendent personal spirituality, a specific questioning representing the interpretive sum of a personal no-longer, poised as a context through which to read what the body senses in making what is not-yet. Seeing is the application of such context, a context-mediated moment of interpretation. Time in which there is past and future is clearly spiritual, pure ideality, because past and future are perfectly non-actual. Only consciousness in its temporal, teleological flight, is transcendent, and occurs plausibly only at the level of the embodied individual.

Ethics will always be an alignment of personal action with transcendence as it is currently understood. With transcendence conceived as non-capricious, non-personal eternal necessities, ethics calls for an act of will to love your fate, cultivating personal imperturbability, sometimes understood as complete selflessness. With transcendence as the will of a capricious and all powerful deity, then the point of orientation is commands of the patriarchal deity, and ethical action is obeying the god’s list of rules, duties, obligations, virtues, and vices. If we recognize that transcendence is the freedom created by the spiritual projection of time in the form of futurity and a personal questioning applied as context to the sensible world, there isn’t any cosmically senior intelligence for our personal spirituality to align with, no sovereign transcendence. Ethical agency then requires aligning with a world in which transcendence takes the form of multiple embodied individuals scattered horizontally in local clusters over the face of the planet. If an ethical life is alignment with the transcendence of intelligent aliveness, then it would be aligning my freedom with the freedom of everyone around me, mutual respect for and empathy with all the other sensitive and teleological beings here within nature.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.