Fragment 207, word count: 696.

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

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

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

The World-Lens of Personal Ideality

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

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

See also: 

Fragment 202, August 13, 2023, Between Spirit and Dystopia (word count: 1,379)

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

Fragment 206, March 15, 2024, Philosophy as Knowledge (word count: 1,076)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.