Fragment 210, word count: 1,838.

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

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

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

Gnostic Drama

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

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

Id and Superego

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

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

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

The Drama-Cloud Anomaly

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

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

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.