Tag Archives: Gnosticism

Existence as Drama-Cloud

13 Thursday Feb 2025

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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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.

Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Nature, Transcendence

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Gnosticism is somewhat difficult to pin down. Roughly, it is a construct of ideas about what is supernatural and the relationship of humans to the supernatural. It seems to have been developed mostly in the first few centuries A.D., with an important concentration of activity in the Greek/ Egyptian city of Alexandria when that city was an international centre of scholarship, research, organized curiosity, and invention of ideas. From the point of view of the orientation being developed in these blog postings, call it Blind-Spot philosophy, Gnosticism is a metaphor or allegory (not entirely successful) for important realities of the human condition, and so possibly a helpful reference in sketching an overview of the Blind-Spot positions. There are gnostic elements in, and a gnostic structure or flavour to, Blind-Spot philosophy. For one thing, there is a fundamental dualism in Gnosticism, the dualism of spirit vs material nature, since, on that view, the whole drama of human life flows from each human spirit being catastrophically imprisoned in matter or nature. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is also a fundamental dualism of freedom vs unfreedom, or intelligence (freedom) vs brute actuality (unfreedom). What is conceived in Gnosticism as spirit has some congruence with what in Blind-Spot philosophy is called the interiority of an intelligence. The idea or fable of disembodied spirit(s) can be plausibly interpreted as an allegory for the experience of the interiority of personal intelligence.

The primary task of early Gnosticism was escape from demonic control, especially control by the demons of stars, dictators of astral or astrological fate. Some specialized knowledge (gnosis) was necessary to enable that escape, knowledge of the supernatural origins of the human imprisonment, and of the structure and history of the supernatural world, leading to discovery of how to be fully human by the memory of being divine. The shape of power in that view is emphatically and quite literally top-down: the demons in the starry sky have overwhelming power. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the idea of disembodied intelligences, including demonic ones. However, as the star-demons represent a dominant evil, an imposing of control and subordination on people where there should be freedom and equality, there is a congruent dominant evil in Blind-Spot philosophy. In Blind-Spot philosophy the dominant evil is not supernatural but is instead cultural and historically rooted. Specifically, the dominant evil is a cultural stream of human macro-parasitism, a cultural, political, and economic faction which successfully maintains and evolves a culture (Aryan or patriarchal masculinity) of macro-parasitic control over masses of other humans, where there should be freedom and equality.

Recognizing the broad dominance of evil, injustice, and oppression within a supernaturally top-down perspective, gnostics thought there had to be two gods, a greater and a lesser, the greater one good, the lesser one evil or at least prone to catastrophic mistakes. Gnosticism is, therefore, often construed as a religion (in one form, a version of Christianity) or a religious philosophy since it has much to claim concerning supernatural divinities. By contrast, Blind-Spot philosophy is nothing like religion since it has nothing to say about supernatural divinities, except that the idea of disembodied intelligences, personalities, or ideas is not rational, neither locally nor cosmically. Blind-Spot philosophy does have a claim about transcendence, but not in the form of omnipotent or all-encompassing divinities who shower gifts or miseries down upon humans from on-high. That would be the supernatural top-down perspective. In Blind-Spot philosophy, intelligences are all embodied and individually creators of freedom, which means we are individually transcendent with respect to the brute determinism of nature or strict actuality.

As discussed in recent postings (Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New, and The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One) there are certain circumstances of human life which make it very tempting and easy to imagine a profoundly top-down shape or structure to reality. It has been traditional for cultured humans to be trapped mentally within such top-down visions. Gnostics were early promoters of a version of that idea known as The Great Chain of Being, a prime example of top-down metaphysics. That was the context in which the gnostic views of time, freedom, and subjective identity were conceived, an extremity of top-down thinking. That perspective is rejected and opposed by Blind-Spot philosophy, which recognizes embodied intelligences as individually or autonomously creative, and as such presents a strictly bottom-up perspective, yet still recognizing transcendence in human experience. Gnosticism was and is a kind of obsession with transcendence of a supernatural kind. The idea of supernatural transcendence is an allegory for the reality of the freedom of individual intelligences.

Both Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy recognize a dominant evil which perpetrates a profound distortion of reality on a mass scale, creating a ‘hidden or secret reality’ which is normally unidentified because of (cultural) distortions arranged and maintained by the dominant evil. In both, the core secret to be discovered and revealed is about the power and freedom of the individual self or subjectivity (the blind spot). Both claim that in ordinary circumstances we function in a condition of relative disability, imprisonment, or slavery through accepting misrepresentations of reality, including alienation from our personal subjectivity. The main aspiration is direct self-acquaintance, based on recognizing a difference between the crippling concept of individual subjectivity promoted by top-down culture as compared with the self of immediate and innocent acquaintance. The supernatural imprisonment or slavery of human beings depicted in Gnosticism is an allegorical identification of the imprisonment of individuals within cultural traditions which legitimize and sanctify a perpetual macro-parasitism. In both Blind-Spot philosophy and Gnosticism, philosophy is conceived and practiced as a way of evading and resisting the dominant evil, first identifying the dominant evil and then re-positioning the self beyond the control of the dominant evil. In both, it is self-recognition which enables personal liberation, achieved by an act of taking possession of personal innocence, always available (gnostic “remembering”). However, there are at least important differences of emphasis in how knowledge is conceived in these two orientations. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is more emphasis on attending to a thinking process, self-directed reorientation, than on any special knowledge (although a knowledge of human history is relevant). Practical acquaintance with the innocent creator of interior non-actualities is basic. In Gnosticism, secret and arcane knowledge of the divine origin of human spirit, passed in person from master to worthy disciple, is the key to liberation and personal freedom. However, the disciple still has to use the knowledge to “remember” innocent or primeval life, to reawakening an innocent intelligence.

There are two conflicting ethical tendencies within Gnosticism. The dominant one is elitism, special entitlement, or exceptionalism, in which those initiated into the sacred knowledge are the exceptions. People who accept the reality of The Great Chain of Being have a difficult time avoiding a supernaturally ordained hierarchy within the human collective. Fables of “the higher Being” make everyone accustomed to various forms authoritarian control, and to lack readiness to question authority in general. Gnostic dependence on secret troves of sacred knowledge makes initiates accept subordination to authorities claiming to guard the knowledge. Elitism also tends to condemn the majority of people as beyond help or unworthy of anything better than existing injustices, even sometimes declaring that misery somehow benefits the victims. However, there is a vestige of an opposing tendency arising from the gnostic conviction that all people have a divine or supernatural origin. That would tend to inspire a universality of respectful, loving, and nurturing treatment of others. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects exeptionalism and subordination, and bases ethics on the insight which must follow from authentic self-acquaintance, that all intelligences are individually transcendent creators of freedom within the unfreedom of brute actuality and the crippling dominance of macro-parasitic culture, and that, as such, all intelligences merit respect and nurture.

The conceptualization of time is also crucial to both, but the attitude to time, or the orientation toward time, is completely opposite in Blind-Spot philosophy as compared to Gnosticism. The gnostic obsession with eternity is absent from Blind-Spot philosophy, replaced by the love of freedom within time and only conceivable within time as a transcendent creation of individual intelligences. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the quest for eternity, infinity, or Being. In Blind-Spot philosophy the transcendence of individual intelligences is not achieved by recognizing a unity or identity with an omnipotent, universal, and eternal deity on-high, or with eternal Being, but instead is achieved in individually creating personal freedom by the use of the non-actualities of interior subjectivity, so creating freedom-in-time in the process of living a particular life.

Rebel Angels

The gnostic myth of the catastrophic rupture of human spirits from their primeval union with divinity and the fall of human spirits into the iron embrace of nature and time, is recognition of a self-alienation within conventional styles of living, a sense of being misrepresented, misevaluated, and diminished by the personal identities offered by the ambient culture and economy. The gnostic myth of the Fall from Grace is an allegory for the loss of recognition of the transcendent creative freedom of every individual. The sense of being punished for some primal fault or crime is misidentification of self as blameworthy because it revolts against the determinism of nature by spinning freedom in an unfree world: the rebellion of the angels. Escaping, transcending, the iron embrace of material nature is exactly what intelligences already do in the ordinary world by constructing the conditions of personal freedom, constructing teleological time from discretionary interior non-actualities.

The differences between Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy have consequences concerning social, economic, and political situations. There was a sense in Gnosticism that the world within time is irredeemably bad, justifying pessimism such that it would be pointless to invest any effort into improving the common predicaments of human life. Such quests as that for eternal Being or for the remote god beyond the hierarchy of astral demons, always provide an excuse to leave institutional injustices as they are. In Gnosticism the only hope of improvement is available to small groups of initiates, and that hope is of escape into the supernatural through arcane knowledge of invisible things and rigorous personal detachment from material nature. This is similar to systems of reality which identify salvation or resolutions of injustice only in an afterlife. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects both of those otherworldly fables. This world at hand, and only this, is the one in which the transcendence of intelligences gets to express itself. Catastrophe is not the same thing as tragedy. Tragedy is final but catastrophe can be overcome. It is true that the current state of human life generally is catastrophic, but that does not make it tragic. There is no fatal flaw in fundamental human nature, no universal taint from an original sin. Autonomous freedom is not a crime against anything. Being free is a crime only when it is exercised and practiced by reducing, restricting, or denying the freedom of other intelligences.

Some Sources

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, by Frances A. Yates (1899-1981), University Of Chicago Press (first published 1964. Midway reprint 1979. Paperback edition 1991), ISBN-10: 0226950077, ISBN-13: 978-0226950075.

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, written by (Dame) Frances Amelia Yates, Published by: Ark Paperbacks, an imprint of Routledge & Kegan Paul plc (1983) (first published 1979), ISBN 0-7448-0001-3.

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.

Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, written by Tobias Churton, Published by Ten Speed (2005), ISBN: 1594770352.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.