One one hand, we don’t want to be tyrannized. On the other hand, we don’t want to be alienated.

We want to be connected to other individuals and belong to some human circle of some breadth, but not at the expense of having our individual particularities and potentialities suppressed or condemned.

Temperamental and circumstantial variability between people can lead to disagreements on what is threat and what is threatened: some will say individual being is threatened by the tyranny of social being; others will claim that social being is threatened by the alienating effect of individual being exalting itself at the expense of all other considerations.

Philosophical minds who see tyranny as the greatest danger tend to gravitate (or levitate?) toward the liberation of radical subjectivism. Philosophical minds who see alienation as the greatest danger tend to pursue the common ground (or groundedness) of objectivism.

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These fears point toward two metaphysical poles of consciousness, which in my metaphysical manifold (the star diagram) is the vertical axis. The lower pole represents fragmentary being – instincts that flow “up” into our awareness from the semiconscious and apparently unconscious regions of our minds. The upper pole represents the unification of fragmentary of being in greater scales of being, the kind of being of a person absorbed in a conversation or in love.

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Anxiety toward the upper pole tends to see unification as necessitating suppression of essential differences – trending ultimately toward a tyrannical uniformity. In response, the upper pole is denied or an intellectual tourniquet is applied at some scale, either at the level of individuality, or at the level of the romantic couple, or of the family, or of a circle of intimates, or even of a political party, a nation, a religious sect. (One comfort of a self-idolizing collectivity: the members always find ready agreement among themselves that what they worship is the God, or some analogue to God. Solipsism can infect being at any scale, not only individual minds. Ideology can be seen as mass solipsism.)

Anxiety toward the lower pole tends to see the instincts as unwelcome disruptions that destabilize unity. The very existence of certain unacceptable impulses is denied or generalized into voiceless indistinction – packed into categories such as “the sinful nature of man”, or “the unconscious”, or “neuroses” – with the practical consequence that certain instincts are marginalized and denied a place in greater scales of being. An intellectual tourniquet is applied somewhere below the motivations that disrupt acceptability, perhaps at the level of action, or speech, or thought, or acknowledgement, or even awareness.

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It is interesting to observe that the twin fears justify and reinforce one another.

A person who fears the “upper pole” does so because the fearers of the “lower pole” provide them ample grounds for fear: the collectivities that fear the irruption of instincts really do create circumstances hostile to individuality, full of taboos, compromising social requirements and distractions from what one experiences as personal destiny.

Conversely, the individuals allergic to every kind of being that exceeds them while requiring something of them – (such people usually don’t mind the concept of greater being as long as it stays hermetically sealed in a non-practical “beyond”, and will often orient their lives around this theoretically-omnipotent, practically-impotent Transecndence) – will sometimes reject entire categories of ethical behaviour, or even morality as a whole, and in so doing destroy the possibility of authentic participation in being beyond individuality and its multifarious insticts. It may appear to seek intimacy with other people, but what it really seeks is stimulation of its instincts in response to other people (which it confounds with “love”).

The antitheses provide one another a legitimate enemy. They are founded on a single obsolete conception of being.

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Culture will not live in the median between the dominant antitheses of our time.

Culture will not live in the compromise between the individual and the collective, or the dualism of subject and object, or the babble of relativism and absolutism, or the distinguishing of artifice and nature, or the separation of (neutral) observation and interpretation, or the existence or nonexistence of God.

These antitheses can only be resolved in practical transcendence, in a different way of understanding.