My brain.anomalogue wiki is a double-decade grounded theory experiment. In this wiki are whole books, essays, poems songs and random scraps of text, divided up into significant verbatims and reorganized into webs of association, some of which have crystallized in symbolic themes.

Two of these themes: “composite being” and “scalar being”. Within both of these themes is a passage:

In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.

A footnote to this passage: “Terms of Scholastic philosophy: individuum: that which cannot be divided without destroying its essence, dividuum: that which is composite and lacks an individual essence.”

And I just found another passage and stitched it into the web:

…through his morality the individual outvotes himself

All this was supposed to be preamble to something I wrote early this morning: “‘Individual’ is an inadequate word. Individuals are desperately and routinely divisible.”

But in light of the passages above, perhaps the word individual is better than I thought. When we morally split ourselves, or immorally dis-integrate, or re-integrate in some overpowering political or religious faith collective, or lose and find ourselves in love… is it not precisely the individuum that is lost or re-found? But then individuality applies just as much to higher- and lower-order scales of being. Technically, “individual” doesn’t help us distinguish the I-fragment from the I or from the we.

In that same early morning writing, I considered the word “Person”.

Person is a fine word, but maybe not as a substitute for individual, for all the same reasons. “Person” describes something that also scales upward into super-individual collectivity and downward into sub-individual units: macropersons and micropersons.

Between macroperson and microperson is the possibility of mesoperson. Maybe this is the word I need.

Notice, I say mesoperson is a possibility. Mesoperson is not a basic unit of being, nor is it something we can assume to exist.

Especially in times like this, mesoperson is a possibility seldom actualized, and rarely for long.

In times like this, “individual” and “person” applies less to mesopersons than to cultures and complexes.

In times like this, if you we not actively cultivating personhood and individuality, it is likely that “we” are not an individual or a person. We are only organs or organelles of other beings, with little being of our own.

All this being said, none of us are persons or individuals if we are not also organs of someone greater.