Of the several truly odd things I have come to believe, perhaps the oddest is the scalarity of self. I believe an individual person is only one scale of selfhood. And an individual is far from indivisible; it is, in truth, a society of intuitive centers whose habitual, ritual, complex and frequently disharmonious interactions produce a personality, and whose episodic conflicts and shifting alliances produce moods, some enduring.

I also believe that our relationships with other people (in pairs or small intimate groups) literally produce new transcendent selves, in whom we participate and from whom we receive meaning. Every individual self is suspended in a web of transcendent selves, and all of them influence the inner intuitive order of each person. Let us call this “intersubjective being”, or maybe “intimate being” would be better.

And we also participate in collective personhood. This is encoded in explicit social norms — epistemic, valuative, behavioral, linguistic — and in implicit ethnomethods. These can strongly condition intimacy and individuality. This also has (or so I believe) self, and when we participate in this kind of collective selfhood, this also affects our individual selfhood and the intimate selves to whom we belong.

Martin Buber famously differentiated these two forms of super-individual being. He called the former “interhuman” and the latter “social”.

One pragmatic consequence of scalar being is that anything that can go wrong with an individual mind can go wrong with a collective mind. I picked this up from Nietzsche:

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

And I believe we are living in an age of collective anosognosia.