Cultural Consciousness

Once Europeans invented the modern concept of culture, they invented a way of seeing history in which recurring problems of public demonstration, recognition, and coordination became visible as cultural phenomena.

we describe them as having cultures because we inherited a nineteenth-century mode of historical consciousness that organizes the past in that way

Cultural consciousness is, plainly, the consciousness of culture. What, then, is culture? You have certainly heard of a nation’s culture. You may also have heard of a company’s culture, a school’s culture, a website’s culture, subculture, cross-culture, multi-culture, and so on. Clearly, then, culture is a modification, or predicate, of a subject and yet may persist as a subject unto itself as either “the culture,” “a culture” or merely “culture.” We yet also speak of it to describe each other, as we are more or less “cultured” persons.

Let us take culture in its broadest, everyday sense. When speaking historically, we refer to cultures, plural, often interchangeably with civilizations. We thus speak of “Ancient Greek culture” and “Ancient Greek civilization” almost interchangeably. By both, we often mean the pottery, the clothing, the religion, food, music, and so on. We mean, then, the practices and beliefs of a group of people and the sensuous manifestations of each in the other. Thus, we may say that that “in Japanese culture, it is appropriate to bow before a superior.” Just as well we may say “In Ancient Greek culture, beggars were allowed to feast with lords because the former were thought to be the gods in disguise.” We see, in each example, a practice—something people do—and a belief—a reason, or set of reasons, for doing it. It is on this basis that we speak of various nations as maintain richly concatenated cultural strata—Ancient Greek culture is part of Bronze Age culture is part of ancient Mediterranean culture and so on. Notice, here, that these stratifications are spatial (geographical) and temporal (historical).

When “culture” modifies a subject, it therefore attempts to describe the subject from the standpoint of culture—from the standpoint, that is, of a spatially and temporally stratified series of practices, beliefs, and their sensible manifestations. National culture, then, describes both the nation per its practices, beliefs, and manifestations (its properties) thereof in a nation. We also mean, interestingly, a given culture’s properties concerning the nation—how do they think of the nation? Why? What do they do about it? What demonstrated it?

These questions may, or course, be asked of any subject about which “culture” is said. As they are asked, we will find ourselves repeatedly faced with the problem of demonstration; namely, how does any person in the culture demonstrate that they are a member of that culture to other members of that culture? The problem is thick. nealogy, obscuring a pre-cultural “will to power.” If each person maintains their own mode of inner time consciousness, what will unite them into a common, outer, spatial consciousness? The answer, historically, is culture.

Culture, as a term, only came to describe the properties given here in the 1800s. Before this the term, if used at all, was instead used in a manner roughly contemporaneous to its medical and biological use—namely, a culture of cells. We will come back to this analogy later! For now a shock of the old: before the use of the term “religion,” medieval Christians did not see themselves as participating in a culture parallel to that of the Jews and Muslims. Today, we say all three are “Abrahamic religions” coming out of “ancient near east culture.” In the Middle Ages, the story was not so simple. For the medieval Christian, “Catholic” meant its etymology—universal. The universal or “mother” church, as Julian of Norwich termed it, was the march of god on earth, the living body of Christ whose members the Catholic Catechism have since come to call the “church militant.” These soldiers of Christ were often actual soldiers, as in the Crusades. These Holy Wars were not fought to save the holy land from a foreign religion. To the contrary, Muslims (or “Saracens” and later “Muhammedans”) were simple heretics—they followed a false prophet. Likewise, the Jews were not a religious sect. They were a “people” (or “populus” in the Vulgate), once chosen by God, but now succeeded historically by the Church’s multicultural oversight of all Gentiles (non-Jews). For the medieval Christian, like the Ancient Greek an Roman before him, there was no such thing as another “culture.” There were insiders and the outsiders loosely defined, and the latter were almost always mere barbarians, uncultured Barbaroi speaking in an incoherent bar-bar-bar.

The ancients and medievals therefore resolved the demonstration problem without posing it at all—either you know and show, or you don’t because you can’t. If you are in the latter camp, you are vulgar at best and heretical at worst. (“Vulgar” from the Latin “vulgus” meaning the common people. We see, here, how inside-outside was hereby analogized to elite-common: only the elite of the group were truly cultured, the rest having a vulgar, outsider understanding). Before the ancients, pre-historic and tribal persons maintained a variety of rite-based inductions, shibboleths, exiles, and sanctifications to maintain in-group / out-group divisions. By the 1000s BCE, though, ancient trading selected for a more cosmopolitan resolution to the demonstration problem. These ancients generally resolved the problem through syncretism: the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Hindus, and Akkadians all absorbed foreign Gods into their rites and equated the foreign deities with those already existing in their pantheons. When no fit was found, a new statue was erected. At various points across various peoples, this situation starts to become overbearing. We read in Psalms the Yahweh’s defeat of other gods—clearly David remembered a time when some Hebrews believed in other deities, a problem that persisted into the time of Elijah. That aside, the reforms of Mahavira and Gautama Buddha in India performed a similar function—dramatizing in prose and practice an organization of prior (Vedic) disorder. Persia’s Zoroaster undertook a similar feat, organizing the pre-Zoroastrian pantheon into a fundamental binary between darkness (overseen by Angra Mainyu) and light (overseen by Ahura Mazda). The trend became almost comical by the first century CE in the near east–Christ organized the Ten Commandments into a mere two: love God, and love others (as yourself). Indeed, this so called “great commandment” was already recognized by Rabbi Hillel about 50 years before and by Socrates and Confucius about 400 years before.

What caused the search for centrality and organization across these ancient cultures? According to Hegel, it was a comprehension of substance as subject, that so many personifications of the gods could be subsumed under a singular (or binary) person, the Absolute Subject. According to Feuerbach, considering Akhenaten especially, it was a mere power play by new priests to kick out the old. Marx, obvious, believed there was money to be had in this (there was). Nietzsche believed it was a “slave revolt,” more or less, of Socratism—of dialectical and categorical “Apollonian” thinking imposed on the diverse field of Dionysiac intensities of early human experience. Vico tells a similar story, as does Frazer in the Golden Baugh. Today, cognitive science suggests the economy of such centralization. Aristotle had already said so in his metaphysics 2000 years ago, citing Homer—”It is not good that many lead. Therefore, let there be One.” Absorption was, we might say, a trader’s strategy in scarcity—”if you can’t beat em, join em” (or have them join us)! It pays, quite literally, to worship with the Hindus you can’t otherwise speak with (and, indeed, the Ancient Greeks erected statues to Hindu gods!) Cultural centralization, contrarily, was a lording strategy in security. As trade produced plenty, philosophers of all stripes were permitted time to reflect. Simultaneously, wealth was stratified across a series of institutions—priesthoods, bankers, legal scholars and, above all, the imperial magistracy. Centralized, doctrinaire belief was thus a strategy in plenty, produced as a vulgar, ideal analogue to the material centralization already in movement. It thereby served a nascent group consciousness through the axial age, one that thereby served incipient military claims to land, colonies, and trade routes—”these are ours, and not yours.” The demonstration problem thence became a complex practice, involving education, protracted ritual practice, and some form of private contemplation. The Catholics, Muslims, and Jews each resolved this through their own mode of religious jurisprudence—Canon Law, Tafsir, and the Talmud respectively. Hereby the demonstration problem was solved anew—recite doctrine, pray regularly, and stay in your lane: yours is the right one.

For about 1000 years, this situation was relatively stable in Europe: Christianity dominated as a successor to Jewish and Greek civilizations (Aquinas baptized Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius baptized Plato, John called Christ the logos, etc). Of course, those pesky Muhammedans to the east could encroach at any time but, like the Persians, they had their own territory and, when the time is right, a new authority like Alexander might arise to subdue them. The situation was comparably stable in China, whose warring states period with its “100 philosophies” had long since settled on an dissonant fusion of Confucian ethics, Taoist metaphysics and ethics, and Buddhist therapeutics. Hinduism was steadily confined beneath the Himalayas, and traditional Chinese, southeast Asian, and Japanese religion was experiencing the same syncretic fusion with the dominant centralizers. The prophet Mani nearly upset the entire order, thinking he could integrate Pagan Greek and Arabian culture with Christianity, Mithraism, and Buddhism through the binarity of Zoroaster. Despite lasting Manichean monasteries in China into the 1100s, his attempt at a genuinely global synthesis failed—everywhere, it ran into elite actors entrenched more completely in the belief systems Mani sought to unite. Mani thus faced on the global stage what Jesus faced locally in Palestine—a crowd not quite eager or willing to listen.

The demonstration problem was now quite easy to resolve: unite to a major prophet with his codified law through Europe and the Middle East, or with a wise man and his codified sayings in the far east. In either case, culture was now somewhat clear to itself in this lordly form. Various elite groups could now demonstrate mutuality to each other per the terms of their centralized codifications.

Had the European reformation, and with it the wars for religious succession, not appeared it is difficult to say how modernity as we know it could have transpired. Indeed, through the reformation, the Catholic Church’s cultural hold on Europe was broken—we know this story quite well. What we are less taught, however, is how dire this situation was within the first 300 years of its inception. Indeed, as European polities and their sprawling Royal families aligned themselves either with or against the Catholics, the web of the the highly centralized institutions wrought in embryonic, codified form by the 600s CE and only economically potent by the 1500 and 1600s CE came into conflict with itself. If one’s finance ministry was run by Catholics but the royal family had just converted to Lutheranism, what would happen to tithes? A fanciful question indeed, but one that led to church-led invasions of various polities through France and Italy. The demonstration problem now returned in full force, since singular codifications (quite literally) no longer cut it. Swords had come in their place aiming to restore the dominance of some codification or another.

It is here, with the problem of demonstration across multiple codified belief systems, that modern “culture” begins to appear. The greats of classical political theory—Hobbes, Puffendorf, Grotius, Rousseau, and Locke—all concern themselves with the problem in its modern form. Namely, how can human beings maintain peaceful intercourse with each other domestically and internationally in spite of different modes of cultural demonstration? How can I trade with the Muslim, who demands unique collateral, as a Christian for whom that collateral is sacrilegious? How can Jews be admitted into our country when they deny Jesus, in whose faith we profess before signing contracts? These thinkers collectively resolved the demonstration problem through what we today call “liberal pluralism,” consisting in the following tenets roughly systematized by John Rawls in the 1970s. First, there are competing claims to belief, especially about what is required for a good life. Second, it is not the task of governments to adjudicate these claims. Instead, third, government must stand above such claims as a condition for their adjudication among members of civil society.

Civil society, you may ask? It is roughly the embodiment of what we have since come to call culture. By the 1800s, capital had come so diffuse among merchants and nascent industrialists that much free time was had on their hands. Thanks to the printing press, they had portable materials with which to use it up—books. Likewise, thanks to human sociality, several enterprising designers had created systematized times, “periodicals,” or magazines, and places, “salons” and coffeeshops, where people could come together to read and discuss. By 1800, what the early liberals had theorized had become a fact in America, France, Britain, and the Netherlands—the government can act as a stable backdrop for free, public discussion, or what the philosopher Immanuel Kant had called the “public use of one’s reason.” Yes, this “Enlightenment” as it was called was thus the birth of culture as we know it. Culture, Kant’s contemporaries argued, was everything that made civil society possible and actual. For Kant’s student Hegel, this actuality could be called a “Geist,” or a spirit, animating people in mutual recognition of their participation therein. The demonstration problem had thus been articulated and, like any other social problem Hegel noticed, resolved in his system.

Of course, some weren’t so happy with this consciousness. Marx and Feuerbach had argued that culture was a superstructure on a material base: little more than a shadow on the wall of the real fires in the heart of man. Nietzsche believed some strange mutations happened along this genealogy, obscuring a pre-cultural, innate “will to power.” Freud believed culture was a projection of this and other wills, collectively called “libido.” Nazis Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger (still oddly respected among academics) noticed a problem beyond the origins of culture, though. According to Schmitt, the liberals hadn’t solved the demonstration problem, or what we now call the “paradox of tolerance” with Karl Popper. Someone, Schmitt said, still had to decide what was worthy of being a competing animal in the bestiary of beliefs on display on the free market. Someone, that is, had to decide the rules of the game. As such, that person had to be an exception to those rules, otherwise they could not decide them. Machiavelli, obsessed with beginnings and foundings, anticipated this–the founder was a prophet, not a civilian. Rousseau, ever the romantic, thought just the same. Followed later by Ernst Kantorowicz account of the king’s two bodies, that of the embodied man and that of the body politic, or the collective mind for which he stood, such a critique of liberal pluralism thence came to be called “political theology” after Schmitt’s own text. Today, several Marxists align themselves with Schmitt and Machiavelli on just this account, but this is a story for another time.

To use the term “culture,”we have learned through this history, is to enact a particular mode of historical consciousness. Namely, it is to enact a liberal mode. Put more simply, the use of “culture” implies the existence of multiple “cultures,” all of which may be allowed free reign beneath the depths of an unquestionable sovereign they cannot touch. Even Kant forbid the public use of reason from critiquing the King! Of course, free speech had the right to do so, but this did not mean reason was permitted in organizing the state thereby. Culture had to remain situated beneath the state in and of civil society as, more or less, everything between conjugal love and the formal rules (and reason) of state. Culture, today, is thus thought of as a realm of freedom and experimentation which is yet informed by necessity on both sides–by tradition, history, and the necessary forms of social reproduction (sex above all, whose practices and ethics are codified and ritualized in nearly all cultures) at its base and the necessities of institutional life at its apex. Culture would forever be a living dead, a zombified remainder of everything which human bio-physics at the individual level (sex, food, hearth and home) and at the collective level (formal administration of security/law, territory/economy, population) could find neither necessary nor sufficient for public life.

As is well known, the Marxists and Fascists revolted against this “homogenous, empty time” of culture from the 1870s-1940s. Following their defeat, Neo-liberals sought ideologically and economically to reinscribe the earlier pluralism. The market knows all and tells all, and you wouldn’t want to lead civilization back to the world wars, would you? No, so go to your clubs, do your job, and enjoy life—unless you happen to be administering it. This administration, the “neoliberal art of government” thus meant learning where to govern least since, following Jefferson, that “government which governs best is that which governs the least.” Culture, on this account, was everything soft and mushy that could be left to women and, above all, the mother’s mouth reciting hymns and lullabies to their babes. Culture, by the mid 1800s, was roughly equated in Germany to the earlier conception of Bildung, or imaging, what was taught to one about all such mushy, gushy, soft, obscure implicatures of being with others. As liberal nationalism gained steam, this view was fused with conceptions of nationhood to suggest various curricula, insignia, and rituals whereby the children of men could be continuously wrapped in a garb of cultural delights. Too much garb, we found out through WW2, and culture enters the state to eradicate those failing demonstration. After WW2, a cautious nationalism (or, as Judith Shklar terms it, a “liberalism of fear”) thus became globally permissible—a fusion of culture at home and legally-sanctioned markets abroad.

Under neoliberalism, this is the situation of culture: a mushy pap which we feed to children and which nearly every professional ignores (except where formally and explicitly inscribed), since it has no bearing on the realpolitik of social administration. This is, of course, unless one begins to speak or act like a non-liberal, at which point realpolitik may fade into common worship (a recapitulation of the Ancient Greek strategy when trading with the Hindus). “Culture wars” thus emerge as fights over which practices, beliefs, and sensuous manifestations we allow, roughly cached out in either a Neo-liberal consciousness of mush, as a common “soil” out of which good individuals of “our” civilization grow (and which growth we thereby protect by protecting the soil), or from a fascist consciousness of roots, “blood and soil,” and an atavistic ecological consciousness in which the soil must be firm lest some foreign implant break it apart. Every progressive claim merely opposes these: neoliberally, we can add new elements to the soil without changing growth patterns (so let your kids go to a pride parade, it won’t hurt!) and, fascistically, we aren’t eugenicists so we can admit of any soil.

What, then, is cultural consciousness? Like historical consciousness, we distinguish between two modes: simplex and complex. Cultural consciousness simplex is merely the standpoint of outer, spatial consciousness had by an individual member of a culture. When we say a man is cultured, we thus say he is well educated (Bilden) in the free conditions of his necessity. We say he can recognize forms and shapes familiar to others of his culture, and we say so primarily in spatial terms. A man is cultured if his behaviors, or practices, align well with the expectations of those around him. We say, then, that he is a gentleman, because he suavely and with ease situates his movements within the terms common to all who may see him. Such mushy terms, we have said, are culture itself. Anyone ever preaching to be a “cultural tutor” or aiming to instaurate in men a “cultural literacy” adorns themselves in signifiers of such refinement thereby.

Cultural consciousness simplex is hereby an ordinary semiotic consciousness, or a reading of signs. These signs may be behavioral, as when we speak of each other as cultured, or textual, as when we say some or another work of human production is part of our (or another’s) culture. The study of culture, or the adumbration of cultural consciousness simplex, has thus been divided among the emic (or internal) and the etic (external) modes across disciplines. The study of the fine arts or literature is often an emic study, taking the literature for granted as significant or canonical within one’s culture of study. (Debates about canonicity problematize this, of course.) Anthropology typically studies culture from an etic standpoint, even if attempting to accrue emic findings, or from the standpoint of its own disciplinary practice. The mass of professionals are scholars in each other’s behaviors and comportments, what Balthasar Gracian called “worldly wisdom,” Machiavelli called “virtu,” and what Nietzsche called “psychologism.” Scholars of the arts are emic students of textual signs (symbols and icons above all), studying their poetic transformations—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Anthropologists study these and other transformations from the outside, as some culture of interest practices them.

As we said of culture in general, culture formed as a determinate term referring to a series of practices of authentic demonstration—through witness, you demonstrate that you are “one of us.” This, we learned, solved a coordination problem across disparate persons’ inner time consciousnesses. Through a common, often codified outward form, inner time consciousness could become unanimous. The technique, if we may be permitted to call it that, was ingenious. By creating a public declaration in the body open for several witnesses to see, the darting of the eyes, the embodiment of inner time consciousness, could be made unanimous across spectators. Multiple members of the culture could thus witness the performance and adjudicate its rectitude. Confucius called the gentleman’s practice of this task the “rectification of names,” or roles with appropriate behavioral performances. The Hebrews had come to call foods falling within it “kosher,” and the Muslims “halal.”

Codification, itself a cognitive representation of unity apparent to understanding, thereby had a public face performed in the body, as across bodies. Spectators were united in seeing a common performance, and performers were united in practicing a common code. Of course, suspicions could forever remain—a good, simple cultural consciousness will always wonder if performers are who they say they are (whence Shakespeare)!

We may say with Kant that unanimity of time consciousness inside each produces a common figurative synthesis without among all—a phenomenal Gestalt available to shared memory. It is hereby that every culture has developed its own mode of aesthetic expression which is essentially exterior and spatial. (“Gothic architecture” but not gothic music, “Renaissance painting” but rarely renaissance cadence, or dialect). If we may be permitted to pass over into magic and magical consciousness, we say that some of these implicatures operate in fields of whose details we are not yet familiar, more on which elsewhere.

Plato thematized the opposition between the inner, or True and Eternal, outer, or False and Changing as a problem for human coordination in his opposition to the sophists—by making the “weak speech the stronger,” they threatened culture by directly undermining and making plural the unanimity of what was, until them, widely accepted as common speech. The “aporia” of the platonic dialogues was thereby a call to action; seeing how such common speech fell into emptiness, the literate could be initiated into the Academy’s accounts of unanimous, eternal forms. All of this was a highly complex cultural consciousness, as I will show below. That aside, Plato’s mistake (if we can call it that, since we are writing nothing but more footnotes to him) was to confuse Pythagoras for Euclid. Pythagoras had already hit upon Number as an eternal Form organizing timeless truth—he initiated men accordingly. Euclid, contrarily, needed no such initiation or theories of truth; geometric demonstration was a merely mechanical act of deduction. Yet, when Plato inscribed his insistence on Geometry onto the walls of his academy, he fused their modes of simple cultural consciousness. Pythagorean mysticism became bound up with Euclidean rationalism, the former ultimately succeeding the latter by the time of Plotinus, Proclus, and above all the theurgy of Iamblichus. This fusion indeed confused the later Platonists, who fought above all to distinguish (however arbitrarily) their philosophy from the religious practices and beliefs of Christians, Hermeticists, and Gnostics.

The problem of demonstration had thus become fickle. Platonic and Pythagorean themes were broken off from the platonic system as early as Aristotle. Demonstration about a common culture could not be thereby solidified—indeed, these ancients had no such conception. So, syncretism was yet again selected for in this context.

To the contrary of such syncretism, however, the earliest mode of complex cultural consciousness was already afoot.

Simple cultural consciousness, being “cultured,” was thus a matter of memory and similitude. The cultured man authentically demonstrated himself as part of his culture by reciting its stories, practicing its codes, and discussing similarities and differences among them in and by that recitation. Jesus, for instance, was a cultural adept. Speaking at the temple with Rabbis, he was said to have recited passages of the law from memory that took years for even the most astute to remember. He debated with these rabbis so clearly that they could not believe their ears. Muhammad too, despite his literal illiteracy, compressed the Bible and the nascent Talmud from stories he had overheard from nearby Jews. Machiavelli was so taken with Roman culture that he dressed himself in a Roman garb as he studied Titus Livy at night, so as to literally coat himself in the culture before his eyes. Indeed, each was an adept at the absorption and repetition of phenomenal Gestalten. Modern culture’s pluralism, we often say, began with Michel Montaigne, whose syncretic and skeptical “essays” were but attempts to live well by seeking resemblance of the ancient with the contemporary—the project we all, under neoliberalism, are tasked with resolving for ourselves.

If one wishes to practice and develop this consciousness, they must study the history and contemporary practice of whatever domain is of interest to them. Hereby, they will become cultured.

Cultural consciousness complex, to the contrary, is the practical formalization of phenomenal gestalten into noumenal gestalten. Somehow, the practitioner of cultural consciousness simplex witnesses a realization. It has taken many shapes but, above all, it roughly follows the following pattern:

1. Something in my environment strikes me.
2. That striking also strikes others.
3. But no one is talking about this thing insofar as it strikes them; they are speaking about it and debating the terms used to describe it.
4. Some of these terms are appropriate, others not. There are similarities between what strikes us now and what did before, but what strikes us now requires its own judgment, description, and narration.
5. I will form such judgments, descriptions, and narrations.
6. And, as I do so, I will find a way produce benefits.

We can apply this formula to every historical figure whatever, but most especially to the great thinkers of every human civilization. The noumenal gestalten, to be sure, have almost always been organized as Gestalten of historical consciousness. We can rarely find a thinker of this ilk who did not concern himself with large historical change and who did not thematize that change through archetypes, exemplars, and patterns for imitation. Plato, Confucius, Ovid, Aristotle, Buddha, Zarathustra, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Morin, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Luhmann all have a theory of historical epochs, the kinds of persons typical of each, and their behaviors and aesthetic sensibilities. Every of this complex historical consciousness had, therefore, sought not merely to make prior cultural implicatures explicit, but to give a poetic and historical narration to their reasons for having done so. (Even the secularist Luhmann poses himself against the “Old European Tradition”!)

These practical-Noumenal Gestalten, of course, are rarely if ever explicated. If they are, they are spoken only to an inner elite who has committed themselves to their exoteric form. These latter exoteric doctrines such thinkers formulate as theoretical-noumenal Gestalten.

Noumenal Gestalten, so considered as theoretical deductions, have historically passed over into one of the following professional types based on the following decision tree:

1. Does the speaker assign simple cultural significance to their Gestalten? If not, they are a merely broad or eclectic thinker. Examples: Lewis Mumford, Cicero. If yes,
2. Does the speaker seek to institute these Gestalten in any determinate space and time for inner time consciousness, for reading? If not, they are an itinerant philosopher. Examples: Socrates, Diogenes, Francis of Assisi. If yes,
3. Do they want to institute them beyond reading, in the body, requiring formalized education? If not, they are a mere essayist. Examples: Bacon, Montaigne, Pascal. If yes,
4. Does the institution require any declaration of or acceptance of beliefs/practices/manifestations on faith? If not, they are a systematic philosopher. Examples: Plato, Aristotle, Kant. If so,
5. Is the faith preceded by some existing cultural form? If not, they are founders of a new faith. If so,
6. Does the speaker consider their Gestalten Noumenal in Kant’s sense, as revelations of a True Reality given by God? If no, they are merely religious philosophers like Aquinas, Averroes, etc. If yes,
7. Do we have any evidence of their practical Noumenal Gestalten being in contradiction with their theoretical Noumenal Gestalten? If no, they are a prophet. If yes,
8. Does the contradiction harm anyone beyond the propagating of mistaken or contradictory beliefs or require novel commitments whose practical consequences are unintelligible from the standpoint of existing cultural consciousness simplex? If no, they are a hack or charlatan. If yes,
9. Is the speaker well known? If no, they are a crank. If yes, they are a would-be cult-leader.

The development of complex cultural consciousness has, historically, therefore been an series of questions authenticating a speaker purveying that consciousness according to a liberal dialectic—is the speaker self-interested, or are they interested in the care of others? If care, to what extent and how novel is that care? If too novel, common cultural consciousness cannot receive it on grounds of imaginativeness, faultiness, inexperience, or apostasy/adultery. If too encompassing, it may be contradictory. it will forever be easier to receive and inhabit the fixed and frozen forms of culture than to judge, (re)-describe, and narrate them. In the former one maintains all unanimities associated with simple cultural consciousness and its unwitting historical (un)-consciousness. There is, after all, safety in numbers, however dull-minded and herd-like. In the latter, one risks everything and, as it were, undertakes a leap of faith. One may have also, just thereby, drunk the Kool-Aid!

Returning to Plato, Plotinus’ opposition to the gnostics and hermeticists practiced a complex cultural consciousness in the religiously philosophical mode, maintaining the harmony of Plato, Aristotle, and Grecian paganism against external Hebraic (among the Christians) and Egyptian (among the Gnostics) syntheses. This, of course, was a bit slipshod—Plato was no stranger to quoting Thoth. The Plotinus episode illustrates the manner in which complex cultural consciousness requires a simple historical consciousness. Sometimes, it may be more useful to polemicize against the spirit of some portion of the times rather than to insist on doctrinaire deduction. Sometimes, something other than figurative syntheses in common space is required to make one’s point. Sometimes, inner time consciousness must return through phenomenal Gestalten into comparisons among Gestalten and their changes. Though implicit to all cultural consciousness as “collective memory,” this practice becomes explicit in all cultural adepts as historical consciousness simplex.