The City, the Self, and the Collapse of We
From Florence to the Sovereign Soul: A Historical Meditation
Summary
This essay explores the historical transformation of identity from communal belonging to individual sovereignty, tracing its development through key moments in Western history. Beginning in 1300s Florence, where civic identity was structured through guilds, territories, and religious obligations, the essay examines how local communities functioned as proto-political bodies rooted in shared responsibility.
The rise of Pope Innocent VIII represents a shift from local spiritual life to centralized ecclesiastical power, while Giovanni Pico della Mirandola introduces the concept of the self as a microcosmic sovereign, capable of shaping its own destiny. Finally, the essay turns to Adi Da, whose critique of modern individualism frames the current age as one marked by radical fragmentation—each person acting as a nation unto themselves, detached from relational or spiritual unity.
The essay argues that the modern idea of the individual-as-state is not a natural endpoint, but the result of a long historical arc—one that now demands serious reflection. If identity was once formed through cooperation and obligation, its future may depend on recovering the possibility of shared meaning beyond the isolated self.
Preface
This essay began as part of a larger inquiry into the historical development of statehood and political bodies—how they emerge, consolidate, and eventually internalize into the structures of modern identity. My starting point was not a modern nation-state, but the city of Florence in the year 1300, during the time of Dante Alighieri. Using Henry Francis Cary’s 1916 Oxford University Press edition of The Vision (his translation of The Divine Comedy), I was exploring not only Dante’s poetic vision but also the lived structure of Florence itself—a city whose political life was shaped by familial alliances, guild membership, territorial districts, and overlapping spiritual loyalties.
What drew my attention was how local communities—like Florence—organized themselves around necessity, obligation, and belonging, and how these structures, over time, evolved into more abstract forms of political order. In the early communal model, identity was largely relational: who you were depended on your guild, your neighborhood, your watch duty, your patron saint. But gradually, through intellectual, philosophical, and religious shifts, this collective identity gave way to something else: the individual as a political, moral, and even spiritual unit—a trajectory that eventually gave rise to the idea of the modern nation and the sovereign self.
This essay traces that movement historically and conceptually. It follows the transition from Florence’s cooperative civic body to Pico della Mirandola’s Renaissance celebration of the individual, and finally to Adi Da’s late twentieth-century critique of a world in which every person behaves like a nation unto themselves. Along the way, the institutional authority of the Church—represented here by Pope Innocent VIII—serves as a turning point, revealing how spiritual legitimacy once externalized began its migration inward.
The result is not a linear history, but a meditation on how identity, power, and belonging have been redefined across time—from the city to the Church, from the self to the spiritual vacuum that often marks our current age. If Florence offered a shared structure and Pico offered personal freedom, then Adi Da asks us to consider what happens when that freedom becomes indistinguishable from isolation.
This reflection is part of an ongoing effort to understand not only the past but the deep architecture of our present condition.
— Ed Reither
Florence: The Cooperative Body
In the year 1300, Florence was not yet a modern city-state, let alone a nation. It was a self-governing commune—economically dynamic, politically unstable, and socially organized through overlapping structures of territory, profession, and kinship. Its institutions did not emerge from ideology, but from the practical need to coordinate urban life among competing families and factions. What held the city together was not an abstract constitution, but a fabric of interdependent functions: neighborhood watches, tax zones, guilds, religious festivals, and militia obligations.
Florence was divided into sesti, or sixths—geographic districts—each of which contained gonfaloni, named after the banners under which residents organized their defense and civic responsibilities. These units provided policing, mobilized militias, and collected taxes. Inhabitants were expected to serve in the defense of their quarter, participate in watch rotations, and attend public rituals. The city operated like a body. Every citizen had a role, and every role was tied to a location.
At the center of Florence’s political life stood the guilds, most notably the Arti Maggiori, or major guilds. These included wool merchants, bankers, judges, and physicians. The guilds were not voluntary associations in the modern sense; they were mandatory structures of professional identity, training, economic regulation, and political eligibility. Access to office required guild membership, and the guilds themselves controlled quality standards, market access, labor relations, and legal arbitration.
Florence’s order was communal, but not egalitarian. Power was concentrated in the hands of merchant families and wealthy professionals, yet even the lesser guilds, the Arti Minori, had institutional voice. Identity was formed in relation to others—through shared labor, collective defense, and neighborhood life. Religious affiliation, too, was not separable from civic life. Bells marked the hours of prayer and civic alarm. Saints were patrons not only of churches but of professional and territorial associations. The line between sacred and secular had not yet hardened.
Florence was also a city of chronic factional conflict. The Guelphs and Ghibellines, and later the Bianchi and Neri, divided the city along lines of papal versus imperial loyalty, but also along deeper economic and social fractures. Yet even in the midst of violence and instability, Florence managed to maintain a civic structure that could absorb conflict without collapsing into total disorder. The political and spiritual coherence of the city was constantly tested, but not yet broken.
In this sense, Florence offers an early model of structured communal identity—not national, and not yet individual in the modern sense, but rooted in reciprocal obligation, spatial organization, and institutional belonging. It was a city in which one’s place in the world was not self-assigned. It was assigned by birth, profession, neighborhood, and custom. And yet within these constraints, a new possibility was emerging: the notion that a person might stand apart from inherited roles, that meaning might shift from external order to internal depth.
It is from this environment that the first fractures in the communal worldview begin to appear, and with them, the first signs of the modern self.
Pope Innocent VIII: The Church as Empire
By the end of the fifteenth century, the spiritual and administrative authority of the Catholic Church had shifted from a mediating presence within civic life to a centralized institution increasingly functioning like a state. At the height of this transformation stood Pope Innocent VIII, elected to the papacy in 1484, just two years before Giovanni Pico della Mirandola would begin drafting his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man.
Innocent’s papacy reflects a period in which the Church no longer served primarily as the spiritual fabric within local communities, as it had in Florence a century earlier, but had become a territorial and bureaucratic power, issuing appointments, forming alliances, managing armies, and brokering marriages among Europe’s ruling families. Innocent VIII is remembered less for doctrinal vision than for his willingness to exercise papal authority as a political instrument. He legitimized his own illegitimate children, distributed church offices for financial and political gain, and involved the papacy in dynastic disputes far beyond Rome.
Under Innocent, the papacy took on the structural features of a court: centralized, hierarchical, diplomatic, and insulated from the practical spirituality of ordinary life. Its language was increasingly legal, its processes clerical, and its vision administrative. The Church had become, in effect, a sovereign power, operating alongside monarchies and communes, often intervening in secular affairs under the cover of spiritual mandate.
This evolution created tension for those thinkers and mystics who sought a deeper, more personal form of spiritual understanding. The institutional Church now stood as a gatekeeper of truth, defining the boundaries of acceptable inquiry and exerting control over religious and philosophical discourse. For a figure like Pico della Mirandola, this posed a fundamental obstacle. His vision of human freedom, divine potential, and philosophical synthesis did not align with the Church’s need for orthodoxy and centralized authority.
In 1486, Pico offered the Roman Curia a document known as the “900 Theses,” a sweeping defense of theological, philosophical, and mystical positions drawn from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and classical sources. He accompanied this with his Oration on the Dignity of Man, a rhetorical introduction framing the human being as a unique creature, capable of ascending or descending the ladder of being through the exercise of free will.
The pope’s response was immediate and decisive. Innocent VIII condemned several of the theses as heretical and suspended Pico’s proposed public disputation. A warrant was issued for his arrest. The confrontation between the centralized spiritual order of the Church and the emergent vision of the self as a spiritual authority was no longer theoretical. It had become political.
What was being rejected was not merely Pico’s synthesis of traditions, but his assertion that the human soul might relate to the divine without institutional mediation. That insight, while cloaked in Renaissance philosophy and Neoplatonic language, quietly undermined the Church’s structural claim to authority. If a person could access the divine through self-purification and intellectual ascent, what need was there for papal control over knowledge?
Pico’s arrest was eventually suspended through intervention by powerful patrons, but the episode marks a decisive moment. The Church, once interwoven into the communal fabric of civic life, had consolidated itself as an empire of doctrine. Its authority rested not in the shared order of the people but in its capacity to define truth from above. It had become a global city, but one with impermeable walls.
In this shift, we can see the broader transformation at work: from localized, participatory spiritual structures to a central, abstract power. And just as Florence’s ordered body had begun to dissolve into new forms of identity, so too did spiritual legitimacy begin to relocate—from institution to individual, from tradition to inward authority.
Pico della Mirandola: The Birth of the Sovereign Self
In the winter of 1486, a 23-year-old Giovanni Pico della Mirandola arrived in Rome with the intention of staging a public philosophical disputation on a scale never attempted. He brought with him his Conclusiones—nine hundred propositions drawn from a wide array of sources: Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Averroes, the Kabbalah, Hermes Trismegistus, Islamic theologians, and Christian mystics. His goal was not merely to display erudition, but to demonstrate the underlying unity of human wisdom—a unity grounded not in institutional authority but in the nature of human dignity itself.
The introduction to these theses, Oration on the Dignity of Man, has often been cited as the manifesto of Renaissance humanism. In it, Pico advanced an idea that broke with the inherited worldview of fixed social and cosmic order. He argued that the human being, unlike plants, animals, or angels, was not confined to any one nature. Instead, man was created with the unique capacity to shape himself.
“We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal,” Pico imagines God saying to Adam. “You may sculpt yourself into whatever form you prefer.”
This was a radical departure from the earlier model of identity that had defined communal life in Florence. There, a person’s identity was determined by their guild, their family, their neighborhood, their place in the order of things. Pico rejected that hierarchy. Instead, he proposed a model in which each person was self-forming—capable of intellectual ascent or descent by the choices they made and the disciplines they practiced.
For Pico, the human soul was not just dignified—it was sovereign. It could ascend toward the angelic or fall into the bestial, but either way it bore the burden of its own formation. This model of the individual was not isolated or relativistic. It was deeply metaphysical. But its implications were clear: identity was no longer to be received; it was to be shaped. Spiritual authority no longer resided in the Church, the commune, or inherited structures, but in the inner capacity of the soul to seek truth and align itself with the divine.
This shift was both philosophical and structural. In redefining the self as a site of divine freedom, Pico implicitly challenged every form of imposed order—social, political, and ecclesiastical. He was not advocating rebellion, but he was introducing a new basis for legitimacy: not tradition, but transformation; not obedience, but interior development.
In many ways, Pico represents the midpoint in the story we are tracing. Florence showed us the communal foundations of civic identity. Pope Innocent VIII embodied the consolidation of spiritual control into centralized institutional power. Pico introduced a third path: the self as a microcosm of the cosmos, a territory in which divine and material forces converge, subject not to law from above, but to the unfolding of inner potential.
But the promise of self-formation, once unleashed, does not end with philosophical dignity. Over time, it becomes social expectation, cultural assumption, and, eventually, political ideology. The sovereign individual becomes the modern citizen, the consumer, the rights-bearer. What begins in Pico as a spiritual possibility evolves, over centuries, into the prevailing structure of the modern self—defined by autonomy, expressive freedom, and personal truth.
It is this final development—the individual as absolute authority—that is most fully diagnosed, and ultimately critiqued, by the late twentieth-century spiritual teacher Adi Da. His warning is not against freedom itself, but against its final form: the self cut off from any larger order, believing itself to be not only free, but sufficient.
Adi Da: The “United Nations of Individuals” and the End of Shared Reality
By the late twentieth century, the concept of the individual had become culturally dominant. What began in the civic structures of Florence as functional identity, and was reimagined by Pico as spiritual self-determination, had by now evolved into a social world in which every person was expected to define, express, and realize themselves in complete autonomy. Individuality was no longer an aspiration or potential—it had become a basic expectation, a given.
In this landscape, Adi Da emerged as a radical critic of the modern spiritual condition. Speaking not from a pulpit or institutional seat, but from a self-formed community on a remote island in Fiji, he identified what he called the defining pathology of the age: the collapse of all collective meaning into isolated self-assertion.
“Sooner or later,” he said in 1993, “every single individual on earth will demand absolute independence from everyone else… It’s the ego taking over the mass of mankind.”
To Adi Da, this was not merely a political trend or a psychological concern—it was a spiritual emergency. In his view, modern culture had replaced shared religious, cultural, and philosophical frameworks with a marketplace of private identities, personal truths, and self-curated realities. What Pico described as the dignity of human freedom had become, in Adi Da’s eyes, the weaponization of separateness—the transformation of the self into a walled-off entity, aggressively protecting its image and defending its autonomy at all costs.
He referred to this condition as the “United Nations of Individuals”—a world in which not only nations, but persons, behave as sovereign states: asserting boundaries, issuing demands, withdrawing into defensiveness, and threatening retaliation when their self-defined identity is not acknowledged. Cooperation, once a civic necessity and a spiritual virtue, had become optional—something people spoke of abstractly, but rarely enacted.
Adi Da was not nostalgic for the past, nor did he idealize pre-modern forms of community or religion. His critique was more fundamental. He argued that the self, in its modern form, had become incapable of transcendence. Its commitment to self-ownership, self-definition, and self-importance had replaced the possibility of relationship—not only with others, but with the divine.
“Reality is all. All is one,” he said. “You think otherwise—be wary of yourself. As you think, so you go.”
For Adi Da, the solution to this crisis was not a return to medieval order or ecclesiastical authority. It was a call to real spiritual practice: not as self-help, not as affirmation, but as the undoing of the very structure of self-contraction. His emphasis was on radical devotion—a submission not to institutions, but to the truth of reality as inherently relational, inherently prior, inherently one.
In this way, Adi Da reintroduces the question that Florence, Pico, and even Innocent VIII had each, in their own way, addressed: Where does spiritual authority reside? Is it in the structure of the city? The power of the Church? The freedom of the self? Or in something beyond and prior to all of these?
What Adi Da pointed to was not a new institution, but a different condition of being—one in which identity is no longer defended, but dissolved in the act of love and surrender. In that sense, he closes the arc we have traced not with a new solution, but with a stark choice: continue as sovereign individuals until nothing is left to connect, or relinquish the illusion of separation and recover the possibility of shared reality.
Conclusion: The Return to the Shared Field
Florence in 1300 provides an image of social life organized through mutual function. Identity was not a possession but a location within a network of reciprocal obligations—guild, neighborhood, parish, and militia. The city operated through cooperation not because its citizens were morally enlightened, but because cooperation was required. It was the practical condition for survival and continuity.
By the end of the fifteenth century, that model was already under pressure. The Church, represented in its institutional peak by Pope Innocent VIII, had consolidated its authority beyond the reach of communal participation. At the same time, Pico della Mirandola proposed a countermodel—not a return to communal order, but an elevation of the self. His oration inaugurated a vision of identity grounded in interior possibility rather than external assignment. The soul, he argued, was free to become what it willed.
Over centuries, this model took root. The communal body gave way to the self-forming individual. The Church’s vertical authority lost its credibility, but no shared structure replaced it. What remained was the individual—empowered, dignified, but increasingly unmoored. By the end of the twentieth century, Adi Da was describing a world of radical fragmentation, in which every person behaves as a sovereign state, asserting borders, demanding recognition, and retreating into isolation when faced with the difficulty of real relation.
The arc from Florence to the modern West traces more than the emergence of political liberalism or human rights. It describes a deeper evolution: the migration of identity from the shared exterior—city, church, culture—into the self-interiorized. At first, this appeared as freedom. But over time, it has revealed another effect: a culture of individuals no longer oriented by anything larger than themselves.
What was once the city is now the self. What was once the Church is now conscience. What was once the commons is now a field of competing truths, curated online and defended psychologically.
The question that remains is not whether the self should be sovereign. That question has already been answered by the modern world. The deeper question is whether sovereignty alone is sufficient—whether it can sustain the weight of meaning, connection, and transcendence that once belonged to a shared world.
Adi Da’s critique implies that it cannot. His solution is not a return to external structures, but the transformation of the self through conscious sacrifice of its presumed centrality. In this, he reintroduces something from the communal past—a spirituality not of personal empowerment, but of participatory unity, where identity is not constructed, but dissolved into relation.
Whether such a reorientation is possible on a broad scale is unclear. But what this historical arc suggests is that the future of human identity may depend on more than self-definition. It may depend on our ability to remember that we were never meant to be states unto ourselves.