Today's dicussion looking over the past year (2017) is made somewhat humorless by failing to mention how our principled thought and action occurs within a bounded historical conditon. Suppose "modernity" is marked by the emergence of consensus arbitration in public opinion and the way that affects establsihed round practices unsuited to square uses. Ceteris paribus is law as long as intentions shape themselves to their governance. Even the crown headed God elect fail the coherence test in the shifting perameters of mindless attrition, i.e., temporal composting.

As long as the political elect are made ephemeral by a fixed date to possible dismissal and crowd cowing cannot shout down the first person voice, autonomous persons can moral individuate in place by principled enagagment, even if that happens in the figurative or actual underground, or requires time-out in the desert.

I assume collective life consists in a collection of particular persons. If so, the mass admixture of opinion informing the consensus debate moves the hand holds up the cliff depending more on the state of the cliff face than on the "will to climb"—if the metaphor is creepy, mea culpa. When Wittgesntein spoke of "forms of life", I take it as obvious that the life in question was anchored in matter and that continuous individuation is the way the person "matters" in the world of hard edges until dead matter remains no longer moved by the mover.