Permanence

Permanence occupies a tensioned position across the depth-psychology corpus, standing at the intersection of metaphysics, phenomenology, personal identity, and developmental psychology. The corpus does not treat it as a settled property but as a contested horizon: something longed for, philosophically interrogated, and psychologically consequential. Plotinus anchors the theurgical pole, distinguishing the eternal, self-identical Life of the Intellect from temporal flux, insisting that true Being is ‘a Life changelessly motionless’ whose perdurance constitutes Eternity itself. McGilchrist introduces a neuropsychological complication, arguing that the left hemisphere demands static permanence while the right hemisphere perceives permanence within flow — a distinction with profound clinical implications visible in the Capgras phenomenon. Ricoeur situates permanence at the crux of personal identity, differentiating character-as-sameness from the self-constancy of keeping one’s word — two distinct ‘models of permanence in time.’ The Buddhist and Yogic traditions, represented through Bryant, contest any metaphysical permanence at the subatomic level, insisting that nothing is static across even a single ksana. Augustine triangulates these positions theologically, anchoring permanence in divine unchangeability against creaturely vicissitude. The developmental literature — Schore, Bowlby — recasts the question as object permanence, a neurobiologically grounded capacity central to attachment and self-formation. Simondon and Harding contribute existential and sociological registers: permanence as the felt conviction of surpassing individual limits, and as a cultural institution (marriage) under erosion.

In the library 17 passages

The left hemisphere seems to accept the permanence of something only if it is static. But things can change – flow – and yet have permanence: think of a river. The right hemisphere perceives that there is permanence even where there is flow.

McGilchrist argues that the two cerebral hemispheres hold fundamentally different models of permanence — the left requiring stasis, the right capable of recognising continuity within change — with direct pathological consequences when the right is damaged.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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it is indeed under this heading alone that the analytic theories that we will examine later approach the question of personal identity and the paradoxes related to it. Let us recall rapidly the conceptual articulation of sameness in order to indicate the eminent place that permanence in time holds there.

Ricoeur identifies permanence in time as the central pivot around which analytic accounts of personal identity and its paradoxes are organised, tying it specifically to the structure of sameness and numerical identity.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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There is, in fact, another model of permanence in time besides that of character. It is that of kee

Ricoeur distinguishes character-based permanence (sameness accreted through habit) from a second model of temporal permanence grounded in self-constancy — the keeping of one’s word — thereby opening a gap between idem- and ipse-identity.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable Existent — one which never turns to any Kind outside itself, that possesses life complete once for all, that has never received any accession, that is now receiving none and will never receive any — we have, with the statement of a perduring Being, the statement also of perdurance and of Eternity.

Plotinus equates genuine permanence with Eternity itself — a self-sufficient, unaugmented Being that has always already possessed all it will ever possess, wholly unlike temporal duration.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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we know Identity, a concept or, rather, a Life never varying, not becoming what previously it was not, the thing immutably itself, broken by no interval; and knowing this, we know Eternity.

Plotinus defines Eternity as the direct cognitive apprehension of an unbroken, interval-free Life — permanence as the highest ontological category, accessible only through intellective rather than sensory knowing.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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not this now and now that other, but always all; not existing now in one mode and now in another, but a consummation without part or interval. All its content is in immediate concen

Plotinus elaborates the eternal mode of permanence as a ‘consummation without part or interval,’ contrasting it with temporal succession in which content appears piecemeal.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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when Horace says ‘exegi monumentum aere perennius’ (I have raised a monument more permanent than bronze), these men are experiencing as authors an impression of eternity: the idea of the work’s immortality is merely the sensible symbol of this internal conviction, of this faith that traverses the individual being and through which the individual feels that it surpasses its own limits.

Simondon reads the creative aspiration to permanence — exemplified by Thucydides and Horace — as an individuating experience in which the subject feels itself transcending its own finitude, with immortality serving as a symbolic expression of a deeper ontological conviction.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the Yoga school agrees with the kṣanika-vāda Buddhists: Nothing is static but changes every kṣaṇa, minute. Therefore, when we say a cloth has become old, in reality we are referring to a certain cutoff point in this sequential flux.

Bryant shows that Yoga metaphysics, aligned with Buddhist momentariness doctrine, categorically denies permanence to phenomenal objects, reducing apparent persistence to a continuous subatomic flux punctuated by arbitrary cognitive markers.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis

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Thy Word remaineth for ever, which now appeareth unto us under the dark image of the clouds, and through the glass of the heavens, not as it is.

Augustine grounds ultimate permanence in the divine Word alone, contrasting it with the transience of creaturely preachers, clouds, and even heaven and earth, which shall pass away — permanence thus becomes an exclusively theological predicate.

Augustine, Confessions, 397supporting

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every nature already formed, or matter capable of form, is not, but from Him Who is supremely good, because He is supremely… there is a certain sublime creature, with so chaste a love cleaving unto the true and truly eternal God, that although not coeternal with Him, yet is it not detached from Him, nor dissolved into the variety and vicissitude of times.

Augustine distinguishes divine co-eternity from creaturely participation in permanence: a creature may approximate permanence through unwavering contemplative attachment to God rather than through its own substance.

Augustine, Confessions, 397supporting

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the presence of my body is to be compared to the de facto permanence of certain objects, or the organ compared to a tool which is always available… Its permanence near to me, its unvarying perspective are not a de facto necessity, since such necessity presupposes them.

Merleau-Ponty argues that bodily permanence is not a brute empirical fact but a transcendental condition of perceptual perspective — the body’s constancy grounds rather than merely exemplifies the permanence attributed to objects.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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flux is not outgoing: where there is motion within but not outwards and the total remains unchanged, there is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Kosmos never ages.

Plotinus describes the cosmos as exhibiting a form of immanent permanence — internal circulation without external loss — distinguishing cosmological self-maintenance from mere static unchangeability.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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Authentic-Existence is measurable not by time but by eternity; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any magnitude but is the unchangeable, the indivisible, is timeless Being.

Plotinus insists that authentic permanence belongs exclusively to the timeless and indivisible, and cannot be measured or accumulated — ruling out any quantitative conception of enduring existence.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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A generation is growing up whose innate sense of the sanctity and permanence of marriage is profoundly modified through their early experience of divorce and of broken families. The demand that a woman must love, honor and obey her husband all her life is a corollary to the belief in the lifelong permanence of marriage.

Harding treats the social ideal of marital permanence as a cultural-psychological norm under dissolution, tracing its erosion to shifting familial structures and their formative impact on children’s moral sense.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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all actions in a perpetual change; and the causes themselves, subject to a thousand alterations, neither is there anything almost, that may ever be said to be now settled and constant.

Marcus Aurelius uses the ubiquity of flux and the absence of anything ‘settled and constant’ as a Stoic therapeutic device — permanence is denied to phenomenal reality precisely to diminish attachment and anxiety.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 180aside

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Matter can never be dissolved. What into? By what process?

Plotinus attributes a paradoxical form of permanence to Matter — indestructibility without authentic Being — distinguishing it from both true eternal permanence and mere temporal endurance.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270aside

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