Am I An Individual? Part 1
A Philosophical History of the Question
Part 1: Ancient to Early Modern Philosophy
Are you an individual? Sounds like a silly question, doesn’t it? You’re you, right? You aren’t anybody else. But it’s not quite that simple. First off, being good philosophers, we have to define our terms. What do we mean by “an individual?” There are many answers to that question. Let’s begin at the beginning.
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophers, most notably Plato, said there are particulars (individual objects) and universals. Plato wrote that particular objects are the types of objects they are because they share a universal form. So, all those particular trees are trees because they partake of universal Treeness. And that means that each individual tree is less real than the universal Tree. That’s because any individual tree is only a poor copy of the universal Tree.
Sounds daft? Well, Plato’s conception can explain why we recognize things as the type of things they are. We can recognize that that’s a particular tree because we know the universal reality of treeness. We compare the particular things we experience with the forms of the universal to identify things. Plato said the way to understand anything is to consider its perfect essence. If I want to understand trees, Plato says, I contemplate what a perfect tree is like — this is the universal essence of Treeness that all particular trees must be like to be a tree. So, we don’t need to study all those particular trees — just drop out, tune in, and turn on to the universal essence, baby.
The same applies for identifying human beings in Plato’s philosophy. I’m a particular human and you’re a particular human because we partake of the universal form of Humanness, but we are each less real than the universal Human. What’s more, because being human means similarity to a universal form, the more unique a person is, the farther away from being “human” that person is. That doesn’t mean anything as drastic as if you are much taller than average or lose a limb you are no longer a human being, but it does mean that being different is being less ideal of a human. So, if you are weird enough, you may no longer be considered human which is a big disincentive to wanting to be an individual.
Plato took these ideas to their logical conclusion in thinking about how to structure a just and well-ordered society. Plato reasoned that because particular humans partake of the universal form of Humanness, social policies should be derived from the objective interests of humans as a whole, not from the desires of individual persons. To understand what people need, we need to contemplate what a perfect human being is like and what is best for that ideal of Humanness. This is why Plato objected to democracy — the idea that individuals should be allowed equal voice in political decisions. It is not that individuals shouldn’t be allowed to speak, but that individuals should understand that alone or even banded together into groups, they are shortsighted in knowing what is best for the society. Only by understanding the universal form of Humanness will we know what is the best way to order society.
Plato’s student Aristotle disagreed with Plato on some matters, but he also opposed democracy for similar reasons. Aristotle said that humans are a political animal — “political” meaning in his time “of the city” or polis. Any human without need or desire for the community was a beast — a sub-human. Thus, anyone wanting to be a lone individual or depart from how others are is a bit suspect. Unlike Plato, Aristotle didn’t think universals like Treeness and Humanness existed on their own in a higher realm, but Aristotle still thought that particulars are what they are because they partake of the substance of a universal.
For the Ancient Greeks, then, “am I an individual” is the wrong question. Individuals don’t matter. The polis, or society, is what matters. Only by looking at what is best for the social community as a whole will we see what is the best way to order the society.
This wasn’t just a Greek idea. The Roman orator Cicero described the Roman Republic as a body and said individuals who were harmful to the body politic were a plague. His remedy for subversive individuals was banishment — remove the disease afflicting the body. It would be easy to attribute that idea strictly to men in power trying to quash dissent, but the urge to suppress individuality was based in a worldview that individuality was a kind of disorder or disease that needed to be cured or stopped. Of course, dictators abused this idea, but it was an idea already woven into the social fabric available for dictators to exploit.
If you thought you were an individual, you just might get burned at the stake for it. No really. The word “heresy” is from the Greek haíresis and Latin haeresis which means to make a choice, take a course of action, or to prefer something. As the word “heresy” came to be used, to be a heretic was to prefer thoughts and actions that diverged from social norms. Romans persecuted Christians because the upstart faith diverged from how normal Romans were. When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, it maintained the practice of denouncing those who took actions different from the social norm. It was never really about religion, it was about surgically removing the disease of individuality from the body politic. Like the song from the 1960s said: “step out of line, the men come and take you away.”
Could someone in ancient times be an individual? Well, not as we would understand it today. The ancients saw people as parts of the social body, not as individual beings, and their understanding was driven by the assumption that any particular individual wasn’t fully real.
Medieval Philosophy
Can you think for yourself? Well, can you? Maybe you can, but maybe you never do. And if you do, maybe you shouldn’t. Believe it or not, people had those conversations in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: the 10th to the late 18th centuries.
Medieval Europe suffered from plagues, waves of barbarian invasions, and endless wars between rival nobilities. Life sucked. Nevertheless, the 15th and 16th centuries saw a period of relative prosperity and security. Christian Europe partly owes its renaissance to the Islamic civilizations of Spain, North Africa, and Persia who kept alive and expanded upon Ancient Greek philosophy. Not surprisingly, Islamic philosophers and the Christian philosophers inspired by them kept with the Ancient Greeks’ belief that individuals were not fully real.
If individuals aren’t fully real, then an individual person can’t come to truth on its own. At least that was the widely held theory. Plato said truth is universal, unchanging, and objective. Similarly, Aristotle said that truths are those rational principles that all men of practical wisdom can determine. (Yes, only men; Aristotle was a sexist pig). In other words, there is no room for interpretation or perspective. There is one set of truths understood by those with the correct wisdom and any disagreement is error.
And there still was the Ancient Greek view of particulars and universals. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy epitomized the Aristotelian view of every object having form and matter. Thomas compiled all of the Islamic philosophical commentary on Aristotle and put it into language Europeans could grasp. He wrote that the individuality of a person lay in its bodily matter. The individual has bodily autonomy — it can move on its own — but this freedom is unique only in its quantity — this person is this clump of matter and that person is that clump of matter, two instances of the universal human form. An individual person has a corporeal form, but it is an “accidental,” not a substantial form. That means your body is an accident — in the original sense of the word “accident” as “a nonessential property or quality of an entity.”
What is essential to you is your immaterial soul, which for Medieval philosophers like Aquinas, includes the rational mind. And these philosophers considered only the rational mind, not emotions, opinions, or perspectives. Inspired by Plotinus (who was inspired by Plato), Medieval philosophers thought there was a cosmic Wisdom or mind. This cosmic mind is to thinking what the sun is to seeing: the light of Wisdom illuminates truth and allows minds to perceive truth. For many Medieval philosophers, the human mind was entirely passive; the only active mind being the cosmic mind. This means that we come to know truth only when it enters us. We do not come to it ourselves much less create it because we do not create our own light. We either take in the light of cosmic Wisdom or we are in darkness. This idea fits well with the concept of heresy mentioned earlier. You should not try to think for yourself because you can’t, not really. And trying to think for yourself only leads to bad things.
But not every Medieval philosopher accepted that you cannot or should not think for yourself. A small dissenting thread of thinkers persisted in the notion that some people do have the ability to come to truth by using their own minds. One champion of this notion was the Islamic philosopher Ibn-Rushd, known in Christian Europe as Averroës. Ibn-Rushd saw humanity as divided into three types of people: gold, silver, and bronze people. The lowest class — bronze people — lived only by reactions and emotions, not reason. Their minds were entirely passive and they needed to be told what to think and how to live. The large majority of people, the masses, were bronze people. In a smaller but higher class were the silver people, who were the religious and political leaders. They tried to establish intellectual justification for their beliefs and were useful in guiding the masses, but the silver people sought only to justify common beliefs and did not have fully active minds. The gold people were the only ones with active minds and the highest human intellects. These few extraordinary individuals could think for themselves and directly discover the truths about life, the universe, and everything. They had active minds.
The concept of the active mind — empowering some individuals to think for themselves — was a minority viewpoint in the Medieval period, but it was influential to later philosophy, as we shall see.
Early Modern Philosophers
Should you have a say in how your society is run? Easy for us today to say, “yes.” We live in a time when democracy, at least in name, is considered an ideal and a right. This has not always been the case.
Prior to the late 1600s, the idea of individuals having input into their government and society was considered heretical. Strongmen ruled (no women allowed), whether they called themselves a king, emperor, duke, prince, caliph, emir, or khan. Political power transferred not by elections but by the previous ruler’s death, often times hastened along by others. In addition to the authoritarian ruler, there was a small nobility, and a larger population of serfs or peasants. The serfs “belonged” to the nobility who also owned the land, and the nobility pledged loyalty to the autocratic ruler. We can see how easily the philosophical vision of humanity being divided into gold, silver, and bronze could be and was adapted to this social hierarchy called “feudalism.”
Suggesting that the serfs — “bronze” people — should have a say in how things were run would have elicited laughter from the “silver” and “gold” people. The peasants were revolting — um, in the sense that they were considered unseemly, not that they were rebelling (for the most part). No, the underclass mostly just accepted their miserable fate, knowing no one cared what they thought or felt.
But back to the strongmen rulers. They were individuals. They had a right to want, say, and do things. They were considered to have their own minds (even when they were stupid) and considered to have free will (unlike the stupid peasants), a will that was the de facto law of the land. Louis XIV of France (ruled 1643–1715) epitomized the ideology of authoritarian rule, a system glorified by some French philosophers as “Absolutism.” The idea was simple. There was one Truth and one God, therefore there should be one King who ruled over everything. Louis kinda liked that idea.
Political Absolutism had its philosophical defenders and opponents. The three best known discussants were Thomas Hobbes (defender), and John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (opponents). Interestingly, all three argued for or against Absolutism using the thought experiment that has come to be known as “social contract theory.” The idea of a social contract, however it was conceived, brought to the fore the role of the individual in politics and society.
Hobbes had a contradictory view of human individuality. He wrote that people are individuals in that we all act independently based on what we want. However, we do not choose what we want because we have no free will. We have different wants and do different things only because forces act differently on the different clumps of matter that are individual people. So, you think differently than other people but not by choice. But, for Hobbes, everyone thinking, wanting, and acting differently leads to conflict. Everyone being individuals is what Hobbes calls the “state of nature.” And it stinks. Life in the state of nature, Hobbes said, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This is because, Hobbes believed, humans are individuals who care only about themselves who would lie, cheat, steal, and even murder to get what they wanted. The answer, Hobbes said, was for everyone to surrender all of their rights and freedoms to the Sovereign, the absolute ruler, who was the Individual who embodied all people. The Sovereign’s will was the will of all and the Sovereign would act in the interests of all and keep everyone safe by imposing absolute rule. We sacrifice freedom for security.
Locke’s view of human nature was the opposite of Hobbes’s. Locke saw people not as selfish brutes, but as considerate and rational. In Locke’s view, people care for others and can use their reason to understand what’s best for everyone. Most of us have freedom of will and purpose. I say “most of us” because Locke had a mental block about including anyone other than wealthy white male Protestants in his definition of people. Still, if you were a wealthy white male Protestant, you were an individual who was entitled to be part of Locke’s social contract. In that contract, individuals used their benevolence and reason to balance their wants and needs with those of others.
To assist us in balancing our various wants and needs, we create a government that works for the welfare and interests of the people (“people” meaning wealthy white male Protestants). Locke brought into light the idea that individual people had a voice in their government and that government served The People not the other way round. Locke’s ideas on individual liberty and the proper role of government influenced the United States Constitution and social democracy.
Then there was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who opposed Absolutism, but also art, science, education, and civilization itself. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” was Rousseau’s credo. He meant by this that man (not woman) is naturally a free individual but the power of social conventions enslave man. On the individual and government, Rousseau’s vision was that everyone had their individual wants but to avoid conflict we must accept the “necessary evil” of society and government. To minimize that evil, Rousseau said that government needs to serve the “general will” of the people. That is not the will of one or even a group of people but the abstract will of all.
In Rousseau’s vision of the social contract, individuals publicly discuss what they want and competing desires cancel out each other and the general will emerges. Each individual then subjugates his will to the general will which is the sole sovereignty over all. Rousseau said the individual develops and thrives within the general will. This means that though everyone is an individual, no one should go against the general will and must be brought into accordance with the general will for his own good. If this sounds like it wouldn’t end well, you’re correct. The French Revolution was patterned after Rousseau’s social contract and repression and punishments were meted out in the name of the “general will.” The message was: “You are an individual, now shut up and follow.”
Other aspects of philosophy and culture in the early modern period reflected this tension between an emerging sense of the individual and the need to maintain a social hierarchy. The idea of the individual with free will and rights was reserved for a select upper class few. That view began to change with Immanuel Kant, but only gradually, as we shall see in Part 2.
Originally published at https://insertphilosophyhere.com/am-i-an-individual-a-philosophical-history/