Am I An Individual? Part 2

A Philosophical History of the Question

Read Part 1: Ancient to Early Modern Philosophy

Part 2: Kant to the Present Times

Kant and the 19th Century

The question of what is an individual took a significant turn with Immanuel Kant. Kant’s philosophical revolution is his realization that the mind contributes to experience. Kant’s schema explained how the mind contained categories of understanding that enabled sense data to be experienced as objects. The mind must impose a rational structure on the sense experiences, otherwise we’d have nothing but an endless jumble of unconnected impressions. So the mind is not purely passive as earlier philosophers had assumed.

You may think that of course our learning, past experiences, and feelings all structure how we perceive what happens to us. Today, we take for granted that our different circumstances and experiences makes us each an individual. This was not the case in Kant’s time. That today we understand that our individual experiences and thoughts help create who we uniquely are has to do with Kant’s discussion of the active mind and what freedom is.

We are each free individuals, Kant says, because our practical reason enables us to know ourselves as a free person who is able to make and commit to moral decisions. Moral decisions relate to the question, “what should I do?” Kant said there are proper moral decisions such as I should not lie. I know as a free person I can lie, but I know as a rational person I shouldn’t lie, so I freely choose not to lie. Kant was definitely not the first to think that we had freedom to chose, but he brought the issue into the center of a philosophical view of what it means to be human.

By saying that the human mind is active and contributes to human experience, Kant opened a door to a new way of thinking about human experience and knowledge. Our mind imposes a form on sense impressions. The leads to the question: how active and free are our minds? Also, Kant assumed that there was one and only one way that a human mind structured experience, just like there is only one moral duty. What if there are multiple ways that different individuals’ minds are structured? What’s more, if we have the ability to freely make moral decisions then can we consciously change the way we experience the world? Can I, as an individual, alter my consciousness?

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the first to walk through the door Kant had opened and said yes, we can change the structures of our mind. Fichte’s philosophy centered on the exploration of individual freedom. You are an individual subject, Fichte says. You have experiences, you make decisions, and you do things. The world gives you a vast field of opportunities. You create your freedom and who you are through the decisions you make and actions you take. Those decisions and actions in turn structure how you experience the world. In effect, you are creating your own world and this structure that you help determine is the ground of all of your experiences. Fichte says that real freedom is when a rational subject creates itself. This subjective activity is what makes you an individual.

Fichte’s philosophy has come to be known as subjective idealism in that in all of your perceptions you only ever perceive your own state of consciousness. Fichte said everything is thought, and he defined thought as an action. That idea was picked up by G.W.F. Hegel, who said that everything is thought and thought is the action of stringing together rational propositions. Hegel’s philosophy that everything is thought is also considered a form of idealism. Hegel’s idealism was an objective idealism because he believed that there was one universal consciousness, which he called “Spirit.” We are individuals in that we are subjects who experience and think and act, but we’re not individuals in that we are objects of history — the consciousness of Spirit works out its creating of itself through everything that happens in the universe, including us. So, yeah, you’re an individual but you’re not, which is that type of both-and contradictions that fill Hegel’s philosophy.

Hegel’s system of objective idealism became extremely popular from the 1810s to 1910s. It is too complex to go into here, but his conception that we are the objects of history and therefore not full individuals, drew the ire of two philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. They blow up the question of are we individuals and demanded that subjectivity be the center of philosophy and life. The two philosophers were radically different in some ways, but they shared some core concepts. They more or less aligned with Fichte’s idea that we create our own perceptual structures and they both vehemently rejected what they saw as Hegel’s opposition to individuality. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche each in their own way urged people to embrace their subjective experiences. Both said that we don’t have to just accept what we are told to believe, we are free to make our own moral choices and those choices make us who we are.

Kierkegaard said that the awareness of our absolute freedom to feel and think for ourselves is scary. Not scary as in “that animal could attack me,” but scary as in “holy crap, I’m responsible for my own actions and I can mess up my life if I make bad choices.” Nietzsche claimed to have no such fear, claiming instead that all historical belief systems are empty nonsense, there’s no objective truth, so anything goes, go out and make the world yours. While Kierkegaard called for us to be introspective and discover the real meaning of who we are as an individual, Nietzsche called for a hell-for-leather attitude of overcoming our past and society and becoming an Übermensch — literally “overman” who has overcome humanity to become something greater. Kierkegaard saw the need to find our individual moral path within the objective moral universe. Nietzsche saw the need for us to create our own individual morality. Either philosophy has its difficulties, but both celebrated the individual as the center of everything.

Today’s Turmoil

Despite centuries of philosophical discussion about the question of individuality, we may actually be more confused than ever. And if you aren’t confused, you aren’t paying attention. Today, there’s an ideological conflict between declarations of individuality in our self-indulgent society and declarations of determinism from cognitive science and analytical philosophy. Few of these colliding ideologies deal in depth with the central question: “are you an individual?”

The turmoil over the question of the individual has its roots in the early 20th century. On the one hand we had Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre who said yes, we’re individuals and that’s scary. Heidegger said that we’re each an individual aware of our own individual existence and concluded that being alive meant we are constantly in dread of impending death. He lived until age 85 so he must have suffered a lot. Sartre said we had absolute freedom and this was terrifying and nauseating (he wrote a book about it called Nausea). But what’s really awful is that existence is absurd and meaningless and we’re condemned to exist and to be free in a society of other equally absurd and meaningless people. Life sucks and then you die and “hell is other people” (from his play “No Exit”).

On the other hand, the proponents of “you are an individual” having not made a positive case for it left us with the positivists who said we aren’t individuals. Positivism was first proposed by Auguste Comte in the early 19th century and adopted by the Vienna Circle in the early 20th century and maintained in what has come to be known as analytical philosophy. In positivism, what matters is the logical analysis of scientific observations. Non-scientific observations are inadmissible, as are any contemplations, speculations, and subjectivity, all of which are dismissed by positivists as metaphysics or worse, nonsense. An inheritor of these beliefs is the field of cognitive science, an arm of analytical philosophy that seeks a physics or biology of mental activity and assumes that mental functioning is objective, not subjective, and leaves no room for human free will. Positivism also spawned the philosophy of language as a discipline which analyzed rules for the logic use of language. Purveyors of that discipline have at times attempted to lay out rules for how people should be allowed to speak (no poetry please, we are analytical philosophers). They have had mixed results.

Philosophy of language has given us some important insights into how to talk about social behavior but it also tends to reduce social issues to problems of language. It ignores not only individuality but humanity and community. This is ironically also a a mistake made by the descendants of Hegel’s philosophy by way of Karl Marx. Marx took Hegel’s notion of people being objects of history but substituted economic determinism for Hegel’s Spirit. Hegel saw nation states as the only true actors in history and Marx saw only class struggle as the only true actor in history. This, obviously, leaves little to no room for considering people as individuals. Some philosophers today see themselves as working within a Hegelian-Marxist tradition and though most agree about the importance of social justice issues, there is considerable skepticism about the importance of individual experiences. They focus on political collectives and how these social bodies act.

One of the few areas of philosophy that talks about and values people as individuals is feminist philosophy. In general, feminist philosophy can be seen as acknowledging the importance of both objective structural social inequalities and subjective individual experiences. It places a value on what individuals feel and say and it acknowledges that our learning, our past experiences, and our feelings all contribute to how we perceive what happens to us. Injustices happen to individuals and justice comes from listening to and valuing individuals. We find similar ideas and values in philosophies of race and sexuality which also see the individual as struggling for recognition and justice within an unjust system. A larger debate is underway in philosophy over how much weight we should place on the importance of individual experiences and suffering and how it is best to be understood and remedied.

All of this is taking place in academic philosophy amidst society’s increasing self-centeredness and self-indulgence. People are much more free than ever before to talk about their personal experiences, feelings, and opinions. The idea that we should not judge others unless we understand where they’re coming from is part of our culture. Social media has given anyone and everyone platforms to express their individual perspectives and creativity. And you may have noticed, people often express themselves. But are they just emulating what they see other people doing? The goal on social media seems to be to create a meme that gets as many likes and repeats as possible. The irony is that “individualism” has become a marketing ploy. Corporations sell you pre-packaged ways to “express yourself.” Funny how these methods of individual expression all have corporate logos on them.

Conclusion?

What do we mean by “an individual?” A distinct lump of matter? A mind with a distinct set of experiences? Or is it something more? The various debates over the centuries over individuality have so often circled around the question of whether it is good or not for individuals to think differently from others. We have seen that there was quite often serious resistance to anyone being different from the norm. But being different for its own sake doesn’t seem to be a good thing. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche emphasized the value of expression genuinely coming from within. That was true of individuality and freedom, they said. But what is genuine self-expression? How could we know we ourselves are thinking and acting genuinely much less if someone else is being genuine?

If we accept that each of us is an individual, what does that mean? What rights do we have? What obligations do we have? What does it mean to really be ourselves, think for ourselves, and genuinely express ourselves? Perhaps the answer is different for each individual.