Individualism

From Vernon Pratt et al, Environment and Philosophy, London, 2000, Routledge, pp.81-84, with permission

'Individualism' is quite a dangerous term, in the sense that people use it in different ways, often quite subtly different. Arguments can get their plausibility from its ambiguity.

One sense is this: that the individual is the 'unit of analysis' of human life, rather as the atom or 'corpuscle' was the unit of analysis when physical things began to be seen through the eyes of Modern science.

It is difficult to keep this idea in focus. It is the view that somehow whatever may be true of the groups that human beings belong to - communities, societies, nations, tribes, eras, classes, or whatever - those features are a consequence of what is true about the individuals that make the group up.

It isn't the view that human beings are by nature selfish. And it isn't the view that they are by nature anti-social. These two views of the human being are possible within individualism but so are the opposites (that human beings are social creatures, always on the lookout for what they can do to help others). All these views are consistent with taking the individual to be the unit of analysis.

What then is the alternative? If individualism in this sense is the thesis that the group is constituted by the individuals that make it up, the reverse would appear to be that the human being is constituted by the group to which he or she belongs. Marx speaks like this: ' The real nature of man [sic] is the totality of social relations.'

THE RISE OF INDIVIDUALISM

The rise of individualism was one of the great changes that marked the emergence of the Modern world, and it may help to look back and see how the human being - a 'non-individual' - was referred to before that shift.

Think of a block of flats. We may on occasion refer to the second floor, or the fourth window from the left, three floors up looking at the front. Here we are identifying bits of the building by reference to other bits. Supposing the window we are referring to here needed replacement. Once the job was done, would we have to refer to it in a different way? There would be a sense in which there was a different window there, but also a sense in which we would pick out the new window with exactly the phrase we had used before - fourth window from the left, three floors up (looking at the front).

There are two individual pieces of glass in this story of course, one which to begin with is the window, and which then gets broken; and another that becomes the window. They could be given serial numbers. But in speaking of ‘the window’ our focus is not on either of these, but on something that is defined by its position in the building (fourth from the left, three floors up (looking at the front).

This is too gross to be an analogy for the medieval conception of, or attitude towards, ‘the individual’ - but maybe it serves as a pointer. In feudal society, a person was somehow, defined by his or her place in society. A man thought of himself, as Alasdair MacIntyre explains, “in terms of a set of established descriptions by means of which he situates and identifies himself vis-à-vis other men.” . [And Macintyre is thinking of men and women here]. People are thus being thought of as more like windows than panes of glass. When the question is asked, Who do you mean? the feudal answer would take the form: the one three levels up and four from the left. But the reference would be not to a block of flats but to the complex edifice of feudal society.

Human beings in the Modern world are not defined by their relative location in social space. I am defined as a person who was born at such and such a time of such and such parents in such and such a place, not by the position I occupy in the social structure. When I die there will not (I hope) be any question of a ‘replacement’. Somebody else may be got to do my job, or even play my role in the family, but it will be a way of slighting my memory to speak of these people as replacing me as a person.

When people are defined in terms of their relationship to others, by their place in a (social) structure, how they should behave is given by the position they occupy. That you are a person is not very significant, and no obligations or duties spring from this fact alone. Your duties come from the fact that you are a knight or a king. One great change associated with the birth of the Modern period was a transformation in the significance of the person simply as a person. Just as the natural world began to be seen as existing independently of its role in bringing messages and being useful to human beings, so human beings began to be seen as existing independently of whatever use they were to society.

MacIntyre on the emergence of the individual

‘ [In the transformation that gave us the Modern world] we get a move from the well-developed simplicities of the morality of role-fulfilment, where we judge a man as farmer, as king, as father, to the point at which evaluation has become detached, both in the vocabulary and in practice, from roles, and we ask not what it is to be good at or for this or that role or skill, but just what it is to be a “good man”; not what it is to do one’s duty as clergyman or landowner, but as “a man”. The notion of norms for man emerges as the natural sequel to this process, and opens new possibilities and new dangers.’


‘Thus the individual no longer finds his evaluative commitments made for him, in part at least, by simply answering the question of his own social identity. His identity now is only that of the bearer of a given name who answers as a matter of contingent fact to certain descriptions (red haired or blue eyed, labourer or merchant), and has to make his own choice among the competing possibilities. From the facts of his situation as he is able to describe them in his new social vocabulary nothing at all follows about what he ought to do. Everything comes to depend on his own individual choice..’

Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, London, 1966, Routledge, p.94, 5 and p.126.

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