Tags
Aristotle, Charles Taylor, expressive individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, modernity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Wilhelm von Humboldt
What is remarkable about the ideal of qualitative individualism is that it is so pervasive yet so rarely thought about in depth. To get a bit more of that depth, I would like to examine next the question of where it comes from.
The idea is modern, I think, though like so many modern ideas it has premodern antecedents. A while ago I breezed a little too easily over the differences between qualitative individualism and Aristotle. I said:
Aristotle – not exactly a great friend of modern liberal freedom – thinks of the best politics in terms of allowing each person to fulfill a highest end or telos, all being the best they can be. Some thinkers would consider this teleology a higher and truer kind of freedom than choice alone. But it seems to me that the freedom of choice is a vital part of the freedom to be what you are. Who would know what you’re meant to be better than you yourself?
I missed something there. If it’s so clear that you’re the person who knows best what you’re meant to be, then why would Aristotle have been “not exactly a great friend” of the political freedom of choice lionized by qualitative individualists today? That question points to differences between Aristotle and qualitative individualism, differences that Charles Taylor again does a good job of pointing out. For qualitative individualists, or “expressivists” as Taylor calls them,
the adequate human life would not just be a fulfilment of an idea or plan which is fixed independently of the subject who realizes it, as is the Aristotelian form of a man. Rather this life must have the added dimension that the subject can recognize it as his own, as having unfolded from within him. This self-related dimension is entirely missing from the Aristotelian tradition. (Taylor, Hegel, 15)
So there are several things that are new, and modern, in the qualitative individualist ideal. It is not just that humans are significantly different from each other – Aristotle would easily agree with that much – but that “the differences define the unique form that each of us is called on to realize.” (17) One’s realization of one’s nature now can involve a conflict between one’s inner self and outer forces that constrain it. And one’s nature and purpose are not pregiven, but one’s own realization of them clarifies them or makes them determinate. It is these differences that underpin a modern political ideal of freedom of choice which Aristotle would likely have been suspicious of. For him, “the wise” who are best informed about humans in general would therefore know best for any individual humans. What Taylor is pointing to is a new conception of the self – a fundamentally metaphysical difference – according to which the differences between humans are so significant that knowing what’s best for one is very different from knowing what’s best for another.
How did we get here? What took the civilizations of Europe and their descendants from views like Aristotle’s to the newer qualitative individualism? Taylor credits the philosophical birth of qualitative individualism largely to Johann Gottfried Herder. But I think Taylor overstates Herder’s role here. He proclaims Herder’s presumed importance for the ideal of self-expression in multiple works, but every time he does this he cites no more than one sentence from Herder, in section VIII.1 of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. There, Herder says: “Each human being has his own measure, as it were an accord peculiar to him of all his feelings to each other.” (The German is, “Jeder Mensch hat ein eignes Maß, gleichsam eine eigne Stimmung aller seiner sinnlichen Gefühle zu einander.”) While this sentence does indeed express a qualitative individualist view, Herder does little to develop it; the section discussing individuality is a few short paragraphs in the Ideen, and having made this brief discussion of individual difference, Herder adds, “It is not the part of the philosophy of the history of man to exhaust this ocean, but by some striking differences to call our attention to the more delicate, that lie around us.” Then he returns to the main topic of the book, which is not individual but cultural differences – a much bigger concern of Herder’s work. Unlike differences between individuals, Herder returns again and again to the theme of differences between cultures, between nations – it may be the largest animating theme of his work.
Much of the qualitative individualist ideal as I understand it, though, sets the individual against the norms of her culture. The culture can be just one more of the oppressive exterior forces that stultify interior growth. Such a claim is perhaps most strongly and famously expressed by Nietzsche, but Nietzsche had significant predecessors – above all in the German Romantic movement, of which Herder was one but only one. Other important early figures include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet and author quoted in the first sentence of the Indian Supreme Court decision on gay sex whom a New Yorker piece rightly bills as the German Shakespeare, and Wilhelm von Humboldt – a significant influence on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty – who claimed at length that if people are left to make their own decisions they will naturally find the place that is right for them. (Ralph Waldo Emerson felt the Romantic currents in a different place, and was also an influence on Nietzsche.)
It is these early Romantic thinkers as a group, I think, who first bring to flower the idea that we are each special in a way that comes out of our own interiority. None of them put together a philosophy as systematic as Kant’s or Aristotle’s – some of them were opposed to the idea of system – but it is in their works together, I think, that one really sees the idea of qualitative individualism born. I believe they are drawing, in turn, on a metaphysical development that is significantly older, but still represents a major change from the views of Aristotle or Augustine. I will turn to that development next time.
I have not heard of qualitative individualism before. Is this a view that individuals are so different from each other that wisdom varies from individual to individual? In other words, that each individual has his or her own spiritual path and has little to learn from others?
This seems to me to be the height of egoism — and, in my view, the height of confusion. It certainly seems to be the death of philosophy, because what could we possibly learn from philosophers of the past who have cultivated wisdom and compassion?
This is not to say that individuals don’t need to realize wisdom, to do the work necessary to cultivate virtue. But we are more alike than different. Perhaps the bread needs to be baked fresh each generation — but the recipe we have received from our parents is useful. And it is possible to say when someone is a fool and using too much salt or sugar.
There’s a lot to unpack in this comment, but I think it hits at a central problem that I will be exploring further: qualitative individualism (or quantitative, but I’m less concerned with that) is at least prima facie at odds with a lot of Buddhist teaching, not least non-self. I have realized lately that my commitment to both is strong enough to make this a really important issue for me to explore.
My first response is that Buddhist teaching is oriented above all toward the cessation of suffering, dukkha (whether our own or others’). I suspect that in that regard human beings are indeed more alike than not. But I do think that there are legitimate goals in life that are not about the cessation of dukkha, and I suspect that those do indeed vary from person to person in the way qualitative individualists would claim. To that extent their paths may indeed be different – though I wouldn’t go so far as to say they have little to learn from others.
I think this series addresses something important and, yes, under-scrutinized. I assume that you will have thought about this, Amod, but what you describe as qualitative individualism, particularly the ethical ramifications thereof, strikes me as something like Kasulis’ “Integrity” to the nth degree. Which may also offer one approach for understanding it or its genealogy — possibly different in emphasis than Taylor’s (still crucial) account.
One thing that also needs to be thought through is our adoption of identities or “authenticities” (to coin a barbarism) via the market or other memetic apparatuses. How did t-shirts, or band fandom, or political tribes, or questioning gender, or etc (for the record, I am not saying that these are equivalent) become constitutive, or even indexical, of “who we are”?
I actually think it’s quite different from Kasulis’s integrity. Kasulis’s form of the integrity orientation is individualist, but it’s primarily oriented to exactly the opposite form, quantitative individualism: the individualism of Locke and Kant, where individuals are important in their separateness but not in their differences and individuality.
The second point is interesting: I think those apparatuses are quite different from each other, though they’re all relevant to the question. If we’re looking at it at a level where they’re equivalent, some of it has to involve the mobility of modern life: in a pre-capitalist society, one’s life and consequently one’s identity would have been defined in terms of one’s ancestors and descendants (“she was a fishmonger and sure was no wonder for so were her father and mother before.”)
This new piece on Maslow is interesting and relevant to the topic:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/what-does-it-mean-to-be-self-actualized-in-the-21st-century/
Thanks very much for that, Seth. I’ve found Maslow’s term “self-actualization” to be a really helpful way of putting the ideal, and I also like the way he takes it to be one human aim distinct from others. I had found the idea of a hierarchy of needs less helpful and had thought that later generations of psychologists had rejected Maslow, but if it turns out that this Columbia psychologist thinks Maslow holds up and his work wasn’t as hierarchical as portrayed, that suggests good reasons to examine Maslow more closely.
Thanks for the response Amod. What I like about this account is that ‘Maslow’s focus was much more on the paradoxical connections between self-actualization and self-transcendence’.
We realize ourselves through our outward connections, and I think transcendence occurs when we perceive and understand the conditions under which seeming opposites are really processes in relation. This way we avoid getting fixated on some narrative that we imagine defines us preventing us from accessing a genuine response. I think anyone who approaches mastery in a particular field ( musician, athlete, writer, teacher, philosopher…etc) experiences these moments of transcendence as genuine self-expression.
Yes, I think this is a really good point. Self-actualization isn’t necessarily about defining oneself as entirely separate from others. It may involve a rebellion against particular others or particular assigned roles, but typically in the direction of some other group of others.
I appreciate your continued engagement with a layman (non-philosopher). I just wanted to add one more comment because I think I want to go farther than your last comment suggests. I think un-coerced self-expression requires letting go of definitions altogether (at least momentarily).
I think we all need narrative identity like a writer needs a facility in grammar, sentence & paragraph construction etc….to bring something out of him/her self that leads the reader back into the world beyond the syntax. Similarly, I teach Tai Chi, and form competence is necessary first step to begin to get beyond the form–to experience something like formlessness. One cannot feel the dynamic wholeness & connectedness of the movement to the environment while clinging to any fixed structural aspect. Joan Didion claimed she only knew what she was thinking by writing about it. I think for her writing was a way of letting her personal narratives find temporary resolutions.