Tags
Alexander Baumgarten, Aristotle, ascent/descent, Christian Wolff, existentialism, expressive individualism, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, identity, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Duns Scotus, Martin Heidegger, modernity, Plato, Romanticism, William of Ockham
Where does our deeply held ideal of qualitative individualism – that our differences from other individuals are of the highest significance for our living well – come from? We saw last time that it was most developed by Romantics, especially German ones. But where did they get the idea? Here as in so many cases, a characteristically modern idea has premodern roots. When German Romantics like Humboldt and Herder articulate the idea they often refer to a metaphysical “principle of individuation”, sometimes referred to by the Latin term: principium individuationis. That is, everything, in the human world at least, has a principle that makes it unique, what it is and nothing else. Where are they getting this idea? Continue reading