Chapter 4 - Individual and Society

Summary

Identity

This chapter is the central one in this book. Previous chapters were preparatory. The theme of individual and society, or self and other, is an old one in philosophy, sociology, political science, anthropology and economics. I will make use of those disciplines when relevant.

There is confusion concerning the notion of identity. First, a distinction needs to be made between personal and collective, cultural identity. The two are connected. People can hardly develop in isolation, so that personal identity needs cultural identity to feed upon, and, vice versa, people contribute to cultural identity. So, identity is inherently relational.

I will first turn to personal identity. David Hume said that there is no coherent, identifiable identity, but only an incoherent buzz of impressions and feelings. That cannot be true. First, he himself granted that impressions yield more or less stable and coherent ideas that are more or less consistent with each other. Further, if they were not coherent, the body would be unable to survive. Body and mind are intertwined, with neuronal circuits guiding interdependent bodily processes, partly unconsciously, and formed in that process, in adaptation to survival and flourishing.

Fukuyama (2018) claimed that identity arises from thymos, interpreted as the urge to distinguish oneself, to gain reputation. That is certainly part of thymos, but identity cannot be reduced to it. One cannot reduce all initiative, such as that of a discoverer, entrepreneur, scientist or artist, to egotistic or narcissistic desire. I hold that the good life is a combination of pleasure and sense, in contributing to something beyond yourself, which can be done in many ways, and if for that one develops and exploits one's talents, it is pleasurable. That can be a means to a goal of riches or reputation but can also have intrinsic value, in the challenge and excitement, the ethics and the thymos that the building and using of talents involves.

In his early philosophy, Jean Jacques Rousseau celebrated the freedom of the individual to act according to its nature, freed from the suffocation and mental mutilation of the individual by the collective. Later he switched to the opposite, where shared public interest and opinion force the individual to conform unconditionally to the ‘general will’ (volonté générale), as opposed to partial, parochial interests of subgroups.