A History of Individuality

The four-stage account of the Individual that I presented yesterday also recapitulates, very informally, a history of the Philosophical concept of Individuality. In some of its earliest manifestations, especially in ideologies often characterized as 'Eastern', Individuality is treated as a transgression that needs to be overcome, e. g. through the reabsorption of the particular into the totality. The Socratic tradition pioneers the second stage, notably with Socrates' assertion that 'I know only that I do not know'. 'Medieval' Philosophy is generally a reactionary regression to the first stage. So, Modern Philosophy is truly a Renaissance, because of its recovery of the anti-conventional Socratic spirit, in the guise of methodical Scepticism, pre-eminently from Descartes and Hume. Kant marks an advance to the third stage, a transition from independence in the negative sense to one with a positive connotation. However, his paradoxical notion of 'Autonomy'--at bottom, the free choice of one's master--was unsatisfactory enough to breed a further search for pure Individuality, with the 'Existentialists'. But the most innovative of those efforts are still compromised. Nietzsche advances an Individualist ethos, while still tied to a commitment, in his neo-Schopenhauerian Dionysianism, to a doctrine of the illusoriness of Individuality. Heidegger presents an Individualistic concept of Conscience, only to swallow up the Individual in Being. And Sartre's Individualistic 'Being-for-itself' is at bottom only a 'flight' from Being, without its own intrinsic character. The general Philosophical problem has always been to account for Individuality within a System, which by definition, is a larger scheme that includes everything, and the specific problem has been to arrive at a purely Individualistic notion of Form. I believe that what I will be developing henceforth solves those problems.