Abstract
Through a historical epistemological reconstruction, this chapter elaborates the philosophical contexts in which these concepts have developed and have been utilized for ideological purposes. This chapter reconstructs the philosophical concepts of individuality and the individual, beginning with the early Greek atomists, covering the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz, the Scottish/English, French, and German philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and concluding with the theories of philosophers and sociologists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann and Ulrich Beck. It demonstrates that the concept of the “undivided/individual” has always embraced a multiplicity of dimensions and layers in its historical development, which have tended to break its “unity” apart.
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Notes
- 1.
“Ille (Demokrit) atomos quas appellat, id est corpora individua propter soliditatem, censet in infinito inani, in quo nihil nec summum nec infimum nec medium nec ultimum nec extremum sit, ita ferri, ut concursionibus inter se cohaerescant, ex quo efficiantur ea, quae sint quaeque cernantur, omnia; eumque motum atomorum nullo a principio, sed ex aeterno tempore intellegi convenire;” s. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, Latin-German, Munich/Zürich 1988, I, 17, pp. 20–21.
- 2.
For his part, Etienne Balibar emphasises the passive-active constitution of the Spinozistic individual-composite: “I take it to be a very general formula in which all the processes of transition between passivity and activity are included, inasmuch as they are causal processes. Since the ‘effect’ which is indicated is an action, there is a clear suggestion here that, although individuals (especially human individuals) are both passive and active, the natural tendency of an individual’s existence is towards activity,” in: Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, A lecture delivered in Rijnsburg on May 15, 1993; in: http://www.ciepfc.fr/spip.php?article236.
- 3.
In the German language, the individual is neutral (“es”); in the English translation the personal pronoun used is “he” which of course brings an erroneous identification of the different individual processes with the male sex.
- 4.
“It is subject, wherein is individuality just as much qua individual, or qua this, as qua all individuals: and it is the universal, which has an existence only as being this action of each and all, and gets an actual reality in that this consciousness knows it to be its own individual reality, and the reality of all.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc1ca.htm
- 5.
Karl Marx (Frederick Engels: Grundrisse, Critique of Political Economy, New York/Toronto, 1973; The production of social individuals is again declared dependent on the “appropriation of nature” (87), with Marx recognising various appropriation processes. Production as a “general law of nature” is joined by distribution, exchange and consumption, in which the conventional positions of subject and object are switched and various mediation processes are restored: “The person objectifies himself in production, the thing subjectifies itself in the person; in distribution, society mediates between production and consumption in the form of general, dominant determinants; in exchange the two are mediated by the chance characteristics of the individual” (89). He outlines a circulatory system of inseparable processes for disposal of the single entity and the return to the same, which results in new forms of production and consumption: “The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production” (94). This also applies from the perspective of society: distribution produces relationships between single persons, with production instruments, working conditions and products, making it possible that “an individual who participates in production in the form of wage labour shares in the products, in the results of production, in the form of wages” (95); Marx/Engels, “Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie”, in: complete edition (MEGA), II, 1.1, Berlin 1976.
- 6.
“Or comme c’est du degré de la volonté que dépend l’usage de la force, et que la force absolue de Gouvernement ne varie point, il s’ensuit que le plus actif des Gouvernements est celui d’un seul” (401); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social, p. 401.
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Ott, M. (2018). Individual/Individuality/Individuation. In: Dividuations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72014-2_2
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