the individual, the solitary, the stone

 

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties.

Yet there are a number of paradoxes here.

In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech.

The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Following Bos, we would see the moraliste writers of the seventeenth century as filling a space between literature and sociology – a space later filled by the novel and the lyric poem, on one end, and the newspaper pundit on the other.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’m a bit of an individualism sceptic. The usual gesture, in neoclassical economics, and in philosophy, etc., is that the individual is the basic level. We reduce collectives and find individuals, just as we reduce metals and gases and liquids to molecules, and then to atoms.

I find this a curious fiction. We evidently start out as embryos, and we are evidently the result of coitus. All of our affordances depend on others. To take chemistry as a model for understanding society is so evidently mad that it registers as an anthropological clue. Something has happened to make modern societies not only accept this model, but try to enforce it. Imagine a society in which the economists all believed in astrology, and developed models of business cycles based on the zodiac. It could, of course, work. Foundations, even fictional foundations, have a certain causal neutrality – the model of the individual as the final unit doesn’t “cause” individualism.

Spinoza’s riff on freedom is well known. It is found in his correspondence. The passage goes:

“For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone's motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions, inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess …”

Spinoza’s stone is, to all intents and purposes, homo oeconomicus. The sovereign consumer.

We are not stones, but under the impress of individualism, we think we are. Spinoza’s gloss on the stone is that it is traveling under an illusion. But his gloss undermines, of course, his point. For a stone that could imagine it was free is different from any stone we know of. 

How we came to be the creatures who imagine they are stones imagining they are free is one way to put the anthropological question.