The metaphysics of individualism

Modern moral discourse often refers to “persons” and to “individuals” as if the notions were more or less interchangeable.  But that is not the case.  In his book Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (especially in chapter 1, section 3), Jacques Maritain notes several important differences between the concepts, and draws out their moral and social implications.

Traditionally, in Catholic philosophy, a person is understood to be a substance possessing intellect and will.  Intellect and will, in turn, are understood to be immaterial.  Hence, to be a person is ipso facto to be incorporeal – wholly so in the case of an angel, partially so in the case of a human being.  And qua partially incorporeal, human beings are partially independent of the forces that govern the rest of the material world.

Individuality, meanwhile, is in the case of physical substances a consequence precisely of their corporeality rather than their incorporeality.  For matter, as Aquinas holds, is the principle of individuation with respect to the members of species of corporeal things.  Hence it is precisely insofar as human beings are corporeal that they are subject to the forces that govern the rest of the material world.

With a wholly corporeal living thing like a plant or a non-human animal, its good is subordinate to that of the species to which it belongs, as any part is subordinate to the whole of which it is a part.  Such a living thing is fulfilled insofar as it contributes to the good and continuance of that whole, the species kind of which it is an instance.  By contrast, a person, qua incorporeal, is a complete whole in itself.  And its highest good, in which alone it can find its fulfilment, is God, the ultimate object of the intellect’s knowledge and the will’s desire.

Insofar as we think of human beings as persons, then, we will tend to conceive of what is good for them in terms of what fulfills their intellects and wills, and thus (when the implications of that are properly understood) in theological terms.  But insofar as we think of them as individuals, we will tend to conceive of what is good for them in terms of what is essentially bodily – material goods, pleasure and the avoidance of pain, emotional wellbeing, and the like.  However, we will also be more prone to see their good as something that might be sacrificed for the whole of which they are parts. 

Maritain puts special emphasis on the implications of all this for political philosophy.  The common good is more than merely the aggregate of the goods enjoyed by individuals.  But because human beings are persons, and not merely individuals, the common good is also not to be conceived of merely as the good of society as a whole and not of its parts.  Rather, “it is, so to speak, a good common to the whole and the parts” (p. 23).

On the one hand, the political order is in one respect more perfect than the individual human being, for it is complete in a way the individual is not.  On the other hand, in another respect the individual human being is more perfect than the political order, because qua person he is a complete order in his own right, and one that has a destiny beyond the temporal political realm.  Hence, a just political order must reflect both of these facts.  In particular, it must recognize that the common good to which the individual is ordered includes facilitating, for each member of the community, the realization of his ultimate, eternal end in the hereafter.  Thus, concludes Maritain, “the human city fails in justice and sins against itself and its members if, when the truth is sufficiently proposed to it, it refuses to recognize Him Who is the Way of beatitude” (p. 24).

This refusal is, needless to say, characteristic of modern societies, both liberal and collectivist.  And unsurprisingly, they have at the same time put greater emphasis on human individuality than on human personhood.  Both do so insofar as they conceive of the good primarily in economic and other material terms rather than in spiritual terms.  Liberal societies, in addition, do so insofar as they conceive of these bodily goods along the lines of the satisfaction of idiosyncratic individual preferences and emotional wellbeing.  Collectivist societies, meanwhile, do so insofar as they regard human beings, qua individuals, as apt to be sacrificed to the good of the species of which they are mere instances.  (It should be no surprise, then, that Burke would famously condemn “the dust and powder of individuality” even as he condemned at the same time the totalitarianism of the French Revolution.  For individualism and collectivism are rooted in precisely the same metaphysical error.)

Maritain cites a passage from Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange that summarizes the moral and spiritual implications of the distinction between individuality and personhood:

To develop one’s individuality is to live the egoistical life of the passions, to make oneself the centre of everything, and end finally by being the slave of a thousand passing goods which bring us a wretched momentary joy.  Personality, on the contrary, increases as the soul rises above the sensible world and by intelligence and will binds itself more closely to what makes the life of the spirit.  The philosophers have caught sight of it, but the saints especially have understood, that the full development of our poor personality consists in losing it in some way in that of God. (pp. 24-25, quoted from Garrigou-Lagrange’s Le Sens Commun)

Among the pagan philosophers, perhaps none is as clear on this theme as Plotinus, who in the Fifth Ennead contrasts individuality with orientation toward God: “How is it, then, that souls forget the divinity that begot them?... This evil that has befallen them has its source in self-will… in becoming different, in desiring to be independent… They use their freedom to go in a direction that leads away from their origin.”  And among the saints, none states this contrast more eloquently than Augustine, who distinguishes “two cities [that] have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self” (City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 28).  This earthly city, in its modern guise, has been built above all by individualism.

Related posts:

Tyranny of the sovereign individual

MacIntrye on human dignity

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