Last week I posted some thoughts that have to do with the book I started writing last year while on sabbatical. With school in session, I haven’t been focused on that project much, but writing that post stirred some of those ideas, and I thought I’d say some more on themes related to the book.1 It got long, so I split it in two. Today we look at some of the philosophical roots of the individualist view of human nature. Next week we’ll look at the relational view.

The biggest theme of the book is that who we think we are as humans has consequences for how we choose to live. Modern events take place against a cultural background with deep roots, and individualism (in both of the forms I disinguished) is a specific manifestation of philosophical ideas that date back as far as the ancient Greeks. This makes it hard to undo. But its contrasting cousin, a relational worldview, has roots just as deep. They make it hard to kill, despite the current dominance of individualism.

There's individualism, and then there's individualism

Erica Lucast Stonestreet

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Apr 10

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The roots of individualism

As I argued last week, individualism as we now know it stems from a bundle of assumptions—or aspirations—shaped by Western philosophical thought. Central to this bundle is the Enlightenment belief that humans are fundamentally individuals, forming groups only out of necessity or convenience. Our basic state is one of separation and autonomy. Competition is seen as natural, and hierarchy and status seeking are prominent. In this picture, self-interest is highly self-centered and highly motivating. It’s taken as both natural and rational to pursue narrowly individual interests. This orientation emphasizes the values of justice, authority, respect, independence, and impartiality—all important, familiar values.

These ideas are woven into the fabric of American self-understanding in large part because they’re prominent in the political philosophies of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose social contract theories had tremendous influence on the founding philosophies of this country. They take rational adults (men) as a starting point. They assume that freedom—by which they mean being uninhibited in the pursuit of one’s own vision of the good life—is both a natural state and an ideal.2

These ideas were important for building democracy as we know it, and they were literally revolutionary in the project of working toward a better world. The idea that people have rights based on the ability to reason, which is distributed throughout the population (not confined to the aristocracy), gave rise to ideas about fundamental moral and political equality that form the stated basis of modern democracy. And that was progress.

Be careful of dichotomies

But the roots of these ideas lie in dichotomies that elevate certain qualities over others. For example, we’ve inherited from Plato a mind-body dichotomy and a tradition of elevating the mind or soul over bodies. In the Phaedo dialogue, Plato makes several arguments that the soul is immortal. One of these is the argument from affinity, in which he argues that the soul is like what is divine, eternal, and unchanging—and the body, with its opposite qualities, is a sort of prison for the soul. This idea is likely to be familiar, since it was pulled into Christianity. Bodies became a source of sin, not to be taken more seriously than necessary for continued existence.

Plato and his student Aristotle also emphasized reason as a defining human characteristic, one that was meant to be the primary guide to the good life. They didn’t discount emotions, however; it wasn’t until the Enlightenment that a reason-emotion dichotomy crystallized into what is in modern times a familiar opposition. Descartes characterized himself as a “thinking thing” in his Meditations, and although his definition of thinking was expansive, his assertion contributed significantly over time to the idea that thinking is the essence of human nature.

When this idea was coupled with the distinction that Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and others made between sentiment and reason—where reason is the logical, objective, scientific faculty and sentiment or emotion is a subjective coloring that arises within us but is not under our control—we ended up with an understanding of human nature as essentially, and ideally, rational. Emotion, appreciated in ancient times for its role in the development of virtue and hence the good life, was relegated to a second-class status. Even worse, it was thought to be not only non-rational, but irrational. For reformers working to craft new social systems based on something non-arbitrary, reason’s apparent universality and reliability made it the better candidate. Emotion was at best neglected and at worst a problem to be guarded against.

While the recognition of the individual was liberating in the social context of the eighteenth century, the dichotomies on which it is implicitly based have had centuries to play out, and we’re seeing their downstream effects now. Environmental degradation, political fragmentation and loss of community, and an epidemic of loneliness, depression and anxiety are surely among the most prominent challenges of our times. They are arguably consequences of the narrow view that we are, and ought to be, free and independent of one another, staying out of each other’s business.

Humans aren’t built for that, however. Next week we’ll take a look at the philosophical roots of the world view constructed from the other ends of the dichotomies I’ve sketched here.

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