> If you are careful about the claims and assumptions, and limit
> yourself to just a recognition of the existence of the concepts
> without going overboard about it, you can see something of a dialogue
> about this problem of identity, individual, subject, society, and
> class in ancient Egyptian art.
Even if his specific examples were shown to be incorrect, Chuck's general point would be almost certainly correct. It is a truism, mostly trivial but not wholly, that things (including bourgeois individualism) always have a prehistory. And one gloss I would put on Chuck's fascinating foray into ancient Egypt is that individualism is at least embryonically present in class society as such. I noted this well before my Marxist days and embedded it in my dissertation, in which I refer to the creeping individualism reflected in the *Odyssey*. That work in its whole thrust, of course, is profoundly non-individualist, and it is quite clear, to use the terminology of this thread, that Odysseus simply has
no identity, no being really, in separation from his *Oikos*. Seen as a 19th
c. novel it is a story of the reuniting of two individual identities, Penelope and Odysseus; but in fact Penelope merely manifests Odysseus' actual reality, his *oikos*. At his point of maximum separation, he idenfities himself as "Nobbdy," which
Polypheumus construes as "Nobody." And of course, separated from his *oikos* he is, really, nobody, merely a lump of matter appropriate for a cannibal feast. But I digress)
One can see this incipient individualism vividly in Plato's *Republic* and in Sophoclean tragedy. It is difficult to talk sensibly about the latter, due to the intellectual and historical confusion Freud introduced into 20th c. thought.
Whatever problems Oedipus had, they did not include anything remotely like an oedipus complex. But it is only 90% anachronistic to paraphrase that drama as the story of a man who goes in search of himself and, when that, search is successful, blinds himself. Aliter, it tells of a man who, coming from nowhere, independent of all social relations, creates a web of social relations which, understood, destroy him by revealing that he never has, in fact, had an identity in the modern sense under discussion in this thread. With a little stretching here and there, one could also fit Robert Graves's construal of the myth/drama into the present context. Oedipus, by asserting his possession of an identity prior to and independent of his social role (of a temporary king obligated to give way to a replacement) drives his wife to suicide in an attempt to reaffirm the matrilinear kingship he has overturned. That is, he destroys
himself and his world by claiming an identity. The Queen's political and principled suicide is then disguised by later changes in the myth which ground that suicide in incest. But then Graves is a definite fruitcake, so we'd better not take his construal too seriously.
Though my reading of *Antigone* is probably anachronistic, I can't help but see Antigone as analogous to the Duchess of Malfy (as I touched on her in an earlier post). She defines her identity (nearly modern sense) as consisting in her sisterhood, which in turn involves burying her brother though there is no good reason for doing so other than her insistence that she cannot do otherwise. Why does she bury him? Because that is what it *means* to be Antigone.
And here is Plato stating rather concisely what I would consider to be the core of an individualist metaphysics (or a metaphysical individualism) (Cornford's translation):
Surely, I [Socrates] began, we must admit that the same elements and characters that appear in the state must exist in every one of else; where else could they have come from.? It would be absurd to imagine that among peoples with a reputation for a high-spirited character, like the Thracians and Scythians and northerners generally, the states have not derived that character from their individual members; or that it is otherwise with the love of knowledge, which would be ascribed chiefly to our own part of the world, or with the love of money, which one would specially connect with Phoenicia and Egypt. [iv. 435] (Cornford, Ch. 13, p. 132)
This is also the abstract principle implicit in such lovely features of capitalism as racism, blaming the victim, inventing an alleged culture of poverty, etc.
Carrol
(Incidentally, to link this with the thread on students and teaching. Some semesters, when I was neurologically well and I had a bit of luck in the student distribution in the ancient lit class I taught, I would have some success, and a lot of fun, capturing their interest in the *Republic* by demonstrating that the reason for studying it was the old military principle of Knowing the Enemy.)