I'm having trouble following the objections to 'individualism'. All depends what the speaker means by it. The term has a nice ring to it so I see no reason to scorn it, though it can of course be defined as amoral self-seeking, in which case we can all agree it's bad.
^^^^^^^ CB: Below are a few criticisms of "individualism" not confined to amoral selfishness.
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the larger human community is predicated upon the pre-existence of individuals.
^^^^ With due respect, this is the crux. Social determinists r saying that the community is not predicated on pre-existing , independent, isolated individuals, or “selves”. Rather the opposite: Society preexists the individuals. There have never been a bunch of preexisting individual persons who then got together and made the group. Robinson Crusoe is a myth so to speak.
Even more an individual ideas are all rooted in their culture. Take remarkably unique individuals like Mozart , Newton or any genius. Their ideas are developments of socially generated topics. Newton understood this and said he stood on the shoulders of giants, most of them dead when he lived, by the way. This is a key point. Human Society includes dead generations. Maybe this makes it clearer how society preexists individuals.
Ironically, the word itself gives the message. Individuals are not divisible, or can’t be divided out from society.
Bad faith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29
A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or “project”. The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire’s colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.
Although circumstances may limit individuals (facticity), they cannot force persons as radically free beings to follow one course over another. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, “I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family”) is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance—a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity ^^^^^ CB: Well yes, Comrade Sartre, Ye Olde problem of free will and determinism. Humans do have free will; so do dogs. But a human individual still exercises her choices among alternatives that are given to her _by society_. The alternatives or “menu” from which she chooses do not originate and well up from within her individual being or person. The feelings and emotions that determine her choices are learned from her society and culture; their genesis is not in her individual infinite “soul” or “psyche” or “Mind”. Valuing supporting one’s family is learned and socially determined.
The zeitgeist – or spirit of the time, the milieu, is certainly a cultural, and therefore historically determined, setting. But Sartre and others, including Nietzsche, were describing their specific milieu, post-Enlightenment, with its increasing cultural uprootedness and alienation, that left the individual adrift.
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Their milieu, and culturally, and therefore historically determined, setting was capitalism, entering its imperialist phase. N doesn’t even use the concept of capitalism.
N off in some delusionary world of his imagination, so he is not likely to contribute to solving the problem of alienation and estrangement. In fact, he basically contributes to the fascist response to these crises of capitalism. The superman concept is ripe for fascism; lends itself to theories of racist superiority.
Alienation and estrangement under capitalism was not a new topic when they wrote. Failure to derive “the individual’s” alienation and estrangement from the wage-labor/capital relation puts one’s analysis “adrift”.
“The” individual is adrift in this new “milieu” ? Not really. That’s another illusion that can only be reached from an individualist premise that u seem to say no one has – “no one is denying that history and culture is formative “. Even in capitalist alienation individuals are highly interconnected in a thick social network.
Or lets put it this way: cogent analysis cannot end with phenonmena; it must deal with noumena or explanations for immediate experience. To me the very name “phenomenology” is a give away as to the weakness of Husserl’s project. Focus and centering and starting with individual experience is a form of “psychology”. We need “sociology”.
In this historical milieu, underlying the alienated , absurd experience of individuals is a social system, capitalism. ^^^^^^^
They describe the EXPERIENCE (as far as I know, experience still resides in the individual, unless we use it merely figuratively) of living in a world without an authority for final reference that is not shrouded in doubt. They describe freedom in a world where meaning has become unmoored.
^^^^^^^^ Evidently they are describing some experience that they allege is typical among many individuals. So, the fact that all experience takes place at the individual level is true but not relevant to what is in dispute here. Put is this way. Widespread alienation and sense of meaninglessness ( of course _experienced_ by individuals) has a social cause. It is due to the dynamics of capitalism. N has no critique of capitalism whatsoever; in fact he champions ruling classes.
Sartre , of course, deals with Marxism, even saying Marxism is the philosophy of our time, tries to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism.
^^^^^^^ They are, however, stating – correctly – that without individuals to experience them, these stories don’t hover in the atmosphere later to descend onto out consciousness.
^^^ CB: This is arguing with a strawperson (shadow boxing). _Nobody_ claims that these stories and ideas hover in the atmosphere ; well maybe Hegel does lol. But Marx is famous for standing Hegel upright off his head onto his feet.
Another point: to confine one’s analysis to phenomena _is_ empiricism.
Famous (and benevolent( individualist anarchist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau
Ah, here’s the Thesis on Feuerbach that speaks directly to the Existentialist, libertarian, positivist, phenomenlogist, all Individualist’ shortcomings:
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Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen = ‘human nature’]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:
1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated – human individual.
2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.
thanks for mention of “selfish gene”. It and all social darwinism are other examples of individualist theory.
Actually, there are no absolutely new ideas. All geniuses stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said he did. New ideas are always development of old id…eas, even if they are negations of old ideas, and thereby not absolutely new.
And creativity in thinking is over-rated in importance. Individual creativity , so-called, is especially overrated. Kant’s “think for yourself” is a misdirection. “Think together; one for all and all for one” is much better.The origin of human society was the discovery of group thinking elevated over individual thinking. Apes and chimps thinking more individually. The main problems with society are not that we need a lot of new ideas. We need to implement a lot of ideas that were thought of a while ago.