The Individual Soul, alone with itself, has become the source of all value even as it disappears before our very gaze. A flickering blue light, registered by the undistracted mind, the steady hand that adjusts the precise gauge of a man- made instrument adding its weight to the observation.
We think we have escaped all those tattered pictures of ourselves. The family, society, the tribe, nation, religion and community all seen for the fictions they are. Instead, the bare soul, the thinking I, the rugged individual in the wilderness, the American woodsman, beyond all attachments, relations to the earth, place, other people and free of all complications..in a word:the frontier self that grunts in his own private language.
And yet, is this idea of the liberal individual just another collective picture, a legacy of the Reformation and the Enlightenment ( Charles Taylor is instructive here).
'In modern consciousness there is not a common being but a self, and the concern of this self is with its individual authenticity, it's unique, irreducible character, free of the contrivances and the conventions, the masks and the hypocricies, the distortions of the self by society.'
D. Bell
The family, in this view of things, warps the individual soul. If there is religion it must be that of the mystical approach of being alone with the Alone. But with the death of God and the destruction of Nature, the elimination of any metaphysical dimension this is eventually reduced to the utterly simple formula: to be alone. And it is a formula, another cliche!
Society is but a contract; community is a " fictitious body" . The self itself has dissolved before our very eyes. Science and latter- day capitalism ensures that the self is an isolated will, a blind mechanism from which an island of choice briefly and inscrutably emerges. Existentialism and nihilism are not so strange bedfellows for us, the modern Gnostics. We veer from being everything to being nothing.
We have moved from the image of Man as a political or a social animal, from Man made in the image of God, to men and women supposedly free from images and icons. And subsequently we find ourselves obsessed by, and our minds saturated with, all kinds of false images. No man is an island.
The question ultimately boils down to: what is the individual attached to? Fidelity to what? The modern individual finds himself surrounded by a mountain of things, out of time, and unable to see how anything but this fragmentary self could be natural. If we are the first truly " free" people, the first to both discard the shackles of pre- conceived frameworks and the hold on us of all that is 'given', if we are the first to live without an inheritance and without a telos, then shouldn't the individual soul as he or she exists be the grandest of things?
It is hard to escape the fact that in the twentieth century, the century of the self, the person and the individual disappeared, replaced by a rather shaky 'self', full of doubts, hostage to the wild forces of the unconscious and the irrational. As the solid world of the bourgeois world gave way- Reason, History, Society, Property- so the individual found he was nothing but a series of fragmentary and often disconnected " episodes" in a story he didn't write ( worse: that could never be a story). And yet no one asks how it is possible that this wonderfully enlightened individual sees himself as not much more than a clever machine. And why, we might ask, is the modern individual currently so caught up in all kinds of addictions?
Could it be that this free soul is actually ripe for manipulation and control by business interests? In a similar vein it was argued by a previous generation that it was the recently displaced, the homeless, who could be worked into the collective fantasies of the totalitarian or fascist state. Or, Foucault: to be a " subject" already indicates a structure of dominance.
The state in our time rules not by imposing a suffocating order on the individual but by releasing the individual from all certainties. The great aspirations of the Romantic individual have ended up in him being satisfied in Disneyland.
Our fascination with selfies, blogging, an online " presence" is, surely, testimony to the shallowness of this surface appearance that we casually call the " self".
And let us not forget that in the twentieth century whole swathes of people lost their names and became merely statistics ( more ominously: forgotten as collateral damage ( Ru self: we don't do body counts) or reduced to a number inked under their skin). Do you still want to talk about the "individual". Really?
We think we have escaped all those tattered pictures of ourselves. The family, society, the tribe, nation, religion and community all seen for the fictions they are. Instead, the bare soul, the thinking I, the rugged individual in the wilderness, the American woodsman, beyond all attachments, relations to the earth, place, other people and free of all complications..in a word:the frontier self that grunts in his own private language.
And yet, is this idea of the liberal individual just another collective picture, a legacy of the Reformation and the Enlightenment ( Charles Taylor is instructive here).
'In modern consciousness there is not a common being but a self, and the concern of this self is with its individual authenticity, it's unique, irreducible character, free of the contrivances and the conventions, the masks and the hypocricies, the distortions of the self by society.'
D. Bell
The family, in this view of things, warps the individual soul. If there is religion it must be that of the mystical approach of being alone with the Alone. But with the death of God and the destruction of Nature, the elimination of any metaphysical dimension this is eventually reduced to the utterly simple formula: to be alone. And it is a formula, another cliche!
Society is but a contract; community is a " fictitious body" . The self itself has dissolved before our very eyes. Science and latter- day capitalism ensures that the self is an isolated will, a blind mechanism from which an island of choice briefly and inscrutably emerges. Existentialism and nihilism are not so strange bedfellows for us, the modern Gnostics. We veer from being everything to being nothing.
We have moved from the image of Man as a political or a social animal, from Man made in the image of God, to men and women supposedly free from images and icons. And subsequently we find ourselves obsessed by, and our minds saturated with, all kinds of false images. No man is an island.
The question ultimately boils down to: what is the individual attached to? Fidelity to what? The modern individual finds himself surrounded by a mountain of things, out of time, and unable to see how anything but this fragmentary self could be natural. If we are the first truly " free" people, the first to both discard the shackles of pre- conceived frameworks and the hold on us of all that is 'given', if we are the first to live without an inheritance and without a telos, then shouldn't the individual soul as he or she exists be the grandest of things?
It is hard to escape the fact that in the twentieth century, the century of the self, the person and the individual disappeared, replaced by a rather shaky 'self', full of doubts, hostage to the wild forces of the unconscious and the irrational. As the solid world of the bourgeois world gave way- Reason, History, Society, Property- so the individual found he was nothing but a series of fragmentary and often disconnected " episodes" in a story he didn't write ( worse: that could never be a story). And yet no one asks how it is possible that this wonderfully enlightened individual sees himself as not much more than a clever machine. And why, we might ask, is the modern individual currently so caught up in all kinds of addictions?
Could it be that this free soul is actually ripe for manipulation and control by business interests? In a similar vein it was argued by a previous generation that it was the recently displaced, the homeless, who could be worked into the collective fantasies of the totalitarian or fascist state. Or, Foucault: to be a " subject" already indicates a structure of dominance.
The state in our time rules not by imposing a suffocating order on the individual but by releasing the individual from all certainties. The great aspirations of the Romantic individual have ended up in him being satisfied in Disneyland.
Our fascination with selfies, blogging, an online " presence" is, surely, testimony to the shallowness of this surface appearance that we casually call the " self".
And let us not forget that in the twentieth century whole swathes of people lost their names and became merely statistics ( more ominously: forgotten as collateral damage ( Ru self: we don't do body counts) or reduced to a number inked under their skin). Do you still want to talk about the "individual". Really?
