Individual and society

The parable of the porcupines says it all: pressed by the cold they draw together, but their quills force them apart, and they end by finding the right distance, that of politeness. The man of rich inner life prefers to suffer a little cold than to be pricked by contact, and holds solitude to be a privilege rather than a lack.

Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, §396

For Bentham, the community is a fiction: its interest is but the sum of the interests of the members who compose it. There is no collective entity with a good of its own above individuals; social happiness is but the aggregate of individual happinesses. This is a clear methodological individualism, the foundation of the whole utilitarian calculus.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §4 (the interest of the community, the sum of individual interests)

Zhuangzi's wisdom is that of an individual who loosens himself from roles, offices and social recognition to preserve his inner freedom: better a free turtle in the mud than a revered shell in the temple. Society and its institutions, far from constituting the human, deform him by imposing distinctions and ambitions foreign to his nature. Priority clearly goes to the singular individual against the social whole, but through withdrawal and flight rather than a claim of rights.

Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (the turtle in the mud) · Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the useless tree)

Society is thought from the individual, not the reverse: it is the individual, subject of rights and reason, who comes first, and institutions exist only to serve his ends. This individualism, extended by the nascent economics of Smith, underlies the critique of the bodies, estates and corporations that hem the person in. Rousseau is the exception here, subordinating the individual to the general will, a sign that the current is not monolithic.

Locke, Two Treatises of Government · Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

A person is intelligible only through their roles and relations: one is a son, a brother, a subject, a friend, and it is by fulfilling these relations according to the li 禮 (rites) that one becomes fully human. Identity is relational, not monadic: the leaning is markedly holist, even if self-cultivation keeps an irreducibly personal demand.

Analects, XII, 11 (each defined by his relation) · Analects, II, 5-8 (the relational duties of filial piety)

The Confucian person exists fully only as caught within the web of his relations: the self is constituted by its roles and duties toward others, not as an autonomous atom prior to society. Personal accomplishment and the order of the social whole are bound together: to cultivate oneself is already to work for the harmony of family, state, and world.

The Great Learning (Daxue) · Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 6.30

The city is prior in nature to the individual, as the whole is to the part: in isolation the individual is not self-sufficient and cannot actualize a properly human end. This priority of the whole leans holist, without dissolving the individual, since the end remains the flourishing of citizens.

Aristotle, Politics, I, 2

The city is for Machiavelli not a sum of individuals but a body run through with collective forces, the two humors of the people and the great, whose clash produces laws and liberty. The salvation of this body, the fatherland, takes precedence over individual conscience, the prince's as much as the citizen's.

Discourses on Livy, I.4 · The Prince, ch. IX

The pact does not juxtapose individuals: it transforms them into a moral and collective body, a « common self » endowed with a will of its own. The citizen draws his being and his liberty from this whole, to which he alienates himself entirely. Against the individualism of the Enlightenment, Rousseau leans holist, without dissolving the individual, since the end remains his liberty.

Rousseau, The Social Contract, I, 6

Man is born for community and mutual aid: we are the limbs of one great body, and the individual good is fulfilled in service to the human whole. Without dissolving the individual into the city, Seneca subordinates philosophical retreat to a duty of common usefulness, leaning toward a holist view of society.

Letters to Lucilius, XCV (the limbs of one body) · On Leisure, III-VI (the sage must serve the great commonwealth)

The free individual remains the source of meaning and values, yet does not exist outside a web of relations: he is constituted in the gaze of others, in institutions and historical conditions that situate him. Beauvoir holds together the irreducibility of singular freedom and a concrete dependence on the collective, hence a position only slightly inclined toward the relational pole.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), freedom and the common world · The Second Sex (1949), woman situated within social relations

The early Sartre starts from the individual freedom of consciousness, irreducible, which anchors his thought firmly on the side of the individual. But the later Sartre, of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, articulates this freedom with matter and history: the individual makes himself within collective wholes (the group-in-fusion, the practico-inert) that condition him in return. The position thus hovers near a balance, shifted slightly toward the collective by this evolution.

Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the group-in-fusion and the practico-inert