I’ve used a chunk of this quote in an earlier posting ( The Liberal Mind: What is politics?):
Now what makes liberal individualism so plausible is that the individual is the only self-conscious entity whose limits appear to correspond to a physiological creature; and also that the thoughts and feelings which constitute institutions such as states or churches must be physically located in the minds of human beings. A prime minister is undoubtedly at various times an individual self standing in competitive relation to other selves; especially, indeed, when he is struggling with political rivals. But there are other occasions when his thoughts and acts must be taken as State-thoughts and State-acts, and when they cannot be reduced to the psychological operations of an individual. In its extremer forms, liberal individualism is a fallacy which since Mill has been called Psychologism: the doctrine that each individual may be psychologically explained, and all social institutions must be explained in terms of individuals. This mistake is endemic in liberalism, though its presence has in recent decades been camouflaged by adding to the basic model of generic-man various sociological components — class membership, social norms and so on. Yet if we wish to learn about the military behavior of soldiers, we must study military activities, not psychology. And similarly, if we wish to understand politicians, we must attempt to understand the activity of politics, not discover whether politicians are nice or nasty men. It is not that psychological (or sociological) knowledge is in these cases of no account; it is simply that the distinction here between psychology and military art or psychology and politics is a false one, and that the starting point for explanation must not be the rationalist essence of the individual, but the complex situation we are trying to explain. [page 50]
The simplest of us is a most complex beast, though some saints, Buddhist as well as Christian, are said to be simplified towards a state of unity. We take on roles in life and may even have not only different ways of thought but also slightly different blocks of memory which are activated or de-activated when we move from one room where we are a son of an aging and mildly demented parent to another room where we have to deal with an overloaded schedule at a local community of worship to another room where we have to answer to a boss and clients. I’ve generalized freely from findings discussed briefly in a podcast from the Scientific American website: see my recent posting, Rooms of Memory, for my take on these findings as well as a link to the podcast.
Let’s say there’s no true ‘ego’, no true center of ‘self–consciousness’, no center of an inborn ‘person’. Where is the true ‘I’ to be found? Or is there no ‘I’ if there is no inborn substance, however metaphysical, to be described as ‘self-conscious’, no inborn substance which simply existed from some magical moment forward for time without end. Perhaps that magical moment is the instant of conception or perhaps an instant of ensoulment — if we wish to return to a Medieval idea which had the virtue of being rational and part of a coherent and consistent understanding of human nature in the context of a world also subject to a coherent and consistent understanding.
Where is the somewhat free individual to be found that he might be me? I’d claim strongly he’s not to be found in some metaphysical incantation which speaks of the undetectable to explain that which is detectable and subject to exploration and maybe even testing. I’d also claim he’s not to be found as a citizen of a realm filled with entities which can act upon an empirical world without being empirically detected. He’s not even to be found in a listing of some encoding of the human mind.
I’d suggest the individual, free-thinking and free-willing and free-acting in a highly qualified but concrete manner, is to be found where human beings are found — in human communities. This introduces problems to be sure. We’re learning from scientists and historians what we should have already known from the Bible and from our various human traditions — we are shaped in communities. I guess this is a painful thought for those who seem to have forsaken their traditions or to have been forsaken by those traditions — a situation found in all periods of radical, and often rapid, transition in the structures and maybe contents of human cultures or even of an overarching civilization.
We’re in trouble but our goals should be relative to our situation. We should seek to understand what our situation truly is which means understanding our own selves in the best available terms and that points to what the true problem is. Our situation is horribly complex and immensely complicated relative to what was properly anticipated by those who gave us our current understandings of our individual human natures, our communal human natures, and the basic structures of Creation. While retaining a respect for what is absolutely true and complete in its truth, we should realize that reality has to be defined as the best understanding of some partially viewed Creation, best being defined by our current capabilities for exploring that Creation and for making sense of it. Due to a variety of factors but mostly the great success of the exploration of this empirical realm of Creation in recent centuries, we are capable of a far better understandings of all of Creation than the understanding we’ve inherited.
Such an understanding has to be faith-based, not because dogmas need to be imposed upon what-is but rather because what-is has to be taken on its own terms and a greater reality has to be extrapolated from the relatively small human stock of knowledge and skills, small at all spacetime intervals however immense our knowledge and thinking skills might be relative to those available even in classical Greece let alone in the growing community of Jericho 10,000 years ago or more.
At this stage of this imaginative journey into the largely unknown, it makes some sense to retreat to the more limited, less truth-seeking, effort to understand the freedom of man viewed as an individual creature. In one of my early essays at my other blog-site, I asked, in that individualistic context: What is Freedom?. where I wrote:
In the modern world, we tend to think of freedom in terms of satisfying desires. To be sure, even many who live for that false sort of freedom seem to realize that we then become no more than our desires or, more horribly, the thwarting of those desires — a terrible and humiliating state in either case. Hannibal the Cannibal is the most free of all modern men because he has become his desires and he has gained the power to satisfy them. Hannibal the Cannibal is the role-model for our politicians and our lawyers, our investment bankers and our corporate executives, our athletes and our entertainers. He may even be a role-model for many clergymen.
Let me move in a different direction with a quote from a modern philosopher:
“[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” (page 172, Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint)
Let me provide another quote, this one from a prominent brain-scientist:
An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. (page 8, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman)
As Freeman discusses, intention is the movement of an organism into the future. If we intend to be free, we will take one tiny step after another towards the goal of having a “whole personality,” which can only occur in a human organism which has taken on the properties of a true person: unity, coherence, and wholeness.
Here’s what it comes down to: though forced in many of his actions by the needs of his land and his animals, a true farmer in his role as farmer is free in a way radically beyond the false freedom of a passive television viewer who can choose from 20 movies, seven football games and three soccer games, five so-called reality shows, and so on. Horowitz playing Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata is playing notes written a century before and yet he exercises freedom beyond my imagination as I try to choose from a bookcase filled with CDs with a variety of musical styles and performers.
They are part of a community and work as members of a community. In the case of American farmers, they have typically had clearly visible but informal cooperative arrangements with neighboring farmers as well as invisible but more binding arrangements with those who farmed that land in the past and the ones who will follow. Horowitz is in a community stretching over the centuries and it includes composers and arrangers, accompanists and conductors, as well as pianists. Farmers are bound by the needs of the crops and animals bred by past generations, pianists by the very design of their instrument and the way that composers sought to use its potential.
But again: that farmer and Horowitz the pianist are free when they truly intend to be what they only pretend to be at the start of their careers, what they become step by sometimes painful step.
There is a problem here that I’ve only partly solved, a problem caused by our inability to shed older ways of thinking and speaking — not always a bad thing since it can prevent changes for the worse or maybe useless changes for the no better. So it is that we can be easily led astray by a language and a set of concepts which grew to explain and justify an ending era of feverish and unbalanced prosperity, that is a prosperity of things and the activities which gain those things which was accompanied by a paucity of well-formed human beings, farmers or pianists, writers or politicians, home-builders or clergymen.
A rich community life is necessary for the development of men of substance and high achievements. Men of substance and high achievements are necessary for a rich community. There is a reciprocal relationship which can be excluded by our modern language and our modern conceptions of man and his communities for that language and all of those concepts were formed by the battle between liberal individualists and various sorts of collectivists. In analogical terms from physics, the liberal individualists would evaporate the streams of human history, liberating drops of water to be particles of gas which would be free from the other particles. The collectivists would freeze those streams into crystalline structures while claiming to be moving bravely into the future.
Water isn’t a compromise between ice and vapor but rather a remarkable substance with properties unpredictable to those who know only ice or vapor. Even in this physical substance, we see peculiar properties arise because of the characteristics of the entire universe, such as its thermodynamic path — from a indescribably specific state, it is expanding into a more general state, one with higher entropy though allowing for the development of highly specific states, such as life, at the expense of throwing still greater entropy into the surrounding environment.
This world is specific in a way that can’t be simply defined by the starting conditions of a physical system as we can currently understand it. It’s specific in a way that can only be described as ‘narrative’. It’s a highly specific story in which water arises because of some peculiarities in the union of two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom. Water is a very useful stuff and has a different relationship to ice than most liquids have to their corresponding solids. This isn’t the place to discuss matters in which I’m barely conversant but the point is: Water has to exist for us to know water. My own thoughts would indicate the likelihood that there are general principles which could allow us to predict the existence of water and its strange relationship to ice at the transition points between states of matter, but if we learn those principles in this mortal realm, it will only be because we first knew water. In this analogy, which might prove dangerous, we are water molecules but we have the full properties associated with such an entity only when we are part of a large stream of other entities like ourselves.
We are born as human organisms with the potential to become some true sort of individuals but we can only become human persons, rich and complex in the way of a small world, in the context of human communities. And a human community reaches a high level of complexity and richness, a level necessary for serious accomplishments, only when there is at least a significant minority of well-formed human persons, human individuals who are worlds in themselves but not separate from those communities.