Myths

[Anonymous]

There is no such thing as an individual existing apart from the social environment. They may support or oppose that environment, feel part of it or estranged from it. Nonetheless, from birth they are of it, just as surely as, where the universe is concerned, they are of all being, both before and after birth, and death.
Whether naturally or socially, true individuality is a myth, just as freedom is a myth.
The environment is, of course, constantly in flux, and the “individual” with it. S/he is in flux too, socially and naturally, in the womb, in life and after death. All is flux, perpetual motion.
Society is perpetual motion too.
To be an “individual”, one would have to be separate from being. Divine. God.
Such a being is a figment that is itself socially determined.
A non-determined being, an “individual”, is likewise a figment, which the philosophically inept console themselves with.
We are all cells, and like all cells, live and function in relation to one another and the society we compose.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>The individual does not exist.</p>

[robbo203]

John

 

I think the question of the individual is relative rather than absolute.  Yes, there is no such thing as a “non determined” being  but it is going too far to say therefore that the “individual does not exist” – unless you chose to define the individual as a “non determined being” which is a quite unrealistic definition, in my view. That is the bourgeois atomistic view of the free floating individual which you are attacking but there are other ways of looking at the individual

 

You say  “We are all cells, and like all cells, live and function in relation to one another and the society we compose”.  But to pursue this metaphor, just as a body wouldn’t exist without cells meaning the existence of a body implies the existence of these cells,  so human society could not exist without the existence of the empirical individuals that comprise it  (which emphatically does not mean human beings predated society and got together to create society in Lockean fashion via the so called “social contract”)

 

The real question that needs to be posed is what is the relationship between the individual and society and surely the answer to that is that it is a two way or dialectical relationship.  Individuals are not merely determined but also determine albeit within constraints set by the nature of the society they live in

 

Plekhanov’s work , <b>On the Role of the Individual in History</b>, remains for me one of the best expositions of this point of view

https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

 

[Anonymous]

Yes, I absolutely agree, but we do not determine our environmental relationship in isolation from the motives it determines in us.

To take the metaphor from the ancient Indian philosophy of  “two truths”, we require descriptions of “self” and “individual” for purposes of social life, and in this sense our “selves” and the fact that self is illusory are both true.

[Author]

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