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Individualism Clarified

March 13, 2004 5:45 PM from

Apparently, blogger Anathema needs some explanation for my blog on individualism. It is not necessarily opposed to holism, which is a theory predicated on collective action springing from a priori ideas similar to Plato’s realm of ideas, except that they tend to omit the required active intellection of an individual to sort out these forms of consciousness. This not simply the chicken or the egg dilemma; it rather presupposes that the collection of forms are already out there whether or not one partakes of them. This is tantamount to saying that a vague law of relativity was inherent, and it simply took Einstein to spot it without any creativity of his own; that is, for him to shape one of the myriad of potentials into his unique perspective and thereby lay claim to its perspicacious identity.

Of course, individualism does not deny society its collective action, but just as holism corrupts Hegel’s “non-sensible sensible” as something out there, individualism pulls it into the sphere of individuated reflection by those thusly gifted and carries out Hegel’s master-slave duality of practices, good or bad, in which there are the movers and the bondsmen who get pushed along until some “Braveheart” — and yet another master — rectifies injustice or takes it to an even higher plane of commonwealth or further down to arrant evil.

The problem with the theory of individualism is that it inevitably is transvalued as rugged individualism or smart ass individuality in that there is no such thing as common values across the broad expanse of consciousness to edify the perspicuity of the slaves as well.

philosophy

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