In Our Time - The Individual

Episode Date: October 21, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the concept of the individual. The Renaissance gave birth to the concept of the individual. Shakespeare defined this individual in language which accepted the primacy of the male gender: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a God!” According to Michel Foucault, French philosopher, polar opposite of Shakespeare and backed as he thought by Marx and Freud, our century killed the individual off. But has it? Was the individual born a mere six hundred years ago and has the century tolled its bell? And what is the individual?With Richard Wollheim, Professor of Philosophy, University of California in Berkeley; Jonathan Dollimore, Professor of English, York University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one view is that the Renaissance gave birth to the concept of the individual, and Shakespeare most brilliantly defined this individual. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form, in moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god. According to Michel Foucault, French philosopher, polar opposite of Shakespeare, and backed as he thought by Marx and Freud,

our century has killed off the individual. But has it? And what is the individual? With me to discuss this is the philosopher Richard Volheim, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley, and author of The Thread of Life, and out today his new book On The Emotions. I'm also joined by the cultural critic Jonathan Dolomor, who's Professor of English at York University

and the author of Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. Jonathan Dollymore, why do you think individualism or the concept of the individual was, as it were, invented or born in the time of the Renaissance? Well, historians, of course, disagree about when it was born, but yes, I think there is a good argument for saying that it was the Renaissance. You quoted from Hamlet, and of course, in a way, Hamlet is the modern individual. I mean, for hundreds of years now, we've been fascinated by this figure. He's enigmatic, he's complex, in some sense. we see ourselves in this figure. And yet, at another level, what is he?

He's a dysfunctional depressive. Now, there are two things going on in that play. Earlier on, when Polonius gives advice to his son on how to behave in that sinful city, Paris, he gives him a lot of good humanist advice. In the very end, he said, above all else, to thine own self, be true. Now, that idea, I think, is a crucial touchstone

for individualism throughout the last few hundred years, The trouble with Hamlet is he tries to introspect this self, and what does he find? The quote continues, the one you gave us at the beginning with, what is man to be about the quintessence of dust. But do you think that Hamlet or the Renaissance discovered an individual who is markedly and decisively different from Plato, from Julius Caesar, from Edward the Confessor, to spread over the last, whatever it is, two and a half thousand years?

The person who wrote about this most influential, Jacob Burkhar, He was the one who said the Renaissance was the place where the individual emerges. He was talking of a very different kind of person from Hamlet. He was talking about the Renaissance man, the great individual, the individual who was thirsty for power, thirsty for knowledge, self-affirming, but in often a brutally self-regarding way, a brutally self-serving way. But yes, in a way, life-affirming, one thinks in English terms of Saul to Raleigh. But the odd thing about Raleigh is the great man of action

But if you read his poetry It's amazing that he got anything done Because there is a melancholy there similar to Hamas I'd just like to come back Before I go to Professor Volheim to ask you What is there different About the individual at the time of the Renaissance How do how in what ways could you tell listeners

That person's a different person from I've just chosen three at random from part of West Plato Julius Caesar And Edward the Confessor I would say that there's not a fundamental difference in the sense that, again, philosophers and historians will find the antecedents of individualism as far back as the Greeks and the Romans. What you have in the Renaissance is an intensification of certain qualities. As I say, the quest for knowledge, the quest for power, a heightened sense of individuality, a heightened sense of self, which is nevertheless problematic.

Professor Volheim, Richard Volheim, do you think it's possible to date the birth of the individual or to see what Jonathan Daimor has been talking about in the way that he is. looks at it? Well, I think there's a lot of exaggeration to my mind in the way in which in those views which Jonathan puts forward. The first thing is, obviously have for many, many, many thousands

of years been individuals. That's just a matter really of evolution and the individual is a kind of biological unit out of which they develop some very special kind of psychology. I think that's interesting what that psychology is. and so the actual fact of the individual,

and for that matter, the concept of the individual, they must be absolutely age old, certainly older than civilization, as we know it. But then I think at a certain period of time, and it may be around the Renaissance, there are also intercedents there. Not one ideology, but a series of ideologies did develop. And these are really ideologies about how individuals should be,

how they should live, what form of authority should take. And I think it's important to see that there are many, many of these, and they all conflict with one another. So I don't think even on the level of ideology, we've got anything like unity. I mean, if you think of, say, Descartes and if you think of Montaigne, one thinks of the individual as being something allness shorn of psychology. The other thinks of it as deep as possible psychology.

You've talked about an individual being present before civilisation. Can you therefore give us some, you've written extensively about this, and we're necessarily in this sense rather elliptical, but could you give us some notion of your definition of an individual? Yes, well, my understanding, really, of what an individual is, is it's first of all a biological unit. It's got this very distinctive structures of neurophysiology, I suppose, and out of that, there develops a certain kind of psychology.

Now, what is, to me, very significant about this psychology, is the particular way in which at any given moment the individual is peculiarly linked to its past and to its future. It's peculiarly linked to its past in the way in which this past is always exercising some influence over it and through consciousness, specifically, I think, through memory. So when we remember our past events we've lived through, we also reinforce, to some degree or other, that influence over us

and then we are peculiarly concerned with the events in our own future. I don't mean that we're more, that we're particularly egotistical or selfish about that, but there's some way in which we react when we know that something is going to happen to us, which is distinctively different from when it happens to someone else, whether that's someone whom we love or hate or somewhere in between. So that's really what I think the core of the individual lies in this psychology.

If you accept that, Jonathan Dolemoymore, how does that fit in with your notion that the individual, as outlined very succinctly and clearly by Professor Volheim there, came to be born or reborn, or certainly given enormous energy, according to your thesis, in the Renaissance, a mere few hundred years ago, five, six hundred years ago?

I agree with Richard. Of course there are conflicting ideologies of the individual, and in a sense it's the philosopher's task to separate at them out, to try and give us that clarity. The point about the individual in real life and, of course, in literature, is that they often live those contradictions.

They lived those conflicting ideas. That was the point I'm making with Hamlet, not that he's a unified individual. My argument is that it's often quite simplistic to assume that there was once a time when the individual was confident, secure, knew exactly who he or she was. My argument is actually that the individual

has been in crisis from the very beginning, and that's part of the human identity of the individual. When for you is the beginning? I mean, I'm not going to dwell on this much more, but I'd just like to, Richard has put it way back back. You talk of beginning, and I've been talking about the Renaissance as a beginning, being prompted by you from your book. So you think that is the beginning? That's what still rather disturbs me. No, I don't actually say that.

What I'm trying to say is that there is an intensification of certain ideas. The individual, put it this way, to be simply put, the individual comes to embody more conflicting, ideas of the self in the Renaissance, perhaps, than before. Now, it's important not to simplify the medieval period, but the argument goes that actually then the individual was conceived, or the identity of the individual, was theorized in terms of his or her relationship to the community, the clan or whatever. Now, again, medievalists would challenge that. We don't want to get into that dispute. But what I'm saying is that the individual comes to embody to internalize many more conflicting notions of what it is to be a person, a subject, an individual.

Would you accept that, Richard? Well, I'm interested in this idea of conflict. Of course, there are conflicting ideas of what people are, no doubt at all about that. But I think there's something maybe more fundamental than that, and that is whether we expect the individual itself to be in conflict, to be an internal conflict, nothing to do with views about the self, but the self itself.

And that I think is absolutely inherent to the notion of an individual or a person, that there are these internal conflicts. Now, these conflicts don't, it seemed to me, conflict with the idea of unity. They conflict, of course, with the idea of simplicity. And some people have thought that the self was simple, not at all. And I think what's interesting is the way in which we experience a lot of these conflicts. And a lot of conflicts we experience by feeling that there are, as it were, different people inside us.

We notice this, of course, particularly in crises of guilt. we hear these voices talking. But that it seems to me is not merely the source of conflict, but it's one of the ways in which the individual lives that's inherent to the life of the individual as I think of it. But do you think there was a real change, as exemplified by Hamlet, the few lines I read out at the start, and the lines subsequently brought to the conversation by Jonathan.

Do you think there was a change then, a different sort of self-awareness, a different outlining of what the individual could be, could stand for about five, six hundred years ago, which is driven through since? Well, I think broadly I don't. I mean, I'm sure there are differences at a degree here, and I think probably just moving away from Hamilton to slightly more general territory, I think that what I've called these ideologies of the self,

one of the peculiarities about them is that a lot of people have thought that we ought to be able to decide how individuals should be or how they should live, and using as our material, basically, primarily, the fact that they are individuals. So the fact that they are individuals should really tell us what they like. That's the most important thing about individuals. That's what they are.

Okay, I think I accept the idea of unity, but for me it's a very abstract concept, and I'm not sure that it helps explain, for example, why the Renaissance is that period of extraordinary intellectual and creative productivity. Now, surely that has something crucially to do with the individual, but it's not this stable, complacent individual,

which is sometimes theorized in individualism, as I say, it's an individual in crisis, an individual deeply conflicted. And in a sense, I don't think the idea of unity helps us understand the complex psychology, which I think, and often for the modern reader, a pathological psychology, which is at the heart of that tremendous intellectual creative productivity. Well, you see, I don't think you can begin to understand the conflicts to which individuals are exposed,

until you think of the individuals themselves as unified, because it's materials out of which these conflict comes are things which are deposited within the life of the individual. Do you think that liberal humanism at that time brought to the idea of the individual, something that had not been there before and something strikingly different from that which had been there before? Strackingly different, but again, if I can make the point,

Pico della Mirandola, who of course did the great oration on the dignity of me, man. Now, this is one of the great humanist texts for the Renaissance concept of man and of the individual, but what does he say? He says that God does not make us fixed. He precisely made us lacking a unity or a fixity. And it is precisely because we are mobile, that we are restless, we move between these identities, that is what makes us uniquely human. So I think that very often, to come back to your question, what happens is that when we do this cultural history, we retrospectively imagine that there was a more confident, stable, clearly defined

individual in the past. I don't think that's true. In the context of literature and certain kinds of intellectual writing and maybe there is a distinction here between the philosopher and the artist. An interesting difference. Can I bring it up to the last century or so? Richard

Volham, do you think that Marx's ideas about the individual and society challenged the notion of the individual, that individuals didn't make society, society made individuals, and they were, again putting it rather elliptically, even crudely, there were cogs in a much more massive machine their influence, their place, was just a sort of drop of water in a flood.

Well, I suppose with Marx, these ideas of the pressure of society and the pressure of more specifically forms of society, different ways in which property and power are assigned, that these really act as deformations of the individual. These are the features that make the individual alienated, make self-fulfillment very different, for the individual. And on the positive side, of course, Marx, apart from the very early writings, is rather not explicit on the matter. I mean, the hope is that once you overcome these forms

of exploitation, then the individual will flourish as individuals do. But we don't know really very much about that. The picture is pretty sketchily and maybe rather simplistically presented, because that wasn't really his interest at all. So I don't think that there's any overall challenge coming from Marx to the idea of the individual as something with a unity and also with great conflict. Perhaps I think Marx probably underrated internal sources of conflict in human nature as far as we can see. Well, I pursue this little with Jonathan.

Jonathan, don't you think, though, that it could be said that your Renaissance man have some sort of unity out of internal disunity, did think he could impose, he or she, mostly he, could impose his view of view on society, win battles, write books, change civilizations, conquer country. And Marx said, this was to do with forces,

and you were just caught up with the forces. And didn't this turn the whole thing on its head? I think it did. I disagree with Richard on this. I think that Marx's idea that social being determines consciousness made a profound difference. Now, we don't necessarily have to accept that he's right. But let's remember also,

and I'm not going to get too technically, here that Marx was drawing on Hegel, Hagellian dialectic, and nothing has been more important in the modern challenge to the unity of the individual than a dialectic. Roughly the idea is this, that as soon as I start to try and define myself as individual, isolated and separate, I have to exclude something else. And in the end, this process of exclusion becomes so crucial to my identity, I end up being dependent upon it.

And this has become, I think, tremendously important, even though Marx himself has waned, the influence of Marx, the Hagellian influence coming through Marx in terms of this idea that the individual is never unified is always to some extent the product of his or her other, this has become tremendously important. I think that, I think Marx did make a crucial difference. As a direct opposition to your position, Richard Volham,

would you like to develop yours a little more strongly? Yes, well, I certainly think that the way in which we do develop as individuals is in part through, conflict, well part through opposition with other people and that may of course be benign. We may derive some of our strength from other people

the way in which we internalize them. Alternatively that may lead to conflict. So I'd think that any view about the unity of the individual, particularly the unity of the individual, the conflicted individual, is bound to emphasize the importance of the environment

and the importance of other people. I mean, Freud, who after all his thought by... Can we say with Marx for a second? Yes. I mean, that man, we could look at man as a species rather than an individual, that this species was moved by economic forces, by powers, literally outside his or her control, even great wars.

I mean, I remember talking to Alan Bullock about which war leaders or which persons, single persons, could be said to have had a singular and defining effect. And he was very chary indeed about that. And he admitted in the end perhaps Hitler. So you went that far from a historian who, you couldn't call Alan Bullock, a Marxist historian, but the idea of the whole of society driving on an individual's being tossed like, sort of, like corks. Destroyed almost by historical.

There's obviously an opposition between two of you here. I'm not looking for any sort of silly rows or anything, but it's very interesting to define it, because Jonathan is very much saying that Marxism, the influence of Marx, and his understanding of society has attacked the notion of the individual as defined or heavily redefined in the Renaissance, aren't you? I do believe that,

and I think it's not necessarily inhumane to say that. What I mean is that for me, there's something which brings tears to my eyes every time I read it, is Breck's remark on Mother Courage, I mean, the great figure in his play, where he said that she thinks she is choosing, she thinks she is making her life,

but in fact what is happening is she's being absolutely destroyed, pulled apart by a great historical contradiction. That seems to me the humane consequence of the Marxist insight. Oh, yes, but that, of course, is the individual under one of these forms of society in which it can only be alienated and can fall into this self-deception. But I suppose Marx was fundamentally inspired by the hope that mankind could get out of this and could in some liberated form of society fulfill itself.

Yes, he was. But still what he saw was anti-the-individual that the Renaissance saw. Well, I mean, it might be that the position of man after the overcoming of exploitation and oppression would be maybe something along, one or other of these many ideas which did indeed flourish in the Renaissance. Sorry. No, for you, John.

Well, I was going to say, the consequence of Marx is that the individual, one, has always got to be defined or understood in terms of his or her social being, and all the conflicts and contradictions which that entails. And I think the second consequence of Marx, of course drawing on Hegel and many other people actually before him, is that the individual is inherently unstable.

And it's a fantasy to think that there is a private sphere, an authentic subjectivity into which we can withdraw in order to escape the conflicts of the world. You mentioned Freud earlier, Richard Volheim. And alongside Marx, Freud could seem to have chance, the notion of the individual, as you presented it earlier this programme. He famously said the individual is not master of his own house. And the notion is that you have to suppress your individuality in order to repress your individuality in order to serve society. What would your comment on that be?

Well, of course, notice that Freud does say in his own house. In other words, there's a little... The individual is not master of his own house. Of his own house. It's the ego. Yeah, yeah. So that's really just referring to the ego, exactly, is not master's own house. but the house is the self, the person,

which of course is prone to conflict. And what I think is distinctive, perhaps the most distinctive feature really of Freud is how he thought this conflict arose. And he traces it really basically to two sources. There's the instincts, the desires we have, which for some reason or other, Freud was always much less certain on this point

of why this was so, but nevertheless these things which are unwelcome to us, which are alien to us, and they we repress or in some other way to defend against. And that, of course, is never totally successful. So these things come back. But the things which come back are things which have always been ours. And then the other source of the conflict is the way, something which doesn't at first say necessarily look like a source of conflict,

the way in which the people who surround us are people whom we either, once we think of them either is dangerous to us or is in danger to themselves, themselves in danger, we internalize. So we get this inner world. And then the thing in Freud is this notion of the inner world, these figures inside us, and these repressed desires, they link up in a certain kind of way. So the inner figures become representatives of the press. But everything is, all the conflicts in us are, of course, conflicts which derive from us. That's the unity of the self. Sorry, Jonathan, can I just steer that back to the individual to keep it on, try to keep it in one line to this program? How does what Richard says and what Freud says affect your notion, influence your notion of what you think has happened to the Renaissance idea of the individual?

I think that what Freud does is to greatly, again, to greatly intensify the idea of the individuals are conflicted, to a degree where, again, I cannot see any unity. I think the unity is a purely abstract idea in relation to Freud. A difference between the Renaissance, perhaps, and Freud is that in the Renaissance, the individual was theorised as someone who could use their energy, could utilise their energy in a dynamic way. Now, in Freud what we have is a model of the psyche, where the energy is always, to some degree, turned against itself. You are using up a degree of your energy in order to hold down your neurosis,

hold down your repressions, to combat the unconscious. And to that extent, the individual is necessarily a character of civilization. What Freud says is quite clear. If you want civilization and most of us do, the price you pay is a highly conflicted, often neurotic, repressed individual, and we are all damaged. That's what he says. And I think I agree with Freud. But I would also add that Freud, when he makes this crucial remark about the ego, not being master in its own house, it's in a context of where he talks about psychoanalysis being only the last of a whole series of attacks on the individual, beginning with Copernicus. Can we come here even more up to date with the French philosopher Michel Fouca who's talked about the death of the individual,

something that you in your book also write about, Jonathan. Can you, how has the individual died this century? What are the signs of this death? This, again, is a very influential idea. It comes from continental philosophy, mainly the French, people like Michel Foucao. And it rests, I believe, and here I agree with Richard, on a simplistic notion of history. It says, well, there's this individual who is not a very nice creature

because he, and it usually is a he, is intrinsic to empire, colonialism, patriarchy. He grew up, emerged in the Renaissance, got theorised in the Enlightenment, had his high point in the 19th century when he stomped around the world. But in the 20th century, when all of these things have collapsed,

imperialism, empire, masculinity, patriarchy. So the individual man has been thrown into crisis. And they say there is no such thing as the individual. There's no such thing as man. And any notion of an interior autonomous self is just the residue of Western metaphysics. This is the argument. I think it's a simplified argument, but it's been a tremendously influential one.

And you endorse it in your own. I don't endorse it in the sense that my argument in the point I was making with Freud, is that Freud himself sees man as impermanent crisis from the Renaissance son. I want to say there was no point when the individual was stable and secure. He has always been in crisis, and that crisis is crucial to his history. But never that's the phrase, the death of the individual figures in your book, as are taking on from Fuku. Does that make any sense, excuse me,

does that phrase the death of the individual in the century, Make any real sense to you, Richard Volho? Not really, no. I think what it depends upon is a very exaggerated view of the relation between the things themselves and the thoughts we have about them. In other words, it depends upon a certain version

of thinking makes it so. Now, there are two ways, I think, in which thoughts can relate to the things they're about. I mean, if we take, say, this coin, a pound coin. Now, I can, for instance, think about it, and I can think that the currency to which it belongs is really much more,

to strain and other people think it is, it's worthless, and this could ultimately have an effect upon the buying part of the pound. So that's one way in which thought can always influence that which it's about. But with this coin, there's a deeper relation of thought to it. That is to say that all the social conventions about money actually make this thing into a unit of currency. That's, in other words, that's a kind of constitutive role. Now, I think the error in various thinkers like Fuku is they don't see the limitations of that.

There are certain things which are made so by thought. Thinking makes them so because they're social, they're institutional facts, like currency, other things they get. But with something like the individual or with human nature, I think that thought about it plays a somewhat superficial contingent role. And that's why to talk of the death of the individual and to think that that follows from the death of these individualistic ideologies seems to me like a big... Right. But what I think, one of the things

which people like Foucault talk to is actually the desire of people today to relinquish these older ideas of a deep self, of an individual self. I mean, there's a sense in which they find them boring. There's that wonderful postmodern anecdote about the fetishist who was in love with a foot but had to settle for the whole person.

There's a sense now which the whole person is boring. People feel that these are obsolete ideologies which constrain us, which actually don't liberate our potential. Now, I'm not saying they're correct, but I think that Fouca and others speak to a great wish to be free in yet a new way. That freedom involves negating these older ideas of human nature, of man and the individual. Does that strike according to Richard Vonhoen? That the wholeness of it is boring,

and that the particularity and the idea of the thing being withering away is where the energy and interest lies. Well, boredness and another matter. and we all have things which we're bored by. But I think that we might very well be bored by some of these ideologies. But it certainly doesn't mean that the whole way of thinking about people is boring, and also the question doesn't arise at all because it just is inevitable. It's rooted in these facts.

We can't but think of ourselves in these ways. But the postmodern individual, I don't endorse him or her, but the postmodern individual, which is so influential in metropolitan circles, It's very much a multiple individual. It's someone who is mobile, who is defined in terms of style and appearance rather than a deep self. People do find this very exciting.

I suspect it rests on a certain kind of advanced capitalism and could easily fragment. I also think, incidentally, that the melancholy is still just underneath. Would you agree with that? Well, I don't think we can affect our psychologists in quite such direct ways as that. Of course, we can affect our psychology.

psychologists up to a point by thinking, but in these oblique ways there. But we can't just wish that we weren't conceptualised in this boring fashion and change. Well, thank you both very much. Thank you, Jonathan Donimore, and Richard Volheim. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.com.com.