Together with rethinking the term for expressive individualism, I’ve additionally currently been rethinking the historical past of the phenomenon. The concept that one must be one’s personal true self is a part of the air we moderns breathe: we don’t give it some thought as a result of we assume it. (A number of the deeper thought on the matter comes from Christian conservatives, as a result of they want to consider expressive individualism with a purpose to oppose it.) Only a few expressive individualists do the work that they need to to defend the best philosophically. Extra consideration has been paid to the concept’s historical past – however this, too, is one thing that I feel we frequently get flawed.
The large query I wish to revisit right now is: when does expressive individualism start? When do individuals first begin considering that each particular person has her personal distinctive function in her individuality, and that following that function is a correct moral ultimate? I’ve argued there are metaphysical precedents for the concept in John Duns Scotus‘s distinction between whatness and thatness, however I don’t suppose there’s any inkling of individualist ethics within the pious thirteenth-century monk Scotus. Expressive individualism comes later – however how a lot later?
Charles Taylor attributes the origin of expressive individualism primarily to Johann Gottfried Herder, however I feel he’s wrong about that: Taylor solely ever quotes one sentence from Herder as proof, and that sentence is inside a context that isn’t about individualism. So my own previous account credit the 18th- and Nineteenth-century German Romantics as a bunch, placing Herder along with Humboldt, Goethe, Novalis. Others return a era to Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Alessandro Ferrara gives Rousseau the credit for expressive individualism, some conservatives give him the blame. However I’ve lately come to consider that that’s not going far again sufficient – not practically far again sufficient.
I modified my thoughts once I learn Michael Allen Gillespie’s sensible The Theological Origins of Modernity. Gillespie’s concern is with the origin of modernity usually; he doesn’t concentrate on expressive individualism particularly. However his work on modernity excavates various uncared for thinkers, and in so doing satisfied me of the earth-shaking significance of 1 particularly: the 14th-century Italian scholar Francesco Petrarca, identified in English as Petrarch.
Petrarch will get his place within the historical past books because the founding father of Renaissance humanism. After we suppose Renaissance we normally suppose invention, literature, above all visible artwork; we don’t take note of the interval as philosophy. However Gillespie has satisfied me that we must always. For it’s in Petrarch’s 1356 Of the Solitary Life or Solitude, I feel, that we first discover concepts that may clearly be classed as expressive or qualitative individualist. Contemplate: Petrarch advises a quasi-Epicurean withdrawal from public affairs into one’s personal solitude, as a result of these concerned in public affairs
are dominated by the facility of one other man’s nod and be taught what they have to do from one other man’s look. They declare nothing as their very own. Their home, their sleep, their meals, just isn’t their very own, and what’s much more severe, their thoughts just isn’t their very own, their countenance not their very own. They don’t weep and snicker on the promptings of their very own nature however discard their very own feelings to placed on these of one other. In sum, they transact one other man’s enterprise, suppose one other man’s ideas, dwell by one other man’s grace. (Solitude 122)
You could possibly think about Goethe or Nietzsche saying one thing like that; perhaps you possibly can even think about Kant saying it. However so far as I can inform, this isn’t a sentiment you’d discover wherever earlier than Petrarch, wherever on this planet – and I’m not even conscious of wherever you discover it within the couple centuries after him, earlier than Rousseau. It’s not one thing Confucius or Śaṅkara or Augustine or Epictetus and even Zhuangzi would say. Epicurus, and the Disengaged Buddhists, could be in sympathy with the recommendation that Petrarch is providing right here – however not together with his causes. Epicurus and Aśvaghoṣa would agree that we must always keep away from public affairs – as a result of they intrude with our tranquility of thoughts. However Petrarch’s causes on this passage are fairly completely different: for him, the essential factor is for our minds to be our personal. In saying that, I feel, he’s seemingly the primary to advocate a sentiment that may centuries later be echoed by Sting: “Be yourself, no matter what they say.”.
The concept that our concepts must be our personal does additionally seem in Kant. However for Kant, what is our own is the rational moral law, which is the similar for all individuals (in comparable conditions); that’s why Simmel takes Kant as a quantitative, slightly than qualitative, individualist. Now even when all Petrarch was saying was that Kantian thought, it might be extraordinary sufficient – to create any sort of fashionable individualism in any respect within the fourteenth century. However Petrarch goes nonetheless additional to say one thing I can’t think about coming from Kant: in Gillespie’s paraphrase, “It’s essential that every man determine in accordance with his personal preferences, for it’s inconceivable {that a} single highway ought to go well with all males.” (61) That may be a core thought of expressive, qualitative, individualism.
I don’t suppose I can emphasize sufficient how early Petrarch is expressing this ultimate that it’s good for our ideas to be our personal and uniquely particular person. It’s not simply that he’s saying such issues earlier than Kant and Rousseau and Goethe. He’s saying it a century and a half earlier than Luther, earlier than Machiavelli. He’s beginning off the Renaissance, however solely beginning it. It was Petrarch who coined the time period “the Darkish Ages” – however to explain his current and never his previous, the age that he was dwelling in and hoped would quickly finish. For Petrarch’s world was not Renaissance however medieval: the Black Loss of life had been a mere ten years earlier than he wrote that passage on our minds being our personal, Dante’s Divine Comedy accomplished twenty years earlier than that. He wrote whereas the Hundred Years’ War was being fought by knights. And but, it was nonetheless in that world, the medieval world of chivalry and plague, that Petrarch managed to advocate the best of our minds being our personal. Rousseau may need been a century or two forward of his time. Petrarch was a number of centuries.
What’s extra: it isn’t simply that Petrarch had these ideas in a solitary isolation after which buried them, to be rediscovered centuries later. Wikipedia, citing Julia Conaway Bondanella, tells us that over 120 manuscript copies of Of the Solitary Life nonetheless exist, “which demonstrates its reputation via the centuries.” That implies to me that Petrarch’s expressive individualist concepts have been being considered within the 4 centuries between him and Rousseau. If that’s so, it appears very seemingly that there have been different individuals advocating this concept properly earlier than Rousseau. We simply haven’t been on the lookout for them laborious sufficient but.
