Individualism Must Die!

 The thoughts below were mostly spurred on by this piece in Harper’s.

Modern Western philosophy is usually said to have been inaugurated by René Descartes’ relatively short essay, “Meditations on First Philosophy”. If you’re “trying to get into philosophy”, you’re usually told to start either here or with Plato. There are 6 essays actually, but all anyone talks about is the first because the rest are about proving God exists, which we don’t consider to be an issue worth arguing about these days. In that famous first meditation, Descartes attempts to systematically doubt everything that he believes to be true, even fundamental axioms such as 1+1=2. He tries to imagine a little demon who deceives all his senses to make him perceive things falsely, you could also just imagine you’re in the Matrix and are actually a body in a vat if you wish. The point is that after he goes through doubting all his beliefs, the one thing he feels that is undoubtable is that he was doing some doubting. He thus affirms the existence of himself as an individual by the fact that he was some sort of “thinking thing”, summed up in the widely known cogito: I think, therefore I am.

The connection between philosophy and real life can seem tentative for most, but the fact that one of the most widely read works of philosophy in the west concludes that the existence of the individual is the only undoubtable truth is significant. Nietzsche is one of the more well-known people to object to this conclusion, arguing that there are many more things that can be doubted. The simplest objection (Wikipedia credits Pierre Gassendi with being the first to raise it) is that Descartes cannot actually make claim to an “I” existing, only that thinking is occurring. There doesn’t necessarily need to be an “I” for it to happen. Descartes’ insistence on clinging to his “I” has consequences that we can feel today. If I were to point to a clear descendant of this line of thinking with political implications, it would be in Margaret Thatcher’s statement that Mark Fisher loved quoting: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.” This is the essence of neoliberal ideology, which is currently destroying the planet.

Before we fully get to modern day though, I want to examine the extremities of individualism. You may think I’m going to talk about Ayn Rand (who I can’t profess to know much about), but this detour will go through a delightful little guy named Max Stirner. Once the existence of God stopped being taken for granted, people attempted to replace this guiding force with “Humanity” or “The Nation” or “Reason” or even “Morality”, which were meant to be pursued for their own sake. Stirner mocks this attempt. He would say “Exactly! Their own sake.” I will quote at length out of respect for my college-age admiration for the man:

“And won’t you learn from these shining examples (God, humanity, etc.) that the egoist gets on best? I, for my part, take a lesson from them, and instead of serving those great egoists unselfishly anymore, I would prefer to be the egoist myself.

[...]

Away, then, with every cause that is not completely my affair. You think that at least the “good cause” must be my affair? Which good, which bad? I am myself my own affair, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither makes any sense to me.

The divine is God’s affair; the human cause is “humanity’s.” My affair is neither the divine nor the human; it is not the good, the true, the just, the free, etc., but only my own, and it is not general, but is—unique, as I am unique.

For me, there is nothing greater than me!”

When you reduce everyone to an individual, they will act out of nothing but self-interest. Stirner is a nice guy, so his self-interest includes having friends that he gets along with because it makes him feel good. The reason is that it makes him feel good though, not because it’s a “good thing” to be a nice person. As you can probably imagine, Anarchists love this book. I think that if you take Descartes’ cogito to be true, this is the only logical conclusion.

What if you don’t take the cogito to be true, though? Some schools of Eastern philosophy have long denied the existence of an unchanging self, namely Buddhism with its doctrine of Annata. I admit I have to do more reading on this, so maybe I’ll follow this up at some point. If we are to continue to inhabit the world, however, I think some adaptation of Annata by the west is the only option.