The increasing importance of biography in relation to individuality is an indicator of difference and the assertion thereof. In this context, Luckmann highlights the augmenting number of roles men play daily but their simultaneous anonymity, their impersonal character.(1) Maffesoli vindicates the person and their roles, submerged in sentiments and feelings, as a post-modern category in relation to the mechanical, functional, individual.(2) In this sense, tribalism is marked by the sharing of common sentiments, their ephemeral character, the externality to the self, partaker in order to ‘be with’ rather than in the search for any project or ideal. Only an aesthetics of emotion redounds in an ethical connection and increases networks based on intensity, on a passionate rather than on a traditional, mechanical, social or political order.
The intersection of social conceptions and epistemology suppose both an individual that is subject of knowledge, and a series of individual objects that can be known. Their existence is verified by the application of the principle of manipulation and production. Individual is a way of being constituted as well as a way of understanding, of referring to the world. A definition of individualism implies not only an ontology, but also an epistemology.(3) The relation between individualism as a social conception and a certain outlook on nature can be tracked down to the beginnings of modernity and its resilient orography.
Friedenthal shows the coalescence of natural science and the conceptions of man and society. The various interrelations between social theory and natural philosophy stood at the base of the prevalence of Newton’s system in front of Leibniz’s ideas.(4) The congruence of both social and natural thought, their consistent configuration in a plane of construction, the common metaphors, based on philosophical assumptions, paved the way to their ultimate acceptance. Prejudices and beliefs, inserted in theoretical constructs, philosophical concepts that underlie diverse disciplines, do not only influence their elaboration but determine their ultimate acceptance and composition within the society’s tissue of credence, the roaming on a plain of consistence producing the conditions of possibility of a judgement, the acknowledgement by others of their righteousness, producing attitudes towards concepts and sustaining forms of power.
(1) T. Luckmann, “Persönliche Identität und Lebenslauf -gesellschaftliche Voraussetzungen”, H.G. Bruse and B. Hildenbrand (eds.) Vom Ende des Individuums zur Individualität ohne Ende, Opladen, 1988.
(2) “The rational era is built on the principle of individuation and of separation, whereas the empathetic period is marked by the lack of differentiation, the ‘loss’ in a collective subject, in other words what I shall call neo-tribalism…” M. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, London, 1996. In this sense the individual loses his autonomy. “Each social actor is less acting than acted upon,” p. 145.
(3) Cf. D. Shanahan, Towards a Genealogy of Individualism, Massachusetts, 1992 defines thus the concept of individuality he traces historically. “For the purposes of this study, we will consider individualism as that system of beliefs in which the individual is not only given direct status and value but become the final arbiter of truth,” p. 20. An interactive understanding of consciousness could produce a final criticism to the notion of individual.
(4) G. Friedenthal, Atom und Individuum im Zeitalter Newtons. Zur Genese der mechanistischen Natur- und Sozialphilosophie, Frankfurt, 1982. The author stresses the influence of the English philosophia prima in Newton’s concept of absolute space and the necessity of the existence of particles in the void. Actually Leibniz’s and Newton’s systems were equally apt theories, the latter’s accommodation to society grounded its ulterior success. “Es handelt sich also nicht kaum, dass ein naturphilosophischer Untersuchungsgegenstand einer sozialphilosophischen ‘Denkform’ entsprechend modelliert worden wäre, sondern darum, dass in beiden Bereichen die gleiche Untersuchungsmethode angewendet wurde, der derselbe philosophische Grundsatz über das Verhältnis von Element und System zugrundelag.” p. 313. Cf. T.A. Spragens, “The politics of inertia and gravitation- The functions of exemplar paradigms in social thought”, Polity 5, 1972-3, pp. 288-310. Cf. S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 1986. The relation between a conception of nature and our place in it and their multifaceted implications is not only a question for anthropological or historical study, but also penetrates certain highly influential scientific topics. Thus if we understand nature as a self-regulating organism we become part of the larger enterprise of sustaining life on earth. M. Migdgley, “Individualism and the Concept of Gaia”, Review of International Studies 26, 2000, pp. 29-44. Cf. J.E. Lovelock, Gaia. A new outlook on nature, Oxford, 1979. Cf. I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphoses de la science, Paris, 1979. On the other hand, some insist in the importance of selection and stress the competition among genes to persevere and become dominant in a population, R. Dawkins, op. cit.
