It is customary for modern philosophers to conceive of human beings in individualistic terms. From the Cartesian ego and Kant’s autonomous moral agent to the modern existentialist, and through the liberal tradition stemming from Locke and the enlightenment, philosophy has been primarily concerned with the experience and freedom of the individual person. Perhaps the most striking example of this approach is evident in Thomas Hobbes, whose account of human nature paints us as isolated and egoistic units driven by competing desires into inevitable conflict. In Hobbes’ account, society itself is an artificial compromise that exists solely to protect our individual interests.
But this is only a modern conception. Like most ancient philosophers, Aristotle believed that the state is of primary concern, and that the interests of the collective should override those of the individual. Such different assumptions naturally lead to varying accounts of exactly how the atomic individual relates to other people and to society as a whole, and what role the state plays – and should play – in shaping our identity.
Existentialist philosophers tend to understand human beings as unique individuals, ‘condemned to be free’ and responsible for choosing their own form of existence. It is the subjective uniqueness of individuals that is the focus of existentialist philosophy, rather than any objective facts about the world. Without a common essence or ultimate goal, individuals must invent their own values and bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. To properly accept this responsibility is to be ‘authentic’; to let others determine your values and actions is to display ‘bad faith’. It is therefore not surprising that the existence of other people presents a problem for many existentialist thinkers. For Kierkegaard, ‘the crowd is untruth’; Heidegger denigrates ‘das Man’; Nietzsche is contemptuous of ‘the herd’. However, perhaps the most pessimistic account of our relationship to other people is provided by Jean-Paul Sartre.
For Sartre, as for Hobbes, the natural condition of human beings in society is conflict. This idea is neatly captured in Sartre’s notorious line:
Hell is other people. Huis Clos
Although each person experiences a radical freedom of choice, that freedom is constrained by the stubborn existence of the world. Individuals are ‘situated’ in a particular time and place, and part of that situatedness is other people. ‘The Other’ is an inescapable part of the structure of our experience. Sartre offers two memorable examples in Being and Nothingness to illustrate this. In the first, he is concerned with the Other’s relation to the world:
I am in a public park. Not far away there is a lawn and along the edge of that lawn there are benches. A man passes by those benches. I see this man: I apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man. What does this signify? What do I mean when I assert that this object is a man?
To apprehend the passer-by as an object is to see him in as an extra thing in the park, along with the lawn, the benches and the statue. At this moment, Sartre says, the world is oriented in relation to me: the benches are to my right and look inviting; the lawn is ahead of me; the statue draws my attention; and so on. When I suddenly apprehend the passer-by as a man, I realise that he too has a relation to the park and it is different from mine: for him the benches are behind him and of no interest; he is on the lawn; he is unaware of the statue; and so on. To recognise the Other like this is to experience a reorganisation of the world, to lose one’s bearings: the Other’s perspective represents a threat to my experience of the world and hence my authenticity. As Sartre puts it:
... it appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole.
In his second example, Sartre addresses the Other’s relation to himself, as an individual subject. He imagines that he is looking through a keyhole into a private room, wholly absorbed by what he sees inside:
But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure...
These modifications are a result of the other person’s gaze – ‘the Look’ (le regard). I suddenly realise that I am an object in the Other’s world, and a shameful one at that. I change from being the observer to the observed and become immediately self-conscious: as Sartre puts it, ‘I am no longer master of the situation’. I experience myself as the object of his gaze, and shame reveals me to myself as the Other sees me, as he judges me. This represents a lapse into bad faith which I must resist by reasserting myself as the subject of experience. It is this struggle to remain the subject, to resist being objectified by the look of others, that accounts for the conflict in all interpersonal relations.
Compelling as Sartre’s examples are, they do not seem to capture the whole experience of being with other people. There is a broad spectrum of attitudes that we can adopt towards others, from the extremes of objectification (slavery, racism, sexism) to a full and rewarding acceptance of their freedom. We are not merely isolated individuals in conflict with others. In his later work, Sartre came to recognise the role of economic and social conditions in constituting human possibilities, and the need to change these conditions through revolutionary politics. Atomistic individualism is not the whole story: society is part of what we are.
At the start of his Politics, Aristotle defines civic association as a natural process, emerging from the tendency of humans to group themselves first into families and then into villages. People make these associations with the view to achieving some good, and the city-state (or polis) is the most successful means of achieving that good.
... it is evident that the city belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city, by reason of his own nature and not of some accident, is a poor sort of being. Politics 1253a2
The state is ‘prior to the individual’ in the same way a body is prior to any of its parts: if the whole body is destroyed, then so are the individual parts of that body. An individual without a political environment is no more useful than a hand severed from its body: he is either a beast or a god, subhuman or superhuman – but not human. Accordingly, Aristotle ranks political engagement second only to philosophical reflection as the ideal goal of a human life. The supreme good for Aristotle is the virtue and welfare of all citizens, and the purpose of political organisation is to make this possible. The distinctive faculties of humans – namely language and reason – allow individuals to discover and share moral values, and to create laws to ensure justice is served. This allows each citizen to flourish within the community.
In practice, this means that the state can and should exert control over the moral development of its citizens, particularly through education of character. In this way the values of the individual citizen and of the state coincide. This is, of course, very different from modern Western conceptions of government which usually draw a distinction between politics and private morality. Such a distinction is meaningless for Aristotle since no community or state can flourish without a broad agreement about the best way to live. There is surely some truth in this: for any society to work, the individuals within it must share a common end.
Many philosophers have been impressed by Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of the state to human flourishing. Similar ideas were explored by Hegel and his followers, and in recent times communitarian thinkers have developed a critique of liberalism that owes a great deal to Aristotle. This critique comes down to the claim that liberals have a false conception of human nature.
From Locke to Mill to Rawls, the basis of liberalism has always been a particular conception of individuals as free and able to live by their own values. The common good is an optimal combination of these individual preferences. The state, however, must be neutral with regard to values and should impose no value system of its own since it is merely an aggregation of individuals. From a liberal perspective there is no difference in value between watching theatre or watching reality TV: both are legitimate free choices and should be protected as such. The role of the state is to protect the ‘natural’ rights of the individual, such as the freedoms of speech, worship and assembly. For the classical liberals, this role was understood in terms of a social contract. Each individual agrees to surrender their independence in exchange for the protection of their liberty. Society therefore aligns itself to the individual’s needs, and not the other way around: government, to a liberal, is a necessary evil.
So liberals have an atomistic, or at least individualistic, conception of the self: each person is autonomous and free to determine the course of their lives according to their own values. This is what Michael Sandel has called the ‘unencumbered self’. But communitarians insist that this picture is wrong: our selves are significantly defined or constituted by our social attachments and associations. Large stretches of our lives are governed by unchosen routines and habits, the social framework of our existence as citizens. It is only when these routines are broken – when we are the victim of a crime, or lose our job, or get divorced – that we revert to thinking of ourselves as free subjects responsible for the direction of our lives. Moreover, society provides a public moral space against which we modify and exercise our own values. This moral space represents the accumulated wisdom of generations and without it, despite existentialist claims of radical ‘freedom’, we would have no ethical or behavioural compass.
It is not difficult to see how a self is ‘encumbered’ by its social roles and interactions. If you ask someone the question, Who are you? – they may well define themselves as (say) a British citizen; a wife and mother of two; a homeowner; a schoolteacher; middle-class; a Christian; and so on. These are all social roles in some sense and clearly help to constitute any person of whom they are true. Communitarians claim that we cannot shed this ‘thick’ identity and still remain ourselves – our family, race, nationality, language and so on, are all essential to who we are. Accordingly, since these social aspects are determined by the broader political picture, the development of a person is as much a matter for the state as for individuals.
The social factors affecting identity seem to be culturally dependent. In the 1990s there was much discussion of ‘Asian values’ given the economic success of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, defined these values in terms of the interests of society taking precedence over those of the individual, a formulation deliberately opposed to Western democratic ideals. Liberals have rejected such alternatives, claiming that they can too easily be used to disguise totalitarian government or override human rights. Certainly, communitarians have struggled to describe a non-liberal conception of the state that appears more attractive than the liberal democratic model: in particular, it is difficult to define a criterion for privileging one conception of the good over another. Nevertheless, the communitarian critique of liberal individualism is a reminder of the role that society plays in enabling us to flourish.
It is worth noting that liberal thinkers have come to recognise that an individual’s freedom depends a great deal upon their social and economic circumstances – poverty in particular will limit a person’s choices and prevent their flourishing. Therefore modern liberalism is less about mistrust of the power of government, and more about using that power to correct inequities in the distribution of wealth. This accounts for government spending on education, health and welfare in many liberal countries.