Individuality

Individuality is the characteristic that contributes to the differentiation or distinction of someone or something from a group of otherwise comparable identity.

• L’individu ne se définit que par sa relation au monde et aux autres individus, il n’existe qu’en se transcendant et sa liberté ne peut s’accomplir qu’à travers la liberté d’autrui. Il justifie son existence par un mouvement qui, comme elle, jaillit du coeur de lui-même, mais qui aboutit hors de lui.
  • The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of him.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Conclusion

• It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1883), p. 55

• Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1883), pp. 55-56

• Wenn wir uns selbst fehlen, fehlt uns doch alles.
  • When we lack ourselves, we lack everything.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

• In anxiety there lies the possibility of a disclosure which is quite distinctive; for anxiety individualizes. This individualization brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being. These basic possibilities of Dasein (and Dasein is in each case mine) show themselves in anxiety as they are in themselves—undisguised by entities within-the-world, to which, proximally and for the most part, Dasein clings.
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, p. 235

• It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am myself, myself alone.”
  • William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture 1

• It will no longer be as it once was, that individuals could look to the nearest eminence for orientation when things got somewhat hazy before their eyes. That time is now past. They either must be lost in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be saved infinitely in the essentiality of the religious life. Many may cry out in despair, but it will not help, for now it is too late. If formerly authority and power were misused in the world and brought down upon themselves the nemesis of revolution, then it was in fact powerlessness and weakness that aspired to stand on its own feet and therefore brought the nemesis down upon itself.
  • Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 108

• It is Christian heroism—a rarity, to be sure—to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and this prodigious responsibility.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849), H. and E. Hong, trans. (1980), pp. 5-6

• If someone took control of your mind and you were not able to think as yourself any longer, you would no longer be yourself. You'd be something in his command. You as an individual would be dead. That's Anti-Life. In other words, if you gave yourself to some cause, and gave up everything as an individual and you were at the beck and call of some leader, you would be dead as an individual.
  • Jack Kirby, "Jack Kirby interview", Train of Thought #5, (1971); February 1990, posted May 23, 2011 in issue 134 of "The Comics Journal", now on TCJ Archive

• The common individual always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion; he regards the state in which everything now exists as the only possible one and passively accepts it all. … To the genius it always occurs to ask: Could this too not be false?
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), C25

• By the term individual I shall mean that in which each of us is peculiarly himself. I shall emphasize not what is common is us, but what is uncommon, and this leads me to a restatement of our question. In considering what is happening to the individual, I shall discuss what in modern civilization is happening to the uncommon in us. Are we becoming more common or more uncommon? Are the common people destroying the uncommon? Is the public self of us crushing out the personal self? Are we being directed more from without than from within? As our group memberships grow larger, do we as persons tend to grow smaller? Do the tendencies of the present day, mass movements, social organization, publicity, public education, emphasize the unique in man, or enhance the dominance of undifferentiated man acting as mass?
  • Everett Dean Martin, The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 9

• It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation.
  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1895), Chapter 3, pp. 112-113

• In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127

• I would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.
  • Plato, Socrates in Gorgias, 482c

• A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. Constraint is always present in society, like a companion of whom there is no riddance; and in proportion to the greatness of a man’s individuality, it will be hard for him to bear the sacrifices which all intercourse with others demands.
  • Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, T. B. Saunders, trans., § 9

• As long as man has not ascended to the rank of existence where he leaves behind him the domain of the universal and enters into his own personal domain—no longer dependent upon the principles operative in the realm of the universal—he is still subject to the rule of the species and the universal form. However, as soon as he liberates himself from the burden of the species, he becomes a free man. Complete freedom belongs only to the prophet, the man of God. The man who is a mere random example of the species, on the other hand, is wholly under the rule of the scientific lawfulness of existence. Between this species man and the man of God, between necessity and freedom, is the middle range in which most people find themselves.
  • Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (1983), p. 135

• If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden

• How is the individual related to the species? How is the part related to the whole? How is the one related to the many? How is he or she as a whole related to everything in his or her make-up? A great part of the dialogues of Plato, for instance, consists of experiments and explorations about this group of questions.
  • H. G. Wells, "Chapter VI". Living Philosophies. Simon & Schuster. 1931. p. 83. 

• Autonomy
• Conformity
• Independence
• Individualism