subject: Analytical Review - "Concepts of Individual, Self and Person in Description and Analysis [print this page] Analytical Review - "Concepts of Individual, Self and Person in Description and Analysis
Individual' refers to people as biological organisms forming a species; self' is the locus of experience and refers to the psychological aspect of individuals; person' refers to the sociological aspect, to human beings as members of society. Different disciplines tend to favour one of these notions. It is necessary to integrate all three in order to have a good understanding of people.
A human being is an individual, but not necessarily a person; personhood requires some achievements, e.g. mastery of language.
The definition of what constitutes individuals is culturally variable; in some cultural settings, humans are believed to take up other forms (e.g. werewolves). There can be different theories about different categories of humans (e.g. conceptualisations of men and women).
The self' refers to the awareness that an individual has of itself. While we cannot experience what it is to be someone else, we have theories about other selves. Here again, there is cultural variation about what constitutes the self, and whether the self is unitary or fragmented.
The person' refers to the individual as agent. Some persons may not be living individuals (e.g. ghosts, supernatural beings, etc.). Being a person is not simply playing a social role. It calls for embodying socially established standards, rights, duties, and expectations.
Ideas about what constitutes the individual, self, and person are not uniform within a society.
We do not necessarily know ourselves better than we know anyone or anything else.
What do we mean by "me"?
Individual' refers to the organism. This changes through time (biologically, psychologically), but in a continuous way (between conception and death).
Self' refers to the psychological experiences which individuals have (of themselves and the rest of the world)
Person' refers to the socially-constituted agent.
The individual is constructed on a genetically-constrained scaffold. Otherwise, there is no general human nature. All three aspects (individual, self, person) are moulded by society and culture.
The individual is modified socially by practices which affect the body: body modification, diet, work, and other environmental influences.
Our psychological experiences are moulded by the settings which have formed us. Our idea of self is not naturally given, but constructed socially and culturally. For instance, in some cultural settings, actions and emotions are thought to have an external agency.
Human beings are intrinsically social.
The definition of what constitutes a human being varies culturally. Each society has its theory of human beings. For instance, there is cultural variation in the notion that people are formed by a body and a soul. Within and across societies, there are different kinds of persons. Societies such as our own, by enshrining individualism, produce a particular kind of agent. The Western conceptualisation of the individual is related to the division of labour of industrial societies and an instrumental relationship to nature. Social definitions of age and gender also vary.
Human agency
In social theory, there has been a polar opposition between society and individual. Some people try to explain social life from the starting point of individualism: they assume that each individual makes independent choices and that the sum of these choices brings about social regularities. Others start from the opposite end: they assume that societies produce and mould individuals so that they are functioning parts of the society. This approach considers that ethnic groups, classes, and even nations are social actors.
To resolve this opposition, we must start by describing what really happens. The starting point is the actions themselves. We first identify an action, then identify the agents of that action. When we do so, we will see that neither individuals nor societies are starting points. In many cases, actions are carried out by several people, who together constitute a single agent. Secondly, any given action does not mobilise every aspect of the individuals involved in the action.
Self-interest
In trying to identify social agents, we need to consider the issue of individualism further. Is individual self-interest a starting point? Even if we assume that every individual is motivated by self-interest, there is still room for variation between individuals on the basis of knowledge, circumstances, and intellectual abilities.
In practice, the hypothesis of individual self-interest is less evident than it seems. First of all, individual self-interest is often about other people. We do not simply compete about things. If we did, selfish self-interest could be an adequate explanation. But if we want other people to act in a particular way towards us, or think of us in a particular way, then we are in a more complicated situation. The fact that we want things or actions from others forces us to take into consideration the desires of other actors. Hence, self-interest must include an evaluation of other people's interests. Secondly, we often want from other people their appreciation, affection, support, etc. Even if we have a starting point of selfishness, it follows that other people's interests become my interest.
Self-interest is based on what we have learned from others. Hence, self-interest cannot be explained at the level of the individual. A person who wants to have an expensive car is acting in his own self-interest. From an economic view-point, his desire is stupid: getting a $60,000 car will not bring you to your destination three times as efficiently as a $20,000 car. The action takes its meaning because of the prestige involved in owning the expensive car. The buyer has internalised other people's evaluations and these constitute an element of his behaviour.
In any case, we cannot assume that individual self-interest is a universal explanation. Both self-interest and altruism have biological and social aspects. For instance, it seems likely that the protective behaviour of some birds and other animals towards their offspring is genetically transmitted; this behaviour has obvious selective advantage for the species, even if it is dangerous for the mother.
Among humans, self-interest and altruism are largely learned in a social context. People learn to co-operate because they overtly or covertly learn it is the right thing to do. In many cases, self-interest is identical to collective interest. For instance, when individuals (esp. children) move to an area where a different dialect or language is dominant, they pick it up rapidly because they find it to their advantage to blend in. More generally, the evolution of languages involves the convergence of many individuals' self-interest, organised by various social forces (e.g. prestigious individuals will influence the linguistic behaviour of others).
Kinds of action
If we are dealing with agency, it may be useful to define some basic concepts. Thought is a kind of activity (We must reject the opposition between thought and action). Perception is also an activity. The distinctions between thought, perception, and motor activity simply focus on different facets of action; most activities are inconceivable without all three. Communication is another kind of activity, which is fragmented into separate discourses. Each discourse has a series of features which establish its boundaries, the nature of its participants, and its articulation with other discourses.
Discourses have a life of their own, distinct from the individuals who participate in them. For instance, scientific discoveries are not in a simplistic way the result of individual endeavours. For instance, Mendel's work, published in 1865, was ignored, but in 1900, three biologists rediscovered the laws of genetics independently of each other, without a knowledge of Mendel.
Knowledge is largely social because we exist socially.
Agents
People become agents by participating in activities, as well as by being acted upon. Thus, agents are more than simple actors. Someone becomes a poet by doing what poets do. Students become lawyers, doctors and accountants both by studying and because the education system moulds them into particular kinds of agents.
Individuals become who they are through interaction. What makes each of us who we are is an assemblage of schemas, models, and scenarios. We have a number of social identities (For instance, someone may be a physician, a wife, and an amateur of science fiction novels). Social identities form poles in social identity relationships, to which are attached rights, duties, privileges, powers, liabilities, and immunities. Various social identity relationships can be combined with each other in specific ways. As a physician, she is part of the social identity relationships physician-patient, physician-nurse, physician-physician, etc. As a science fiction reader, she has social identity relationships with booksellers, authors of science-fiction, etc. Procedures may establish when that person must give precedence to one identity over another. Individuals gain a social identity by taking part in the appropriate scenarios.
Social identities are different in each society.
The integration of the individual
The common-sensical view is that every human being is a small organized universe of knowledge and action. We recognise that this organization is accidental (each person integrates a number of unrelated roles), but we feel that there is a totality. This is partially true of the individual as a biological organism, which is organized (through a genetic code which is specific to it) and persists through time, with small, gradual, changes which give the impression of a fairly stable entity travelling through time. Our memories also provide a feeling of continuing self-identity.
Individuals have a feeling of identity and a degree of autonomy. However, this feeling of self-identity is not biologically given, but a socio-cultural construct. It is important to study conceptualisations of the self, but from that it does not follow that individuals are the agents of action.
What we do and know does not affect us as a totality. A person is composed of several autonomous sectors which can exist independently of each other. A person's knowledge is not integrated, but rather a series of statements which remain independent of each other unless steps are taken to articulate them.
In our daily life, we constantly shift from one to another province of meaning, each of which has its own structure. E.g. being awake vs. being asleep; daydreaming and make-believe; the separate reality created in a film or a stage play. Each province of meaning has an internal consistency, but distinct provinces of meaning may or may not be compatible.
We can hold contradictory views simultaneously or sequentially. People change their minds about various issues. In some cases, the changes are so radical that we can't really say that we are still dealing with the same person.
The notion of a person who is "the same" through time is not based only on biological continuity. The continuity of the person is a social fact: without it, no contracts would be possible. Contracts identify social agents who are committed to some actions as circumstances change. This legal continuity exists to counteract our experiential discontinuity.
The link between agent and thinking
Individuals are not integrated agents, but assemblages of ideas, beliefs, and actions which coexist but do not form a coherent system. Not only are individuals not integrated, they are not the agents of thinking and knowledge in the first place. In other words, thinking is not an individual activity, although we think it is.
When two people are moving a table, both of them are moving the whole table. We do not say that each of them is moving half a table. There is a single agent to the action, the two individuals carrying the table. Some activities are impossible without team work.
Thinkers can be, and often are, trans-individual agents. Verbal thinking (ideas which are formulated with words and can be expressed through language) has necessarily a social aspect because of the social nature of language. Silent thought is internalised speech. As we learn to speak, we first speak out loud only. Then we learn to think without vocalising. Thought derives from communication.
Who are the trans-individual agents of thought? The activity of committees is an example of co-operative thinking. Committees can develop different thoughts than would be produced by the same individuals thinking about the same issue independently of each other. In committee work, an idea is passed along, developed, and the end product is the product of a team effort.
There are many other situations where the agent is trans-individual. If we pay attention to the process of thinking, we will recognise that it usually involves several individuals. There is no good reason for refusing to see thinking as a co-operative activity in the same way as other productive tasks. We resist doing so because the concept of trans-individual agent runs counter to the common-sensical notion of agent, which we conceive of as a (human) biological organism which exists in a continuous fashion from birth to death. It also goes against the social practice of assigning responsibility for actions to a specific individual.
If we recognise that agents are not individuals, we have to rethink our model of agency. To take the example of the committee, it is summoned into being according to schedules; it maintains an existence through changes in its personnel. We can refuse to see a committee as a trans-individual agent only by making the a priori assumption that only discrete biological units think. We have already seen that the individual is not a continuing thinking unit; while he or she may go on living, there may be no continuity in his or her thoughts (e.g. Pascal). This is no different from trans-individual agents, which are active only from time to time.
The common-sensical view of the self is supported by linguistic realism, i.e. the idea that words must represent entities. From this view, it is assumed that the words I', me', myself', must all correspond to an entity, which is The Self. There is no such correspondence between language and reality (One of the features of language is that we are able to tell untruths). These words are simply linguistic markers, like here' and there'. Nothing is intrinsically "here"; here' is a shorthand for "the area near the speaker of the word here'". In the same way, I' refers to the speaker of the sentence which includes I'.
If we recognise the fragmentation of the person, it may become easier to recognise how people, in given contexts, may coalesce into trans-individual agents. For instance, while small-scale peasants can hardly be expected to favour collective ownership of agricultural resources, the same individuals may come to support it after moving to the city and becoming industrial workers.
Committees are trans-individual agents who come together at the same time. Other trans-individual agents act at different times; we might call this sequential team-work. One person does something, which someone else develops and carries further, and so on. The progress of modern science is an example of this. We also know that authors cannot in any simplistic way be seen as independent agents. People become authors by inserting themselves into a discourse and following its rules, or, occasionally, by modifying the rules in ways which are compatible with the discourse, or, more rarely, by breaking the rules to produce a new discourse for which there is an audience.
We think by inserting ourselves in a discourse; we fit ourselves to it, and we are thinkers as long as we are part of it. Contrary to common sense, thinking is not a private or an individual activity. By moving from one discourse to another, we join trans-individual agents in progress.
Individual and agent
Self-knowledge is trans-individual.
It requires us to consider ourselves as subject and object. In private thought, when we are considering both sides of an issue, we are in practice dividing ourselves into two agents who enter in a dialogue.
Self-knowledge is the knowledge of our participation in trans-individual agents.
Each kind of activity has a set of rules or practices; as we shift from one action to the other, we follow another set of procedures. This does not mean that, at the core of each individual, there is an essential "I" which regulates the transition from one activity to the other. Specific agents are brought into being by other agents (which can be part of the self' or trans-individual).
From our feeling of self-identity, it does not follow that each of us is a separate, organized small universe; rather, this feeling is our perception of being part of several trans-individual agents. Individuation is a process to which we are subjected (Others make us into persons); by being subjected to those pressures, we make ourselves into acting agents, who subject themselves to pressures which attempt to develop this integration.
A focus on trans-individual agents may help us understand better a number of issues. For instance, when we analyse the relationships between men and women, the description is incomplete if it assumes that men and women are always distinct actors with distinct interests; in some cases, they are part of the same agent, e.g. the domestic unit.
A focus on trans-individual agents allows us to rethink the issue of belief. Sometimes, people behave as if they believe in something, and sometimes not. In the same conversation, someone might come up with a statement like "Live and let live", while a few minutes later, he will engage in racist rhetoric. While we are dealing with a single speaker, we are faced with different agents who hold different views because they have different interests.
In some situations, an individual may be unaware of shifting from one agent to another. In other situations, the shift is self-evident, and this may bring about some further action to co-ordinate the two agents.
