Are You Really An Individual?

In what sense are we truly separate from other people?

One of the most powerful ideas in the Western world is that a person is an individual. 

The notion runs through our culture and politics, affecting them in good ways and bad. 

On one hand, the notion of the individual feeds into our highest ideals: human dignity, human rights, and the freedom of each of us to find our own way in life. 

On the other hand, excessive individualism weakens community and familial bonds and amplifies problems like depression, loneliness, and selfishness. It encourages us to see ourselves as free of obligations, pursuing only our own happiness.

Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, neatly illustrated this when she famously said: “Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women.”

It’s undoubtedly a powerful sentiment. However, there may be a much fuller and more fulfilling way to think of ourselves—one that could even change society for the better.

Being with others

In some cultures around the world, people conceive of themselves not as individuals but rather as persons intimately connected to their family, their community, and their wider society. 

The sense that there is no me without we is particularly strong in East Asian nations such as Japan and China. Even if we don’t fully endorse the idea, simply bearing it in mind is a helpful corrective to the excesses of Western individualism.

After all, in what sense are we truly separate from other people?

For one thing, everybody who ever lived came into being through the actions of other people (or three, in the case of ‘three-parent babies,’ a small number of whom have been born since the 1990s via reproductive technology). Each of us then gestated in our mothers’ wombs, and even after we entered the world and physically separated from our mothers, we relied on the continual care of adults for our survival.

Moreover, even as adults ourselves, most of us would struggle to survive, or stay sane, without the company and assistance of other people. Think of Tom Hanks in Castaway, anthropomorphising his volleyball Wilson out of sheer loneliness.

Now, somebody might object to this by saying that being an individual isn’t about survival. What matters, they might say, is that I'm a distinct self, clearly demarcated from any other.

But is this really true?

Me and You

Some philosophers have tried to show that the only true way of understanding ourselves is in relation to the world—which includes other people. 

One of the greatest advocates of this idea is Martin Buber (1878–1965), the Austrian-Jewish philosopher and Hasidic scholar. According to Buber, there are two basic ways in which each of us lives in communion with the world. 

The first he calls the “I–It combination.” This is the way in which we experience objects in the world: using a phone, say, or counting money. We are active, and the thing is passive.

The second is what Buber calls the “I–Thou combination.” This is when we open ourselves up to another person and form a connection with them. In this case, I’m not an active subject confronting a passive object, but rather part of a relationship, one link in a chain formed with other people. 

What’s essential for Buber is that there is no standalone I. For the entirety of our lives, we either experience Its or form relations with Thous—and as we switch between these two modes, I change accordingly. Buber says that when I experience an It I am a mere individual, whereas when I form a relation with somebody else, I am much more: a person.

The upshot is that—no matter how much of an individual you might think you are—we’re all, in fact, forged by things and other people, and so constantly oscillate between being an individual and being a person.

Becoming a person

Even though Buber’s great book I and Thou was published exactly a century ago, in 1923, the world he lived in was similar to our own. In particular, Buber observes that our culture primarily encourages us to be individuals who actively forge a path through the world rather than people who exist with others.

One of the problems with this imbalance is that we’re less inclined to see others for what they really are. We’re liable to experience them as though they were an It, by objectifying them, treating them as a mere means to our individual ends. Think, for example, of how we might compete with colleagues at work rather than work with them or order a waiter around at a restaurant rather than treating them with respect. As Buber says, this tendency threatens to shrink the I–Thou connection for us, diminishing our lives accordingly. 

What we must do, according to Buber, is resist the urge to constantly individualise ourselves and treat others as though they were Its. If we manage to do this, he says, we’ll increasingly share in a space that neither belongs solely to us nor lies outside us. It’s a relational space that instead exists between two or more people, and it’s there that we reach our full potential.

So are you an individual? Buber would say yes, you are—some of the time. But we should be careful not to be an individual all the time—because, in truth, we are much more.