Ethical Individualism

I know I'm not alone in having some long-term "projects" of thought - preoccupations and concerns which are at once bedevilling and edifying, and  persist over decades. They'll probably never be resolved to one's satisfaction; perhaps, though, it's not asking too much to grasp their essential terms more deeply over time.

The character and exigencies of arete - human excellence - are facets of just such a longstanding "enthusiasm." To me, the matter is fascinating for its own sake, as well as needful instrumentally (making the practical practicable). In such cases it's always a happy day to find an author who articulates views which were, at best, inchoate in your own mind - but who manages to say things just as you'd like them to be said. Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism, by David L. Norton, has been a good companion of late; it abounds in assertions that could be profitably cited, repeatedly. Norton is a master of philosophical prose - not the arid stuff of academia - and excels at pithy, insightful formulations. The basic thrust of the book is that ancient eudaimonism is still a live option, philosophically - and that in fact some of the more considered strains in modern psychology (Maslow especially) extend and strengthen the key insights of the ancient teaching.  Along the way the reader is led to consider critically the quasi-eudaimonistic strains in thinkers as diverse as the British Idealists (Bradley, Green), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre - and see how their attacks on core elements of the ethical tradition inaugurated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fail. Anyone who reads me regularly will understand that this is music to my auricles.

Of especial interest is the fact that Norton understands his account to ground a kind of individualism - an "ism" in disrepute with both Left (collectivism) and Right (communitarianism). Those two poles are often likeminded in taking individualism necessarily to be of the "atomistic" (Hobbesian; sc., merely numerical) variety. Norton's eudaimonism claims to establish "qualitative" individualism: each person, ex hypothesi, is obliged to actualize an excellence uniquely his own; to live in truth to his daimon. The social entailment of this doctrine is the "complementarity of excellences," implying the need for counterparts. Hence an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.

What follow are a few citations that strike me as worthy of underscoring - though there's really no common thread beyond that.

"In pre-Hellenic Greece, sculptors made busts of the semi-deity Silenus that had a trick to them. Inside the hollow clay likeness was hidden a golden figurine, to be revealed when the bust was broken open ...Each person is a bust of Silenus containing a golden figurine, his daimon. The person's daimon is an ideal of perfection - unique, individual, and self-identical. It is neither the actual person nor a product of the actual person, yet it is fully real, affording to the actual person his supreme aim and establishing the principle by which the actual person can grow in identity, worth, and being. Prior to the appearance of the person in the world this ideal of perfection is not nothing, for his appearance in the world cannot be a presentation ex nihilo. Instead, its aboriginal status is pure, unactualized possibility. The appearance of the person in the world then constitutes the actualization of that possibility ..."

"... For the locus classicus of the duplicity in human being our source must once again be Plato - this time the famous image in the Phaedrus of the human soul as charioteer with two horses, a white one, which struggles to rise aloft, and a black one, which tries to plunge below. Here the souls of man is represented as a radical equiovcation in being, a relentless argument with itself. Here, too, appears the true form of the much misunderstood priority ascribed to man by classical humanism. Under humanism man appears, not as the supreme being metaphysically or morally, but rather as his own first problem, upon his solution to which rests all hope of his success with other problems."

"Ordinary experience teaches that many people are largely unreliable at doing what they ought; a few are generally reliable; and there are some truly worthy individuals who are unfailingly scrupulous both at doing what they believe they ought and at seeing to it that the ought that appears to them is the true ought. Here is intractable integrity."