The Individual and Society

  • Hugo Strandberg
Chapter

Abstract

Is it possible to come to know oneself? Is it possible to overcome the difficulties on one’s own? ‘If self-knowledge is about moral goodness, isn’t there social conditions of its possibility? If so, isn’t your understanding of self-knowledge thereby rejected, for in that case self-knowledge isn’t only (or even primarily) my own business? And if we use the concept of responsibility: it is society that has, at least partly, made me into who I am, hasn’t it, and doesn’t this mean that the responsibility for who I am is never entirely mine?’ Kierkegaard in particular is sometimes criticized in this way, criticized for having a naive idea about the individual1 and her relation to society.2 Being oneself is impossible and there is no such thing as being oneself, it is said; an individual is who she is through society. In particular, language is stressed: my way of thinking about myself is linguistic through and through, and language is not mine but a social phenomenon. The ways of expression handed down to me through society determine what I am, and am not, able to think. Consequently, it is naive to lay a heavy stress on one’s own standpoints and one’s own responsibility for these. Slavoj Žižek writes:

The subject can exonerate himself from responsibility with regard to the symbolic network of tradition which overdetermines his speech; he is justified in claiming: ‘I am not the true author of my statements, since I merely repeat the performative patterns I grew up into — it is the big Other which effectively speaks through me’.3

Keywords

Moral Responsibility Linguistic Expression Formative Context French Revolution Moral Goodness 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    (cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed: En ligefrem Meddelelse, Rapport til Historien, in Bladartikler, der staar i Forhold til “Forfatterskabet”; Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed; Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964), 18:153).)Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    See Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 281.Google Scholar
  3. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, in vol. 4 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), § 99Google Scholar
  4. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. 2, Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft, 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 177Google Scholar
  5. Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 3.
    Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 93.Google Scholar
  7. 4.
    However, this interlocutor is not made up, but mainly based on a paper by John Christman (‘Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom’, Ethics 101 (1991): 343–59).Google Scholar
  8. Kierkegaard (Afsluttende uvidenska-belig Efterskrift, 2 vols, Samlede Værker 9–10 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1963), 1:162–3) makes fun of the idea of such criteria by telling a story about a man saying ‘the earth is round’ every time a ball he has put in the tail of his coat bumps him.Google Scholar
  9. 8.
    Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 195–6.Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    (See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise: Ein dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Aufzügen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 101 (my translation)) The ironical meaning of this saying, when read in the context of the play, should however be noted.Google Scholar
  11. 11.
    For this issue, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit; On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), above all §§ 27, 52, 81, 94, 105, 138, 143, 160, 476.Google Scholar
  12. 15.
    Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Wie weit schreibt Sprache das Denken vor?’, in Hermeneutik II, Gesammelte Werke 2 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986), 206 (my translation).Google Scholar
  13. 16.
    Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 112.Google Scholar
  14. 18.
    Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 197.Google Scholar
  15. 19.
    Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18.Google Scholar
  16. 20.
    Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15.Google Scholar
  17. 22.
    Robert Kurz, Blutige Vernunft: Essays zur emanzipatorischen Kritik der kapitalistischen Moderne und ihrer westlichen Wert e (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2004), 221 (my translation).Google Scholar
  18. 23.
    Compare Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 13th ed. (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1914), 7 (my translation): ‘The idea of the future, full of an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fertile than the future itself, and it is therefore one finds more charm in hope than in possession, in dream than in reality.’Google Scholar
  19. 24.
    Bertolt Brecht, Die Mutter (1933), in vol. 3 of Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 265 (my translation).Google Scholar
  20. 25.
    Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 235–6.Google Scholar
  21. 26.
    See Karl Marx, ‘Lohn, Preis und Profit’, in vol. 16 of Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), 148; and Marx, Das Kapital, 185, 246–7.)Google Scholar
  22. 27.
    Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 14.Google Scholar
  23. 28.
    Martin Buber, Das Problem des Menschen, 7th ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007), 167 (my translation).Google Scholar
  24. See also Martin Buber, Das dialogische Prinzip, 12th ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2012), e.g. pp. 18–19, 41, 121, 276.Google Scholar
  25. 29.
    Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 127.Google Scholar
  26. 31.
    Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, in vol. 13 of Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1961), 9 (my translation).Google Scholar
  27. 32.
    Which, of course, does not mean that what meaning it has for us is a matter of course. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 157–8: ‘Nowhere is the dictum that “every history is a history of the present” more true than in the case of the French Revolution: its historiographical reception has always closely mirrored the twists and turns of political struggles.’Google Scholar
  28. 33.
    Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in vol. 42 of Marx Engels Werke, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 2005), 127 (my translation).Google Scholar
  29. 34.
    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in vol. 3 of Marx Engels Werke, 4th ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1969), 26–7 (my translation).Google Scholar
  30. 36.
    Compare Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in vol. 8 of Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1960), 115 (my translation): ‘Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it out of free parts, not under circumstances that they have chosen themselves but under circumstances that are immediately found, given and handed down.’Google Scholar
  31. 38.
    Anselm Jappe, Die Abenteuer der Ware: Für eine neue Wertkritik (Münster: Unrast, 2005), 181 (my translation).Google Scholar
  32. Max Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 7th ed. ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988), 167Google Scholar
  33. and Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Werkausgabe 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), 176.Google Scholar
  34. 39.
    For this distinction, see Sören Stenlund, Language and Philosophical Problems (London: Routledge, 1990), e.g. pp. 67–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  35. 40.
    For an interesting discussion of this and of what it takes to come to understand what they are talking about, see Jakob Meløe, ‘Words and Object’, in Wittgenstein and Contemporary Theories of Language, ed. Paul Henry and Arild Utaker (Bergen: The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 1992), 109–41.Google Scholar
  36. 44.
    See Hugo Strandberg, Escaping My Responsibility: Investigations into the Nature of Morality (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), in particular Chapter 2.Google Scholar
  37. 45.
    An example of this is to be found in Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, ed. Helmuth Nürnberger (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995).Google Scholar
  38. 46.
    For this paragraph, see Elizabeth Wolgast, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
  39. 47.
    See H. C. Andersen, ‘Kejserens nye klæder’, in Samlede Eventyr og Historier (Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 2012), 81.Google Scholar
  40. 48.
    Brecht’s famous line — ‘Food comes first, after that morality’ (Die Dreigroschenoper (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 69 (my translation)) — is often understood too literally, and remorse for what I have done during times of distress would then make no sense.Google Scholar
  41. (Bertolt Brecht, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder: Eine Chronik aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), scene 11).Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Hugo Strandberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Hugo Strandberg
    • 1
  1. 1.Åbo Akademi UniversityFinland

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