One can often imagine that the best growth occurs on one’s own, even during one’s greatest rebellion, but in fact one can only grow as a person while in direct and significant relationships, complementary partnerships with others. A person (Evola) finds one’s true and soulful being in mutual love and communion. Some intellectuals believe that love is more basic to our identity than reason, although not against reason. One can attempt to be an individual alone but will fail to become a person on one’s own.
Redeemed freedom by definition takes on a distinctively communal character; it is contextualized within a conversation, within relationships between fellow interlocutors, against the backdrop of larger narrative that makes sense of self. This is the deep structure of self. Individual freedom gives up sovereignty ground to community and makes space for the Other in order to avoid some of the pitfalls and deficits of radical autonomy. As one gains a stronger identity as a social being, one reaps the benefits. The move is towards a deeper, more complex, communal character of self, a thick self. Foucault articulates freedom as flight from one’s neighbour; the aesthetic self is part fugitive, part manipulator; its context is reduced to a life of contest with the Other (agonisme), manipulating power relations and truth games to one’s own advantage. There is a certain validity to these concerns, but from the perspective of Taylor’s comments (and those of other key thinkers), they lack vision for relationships that are other than a manipulative contest of wills, that is, relations informed by love, compassion and cooperation. Prominent social thinker J. Habermas, in response to Foucault’s ethics as aesthetics argues that the preoccupation with the autonomy or self-mastery is simply a moment in the process of social interaction, which has been artificially isolated or privileged:
Both cognitive-instrumental mastery of an objective nature (and society) and a narcissistically overinflated autonomy (in the sense of purposively rational self-assertion) are derivative moments that have been rendered independent from the communicative structures of the lifeworld, that is, from the intersubjectivity of relationships of mutual understanding and relationships of reciprocal recognition. (Habermas, 1987, p. 315)
In the light of this critical investigation, it is suggested that there is a need to rethink individuality in terms of a reconciliation between self and the Other, self and society, to put it metaphorically, in terms of self and one’s neighbour. The direction of reformulation is the recovery of a social horizon, including a stronger concept of the social body, and the common good; one needs the courage and determination to face the neighbour as a good. A radical pursuit of private self-interest, to the exclusion of the presence and the needs of the Other, is rendered untenable and dysfunctional after this critical dialogue.
Redeemed freedom by definition takes on a distinctively communal character; it is contextualized within a conversation, within relationships between fellow interlocutors, against the backdrop of larger narrative that makes sense of self. This is the deep structure of self. Individual freedom gives up sovereignty ground to community and makes space for the Other in order to avoid some of the pitfalls and deficits of radical autonomy. As one gains a stronger identity as a social being, one reaps the benefits. The move is towards a deeper, more complex, communal character of self, a thick self. Foucault articulates freedom as flight from one’s neighbour; the aesthetic self is part fugitive, part manipulator; its context is reduced to a life of contest with the Other (agonisme), manipulating power relations and truth games to one’s own advantage. There is a certain validity to these concerns, but from the perspective of Taylor’s comments (and those of other key thinkers), they lack vision for relationships that are other than a manipulative contest of wills, that is, relations informed by love, compassion and cooperation. Prominent social thinker J. Habermas, in response to Foucault’s ethics as aesthetics argues that the preoccupation with the autonomy or self-mastery is simply a moment in the process of social interaction, which has been artificially isolated or privileged:
Both cognitive-instrumental mastery of an objective nature (and society) and a narcissistically overinflated autonomy (in the sense of purposively rational self-assertion) are derivative moments that have been rendered independent from the communicative structures of the lifeworld, that is, from the intersubjectivity of relationships of mutual understanding and relationships of reciprocal recognition. (Habermas, 1987, p. 315)
In the light of this critical investigation, it is suggested that there is a need to rethink individuality in terms of a reconciliation between self and the Other, self and society, to put it metaphorically, in terms of self and one’s neighbour. The direction of reformulation is the recovery of a social horizon, including a stronger concept of the social body, and the common good; one needs the courage and determination to face the neighbour as a good. A radical pursuit of private self-interest, to the exclusion of the presence and the needs of the Other, is rendered untenable and dysfunctional after this critical dialogue.