The Individual and Society

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 individual 1 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 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.