I admit it – the name of this blog was taken from a blog name generator web service. But when it proposed me this word – dividual – I remembered I actually have a beef with the concept called “individual”. You see, it just means “indivisible” in Latin. In Greek that would be “atomos”. So the idea of the “individual” means our minds should be seen as indivisible, atomic units that do not consist of parts. But of course, EVERY psychology ever, from Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul to Freud or Jung or Adler is precisely about HOW exactly our minds consist of parts.
I think the major issue is that the idea of the “indivisible” mind means that human beings have one unified will. It is fairly obviously false – parts of us have conflicting wills, such as one part of us wants to lose weight while another part wants to eat that cake.
To put it bluntly, this makes me less upset about coercion. If you would force me to not eat that cake, then the part of me that wants to eat it would feel frustrated, the part of me that wants to lose weight would thank you, and a third part, let’s call it pride, would be upset about not being treated like an adult. So my feelings would be more mixed than 100% opposed to that external coercion.
This doesn’t mean I oppose libertarianism or support modern statist coercion. Let me put it this way, I find much of libertarianism OK in practice, I just disagree with the individualistic the philosophy behind it. Not being so staunchly opposed to the theoretical concept of coercion does not mean I like the typical ways how it is done today, who does it, to whom, for what purposes, how often, by what means etc. But I guess that would make a longer post and now I just wanted to explain the “dividual” term.
I have to add one thing. Perhaps some readers will think that denying that human beings have unified will means denying personal responsibility and with that rewards, punishments, the logic of capitalism and so on. I think it is not so. At least I am a pragmatic guy: I don’t necessary want incentives etc. to be just, it is enough if they work. And all too often they work precisely through the idea that we don’t have unified will: if part of me wants to be productive and part of me doesn’t, paying me to be productive strengthens the will of the first part and weakens the will of the second, making the first part win. How would even incentives work if we really had this mythical unified indivisible will? Suppose I don’t want to be productive, with a 100% unified will. Then I would just lazy around and stubbornly refuse to be productive no matter what happens, even if I starve to death. Don’t you find? For an external incentive to change my behavior, I need at least a little bit of disagreement inside myself, and then the incentive latches onto it.
Although of course it means punishing a whole person, a whole body, is something sort of a primitive solution and we use it only because we don’t have a better one. Ideally, we should be only punishing the part of the person that has the will to do bad things. Punishing not the criminal as such, but the inner criminal in him. How that could be done I don’t really know. Perhaps this is what the religious stuff about confession and repentance is about. Overally, I think society can only be organized on the basis of rewarding and punishing whole persons, unless someone has a really, really clever idea here.
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