The Failure of Individuation: Introduction

Across philosophy, biology, social theory, and everyday thought, we treat individuals as the fundamental units of existence. We assume they generate stability, define identity, and underpin agency. We rely on counting them, naming them, and granting them autonomy.

This series argues otherwise. It does not deny persistence, coherence, or action. It does not claim that individuals are illusions. Instead, it makes a subtler, more precise claim:

Individuation does not generate stability. Identity does not require boundaries. Counting presupposes cuts. Autonomy is a narrative stabiliser.

Across five posts, we will examine these claims calmly, systematically, and rigorously:

1. Individuation as a Retrospective Illusion — showing that what we call individuals are inferred after stability emerges.

2. The Collective as Primary Potential — establishing that collectives are ontologically prior, and local stabilisations are perspectival actualisations.

3. Identity Without Boundaries (Identity as Stabilised Relation) — reframing identity as relational coherence, not enclosure.

4. Why Counting Presupposes a Cut — revealing that numeracy depends on cuts and stabilisations, not pre-existing units.

5. The Myth of the Autonomous Individual — explaining why autonomy persists as a concept without requiring metaphysical foundation.

Taken together, the series quietly but systematically removes the explanatory scaffolding traditionally attributed to individuals and autonomous agents. What remains is a framework for understanding identity, collectivity, numeracy, and agency that is relational, perspectival, and grounded in actualised potential — not in metaphysical primitives.

This is not a polemic. It is a clarification: a reordering of explanation so that stability is first, and inference comes afterward. By the end, the world may look familiar, but the structures we rely on to describe it will have shifted irrevocably.