Few ideas seem more obvious than the individual.
Each of us experiences ourselves as a particular person.
We recognise other people as individuals.
Our institutions count individuals.
Our laws protect individuals.
Our moral lives often begin with individuals.
The concept appears so fundamental that it scarcely seems to require explanation.
Yet perhaps we should pause.
What makes an individual an individual?
The question is more difficult than it first appears.
Suppose we begin with the body.
Certainly our bodies distinguish us from one another.
Yet bodies change continuously.
Cells are replaced.
Memories fade.
Abilities develop.
Relationships transform us.
The body contributes to individuality.
But it does not by itself explain it.
Perhaps individuality lies in consciousness.
Again, something important has been recognised.
Yet consciousness itself develops.
It depends upon language.
Upon learning.
Upon relationships.
Upon countless forms of participation extending throughout a lifetime.
It too appears less isolated than we first imagined.
Or perhaps individuality consists in identity.
But identity, as we discovered in the previous series, is not a simple given.
It is itself organised.
The question therefore returns.
What makes individuality possible?
Notice something curious.
A newborn child does not become an individual by first existing in isolation and then entering relationships.
From the very beginning, individuality develops through participation.
Parents.
Family.
Language.
Care.
Culture.
Education.
Friendship.
Conflict.
Memory.
Expectation.
None of these simply surround an already completed individual.
They participate in the continual actualisation of individuality itself.
This observation does not diminish the individual.
Quite the opposite.
It reveals individuality as an extraordinary achievement of organisation.
Each life becomes a distinctive trajectory through innumerable relations.
No two trajectories are identical.
No two patterns of participation coincide completely.
Individuality therefore does not oppose relation.
It emerges through relation.
This helps explain something that has often puzzled us.
We change throughout our lives.
Yet we remain recognisably ourselves.
The continuity does not arise because some hidden essence remains untouched beneath every change.
Nor because every aspect of us remains constant.
Rather, continuity belongs to the ongoing organisation of participation through which a life is actualised.
The organisation persists.
Its actualisations continually change.
Consider a musician.
Years of practice reshape perception itself.
Music becomes differently available.
The person's individuality has changed.
Yet we do not conclude that a different person has replaced the first.
Or consider friendship.
A deep friendship alters both participants.
Each becomes differently organised through the relationship.
Again, individuality has not been lost.
It has been enriched.
Learning provides perhaps the clearest example.
A child learns to read.
Nothing merely accumulates inside the mind.
The world becomes differently organised.
Books become available.
History becomes available.
Science becomes available.
Imagination becomes available.
The child is no longer simply the same individual with more information.
Individuality itself has been transformed.
This is why individuality should not be confused with independence.
The more richly an individual participates in organised reality, the richer individuality may become.
Participation is not the opposite of individuality.
It is one of its conditions.
This observation also changes how we understand responsibility.
If individuality is continually actualised through participation, responsibility cannot belong solely to isolated persons.
Nor can it dissolve entirely into society.
Responsibility itself becomes relational.
Each person participates in organisations that both enable and constrain future actualisations.
The individual therefore neither disappears into the collective nor stands apart from it.
Individuality is the distinctive organisation of participation through which a life becomes its own.
Perhaps this explains why individuality often feels both stable and changing at once.
We remain ourselves.
Yet we continually become.
Neither impression is mistaken.
Each reflects a different perspective upon the same organised life.
The person remains before us.
The conversation continues.
The years pass.
Nothing has changed.
Except that we have begun to notice that individuality is not the possession of an isolated self.
It is the ongoing actualisation of a uniquely organised participation in reality.
The next question now becomes unavoidable.
If individuality emerges through organised participation...
what, then, is society?
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