certain durability, but are also open to change. The concept of life projects seems helpful in trying to escape the twin risks of cultural determinism and randomness. Whereas sociological thinking tends to think of stable patterns of personal behaviour in terms of dispositions, Sartre opts for the more voluntarist concept of inclinations. Inclinations may change as a pure result of an act of will. Sartre thus argues that character traits that result from interactions with the environment are freely chosen responses to one’s situation or facticity. This is what is meant by his early slogan “existence precedes essence”.
In a famous paradoxical formulation Sartre defines the “human reality” as “a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is”.7 What Sartre wants to express here is essentially a kind of open individualism, in which the key point about the person is not his or her attitudes or behaviour in the here and now, but his or her ability – and I guess Sartre would whisper likelihood – to change from one moment to the next. Therefore it is also true to say that the person “is not what it is”.
In my view this perspective offers a much more promising dynamic conception of Political Man than the social constructivist view with its somewhat obscure assumptions regarding the interplay between structure and agency. Sartre’s theory helps us grasp the many known instances of changes in meaning caused by individual choices and actions. This of course prompts the question, how the incessant struggle for authenticity and the realisation of projects on the part of both individuals and cultures can be reconciled with mutual recognition, social communication and indeed societal stability. It would seem that Sartre’s theory of freedom is compatible with the idea of a “private language”, a notion rejected by i.a. Wittgenstein. In this debate Sartre would seem to have the stronger argument, since it is not evident that all language is social. It is true that acquiring a language involves a social dimension; but the evolution of language would appear not always to be a social process. Indeed, some of the problems in contemporary Western societies might be related to growing fragmentation in patterns of meaning as a result of human beings having become more aware of their innate, expressive freedom.
To be a Self requires a minimum of permanence and coherence of personality. How is this achieved? Here a lot can be learned from revisiting Henri Bergson’s philosophy. The key proposition in his thinking is that beneath the social Self (le moi superficial) there is a deeper, inner Self (le moi profond). While our everyday Self is characterized by space, our inner Self is characterized by duration, a key concept in Bergson’s thinking. In Seigel’s interpretation … “to say that the mind exists in the mode of duration is to envision its life as flowing along like a stream, all the parts of which course in and out of each other”.8 Thus our memories and experiences cannot be neatly divided into parts and arranged as a series of chronological numbers. The personal life of duration consists of experiences that flow into each other like the notes in a melody. The inner life of duration is always on the way to formation and veiled by social relations and it has to be recovered. Intuition plays a key role in the mental operation giving access to this spiritual realm. Here Bergson accords artistic vision an important role9. In moments of free action the Self gathers up all its part in a single unity, which may pave the way for artistic genius or political revolution. Memory and imagination are seen as the great unifiers in life. Every person fights to penetrate the shell of social life in order to get access to the durable Self. Individuals suffer from a fundamental duality and many remain caught up in habits and postpone the act of will, by which they recover their inner self. Much like Sartre Bergson calls upon the individual to temporarily withdraw from relations with the world, so that social relations may no longer impede his or her genuine mode of existence. Although at times Bergson’s writings can be read as a downgrading of the role of reflection, it is more accurate to interpret him as arguing in favour of an extended rationality. When Bergson talks about “good sense” it characteristically is on the side of both reason and feeling.10
Following John Stuart Mill and Merleau-Ponty, one can furthermore say in a modification of Sartre’s position that the development of character provides the anchor necessary to give the personality a positive dimension and thus an autonomy, which is more than simply a rebellious cry in the wilderness. Quoting Buchan … “character provides the inner strength, resourcefulness and purpose by which continued dependence upon external sources can be replaced with the search for, but perhaps never the complete achievement of self-reliance and self-determination”.11 This basic position of course implies the falsehood of any form of psychological determinism. A modified Sartrean view would hold e.g. that only some character traits are rooted in projects, while others are not.
Obviously, a number of objections can be made to these and more traditional individualist claims. Modern anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz have insisted upon the importance of the cultural sphere understood as the mechanisms operating in the area between inherent human capacity and actual human accomplishments. Geertz’s first major objection to the universalist claim, which refers to the timeless nature of many artistic works, is that men unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist. His second objection takes the form of a counter-claim with the proposition that culture is best seen as a set of control mechanisms for the governing of behaviour.12 These mechanisms are argued to help Man find his way in the darkness of a confusing world. Geertz’s reflections may seem convincing at first sight, but suffer from major flaws: First of all, his theory is rather compilatory; it aggregates a number of discreet analytic dimensions in a less than transparent fashion. Thus it is unclear what the relative importance is of each layer of control. Secondly, like all systemic thinking his theory tends to reify the holistic and underestimate the scope for individual choice in cultural matters. To make the search for meaning synonymous with the fear of chaos makes the whole theory rather banal and difficult to falsify. There is a certain tension and ambiguity in Geertz’s thinking, because elsewhere he warns against a purely custom-oriented understanding of culture, which he – rightly in my view – senses risks losing sight of Man altogether.13 Geertz is both a holistic collectivist and a holistic subjectivist claiming that the “politics of meaning” are anarchic and that “the most critical decisions in public life” are in fact made in “the unformalized realms of what Durkheim called the “collective consciousness”.14 Here surprisingly he comes out as a pure Durkheimian. There is little scope in this theory for human autonomy. Thirdly, and most importantly, Geertz’ s theory is essentially static and probably also ethnocentric in a non-European sense. For instance he does not consider the cultural implications of a globalization that makes most of Mankind less bound to – and hence less influenced by – place.
One of the most individualistic and, in my view, most promising conceptions of nationality is found in France in the guise of the 19th century historian, Ernest Renan. His Republican views on nationality are close to the position I call integrism. The difference has to do with the excessive rationalism in Republican thinking. It assumes that citizens are rational and will be responsive to the appeal of reason; hence the expectation that nations can be constructed by a remote and enlightened elite. In Renan’s words … “let us not abandon the fundamental principle that man is a rational and moral being before he is penned up in this or that language; before he is a member of this or that race; before he adheres to this or that culture. Look at the great men of the Renaissance. They were neither French, Italian, nor German”.15 One notes the double definition of Political Man as both rational and moral and the underlying individualism of Renan’s thinking. His thinking is not devoid of spirituality, but the focus is on memory rather than cultural expression as a source
