Particularity and Individuality

Definition

The central anthropological distinction of Agnes Heller's Everyday Life. Particularity is the human being as born with given qualities, capabilities and a particular viewpoint — the subject who maintains and reproduces themselves by taking the ready-made world as datum. Particularity is an ontological fact (uniqueness, non-repeatability), but particularistic motivation — subordinating everything to self-preservation — is socially produced and historically variable. Only a few affects are purely particularistic (envy, vanity, cowardice; then jealousy and selfishness); we-awareness can be just as particularistic as self-awareness. Individuality is not a possession but a development: "the coming-to-be of the individual begins where the acceptance of the ready-made ends" (Heller, p. 20). The individual is "that person who synthesizes within himself the contingent singularity of particularity and the generality of the species" (p. 20) — only the individual has self-consciousness, "self-awareness as relayed from consciousness of species-essence" (p. 21). Crucially, "no hard and fast line can be drawn" between the two: even the developed individual retains particularity (p. 15). Under alienation, "particularity is the subject of alienated everyday life" (p. 14) — Heller's claim is not that the everyday must be particularistic, but that in class society it has been.

Key Thinkers

• Agnes Heller — the systematic theory: particularity as the subject of everyday life; individuality as its conscious transcendence; moral individuality (humanizing one's inborn qualities into a normative exemplar) as the highest type.
• Karl Marx — the source distinction: the "particular relation" (man as simple existence) vs the "individual relation" (man developing his essential powers) in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; alienation as the emptying-out of individual existence and the efflorescence of the species at the expense of persons.
• Georg Lukács — the Budapest School backdrop (species-essentiality in the Aesthetics); referenced but not the object of a dedicated treatment here.

Related Concepts

• Species-Essentiality — the generic pole against which individuality is constituted; individuality is a conscious relationship with it.
• Everyday Life — the terrain where particularity reproduces itself, and where the individual orders a life.
• Objectivation 'In Itself' and 'For Itself' — the individual orders everyday life via objectivations 'for itself' (science, art, philosophy, morals).
• Homogenization — the sifting of particularity that marks emergence from the everyday.
• Doxa and Epistémē — 'blind faith' is the particularistic person's belief; 'trust' is the individual's.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — the primary source: the breakdown of the 'person' concept (ch. 2), the theory of individuality as development and synthesis, moral individuality, and the hierarchy of particularistic affects.
• 'Everyday Life:' a sui generis ontology? (Paolucci 2015) — the secondary reading of Heller's particularity/objectivation framework.
• The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski 2000) — Felski's reconstruction of the everyday presupposes (without elaborating) Heller's account of who the everyday subject is.
• The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook 2002) — names the "dialectical" tradition (Aristotle to Schutz, incl. Heller) whose normative subject Colebrook deconstructs.

Open Questions

• If individuality is always "relative autonomy" (choice within a field of limited alternatives), can a collective — a class, a movement — be an individual in Heller's sense, or is individuality irreducibly personal?
• Heller's four purely particularistic affects (envy, vanity, cowardice, jealousy/selfishness) — how would this list fare against contemporary affect theory, and against psychoanalysis's accounting of self-interest?
• Does the gendered history of 'individuality' (Renaissance onwards, as Heller notes) complicate her claim that individuality is a development available to persons in democratic communities?