Imperfect Garden by Todorov Tzvetan;

Author:Todorov, Tzvetan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Chapter 6

The Individual : PLURALITY AND UNIVERSALITY

The humanists have shown that the devil’s first threat was empty: life with others is not the price we pay for liberty. The autonomy of the I does not force each individual to isolate himself and cut himself off from other men. But as we know the devil has other cards up his sleeve: he also claims that this individual who boasted about becoming the subject of his own actions was in reality impressionable, fickle, distracted—a thoroughfare rather than a coherent being.

The autonomy of the individual can in fact be understood as having a double meaning: in relation to the larger entities that contain him, or in relation to those smaller ones that create him. The great French humanists, from Montaigne to Tocqueville, believed in the possibility of the freedom of modern man in relation to his particular community. This does not prove that he can meet a second challenge from the other side unscathed. For if the individual is merely a bundle of multiple characters over which he has no control, if he is merely the label haphazardly slapped onto a series of discontinuous states, if he can never take ad-vantage of any unity, can we still speak of his autonomy? Having es-caped the grip of the powers he should have served, doesn’t man risk succumbing to the elements that should serve him? Wouldn’t the appropriate price for the enjoyment of freedom be the dissolution of that man who was meant to become the beneficiary of the pact?

The internal analysis of the person will be conducted by humanist thought, not within the framework of a general theory, but in the mar-gins of self-knowledge. Montaigne and Rousseau embody, in France, its two decisive moments, prompting unexpected developments in humanist doctrine.

Man, Diverse and Undulating

The idea that the particular being is multiple has been understood in two different ways: on the one hand, as a variation in time, a segmentation of life, modifications in a “horizontal” unfolding we call inconsistency; on the other hand, as a simultaneous multiplicity, in space and no longer in time, and more specifically, as a stratification of the inner being, which is this time dissected “vertically.”

What is the cause of “spatial” plurality? Montaigne straightaway points to the answer by encapsulating the plurality of men and the plurality of inner man in the same analysis. The exchange in which we are engaged with others can be pursued within ourselves. “You and one companion are an adequate theatre for each other, or you for yourself” (Essays, I, 39, 182). The interior dialogue is set on the same level as the dialogue that unfolds outside, the internal plurality is similar to that which surrounds us. “And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others” (II, 1, 244). If this interior dialogue is possible, that is because I am multiple in myself, or as Montaigne says: “We have a soul that can be turned upon itself” (I, 39, 177).

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