Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.