Individualization and the Ideal of Self-Realization in Conditions of Reflexive Modernity

Ciprian Turcan

doi:10.26552/com.c.2018.1a.3-7

Abstract

Individualization as a modernization social phenomenon is of a highly ambivalent character. On the one hand, it represents the emancipation of individuals from general pressures of the society, from the traditional relations of domination and material dependence, the reduction of social pressure on the reproduction of traditional, typified social roles and lifestyles associated with social status and gender. On the other hand, individualization leads, under the current conditions, to increasing isolation of individuals in the context of instrumentalized, anonymous and fragmentary social relations and contacts, ultimately to forms of social deprivation. Emancipation creates room for an individual and subjectively gripped biography, for individual subjectively answering the question of good life, which promotes the ideal of individual self-realization as a new ideal of behavior and good life. However, the parallel process of social isolation seriously restricts and distorts the possibilities of its application. Based on this contradiction, this paper focuses on the critical exploration of the ways and forms of applying the ideal of self-fulfillment in contemporary society.

Highlights

The social process of individualization of modern societies and the associated moral individualism are, in the context of moral and social philosophy, the subject of controversial and even contradictory interpretations
The aim of this paper is to examine the critical thesis formulated in this context by Axel Honneth according to which “the claims to individual self-realization which have rapidly multiplied, beginning with the historically unique concatenation of entirely disparate processes of individualization in the Western societies of thirty or forty years ago, have so definitely become a feature of the institutionalized expectations inherent in social reproduction that the particular goals of such claims are lost and they are transmuted into a support of the system’s legitimacy /.../ the processes which once promised an increase of qualitative freedom are altered into an ideology of de-institutionalization” [4, p. 467]
If we have a look at the problem of the individualization of society and abusing of the ideal of self-realization from a wider historical and philosophical perspective, we find out that we are not dealing with a new phenomenon

Summary

Introduction

The social process of individualization of modern societies and the associated moral individualism are, in the context of moral and social philosophy, the subject of controversial and even contradictory interpretations. Conservative, communitarian, and approaches based on the critical theory of society are in principle more cautious and skeptical in the interpretation and evaluation of individualization. They try to point out that the development of modern societies overcomes the traditional forms of dominion, but at the same time it can lead to the emergence of new forms. Contradiction of these interpretations can be illustrated on the theories of Charles Taylor and Christopher Lasch. The intention is to build on Honneth argumentation and to develop it, partly to concretize it and extend it to other context

The rise of individualization and of the ideal of self-realization

Institutionalization of the ideal

Conformal self-realization

Conclusion