On Friday, August 27, 1999 at 18:02:28 (-0700) Ajit Sinha writes: >Rod Hay wrote: > >> "The will has no meaning in isolation. Therefore it does not exist" >> The heart has no meaning in isolation from a body. Therefore it does not >> exist. >> The part has no meaning in isolation from the whole. Therefore it does not >> exist. >> There is something wrong with this logic, Ajit. > >Rod, why don't you quote what people write rather than make up your >own quotations? When did I say "will has no meaning in >isolation. Therefore it does not exist"? Let me try to explain a >simple argument for the nth time. Husband has no existence without a >wife, and vise versa. Neither the husband nor the wife has any >existence outside of the relationship of marriage. Sons have no >existence outside of the relationship of father or/and mother, and >vise versa. Yes, this is quite true, as the Puritan's pointed out using their Ramist logic. See Edmund S. Morgan, *The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England* (Harper & Row, 1944 [1966]). However, the question still remains: are there such things as individuals? You merely define what a subject is (husband, son, pastor, congregation, etc.) pointing out they cannot exist in isolation, which is true but uninteresting and begs the original question. I feel that the creative use of language (for one thing) shows that no matter what the social relation, a person retains a measure of indeterminate behavior. Despite being "incited and inclined" to behave in a certain way as a subject, people often do not. This is to me the very essence of an individual. To say there are "no individuals, only subjects" seems to me to contradict this, simply by assertion I must note. To be a subject, in my view, does not mean one cannot also be an individual (I think this is the very essence of my objection to the preceding quote of yours). To be a subject is to play a particular role, the parameters of which change over time. If the roles change, somebody has got to act, at some point, outside the bounds of these roles, enlarging them or contracting them at some point. This again is evidence of individuality, to my mind. Additionally, even within the roles we are assigned, we might also remind ourselves of problems of commensurability that we have learned studying economics (honestly). To you, to be a husband may mean something totally different to me. If the roles we play are similar, though not identical, this again points to individuality. Bill
