As is true of many of the stories that we tell ourselves, the narrative creates the reality in which that story makes sense and becomes truth. For example, my father likes to tell a story about me, walking down the wooden staircase of my childhood home, stopping midway on a little landing there and declaring that "Nadie Sabe Como Es Mas Mejor," which translates to "Nobody Knows What Is Best." It is a story that helped to explain, after the fact, how I went on to become a philosopher, a rather unusual outcome for a Dominican girl. According to this story, I was always already a philosopher.
Interrogating my own investment in an American ideal of individualism, I have come to realize that the story of US-American individualism is just this kind of narrative. The story goes something like this:
The colonial settlers came to America in search of religious freedom, economic independence, and personal liberty. Personal liberty included the right to self-determination and self-governance, and the spirit of exploration. These ideals would later be embodied in the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the U.S. Constitution (1787). The Declaration on Independence, primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson, declared that all men are created equal, a rejection of the divine right of Kings and an assertion of individual rights.
The United States becomes the first nation to be founded on the principle democratic governance where the power of the law derives from the consent of the governed, not from hereditary privilege or autocratic rule. While the Declaration of Independence articulates the philosophical foundation of American democracy, the Constitution provides the structural and legal mechanisms to realize those ideals, including the Bill of Rights guaranteeing individual rights; the equal protection under the law clause; and the separation and balance of powers across the three branches of government - the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
The story of the birth of our nation gave rise to the belief that America, the United States, is a singularly unique nation in the history of nations, with a special role to play in promoting liberty and democracy worldwide. This is referred to as American exceptionalism, idea credited to Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote in the two tomes of Democracy In America (1835, 1840): "The position of the Americans is...quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." The idea of American Exceptionalism is embodied in Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century doctrine that the United States was destined to expand across north of the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, spreading its values and way of life.
During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's eventual decision to join the war was framed not merely as a response to specific acts (such as the sinking of the Lusitania or the Zimmerman Telegram) but as a moral crusade to make the world "safe for democracy." This rationale highlighted the belief in America's unique role in defending the principles of freedom and democracy, consistent with American exceptionalism. Likewise, during World War II, the fight against totalitarian regimes abroad was framed as a defense of individual freedoms and the American way of life, reinforcing the notion that the United States was battling not just for its survival, but for the preservation of individualistic values worldwide. Well into the 20th century, as the the Cold War between two super powers took hold over global politics, American exceptionalism was contrasted with Soviet communism, highlighting the U.S.'s role as a beacon of freedom and democracy. The logic is still very much in play today, with arguments in support of Israel because it is the only foothold for freedom and democracy in the region. As President Biden is quoted as saying, "Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region."
—
Transcendentalism, arguably the first uniquely US-American philosophical and literary movement that significantly influenced the country's culture and thought, and it's figureheads Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), elaborated an aesthetics of self-reliance. Thoreau is known for his Walden experiment, where he lived in a cabin in the woods to embark on a journey of self-discovery, aiming to live according to his own values instead of societal expectations. In an essay entitled "Self-Reliance," Emerson wrote, "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." Both Thoreau and Emerson's works celebrate the individual's ability to think independently and to rely on oneself for guidance and understanding.
Early feminist trailblazer and editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) took the idea of self-reliance and applied it to women's emancipation, arguing for the importance of recognizing women as individuals capable of self-determination and intellectual development. Another well known Transcendentalist and author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), embodied the values of personal integrity and the pursuit of one's own path in her characters as well as in her life, seeking to support her own family through her writing.
The Beat Generation, emerging in the 1950s, featured icons like Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road depicted post-war disillusionment and the quest for freedom, and Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl challenged societal conformism, embodying the era's anti-establishment vibe and search for authenticity. Their works deeply engaged with existential themes, navigating the balance between individual freedom and societal norms, the quest for meaning, and the pursuit of an authentic life.1
The hippies of the 1960's inherited and further politicized this anti-establishment and anti-war sentiment. The liberation movements of the late 60's and into the 1970's - the Algerian Liberation Front, Black Liberation and Black Power, the Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation Movements - and subsequent identity politics at play well into the 1980's, all seem grounded in this US-American myth of the American individual.
—
This is, more or less, the story that we tell ourselves about the individualism at the heart of US-American identity, which I now want to argue is a product of this narrative. How can I prove that to you? Well, first of all, there isn't an ideal of the American individual that stands before and outside of this American experience. Quite simply, the "American" does not exist to act all self-reliant and independent. The idea of individualism is not a single static idea that is unchanging, laid under the American experience as some sort of Aristotelian substrate, the stuffs out of which American experiences are made. In fact, US-American individualism is rather a constellation of ideas that morph over time and adapt to situations as they emerge. Initially serving as a rationale for settler colonialism, US-American individualism ends up being a support for anti-colonial, liberation movements in the 20th-century.
The ideas embodied in US-American individualism are not necessarily continuous, consistent, or even complete and self-referential, self-enclosed. Concepts are porous and subject to being infiltrated. All these disparate ideas are gathered together, come to be naturalized, and are then projected backwards to the origins of our story, as the cause and support for our uniqueness as a peoples. This logic trick is as old as Aristotle, and as contemporary as the feminist deconstruction of the sex/gender binary that naturalizes sex as the origin for gender identities and expression.
The good news is that there is no pre-determined idea of American individualism, and so we can begin to tease out what parts we want to affirm and what it may look like in any number of imagined future scenarios. This all raises a question for me, personally, of which individualism, or what aspects of individualism am I holding dear to, when I proclaim myself to be a staunch supporter of individualism? Have I been hoodwinked into supporting settler-colonialism? I should proceed with suspicion even of myself, it is prudent. We all should.
—
Let me give you an overview of where I am going next with this exploration. We began with the desire for community, and a belief in individualism that seems contrary to community, at least in my mind. What I have come to realize now is that what I mean by individualism is more influenced by Existentialism, so I'd like to put a more philosophical frame on the question. When existentialist themes are folded into US-American individualism in the 20th-century, which is where I come into the picture, some important aspects of Existentialism get left on the cutting room floor. Perhaps because of the already established principle of the equality of men, and the use of liberal equality as the starting point for American democracy, the existential account of an encounter with the Other at the heart of subjectivity, one that establishes asymmetry, and not equality, as the starting point for intersubjective relationships, is elided.
As I will recount, in existential phenomenology, there is no self prior to encounter with the Other, and there is no individual except for the one that emerges in a social context. There is no Walden, and no individual that can stand apart and figure out what it truly believes apart from society. This point us towards an account of individualism which perhaps could be made compatible with a desire for community, although we will also need to interrogate that stuffy, traditional idea of community.
Onwards!
Earnshaw, Steven. _Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed_. Continuum, 2006, p. 9.