On Being

On Being

To my pets, my muses. To all the fur babies of the world that keep us sane. From the cats in Egypt that had men bowing to them like gods, to the cute lil puppers who love us unconditionally, and every pet in between. If you’re reading this, give your pet some love for me. Send them a J from me personally.

I

When you call yourself an individual, what do you think you’re saying?

Most of us mean alone. Individual: the single one, the unrepeatable, the self set apart from every other self. A person narrowed to a point, distinct and uncuttable, standing where no one else can stand. We reach for the word when we want to say separate, and it answers to that name. It has learned to. But hold it up to the light and it says the opposite of what we ask of it.

In the Latin, individuus means not divided: in-, not, and dividuus, divisible. The indivisible. When Cicero needed a word for the atom of the Greek philosophers (átomon, the uncuttable, the thing no blade can halve), he reached into the same root and rendered it individuum.¹ The individual was, first of all, the thing that could not be split. In the medieval schools, where logicians drew Porphyry’s tree of being branching down from the highest genus through every species, the last branch (the place where dividing finally had to stop) was the individuum.² And in the oldest English uses the word belonged to the Trinity, three persons and one God, held in a unity nothing could divide.³ For most of its life, individual did not mean apart. It meant unable to be torn in two.

II

Somewhere in the seventeenth century the word turned inside out. The indivisible whole became the separate part; the unity became the unit. We kept the spelling and mislaid the meaning, and now we say individual and hear alone.⁴

Through the Quantum Lens (the way physics talks about observation, borrowed to read things that were never particles), a word like this is a superposition, and I’d leave it open. Two readings live inside it at once, separate one and undividable whole, and they do not cancel. The Ego is the observer that resolves it: look at the word wanting it to mean apart, and it gives you apart.⁵ But the other state was never gone. Loosen the looking and the word spreads back into its full reading, both meanings held together, the way anything unattended holds all of what it is.

III

And consider what the whole word actually contains. In-divi-dual. It opens on I, the Ego, the capital letter that stands first and stands alone. But the word does not end at the I. It carries, folded into its own body, dual: the two. Not divided — and two. An indivisible duality. The self the word describes was never an atom after all. It was always a pair that cannot be pried apart. (The philology, I grant, runs only on the first half of that; the rest is the art. But the art is the part I trust.)

Jung built a life’s work on the first half and arrived at the second. He called the slow labor of becoming whole individuation, and he was careful, almost stubborn, about the hyphen: to individuate is to become a psychological “in-dividual,” in his words “a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole.’”⁶ Separate, yes; he kept that word in. He also warned against the self that walls itself off to prize its own peculiarity; that was individualism, and he counted it the opposite error. What he was after, as I read him, was an end to the split: the I that performs (the mask he called the persona) and the deeper Self that watches, finished with their quarrel and become one figure.⁷ Whitman said it in the first person, “I contain multitudes,” and he was not embarrassed by the arithmetic.⁸ A mirror ball is a single sphere and is made of nothing but the many faces it turns toward the light; it is most itself when it is showing you every version of you at once. The duality is how the unity is built.

IV

This is what it might mean to remove the I from the Ego, to leave the self standing and loosen its grip on being the only one in the room. The grasping I insists on the point: here, now, only this, only me. It seizes each moment fresh and holds it alone, so that a life becomes a chain of nows that have forgotten each other. Let that grip ease, and something stranger and truer comes into view. The self is not a point. It is a duration: a wave with a shape, drawn across time.

Look closely and the wave is made of moments after all, moments that remember each other. I call each one a Jay: whoever was there, how it felt to them, and which way they leaned. They pile up. The kinds you live over and over cut grooves, and enough grooves, run together, make what the people who know you would call your character.

V

Boethius, in his cell, waiting on a death he could already see, defined eternity as a life without end held whole and all at once, complete and entire, the way he believed God lives, and nothing in time can.⁹ I borrow it anyway, for a life measured in years. That is what it would be to be aligned in Time: standing indivisible across your own duration instead of pinned inside a single seized instant, past and future held as one coherent Trace (the ripple your Intent sends through the years, ahead of you and behind). Every self you might become would face the same way, toward the whole of things. To be aligned in Time is to stop being divided from yourself by the minute hand. You still choose, moment to moment, who to be. You just stop forgetting the last choice when you make the next one.

So return the word to its title. On being myself. When I call myself an individual now, I mean something older than alone. I don’t mean a single uncut stone set apart from the world, defended and alone. I mean a duality that refuses to divide: the I, and the Trace the I leaves through Time; the particle that is here, and the wave that is everywhere I have been and will be. Remove the grasping I from the Ego and nothing is lost. The self widens into what the word meant all along.

An indivisible duality. On being me.

Notes

1. Latin individuus, “undivided, indivisible,” is in- (“not”) plus dividuus (“divisible”), from dividere, “to divide.” Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, s.v. “individuus.” Cicero gives the atomists’ Greek term its Latin form when he writes of “atomos quas appellat, id est corpora individua,” the atoms, as Democritus calls them, that is, undivided bodies. Cicero, De Finibus 1.17. The neuter individuum also appears in Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.65, and as a noun for the atoms at Academica 2.55.

2. Porphyry’s Isagoge, which reached the Latin West through Boethius’s translation and commentaries, traces the descent from the highest genus through species to the lowest species, below which lie the individuals, Greek átoma, Latin individua. Porphyry, following Plato, stops dividing at that lowest species and leaves the individuals beneath it, being without number, alone. Porphyry, Introduction. Porphyry himself drew no diagram; the branching tree that carries his name was drawn by medieval logicians commenting on his text.

3. The earliest English uses, from the fifteenth century, apply individual to the indivisible unity of the Trinity; that sense is now obsolete. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “individual (adj.).”

4. The sense “single, separate” emerges in the early seventeenth century, and the noun for a single human being by the 1640s. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “individual (adj.)” and “individual (n.).” Raymond Williams traces the same turn, from the indivisibility argued over in medieval theology, the Trinity above all, to the separate person of modern use. Williams, Keywords.

5. Register note. That an observer resolves a held superposition is one reading of quantum theory among several. Some Copenhagen-style accounts lean that way; on Everett’s many-worlds nothing collapses at all; Bohm’s pilot-wave theory, the spontaneous-collapse theory known as GRW, relational quantum mechanics, and QBism each tell the story differently, and physics has not decided between them. Here the Lens is borrowed for a word, not asserted as a physics, and the etymology stands whether or not the quantum reading does.

6. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation,” §490: “I use the term ‘individuation’ to denote the process by which a person becomes a psychological ‘in-dividual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole.’”

7. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. In §§266–267 Jung separates individualism, which stresses some supposed peculiarity over collective considerations and obligations, from individuation, which he describes as a fuller realization of the collective qualities of a human being. In §§245–246 he calls the persona “a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality.” Jung’s own aim is to see through the mask, and in §269 he names the goal as divesting the self of the persona’s false wrappings; picturing the performer and the watcher as one figure once the pretending stops is mine.

8. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 51: “(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The poem ran untitled in the first Leaves of Grass of 1855 and took the title “Song of Myself” in the edition of 1881.

9. Boethius, Consolation 5, prose 6: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, which I render as the whole and perfect possession, all at once, of a life without bound. Boethius gives it as the definition of God’s eternity and denies it to the world, which at most goes on forever. Carrying it over to a single human span is this essay’s step, not his.

Bibliography

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by P. G. Walsh. Clarendon Press, 1999.

Cicero. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 40. Harvard University Press, 1914.

Cicero. De Natura Deorum; Academica. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 268. Harvard University Press, 1933.

Jung, C. G. “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation.” In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 9, pt. 1. Princeton University Press, 1968.

Jung, C. G. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 7. Princeton University Press, 1966.

Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Clarendon Press, 1879.

Oxford English Dictionary. S.v. “individual (adj.)” and “individual (n.).” Oxford University Press.

Porphyry. Porphyry: Introduction. Translated with a commentary by Jonathan Barnes. Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers. Clarendon Press, 2003.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass. David McKay, 1891–92.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. Fontana Paperbacks, 1983.

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