Existenzielle Gewissheit und individuelle Beständigkeit. Bernardo Gut

      1. In the following Abstract, I will give a succinct summary of the main subjects dealt with in The Idea of an Aggregate (or, in a larger view: Totality) of Free, Independent Individuals. –

      As early as the 7^th Century BC, we perceive in Ancient Greece a slowly increasing zeal to encourage chosen individual human beings to confide in their innate, latent drive to liberate themselves of family and group-bounds, and to become independent personalities. A telling testimony to this delicate, hazardous adventure is an appeal by Heraclitus (ca. 550 BC – ca. 480 BC), who in one of his fragments simply exhorts: One ought not to act as child of his parents. This demand to cherish one’s personal independency and dignity is a major concern in classical tragedies by Aeschylus (e.g. Prometheus) and Sophocles (e.g. Antigone). The appeal to the individual is paramount in the Gospel of St. Matthew (10, 34 f.), where Christ says: «Think not that I am come to send peace on earth … I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother …» – And in the Gospel of St. John, Christ encourages his disciples, appealing to them as individualities, not as a collective, closed group: «And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.» (St. J., 8, 32). And again: «I call you not servants … I have called you friends …» (St. J., 15,15). The disciples are looked upon as being independent personalities.

      2. Independently of the afore mentioned hints in classic tragedies and in founding texts of the Christian religion towards a growing awareness of personal dignity – there was a comparable quest among the Ancient Greek philosophers to understand the essence of Individuality. It was eventually Plotinus (ca. 205 AD – ca. 270), who was the first to introduce the term Ego in philosophical reasoning, and who – in Ennead V,7 – ventured to tentatively consider the existence of separate individual, perennial ideas in every human individual.

      3. This hopeful, encouraging advance – at the outset of our common era – towards a definite acknowledgement of the dignity and inviolability of the independent human individual came to a premature stop, as soon as a hierarchically organised, authoritarian «Christian Church» established itself with its dogmatic intolerance. A turning point was the persecution of Pelagius (ca. 350–430) by Augustin of Hippo (354–430). It set in motion a campaign against heretics, independent individuals who searched their own way of life and would neither bend nor conform to the uniform doctrine and commands imposed by the mighty Christian (Catholic) Church. This persecution of independent, free-thinking individuals continued for more than a thousand years. Unfortunately, groups of heretics that managed to evade being harassed, who survived, subsequently initiating new, strictly organised religious movements with new temples often tended to treat their own «new-heretics» in ways which hardly differed from what the founders of their «New-Churches» had experienced from the representants of the «Old-Church».

      4. With the outbreak of the French Revolution 1789, started a dramatic debate with the aim to introduce fundamental individual human rights in newly devised Constitutions and Charts. After several attempts, severe drawbacks, terror-regimes, two World Wars, the United Nations was finally able, on the 10^th December 1949, to proclaim the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares in Art. 1: «All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.» Art. 2 underlines that it is Everyone [the Individual] who is entitled to all the rights and freedoms [liberties]. And Art. 20, 2 proclaims: «No one may be compelled to belong to an association.» This clear formulation is crucial for the dignity and the defence of the claim-rights and liberties of the individual.

      5. It is exactly the quoted Art. 20, 2 and its implications which are absent in the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (Kairo, 5^th August 1990), presented by the Foreign Ministers of the Islamic States. All 25 Articles depend on the Sharia, and they basically express collective rights (group-rights), never independent individual rights. Furthermore: Women are declared to be «equal in dignity» to men, and «they have rights» (Art. 6), but they do not have the same rights as men. Here, as elsewhere, the ministers address collectives, not individuals.

      6. A similar objection applies to authoritarian states, e.g. China, Russia, Venezuela, etc., where collective privileges dominate over any attempt to assert and activate an independent individual liberty. Individual liberties are also undermined by the widespread, increasing pressure to introduce collective privileges for all kinds of groups.

      7. The independent, self-confident free personality remains the common danger and enemy of every authoritarian church, community, congregation, society, state. A recent example that corroborates these reflections is Luis Ladaria’s letter Placuit Deo, addressed to all the bishops of the Catholic Church (published by order of Pope Francis on the 22^nd February 2018), in which he condemns the modern individualism as a renewal of the heresy of Pelagius, urging the believers to proselytize against it. The independent rational personality will always be the heretic par excellence.

      In short: With The Idea of an Aggregate of Free, Independent Individuals I mean to draw the attention to three fundamental subjects: (i) The notion of a developing, free personality based on a potentially perennial Ego; (ii) the individual’s innate need to enter in contact with his equals, engaging himself in a deliberative exchange of ideas and projects, and committed to encourage and offer support to every striving individual he or she meets; (iii) to keep in mind that the terms ‹aggregate› and ‹totality› refer to the individuals as such, who remain independent, in an open, liberal relation – and are not embodied in a community nor in any other kind of a collective closed group. – I am well aware that the realization of what has been outlined in the essay will always remain a delicate, fragile ideal.