Articles & Papers

The Chain

From Ockham to today — seven hundred years of one idea, pushed one step further at each stop.

1. 1

   William of Ockham

   1287–1347

   No universal is a substance that is single and one in number… therefore no singular substance is some universal, but every substance is one in number and singular.

   William of Ockham

   An ontological claim: reality contains singular things, not universal things. Universals aren’t real — only individuals are real, everything else is a name, not an essence.

2. 2

   Ockham, carried forward

   If universals aren’t real — if there’s no fixed “nature of man” outside individual men — then, carried far enough, no fixed nature attaches to any one individual either, beyond what he’s made of and what he does.

3. 3

   Locke

   1689

   If no fixed nature attaches to the individual beyond what he’s made of and what he does, then nothing can bind him except what he agrees to — not what he supposedly is by nature. That is Locke’s move: the individual holds rights before political society exists, and government is created by consent to secure them.

4. 4

   Mill

   1859

   If the individual holds rights before political society exists, the next question is what those rights cover. Mill answers plainly — everything that touches only himself:

   The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

   In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

   The claim is total. Neither government nor society’s opinion has any legitimate authority over anything that touches only the self.

5. 5

   Marcuse

   1955

   If the individual is sovereign over his own body and mind, a harder question opens: which constraints on that body and mind are true necessity, and which are domination wearing the mask of nature? Marcuse’s answer is mostly the latter — “surplus-repression,” not the “basic repression” biology itself requires.

6. 6

   Today

   If most of what constrains body and mind is imposed, not required, the last move barely needs stating: any category presented as fixed nature — the sex assigned at birth included — gets the same test, and the individual, sovereign over himself, defines it for himself.

SOURCES · William of Ockham · John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) · John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) · Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955)