Get Your Smart On
Part Two of The Desire For Community series
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.
I think that the story we tell ourselves about US-American individualism is just this kind of narrative, an origin myth that supports a desired outcome. The story goes something like this:
The roots of American individualism trace back to the earliest colonial settlers—men and women who braved the Atlantic seeking religious freedom, economic independence, and personal liberty. For them, liberty wasn't just an abstract concept; it meant the right to self-determination, self-governance, and the freedom to chart their own destinies. These pioneering ideals would later shape the nation's core founding documents: the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the U.S. Constitution (1787). In the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson boldly asserted that "all men are created equal," rejecting the divine right of kings and championing individual rights over inherited privilege.
This foundational ethos fueled the belief that the United States was a nation like no other—a beacon of liberty and democracy with a unique mission on the global stage. This belief, known as American exceptionalism, gained prominence through Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations in Democracy in America (1835, 1840). He famously described America’s position as "quite exceptional" among democratic nations. This exceptionalism later manifested in Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century doctrine that envisioned the U.S. expanding across North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Central to this vision was the archetype of the rugged individual—self-reliant, independent, and fiercely committed to personal freedom and self-rule.
Transcendentalism, often considered the first uniquely American philosophical and literary movement, profoundly shaped the nation's cultural identity. Its leading voices—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)—crafted a powerful ethos of self-reliance. Thoreau’s Walden experiment, living simply in a cabin in the woods, exemplified his rejection of societal expectations in favor of personal values. Emerson, in his iconic essay Self-Reliance, urged individuals to "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." Together, their works celebrated independent thought and the belief that personal intuition was the truest guide to understanding.
Transcendentalism’s ideals also shaped early feminism. Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial, expanded the philosophy to argue for women’s self-determination, intellectual development, and equality. Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author of Little Women, lived these principles by pursuing a writing career to support her family, weaving themes of personal integrity and self-reliance into her characters’ lives.
This spirit of rebellion and individualism resurfaced with the Beat Generation of the 1950s. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road captured the restless search for freedom and meaning in post-war America, while Allen Ginsberg’s Howl railed against societal conformity. Their existentialist themes and anti-establishment ethos set the stage for the countercultural movements of the 1960s.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: defiant, self-determined, and relentlessly in pursuit of freedom and justice.
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 (and not a simple cause) of this narrative. The idea of individualism is not a single static idea that is unchanging, laid under the American experience as some sort of Aristotelian substrate. It is, rather, a constellation of ideas that morph over time and adapt to situations as they emerge. Originally used to justify settler colonialism, it later becomes a rallying cry for 20th-century anti-colonial and liberation movements—a complete reversal.
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, 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, over what aspects of individualism I am holding dear to when I proclaim myself to be a staunch supporter of individualism? Have I been hoodwinked into supporting settler-colonialism? It is prudent to proceed with suspicion even of myself. Given this history, 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 an 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 they truly believe apart from society. This points us towards an account of individualism that could be made compatible with a desire for community, although we will also need to interrogate that stuffy, traditional idea of community.
To be continued…