Ethical Individual: A person develops qualities and activities of their own, and the basis for these we can seek only in the person themself. What is generic in a person serves only as a medium in which to express their own individual being. Question: Since we bear the general characteristics of the groups to which we belong, is individuality possible? Comments - Questions: Chapter 14 Discussion Forum [0]

[0] P1 Is individuality Possible? [0] [0] A3 What Is Free Community? [0]

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top [0]14.0 [0] Group Member
A person bears the general characteristics of the groups to which he belongs.

14.1 [0] Group Characteristics
If we ask why some particular thing about a person is like this or like that, we are referred back from the individual to the genus.

14.2 [0] Generic Medium For Individual Expression
A man develops qualities and activities of his own, and the basis for these we can seek only in the man himself. What is generic in him serves only as a medium in which to express his own individual being.

14.3 [0] Individual Capacities And Inclinations
A man's activity in life is governed by his individual capacities and inclinations, whereas a woman's is supposed to be determined solely by the mere fact that she is a woman.

14.4 [0] Individual Social Decision
What a woman, within her natural limitations, wants to become had better be left to the woman herself to decide.

14.5 [0] Unique Characteristics
Determining the individual according to the laws of his genus ceases where the sphere of freedom (in thinking and acting) begins.

14.6 [0] Intuitive Conceptual Content
The conceptual content which man has to connect with the percept by an act of thinking in order to have the full reality cannot be fixed once and for all and bequeathed ready-made to mankind. The individual must get his concepts through his own intuition.

14.7 [0] Individual Concrete Aims
It is not possible to determine from the general characteristics of man what concrete aims the individual may choose to set himself.

14.8 [0] Individual View And Action
And every kind of study that deals with abstract thoughts and generic concepts is but a preparation for the knowledge we get when a human individuality tells us his way of viewing the world, and for the knowledge we get from the content of his acts of will.

14.9 [0] Emancipation Of Knowing
If we are to understand a free individuality we must take over into our own spirit those concepts by which he determines himself, in their pure form (without mixing our own conceptual content with them).

11.10 [0] Emancipation Of Being
Only to the extent that a man has emancipated himself in this way from all that is generic, does he count as a free spirit within a human community.

14.11 [0] Intuitive Conduct
Only that part of his conduct that springs from his intuitions can have ethical value in the true sense.

14.12 [0] Acceptance By Communities
It is from individual ethical intuitions and their acceptance by human communities that all moral activity of mankind originates.