PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

The Individual and Democracy.

During recent years I have been made to realize with increasing acuteness that no word of that I use in conversations with people is more misunderstood than my use of the term individual. If there is a serious discussion I invariably use it, as it is basic to my conception of man and his goal. The instant I use it a stir goes around. Those of my friends who are communistic, or in any case collectivistic, seem to feel that I have challenged all they value. Those who consider themselves individualistic either shake their heads sadly at what they consider to be the present-day disappearance of the individual, or else they rise to my support without knowing precisely what they are supporting. In any event the use of the term individual creates a scene as emotional as the use of the term "red" did some years ago.

In those emotional situations I have ventured to define my meaning of the term - and, as one would expect, I have had difficulty in making myself understood. As I place, as I have said, considerable importance upon this term, and as it is my belief that an understanding of the process and result of individualisation is extremely important for men in general, I write this article. Here, though I shall lack the stimulus of a company, I will gain by being free to put my thoughts down unhindered by the discolorations of an emotional situation.

I should say at once that the thing I have in mind is a *process*, and would therefore better be expressed by *indiv dualisation* - the process of becoming an individual, the kind of life in general that would produce men and women capable of doing their own thinking, feeling, and acting. This ability oneself to do - this is my main criterion of an individualised person. A second main characteristic is that an individual, in my sense of the term, has what we may call roughly an all around development. Further, a truly individualised man or woman is capable (1) of being purely alone, (2) of particip ating fully in the lives of others, and (3) of maintaining a dynamic balance between himself and the rest of mankind, between aloneness and participation, between his interests and collective interests.

The individualising process is that in the life of the given person which tends to make him become such a man or woman as I have described above.

Many times in the past I have tried to work out a definition of what I mean. I have tried in speech. I have written I do not know how many pages. What I have written here does not satisfy me because it is too general and too vague; but it will, I think, serve as a starting point.

This paper, as its title suggests, will have to do not only with the individual but with democracy. In brief, my thesis is that the process of individualisation and the process of genuine democratisation are practically one and the same thing.

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PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY:

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that I have been through in the past few years. And again I
wish to emphasise not only that I was misunderstood but that
so much emotion was aroused that there was no chance of my ex-
plaining myself, of my words being heard, of my meaning being
understood.

Instead of writing more words let me at this point give
a diagram which, at the risk of oversimplification, will present
and clarify what I attribute to an individual.