2. Distinct from this first idea is a second: the notion
of individual self-development. This idea, and the
phenomenon of self-cultivation to which it refers, may
be traced back to the Italian Renaissance (as by Burck-
hardt), but it was most fully worked out among the
early romantics. Thus Schleiermacher in his Monolog
of 1800 describes how
... it became clear to me that each man ought to represent
humanity in himself in his own different way, by his own
special blending of its elements, so that it should reveal
itself in each special manner, and, in the fullness of space
and time, should become everything that can emerge as
something individual out of the depths of itself.
The same idea is found in Wilhelm von Humboldt,
for whom the “true end of Man” was “the highest and
most harmonious development of his powers to a com-
plete and consistent whole,” whose “highest ideal...
of the co-existence of human beings” consisted in “a
union in which each strives to develop himself from
his own inmost nature, and for his own sake,” and who
concluded that
... reason cannot desire for man any other condition than
that in which each individual not only enjoys the most
absolute freedom of developing himself by his own energies,
in his perfect individuality, but in which external nature
even is left unfashioned by any human agency, but only
receives the impress given to it by each individual of himself
and his own free will, according to the measure of his wants
and instincts, and restricted only by the limits of his powers
and his rights
(Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der
Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen [1852], Ch. II; trans.
J. Coulthard).
The history of this idea is well known: it soon devel-
oped into a theory of organic community, the term
Individuelle shifted its reference from persons to supra-
personal forces, and individuality came to be predi-
cated of the Volk or the State. Apart from this, it
entered into the liberal tradition, especially through
John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859, Ch. III: “Of Indi-
viduality...”), and it entered as a crucial element into
the ethical basis of Marx's thought, as in Diedeutsche
Ideologie ([1845-46], Part I, Sec. C, where Marx writes
of the individual under communism “cultivating his
gifts in all directions”), while it has remained attractive
to artists of all kinds ever since Byron and Goethe.
In general, it specifies an ideal for the lives of individ-
uals—an ideal that is either anti-social (as with some
of the early romantics), extra-social (as with Mill), or
highly social (as with Marx, or Kropotkin, or the
English Idealists).
