Global Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

To Bind or to Loose: Individualism and Weak Identity

Pier Paolo Bellini

Starting from the individual as a “potential being”, constantly pushed to exceed what he is to realise himself, the dynamics of this process is analyzed, that is the “aspirations”: it is through them that the subjective pushes and the collectivity’s influences are directed to the achievement of the personal goals. The process of “individualization”, which has developed throughout the history of humanity but has experienced an extraordinary explosion in modernity, aims to enhance these dynamics through the absolutization of the principle of individual “freedom”, understood as a progressive thinning of space-time constraints and as priority of the private sphere compared to the public one. Our thesis is that self-realization is basically a “relational enterprise” and that out of this relatedness we run the risk of causing a “short circuit” of the human, giving rise to a generation of a “depleted” (or “weak”) man.