In the modern Western world, it seems completely natural to think of society as nothing more than an assembly of individuals. However, this particular way of thinking about people is actually fairly recent in the grand scheme of human history, and, like every way of understanding the world, it has both strengths and weaknesses.
In the individual model, every person is a discrete unit who should aspire to be self-sufficient. Many action heroes are “ideal individuals”—think, for example, of Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, he has friends and loved ones, but in the end we are told to admire him because he uses his own talents and strengths to defeat his enemies and protect himself and advocate for his goals. A more classical expression of individualism appears in the philosopher Descartes’ famous expression, “I think therefore I am.” Descartes argued that the thing we can be most sure of is our own thoughts. Anything outside of our self might be an illusion.
Yet some contemporary thinkers argue that individualism itself is an illusion. There are some obvious examples: for example, no matter how much you claim to have pulled yourself by your own bootstraps, you probably depended on other people to survive when you were a child. Most highly successful people received more extensive help from both family and broader society, whether they inherited money from their parents, or merely got lucky when someone else believed in them or offered them an opportunity. Without a stable and reliable economy, the global infrastructure constructed over the last century, and a healthy dose of generational wealth, Jeff Bezos would be no richer than anyone else.
However, it can go a lot deeper than this. We don’t just sometimes depend on other people to help us achieve our goals; as social animals, the very basis of our personality is other people. Everything from our ideas and values to our senses of humor are fundamentally shaped by those around us. That includes not just our immediate family, but our friends, peers, and the broader culture. The question “who am I?” cannot be fully separated from the questions “who do I love?,” “who raised me?” and “with whom do I spend my time?” Many sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers now embrace this social model of the self.
We can read “I Am!” as a prescient eighteenth-century intervention in these conversations. The first line of the poem recalls Descartes’s famous pronouncement, but for Clare “I think, therefore I am,” is not enough. Sure, the fact that he thinks makes him certain that he exists, but it doesn’t let him know anything about who he is—that would require being connected to a broader social world.
