Exemplary individuals become free by forming the genus that forms them

Evidence

The exemplary nature of these men comes out in the way they embody the synthesis of the particular with the genus. Such individuals are called ‘free’ in so far as ‘they are grown independently on the soil of their own inherently substantial personality’: they express the genus only by, in turn, forming what it is. That is what is meant by the expression: ‘self-made and developing into what they essentially were (sich aus sich erzeugend) and wanted to be’. If there is anything that still remains of the accidental in such exemplary individuals and their particular shape, it has acquired such a formative power that it is impossible to know, or say, of Thucydides, Phidias, Plato and others cited by Hegel, whether they are men or gods. They have become ‘ideal artists shaping themselves, individuals of a single cast, works of art standing there like immortal and deathless images of the gods in which there is nothing temporal and doomed’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 588

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the plastic individual as self-making through self-formation into genus — a core step in Malabou’s plasticity thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Thought individuates itself the way a genus does, through self-embodiment — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 967; Exemplary individuals so embody the genus they become indistinguishable from gods — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 588; The natural unity of individual and genus must be sublated into opposition — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 298 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Exemplary individuals so embody the genus they become indistinguishable from gods #expands (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 588
• Freedom is practiced by killing psychology to create unnamed individualities #responds-to (0.80) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 180
• The natural unity of individual and genus must be sublated into opposition #qualifies (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 298
• Human beings create their own essence through action rather than inheriting a fixed nature #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 27
• Individual diversity can be conceived as a division of labor among unique beings #expands (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 691
• Animal reproduction is driven by felt deficiency between individual and genus #corroborates (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 539