The Individual and Nature. The separateness of individuals, Xxxxxxxx argues, is an important aspect of life and of our experience which liberalism protects by recognizing each individual as an end. Any political theory which does not recognize this separateness, she fears, threatens the individual, and threatens to ignore the important differences between individuals in particular the fact that their wellbeing is not always satisfied in the same ways. Liberal theories are committed to recognizing the fact of human separateness. Xxxxxxxx explains: “[Liberalism] says that the fundamental entity for politics is a living body that goes from here to there, from birth to death never fused with any other…In normative terms, this commitment to the recognition of individual separateness means, for the liberal, that the demands of a collectivity or a relation should not as such be made the basic goal of politics: collectivities, such as the state, and even the family are composed of individuals…Each of these is separate, and each of these is an end. Liberalism holds that the flourishing of human beings taken one by one is both analytically and normatively prior to the flourishing of the state or the nation or the religious group: analytically, because such unities do not really efface the separate reality of individual lives; normatively, because the recognition of that separateness is held to be a fundamental fact for ethics. The central question for politics should not be, How is the organic whole doing?, but rather, How are X and Y and Z and Q doing?” 467 Xxxxxxxx supports the normative individual separateness of liberalism because it suggests that we need to take account of each and every individual, and not assume that because the whole or because the group as a whole is doing well that each individual can be taken to be doing well. Liberalism takes individuality seriously in a way that other metaphysical views cannot. She writes, “The separateness of persons is a basic fact of human life; in stressing it, liberalism stresses something experientially true and fundamentally important. In stressing this fact, the liberal takes her stand squarely in the camp of this worldly experience and rejects forms of revisionary metaphysics (e.g. forms of Buddhism or Platonism) that would deny the reality of our separateness and our substantially embodied character.” 468 The question remains for us, is Spinoza’s view a version of such a revisionary metaphysics? Spinoza’s well-known monism, and his argu...
