From Peter Thiel to Donald Trump, the ideal of the “sovereign individual” who bends reality to their will is newly dominant. Technology will soon enable a “bizarre genius” to live free from all constraints, prophesizes Thiel’s favorite book. But this vision fatally misunderstands the nature of the self, argues James I. Porter, author of books on Nietzsche and Greek culture. Individuality is forged only by the friction of contesting with others, and subjective experiences become meaningful only in relation to the experiences of others. To remove this resistance would be to erase meaning itself; absolute self-sovereignty would be self-annihilation.

"Nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things."

- Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth.” Arendt was taking on the tradition of liberal individualism, familiar from Kant, which posits that individuals are rational agents whose autonomy and inalienable freedom are the foundation of their realization as self-sufficient beings in a community of peers. Dissenting from this still widely held view, Arendt argues that “sovereignty is possible only in imagination.” The fantasy of sovereignty, be it over oneself or over others, is a compensatory mechanism—a defensive illusion—that papers over the intrinsic “frailty” of the human condition.

This condition of frailty has resonances with what the French philosopher and author Georges Bataille called “the principle of insufficiency.” Bataille suggests that inner experience can have no other value or authority beyond what it finds outside itself in a community of other beings. For this reason, inner experience, despite its name, is intrinsically an experience of otherness, extimacy, incompleteness, and self-insufficiency. Conversely, the principle of insufficiency is tied to a “principle of a community.” Each is the condition of the other.

Today, the critique of sovereign individualism is a given for thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Judith Butler, and Fred Moten, all of whom recognize that vulnerability, dependency, and interdependency are the conditions that make social existence possible and, all too often, impossible. We might call this a shared insufficiency. These traits, which may appear to be concessions, a give-away of agency, are in fact not disabling to human agency. They are its animating force. But they also set out the constitutive limits of the human condition.

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Across every instance of existence, every whole and every part is unstable, uncertain, fleeting, and impermanent.

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