THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE IN TAYLOR AND PLATO

In Charles Taylor's Multiculturalism: examining the Politics of Recognition, the idea of individual identity is presented, in political-cultural terms, as being partly dependent on collective identities. In this sense, the political solution for social harmonization and even for the cultural formation of particular identities is linked to collectivity. In Plato's Politics, although the final concern is also to harmonize the collective, the polis, political art acts rather in the adjustment of the individual psyche. This is because the collective is a kind of mirroring of the individual. If on the one hand Plato is taxed as an idealist for the political solutions he presents to the collective question, on the other, he is not when he points out that (philosophical) discourse is capable of reorienting the individual towards political life.