John Locke
John Locke provides the epistemic and political groundwork for individuality understood as self ownership. Where the Stoics establish inner sovereignty through discipline and judgment, Locke turns to the origins of knowledge itself and asks how a person comes to know, choose, and claim authority over their own life. His answer is radical in its simplicity: the mind is not born furnished with ideas or obligations, but shaped through experience, reflection, and personal judgment. If the crowd becomes the primary source of ideas during this formative process, individuality gives way to conformity, and character is shaped by collective instincts, borrowed emotions, and inherited moral reflexes rather than by conscious understanding. Individuality, in this sense, is not inherited or bestowed, but formed.
At the centre of Locke’s philosophy is the rejection of innate ideas. The mind begins as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, upon which experience writes. Knowledge arises not from authority, tradition, or revelation, but from the interaction between perception and reflection. What we know comes from what we encounter and how we think about it. This move quietly dismantles inherited hierarchies of belief. If knowledge is grounded in experience rather than decree, then no institution, doctrine, or crowd can claim automatic authority over the individual’s understanding. In Individua, this underwrites the reclamation of interpretive authority from inherited structures and unexamined assumptions.
Locke’s account of personal identity deepens this emphasis on authorship. Identity is not anchored in substance, status, or social role, but in the continuity of consciousness. A person is the same self insofar as they can remember, reflect, and recognise themselves across time. This places responsibility and ownership squarely within the individual. One is not merely a bearer of roles assigned by family, church, or state, but a conscious agent whose life is unified by awareness and memory. Individua draws on this to frame individuality as something lived and maintained, not passively received.
Locke’s political philosophy extends these insights into the public realm. If individuals are self owning agents, then political authority cannot be absolute or imposed by divine right. In the Two Treatises of Government, Locke grounds political legitimacy in natural rights and consent. Life, liberty, and property are not granted by the state; they precede it. Government exists to protect these rights, not to redefine or override them. When authority exceeds its mandate, it loses its legitimacy. This establishes a clear boundary between individual sovereignty and external power, reinforcing Individua’s resistance to coercive structures that claim moral or political supremacy over the person.
In A Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke further dismantles the fusion of authority and belief. Matters of conscience, he argues, cannot be compelled without destroying their meaning. Genuine belief cannot be forced, and attempts to do so produce conformity rather than truth. This insistence on toleration is not moral relativism, but a recognition of the limits of power. It affirms that the inner domain of judgment belongs to the individual alone, and that attempts to govern it through fear, shame, or coercion are both ineffective and illegitimate.
Taken together, Locke’s work supplies Individua with its epistemic and political spine. He shows how individuality emerges through experience, reflection, and conscious continuity, and how self ownership extends naturally into claims of liberty and consent. His philosophy dismantles inherited authority without collapsing into chaos, replacing obedience with responsibility and submission with authorship. In doing so, Locke anchors Individua’s commitment to autonomy not as rebellion, but as the rightful condition of a thinking, choosing human being.