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As commonly used, individual refers to a person or to any specific object in a collection. In the 15th century and earlier, and also today within the fields of statistics and metaphysics, individual means "indivisible", typically describing any numerically singular thing, but sometimes meaning "a person". (q.v. "The problem of proper names"). From the seventeenth century on, individual indicates separateness, as in individualism. (Abbs 1986, cited in Klein 2005, p.26-27)

What is the essence of an individual? First of all we can refer to it with a noun. Secondly it does something or we think it can do something. Doing something means making a change. A person for example could do something by moving his arm.

If we search for examples of individuals then we can not just take any change or group of changes as the appearance of an individual. One would not consider the group of totally unrelated events as the appearance of an individual. But the moment there arises coherence in the actions, the moment we see a common goal, that moment we are willing to see this as the acts of an individual.

Because of the above it seems reasonable to state the following:

The property that all individuals have in common is that they tend to change their world in order to obtain and maintain a specific state. In an abstract sense, an individual tries to remove every factor that he dislikes and tries to add every factor he likes. This behavior can be referred to as moving towards a state of happiness.

This could be used as a very generic and abstract definition for the concepts "individual" and "happiness". It is so general that with this one can recognize an individual behind every group of more or less coherent changes in the world. For example, gravity could be the individual that tries to put all mass together. Note also that there is allmost no previous knowledge of concepts required, one does not need the know what a human is to know what an individual is.

In everyday life we usually do not want to call every force we detect an individual. But strictly spoken every event could be the act of an individual. This is closely related to Animism: One could explain all unexplained events as the acts of imaginary individuals.

This idea is what most people use intuitively when they think about each other. They do not think about each other as complicated organisms consisting of millions of interacting cells. In the first place they got a very basic idea of each other, called "he" or "she", and associate with it what "he" or "she" "wants". We usually use it as a simplification for things we do not understand.

Who finds it nonsense to call a force of nature (the act of) an individual should be aware that a humans individuality is also no more than the result of a very complicated form of chemistry.

In practice everyone we could know of in our world is constrained (restricted). The following tries to proof that. If there was one entity almighty then the world would already be in a for him desirable state, his state of happiness. If he had to do any effort to keep it that way then he would not be almighty, because then he would be constrained to do something. So we got satisfied undetectable individuals and the individuals we know of: those are all bound to rules.

Those constraints mean that an individual can not from his current state of his world go towards whatever other state he could wish for. So in order to reach happiness he needs to find and follow a path of actions that brings him from state to state and eventually to one that makes him happy.

In our world the individual from a human needs his body. All his ways towards happiness probably assume a reasonable health. His body is not the only material thing he needs. He needs to maintain that body, clothing, food. Utilities. He wants certainty that he can maintain it in the future: money, housing. And many people somehow find out that having gadgets is also a requirement for being happy. He also needs knowledge, he needs to know what he is doing. A humans mind is the place where the human individual acts in the first place by merely thinking.

An individuals next action will be the product of his desires, his capacities and his achieved current state in the world. That state includes but does not limit to whatever is in his mind and whatever he possesses.

An individual does not strictly need possession, as long as it is not essential for his happiness. The concept of law is also merely an idea that individuals try to follow in order to be able to coexist.

• Gracia, Jorge J. E. (1988) Individuality: An Essay on the Foundations of Metaphysics. State Univ. of New York Press.
• Klein, Anne Carolyn (1995) Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. ISBN 0-8070-7306-7.

• Atom (disambiguation)
• Consciousness
• Cultural identity
• Identity
• Independent
• Person
• Self (philosophy)
• Self (sociology)
• Self (psychology)