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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individuation | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individuation | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:15:35.415660+00:00 | kb-cron |
The principle of individuation, or principium individuationis, describes the manner in which a thing is identified as distinct from other things. The concept appears in numerous fields and is encountered in works of Leibniz, Carl Jung, Gunther Anders, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, David Bohm, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Manuel DeLanda.
== Usage == The word individuation occurs with different meanings and connotations in different fields.
=== In philosophy ===
Philosophically, "individuation" expresses the general idea of how a thing is identified as an individual thing that "is not something else". This includes how an individual person is held to be different from other elements in the world and how a person is distinct from other persons. By the seventeenth century, philosophers began to associate the question of individuation or what brings about individuality at any one time with the question of identity or what constitutes sameness at different points in time.
=== In Jungian psychology ===
In analytical psychology, individuation is the process by which the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious – seen as a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person's life become, if the process is more or less successful, integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. Other psychoanalytic theorists describe it as the stage where an individual transcends group attachment and narcissistic self-absorption.
=== In the news industry === The news industry has begun using the term individuation to denote new printing and on-line technologies that permit mass customization of the contents of a newspaper, a magazine, a broadcast program, or a website so that its contents match each user's unique interests. This differs from the traditional mass-media practice of producing the same contents for all readers, viewers, listeners, or on-line users. Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan alluded to this trend when discussing the future of printed books in an electronically interconnected world in the 1970s and 1980s.
=== In privacy and data protection law ===
From around 2016, coinciding with increased government regulation of the collection and handling of personal data, most notably the GDPR in European Union law, individuation has been used to describe the "singling out" of a person from a crowd – a threat to privacy, autonomy and dignity.
Most data protection and privacy laws turn on the identifiability of an individual as the threshold criterion for when data subjects will need legal protection. However, privacy advocates argue that privacy harm can also arise from the ability to disambiguate or "single out" a person. Doing so allows the person, at an individual level, to be tracked, profiled, targeted, contacted, or subject to a decision or action which impacts them - even if their civil or legal identity is not known (or knowable).
In some jurisdictions the wording of the relevant statute already includes the concept of individuation, for example the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). In other jurisdictions, regulatory guidance has suggested that the concept of 'identification' includes individuation - i.e., the process by which an individual can be 'singled out' or distinguished from all other members of a group.
However, where privacy and data protection statutes use only the word "identification" or "identifiability", varying court decisions mean that there is not necessarily a consensus about whether the legal concept of identification already encompasses individuation or not.
Rapid advances in technologies including artificial intelligence, and video surveillance coupled with facial recognition systems have now altered the digital environment to such an extent that ‘not identifiable by name’ is no longer an effective proxy for ‘will suffer no privacy harm’. Many data protection laws may require redrafting to give adequate protection to privacy interests, by explicitly regulating individuation as well as identification of individual people.
=== In physics === Two quantum entangled particles cannot be understood independently. Two or more states in quantum superposition, e.g., as in Schrödinger's cat being simultaneously dead and alive, is mathematically not the same as assuming the cat is in an individual alive state with 50% probability. The Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that complementary variables, such as position and momentum, cannot both be precisely known – in some sense, they are not individual variables. A natural criterion of individuality has been suggested.
== Arthur Schopenhauer == For Schopenhauer, the principium individuationis is constituted of time and space, being the ground of multiplicity. In his view, the mere difference in location suffices to make two systems different, with each of the two states having its own real physical state, independent of the state of the other. This view influenced Albert Einstein. Schrödinger put the Schopenhaurian label on a folder of papers in his files “Collection of Thoughts on the physical Principium individuationis.”
== Carl Jung ==