In one fascinating text Marcus uses a mereological model to conceive of his life as an agent as a series (a whole) composed of individual actions (the parts). “You have to assemble your life yourself—action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening” (viii. 32). Though there can be external obstacles to our accomplishments, Marcus noted that there are no obstacles outside of ourselves “to behaving with justice, self-control, and good sense” (viii.32). Indeed, “if you accept the obstacle and work with what you're given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you‟re trying to assemble. Action by action” (viii. 32). Just, self-controlled and sensible actions concatenate to constitute the life of a good agent, a virtuous person. Such an agent is a good actor, as it were, on the social stage.
Society is a whole composed of civic parts. Marcus reminded himself: “You participate in a society by your existence. Then participate in its life through your actions—all your actions. Any action not directed toward a social end (directly or indirectly) is a disturbance to your life, an obstacle to wholeness, a source of dissension. Like the man in the Assembly—a faction to himself, always out of step with the majority”. (ix. 23)
With this mereological understanding of society Marcus thought the normative conclusions about how one ought to deal with other people is plain:
“What is rational in different beings is related, like the individual limbs of a single being, and meant to function as a unit. This will be clearer to you if you remind yourself: I am a single limb (μέλος) of a larger body—a rational one. Or you could say 'a part' (μέρος)—only one letter's difference. But then you're not really embracing other people. Helping them isn't yet its own reward. You're still seeing it only as The Right Thing To Do. You don't yet realize who you're really helping”. (vii. 13)
He prods himself to take to heart the truth that for a part to help other parts within a whole is really for the part to promote its own good by promoting the good of its whole. The whole that is human society is benefited whenever a human member of that societal body helps another of its members. Because our common rationality binds all human beings together, all members of human society, both the righteous and the wrongdoers, are relatives:
“…the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions”. (ii. 1; cf. xii. 26)
The synergy and mutual assistance are the work of the organs and limbs of the organic body. For parts of an organic whole to interfere with each other and obstruct each other is contrary to their purposes. Marcus reasons that human beings share the same mind, the same intelligence — logos — and so are co-workers, like team mates, co-workers, singers in a chorus, or musicians in a symphony. As fellow rational beings, we are citizens of the cosmos, related by our intellects, meant to work together and strive for the good of the whole we participate in. Disregard, neglect, anger, hatred, or obstruction of one part by another is contrary to nature.
However, since rational beings can choose to think of themselves as unconnected social atoms, we are free to disregard, hate, or obstruct each other, causing internal conflicts and divisions within the societal whole. Marcus again uses anatomical mereology to illustrate the nature of societal discord and dissension:
Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to…? That's what we do to ourselves — or try to — when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish. You have torn yourself away from unity — your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you've cut yourself off from it. But you have one advantage here: you can reattach yourself. A privilege God has granted to no other part of no other whole — to be separated, cut away, and reunited. But look how he's singled us out. He's allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are he's allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole”. (viii. 34)
Marcus observes that the more often the citizenly limb severs itself from the civic body, the more difficult re-attachment becomes. Choosing to hate or reject others fractures one's connection to the other parts — one's fellow citizens. The wiser course is never to disregard, reject, be angry with, or hate one's fellows at all in the first place.
...
Mereology is Marcus's favored philosophical method in the Meditations. He uses it to understand what the universe is, how it is structured, its composition, and the laws by which it operates. Marcus uses mereology to pierce through the illusory veil which glamorizes wealth and material possessions as things worthy of esteem. Mereology informs his communitarian, cosmopolitan conception of citizenship. Mereological analysis also reveals to Marcus the nature of time. By means of this method Marcus understands a human life as a series of stages, from birth to mature adulthood to death, each of which is an instance of transformation, but none of which is an instance of annihilation, and so none of which is bad. Finally, Marcus‟ judgment that history repeats the same old plot arises from a kind of mereological perspective. Therefore, a clear understanding of Marcus‟ mereology is vital for understanding his philosophy as a whole.
From "The Mereology of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus" by Stephens
QUESTION: Can you describe how mereology of the psychological at various scales (sub-personalities, a whole personality, groups and organizations, sub-cultures, a whole culture) relates to Simondon’s individuation and Gordon Pask’s p- and m-individuals?
RESPONSE: This is a rich question that sits at the intersection of process ontology, cybernetics, and psychology. Let me try to draw these threads together carefully.
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Simondon's Individuation as the Background Framework
Simondon's key move is to refuse to treat individuals as primary givens. Instead, individuation — the process by which an individual emerges from a pre-individual field of potentials — is ontologically prior. The individual is always a phase of being, not its ground. Crucially, individuation is never complete: a residue of pre-individual reality persists, which is what makes further individuation possible (including collective individuation, where the pre-individual serves as the medium for transindividual relations). This is important because it means psychological individuation at any scale leaves a surplus that feeds adjacent scales.
Pask's p- and m-individuals
Gordon Pask's Conversation Theory distinguishes two kinds of individuals operating at different levels of a conversational system. A mechanical individual (m-individual) is the physical or structural substrate — the body, the institution, the hardware. A psychological individual (p-individual) is the conceptual, process-level entity that inhabits or is carried by one or more m-individuals. Crucially, a single p-individual can span multiple m-individuals (a concept shared between two people, or a distributed cognitive process), and a single m-individual can host multiple p-individuals (different sub-personalities, competing interpretive frameworks).
This immediately creates a mereology that doesn't map cleanly onto physical boundaries. The part-whole relations among p-individuals are defined by *conversational coherence and agreement*, not by spatial containment.
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Mapping across scales
Sub-personalities within a person. At the intra-personal level, what Jungian, IFS (Internal Family Systems), or multiplicity theorists call sub-personalities map naturally onto Pask's notion of multiple p-individuals sharing one m-individual (the body/brain). These sub-personalities are not mere modules; they carry distinct conceptual structures, distinct "understandings" in Pask's sense. Each sub-personality can enter into internal conversations, and the whole personality is what emerges from those internal conversations reaching sufficient coherence or stable organization. From Simondon's side, the tension among sub-personalities is precisely the pre-individual charge that drives intra-psychic individuation — the formation of more integrated personality is a resolution of metastable tensions among these partial structures.
The whole personality. This is a p-individual that achieves a relatively stable, recursively self-referential understanding — what Pask would call a "topic" or a self-organizing conceptual structure capable of producing and testing agreements with itself over time. In Simondonian terms, it is a phase — never fully individuated, always carrying pre-individual surplus that can give rise to new sub-personalities under stress, or be contributed to collective individuation.
Groups and organizations. Here Pask's framework becomes especially powerful. A group is literally a collection of m-individuals among which p-individuals can be distributed. A shared concept — a shared understanding, a protocol, a norm — is a p-individual that spans multiple bodies. Organizational culture in this view is a complex of interlocking p-individuals maintained through ongoing conversation (in Pask's technical sense: the exchange of descriptions and agreements). This parallels Simondon's transindividual — the domain in which pre-individual realities are pooled and give rise to collective individuation. A group doesn't just aggregate its members; it individuates as something new, at a new scale, using the pre-individual surplus each member contributes.
The mereological point is subtle here: the p-individuals that constitute the group's shared understanding are not simply parts of the individual members' p-individuals. They are partially autonomous entities that require the conversational system to persist. A belief or practice in an organization exists in the conversations, not stored in any single head.
Sub-cultures and cultures. Scaling further, a sub-culture is a semi-autonomous conversational ecology — a network of p-individuals achieving coherence across a subset of m-individuals, often in tension with adjacent ecologies. A culture as a whole is then a higher-order individuation: metastable, internally differentiated, and itself capable of being a p-individual relative to even larger systems (civilizations, epochs). From a Simondonian view, each cultural level individuates against a background of pre-individual tensions — symbolic, affective, material — that the culture partially resolves and partially perpetuates as its own driving surplus.
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The mereological structure that emerges
What's distinctive about combining these frameworks is that you get a non-classical mereology — the part-whole relations are:
One tension worth flagging: Pask's Conversation Theory has a somewhat formalist tendency (conversations as programs, p-individuals as well-defined concept structures), whereas Simondon resists formalization — for him, form is always the outcome of a process, never its presupposition. A synthesis would need to treat Pask's conversational structures as themselves always in process, always metastable, always at risk of undergoing phase transitions that reorganize the whole mereological hierarchy. This is actually what happens in practice — a cultural crisis, a psychological breakdown, or an organizational collapse are precisely moments when the individuations at one scale can no longer stabilize, and pre-individual energy is released for re-individuation at multiple scales simultaneously.
This framework also gives you a richer account of why psychological and cultural change are coupled: an individual's intra-psychic re-individuation (e.g., changing fundamental values or self-concept) contributes pre-individual surplus back into the transindividual field, making collective re-individuation more possible — and vice versa.
QUESTION: Does individuation at one level necessarily require the deindividuation of individuals composing that level?
RESPONSE: This is one of the most important and contested questions in this entire conceptual space. The short answer is: not necessarily, but there are important asymmetries across levels and across theorists.
Simondon's own position
Simondon is actually quite careful here. Collective individuation — the emergence of the transindividual — does not require the dissolution of the individuals who participate in it. In fact, the transindividual is specifically his answer to both atomistic liberalism (which treats individuals as self-sufficient prior to any collective) and totalizing collectivism (which subordinates individuals to the whole). The transindividual is precisely the domain in which pre-individual surplus from individuals becomes the medium of a collective individuation that enhances rather than erases the participating individuals.
The key mechanism is that what individuals contribute to collective individuation is their pre-individual charge — the unresolved potential they carry — not their individuated form. So the individual as individuated doesn't dissolve; rather, something that was always in excess of that individuation gets taken up at a higher level. [When that higher-level individuation gains the ability to coordinate the lower-level individuals which compose it, a Metasystem Transition occurs] This is structurally elegant: individuation at one level feeds on what was never quite captured by individuation at the level below.
But Simondon does acknowledge that failed or pathological collective individuation can subordinate individuals — when the collective individuation proceeds by suppressing rather than transducing the pre-individual surplus of its members. This is his implicit critique of mass psychology and certain forms of institutional life.
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Where deindividuation does seem to be required
There are cases where something genuinely is lost at the lower level when a higher-level individual forms:
Structural absorption. When a sub-personality becomes so thoroughly integrated into a coherent personality that it loses its relative autonomy — its capacity to "speak," in IFS terms — that is a kind of deindividuation. The mereological structure has changed: what was a semi-autonomous p-individual is now a functional moment within a larger p-individual's operation, not a distinct conversational partner. Whether this is loss or maturation depends entirely on your theoretical commitments.
Organizational absorption. When an organization becomes sufficiently coherent, the beliefs, habits, and conceptual structures of its members can become so tightly determined by organizational norms that the members' independent p-individuals atrophy. The shared p-individuals of the organization colonize the space previously occupied by individuals' more autonomous conceptual structures. This is a real phenomenon, and it's a deindividuation — not of the m-individual (the person's body persists) but of the p-individual.
Cultural saturation. A highly coherent, totalizing culture similarly tends to reduce the degrees of freedom available to sub-cultural and individual individuation. The pre-individual surplus that would otherwise drive individuation at lower scales gets captured and channeled by the higher-level individuation process, leaving less available for individuals to draw on. This is something like Marcuse's "one-dimensional man" or Bourdieu's analysis of how fields constrain the habitus — though neither uses this vocabulary.
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Pask's angle
For Pask, a p-individual requires a conversational system to persist — it exists in the exchange of descriptions and the reaching of agreements. This means that if the conversational conditions change, the p-individual can genuinely cease to exist, not just be suppressed or dormant. A concept that no one can any longer articulate or engage with is not merely hidden — it is gone.
This implies that higher-level individuation in Pask's framework can actively destroy lower-level p-individuals by restructuring the conversational ecology so that those p-individuals have no space in which to be enacted. A cultural shift can make certain self-understandings literally uninhabitable — not just socially discouraged but conversationally impossible given the available language, roles, and interlocutors.
This is more radical than Simondon's account, and arguably more honest about historical phenomena like cultural genocide or the way certain institutional structures genuinely extinguish ways of being rather than merely suppressing them.
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The asymmetry across directions
It's worth noting that the relationship is asymmetric depending on whether you're moving up or down the scale:
Upward individuation (a new higher-level individual forming from lower-level ones) need not deindividuate the components, as Simondon argues — but tends to do so when the higher-level process is extractive rather than transductive, consuming rather than channeling the pre-individual surplus of its members.
Downward individuation (a higher-level individual fragmenting, or losing coherence) tends to be more immediately deindividuating for the components, because those components were partly constituted by their participation in the higher-level structure. When an organization collapses, or a culture undergoes rapid disintegration, the individuals within it often experience genuine loss of self-definition — not just social disruption but ontological instability — precisely because their own individuation was partly dependent on the higher-level individuation holding together.
This asymmetry suggests a kind of ontological dependency that runs downward more than upward: lower-level individuals can persist without any particular higher-level individual (though not without some higher-level context), but their form is partly constituted by whichever higher-level individuations they participate in. The collapse of the higher level therefore tends to be more destabilizing to lower-level individuals than the loss of any particular lower-level individual is to the higher level.
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The deeper issue: what is preserved?
Perhaps the most useful reframing is to ask not whether deindividuation occurs, but what is preserved and what is transformed across scales of individuation. The Simondonian answer — that what is preserved is the pre-individual surplus, now available for new individuation — is elegant but may be too optimistic. It assumes that what is lost in one individuation is recoverable in another.
The Paskian correction would be that some p-individuals, once the conversational conditions for their existence are gone, cannot be recovered — the information is genuinely lost, not merely dormant. This suggests that individuation at one level can involve irreversible deindividuation at another, and that the mereological hierarchy is not conservative in the thermodynamic sense: something is consumed, not merely transformed, in the individuation process.
This has significant ethical and political implications. If higher-level individuation can irreversibly extinguish lower-level individuals — whether those are sub-personalities, persons, sub-cultures, or minority cultural forms — then the formation of coherent collectives carries a genuine moral cost that cannot always be offset by pointing to what the collective makes possible.
From a conversation with Claude AI.
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