Here is an idea that I was thinking about, this is not a full discursive analysis but just some loose thoughts. I was reading a small section of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Vol 1, the part of the text where the concept of ‘I’ comes about as a type of amalgamation of all universals is of particular interest. After thinking about this a little, it seems to be itself the point of departure between the sociological and individual perspectives of cultural theory.

“When I say I, I mean to refer to myself as this individual, indeed as this determinate person. Actually, however, I do not thereby say anything specific about myself. Everybody else is I as well, and although in denoting myself as I, I mean myself, this individual being, I simultaneously utter something completely universal. 'I' is pure being-for-itself in which all that is particular has been negated and sublated; it is the ultimate, simple, and pure element of consciousness. We can say that I and thought are the same; or more specifically, I is the thinking as someone thinking. What I possess in my consciousness is for me. I is this void, the receptacle for anything and everything, that for which everything exists and which stores everything within itself. Every human being is an entire world of representations buried in the night of the I.”

-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1, Science of Logic

Regarding the two perspectives themselves, when we see something from the sociological perspective – a phenomena, an action, a movement– our aims are usually to describe it with respect to motivational factors of cultural values and beliefs represented within a social group, whether it be by geography, shared interest, or similarity. On the other hand, there is the concept of the individual perspective relating to the whole sphere of a person’s life as it would appear to them, allowing them to act and express meaning rather than act in themselves. These two perspectives the individual and sociological both seem connected with the divide of what Hegel is referring to by ‘I.’

“I” in the usual day to day sense as in ‘I walk the dog,’ or ‘I’m feeling sad’ is a concept as close as I can fathom to the individual perspective. When we try to see the world through the individual’s eyes, we think of an individual behaving in this manner; it seems the best way we have for sharing understanding of experience. This is not the individual’s real existence or will but a representation of them, a structure of representations strung together beginning from experience and other concepts and formed into an idea.

However, ‘I’ in the second sense, in the sense in which Rene Descartes used it, as the self thinking about the self universally, would closely follow the sociological perspective. Once the ‘I’ frees itself from the subjective usage, and begins to become universal and objective itself it forms what is called the sociological perspective. This is not the description of the sociological, which deals with the content or results of that thinking, but is simply the embodiment of the perspectives essential formula. When Descartes emptied his mind of everything and determined what was left, he established the all-inclusiveness of the ‘I’ in the cogito ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If ‘I’ is a thing that thinks, and not necessarily a particular person, then it would be the perspective most fit for making explicit how individual values can vary from person to person. If we were to try and use the individual representations for such a perspective, we would be explaining another’s experiences using the language of our own interests, which would be like trying to explain sense by referring to sense.

For instance, trying to explain poverty by the thinking of “I can go out and get a job, there’s no reason why someone else couldn’t” tries to explain a concept that has been thought of in terms of social universals through the language of the individual. The individual’s interests as appearing to him or her are given a separate treatment since they are a different language or structure of thinking more closely tied in with particulars, experience, and intuition. Something could very well be completely true and complete to the individual, and also false in the other sense. Using a sociological perspective we might feel inclined to rebut, ‘factors influencing hiring in low income neighborhoods can be significantly affected by social status, race and ethnicity.’ If we were to explain the individual’s actual representations in this way, we would wind up in a similar conundrum but limiting their world only to a system of laws that operate on them, denying him/her their realness.

There seems to be at least two easy to identify categories as instruments of these forces: a historical and narrative. Both of these are interpretations of reality and go farther than to describe, but are actually ways in which sociological factors exert themselves through determinations of cultural power.

Sociological sentences sometimes sound like, ‘The work conveyed the sufferings of a man exiled by his nation during the height of the civil war.” To the individual themselves, this statement would sound like an exterior cause, something they’d had nothing at all to do with. Alternatively, we could say, ‘The people spoke up, representing two hundred years of anger and subjugation at the hands of their oppressors.’ And we can extrapolate that this is contrary to the concept of the act as it appears to either the oppressor or the individual acting, but rather represents universalization of the individual and their actions. This type of perspective is more or less a type of historical style.

We could also think about life to a certain extent this way, as separate from the things that we think and feel in the moment of acting, and find some type of meaning in this that cannot be found elsewhere. This occurs in the form of a story or narrative, and sometimes this has influence on the individual’s actions themselves. Mostly talking in this way would sound descriptive of the individuals psychic causality. For example, "My life is about helping people affected by droughts," would be an example whereby the actions that went into producing this universal concept did not bear the meaning but there was a narrative to hold them together. In this narrative way, attitudes, values, and personal emotions are mixed between the individual and sociological concepts moving towards an ultimate directive.