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assume that it was a solitary and curious individual who first made
fire). On the other hand, it is misleading to overlook the strategic
differences accounting for the diversity of paths that human beings
cut through history. To do so is to make history a grey area . The
very fact that we can intelligibly speak of "Western civilization" im–
plies that this particular aggregation of human acts and meanings
differs in significant ways from other aggregations, such as, say, those
of southern and eastern Asia. In this "Western aggregate," we would
contend that there is a strategically central item -
the autonomous indi–
vidual,
both as an idea and as a reality of human experience. This
phenomenon precedes modernity; indeed it has roots in very early
developments of Western culture, and it underwent a radical change
with the advent of the modern age. In fact, it is arguable that this
very change was an important element in the genesis of what we now
know as the modern world.
If
so, it is not a truism to point out that
the modern world originated in Europe -
not
in India,
not
in China,
nor anywhere else in the vast array of human cultures.
All human beings have selves, and insofar as they are reflec–
tive , they ask questions about the nature of this self. The West has no
privileged status with regard to either the intensity or the depth of
these questions. To take only one non-Western case, it could be
argued that questions about the nature, boundaries, and destiny of
the self constitute the core of several millenia of Indian thought , all
the way back to the more speculative portions of the Rig-Veda .
Nevertheless, the autonomous individual, in the Western sense, is a
very peculiar variant of that human self, which we may stipulate as a
cross-cultural universal. Jan Romein, the Dutch historian , has coined
the phrase "common human pattern" to denote a set of cross-cultural
uniformities, which are not universal but very widely distributed.
His purpose was to underline the peculiar character of modern
Western culture. In Romein's sense, Western individuality deviates
sharply from the "common human pattern ." And it is deviant
precisely in its features of liberation and loneliness - the individual
as free in and of himself, as differentiated from any and all collective
allegiances, and for that very reason alone, thrown upon himself,
"alienated."
It
is important to understand that the distinctiveness of
this phenomenon has been perceived both by those who glorified it
and by others who deplored it . This same feature of Western
civilization strikes non-Westerners, over and over again, when they
first come in contact with the West. Whether repelled or attracted,
most Asians or Africans , upon their first visit to a Western country
