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much as ideational) may be said
to excise
the individual from his col–
lective background-to make him both freer and more alone . In–
deed, the very vision of the individual here is, more and more, a
solitary vision - the individual who is ultimately to be recognized
and judged in his unique reality. This individual is, in Paul the
Apostle's words, "neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free,
neither male nor female" -or, more precisely , while he (or she) is
this or that, such identifications are accidents of birth and biography
that do not touch on the
ens realissimum
of the unique individual
"underlying" them all. Paul, to be sure, was speaking only of the unity
of all Christians within the body of Christ. But it is not such a long
way from this assertion to the modern one of the individual who has
inalienable rights
qua
unique individual- "irrespective of race, color
or creed"-to which a list of "accidents," such as national origin, sex
(or, for that matter, "sexual orientation"), age, and physical or men–
tal incapacity have been added. All of this comes to liberation,
understood in ever fuller ways - and, in the very same movement, to
a deepening aloneness.
If
one argues that the above propositions delineate a specific
Western phenomenon and
ipso facto
a deviation from the "common
human pattern," one need not imply thereby that this phenomenon
is absolutely without parallel elsewhere. Very few sociohistorical
phenomena are that idiosyncratic . Diligent researchers will always
be able to find a quasi-Socrates in ancient China or a quasi-Buddha
in colonial New England.
If
nothing human is truly alien to me, then
I must be open to the possibility that everything human can be found
in very alien places. But here we are dealing with
aggregates.
Put dif–
ferently , everything (or nearly everything) can be found everywhere,
but in different aggregations. The distinctive character of Western
individuality lies in the frequency and the centrality of these traits in
the development of the West. This particular aggregate, we would
argue, is indeed unique, and within the overall spectrum of human
cultures it is sharply deviant.
Where does it come from? By the very nature of this sort of
question, and given the vicissitudes of historical scholarship , there
cannot be a conclusive answer. Still, we know where to look . The
roots of the phenomenon lie in the eastern Mediterranean, in the
discrete but finally conjoined experiences of ancient Greece and an–
cient Israel. Something must have happened, even if we cannot be
certain what it was, which made some early Greek sculptors take
their figures out of the background of the frieze and allow them to
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