The Nature of the Individual and His Fulfilment

"The Nature of the Individual and His Fulfilment "

- Chinua Achebe

Introduction:

According to Chinua Achebe, every human culture, either now or in the past, has confronted, in some form, the two realities of social man - his individuality and his membership of a group. Differences between cultures must therefore be sought not in the presence or absence of this polarity, but rather on whether they place their emphasis nearer one pole or the other. Yet, it is important to remember that however strongly one culture may seem to be dominated by either of these realities, the other is always present, if only in a recessive role.

Seeds for the Growth of Western Individualism:

When the West was ready to enthrone individualism as a consequence of its peculiar political and economic evolution, there was Biblical authority ready at hand: In the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, we find the collective responsibility for sin is superceded by a new morality based on individual accountability. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die" said the prophet [Ezek.18:4]

There were also other and more recent seeds - sown by the Protestant Reformation, which made every man his own priest and later in the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century in America and France with their ringing assertion of the equality of men. Finally the sweeping success of Freud gave the seal of scientific approval in an increasingly science-oriented age to the growing preoccupation with self.

Difference between Western Culture and Other Cultures:

One of the major differences between Western Culture and the cultures of other parts of the world is the West's celebration of the autonomy of the individual at the expense of society.

Achebe here quotes the protagonist of the novel Ambiguous Adventure, by the Senegalese Muslim writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane, when the hero is asked how the history of Western thought strikes an African, he says:

"Socrates' scheme of thinking does not seem to me, at bottom, different from that of Saint Augustine, though there was Christ between them."

Achebe says that if Socrates - or his student Plato and Augustine were to return to the world today... ... ...

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