Battlegrounds

Abstract

In a superficial sense, we all have to live together. In reality the men and women whose actions and attitudes make a significant contribution to the shape and meaning of an individual’s life are comparatively few in number, and most of these are dead. Indeed many of them have never actually existed. Our wives or husbands, our parents and children, our personal friends, rivals, and enemies, our immediate colleagues, but also the memorable figures who present themselves to us from our own or our culture’s past and the imaginary figures who address us intimately from their private fictitious worlds - these are the seminal personalities who make up the creative circle of human meaning within which we establish the identity we recognize as properly ours. Nevertheless, outside this vivid circle there stretch seemingly endless networks of social causality which we perceive as essentially impersonal because they are virtually deaf to our unique individuality even when their operations tend to favour the development of individuality as a general principle. This is how we inevitably, and rightly, perceive the world of social, economic, and political institutions and processes; and yet we know that there is good and evil in this arid, collective, marginal world too, and that we sometimes have to make judgements and take sides.