The Transcendence View of Human Creativity

Abstract

Although the revisionists were able to challenge the grand narrative for the rise of the West and the blockage of the Rest, they were less successful in providing a robust alternative with a big picture as consistent as the grand narrative. As a result, they have made it more imperative to address the central question on the rise of the West.¹ Indeed, if ancient Greece was not the direct source of Western modernity, if some factors once considered pivotal for its rise also existed in the non-Western world, and if the “blockers,” once regarded as causes for the latter’s inability to originate modernity, were nonexistent, or not blockers at all, then the question of why it was the West that developed modern science, technology, and economy becomes even more puzzling. The results have been the great divergence debate regarding the sources for the rise of the West and the continuist-discontinuist debate concerning the causes of the scientific revolution.

I am that which must overcome itself again and again.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra