Some Thoughts on the Development of Western Culture

Consistent with the tragic dualism that permeates Western thought, we have come to formulate our cultural ancestry as emanating from two fountainheads that eventually converged, but, alas, could not fully merge, and thus retained all the tensions inherent in such an interracial marriage: Hellenism and Judaism. Caught in the folly of dualism, we have again — at certain moments of our ideological history at least — sought the secret of “happiness” in the East, dividing the uninterrupted surface of this planet, and its inhabitants, into East and West.

Faithful to our Western tradition of dualism, or rather unable — perhaps unwilling—to transcend it, I propose to look at our dual cultural parentage from a developmental perspective, and situate it within the theoretical framework of what we know about individual psycho-ontogenesis.

One can hardly utter a few words without unintentionally and painfully expressing the underlying inner tensions within our conceptual apparatus: “to look at … from a developmental perspective … situate it within the framework of individual ontogenesis.” The ingredients of our Western “marital conflict” are all present here: it is the tension between seeing and hearing, between Space and Time.

Let us look first at some characteristic features of our Hellenic ancestry. One cannot avoid in this type of study the intellectual compromise that accompanies generalizations, the grossness of speaking in grosso modo, but, on the other hand, “generalizing” involves “synthesizing,” and synthesis is our valued inheritance from the Greeks as analysis is from the Hebrews.

Bruno Snell (1924) calls the Greeks “Augenmenschen,” people of vision. The Greek verb oidein, “to know,” derives from the stem id, “to see.” For the purposes of my argument one can choose Plato as