The Originality Paradox

Abstract

neously the opposed categories of individual and society. pivotal point, insists Simmel, of the concept of is when man is freed from everything is not wholly himself, what remains as the actual substance of his being is man in general, mankind, which lives in him and in everyone else. ' It is only by this truth there can exist the conception of a lonely crowd, for the paradox of title reflects the paradox of human consciousness. Neither individuality nor communality can be felt without the other, although each strains against its complement. paradox reflects no adventitious alignment of possibilities, but rather an irreducible truth of what it is to be human. The fact is, points out Kierkegaard, that at every moment the individual is himself and the race. 2 Any attempt to resolve the paradox is unsuccessful. Romanticism's very emphasis on the isolated ego (From my youth upwards, intones Manfred, spirit walked not with the souls of men ... / My joy was in the wilderness,-to breathe / difficult air of the iced mountain's top) is an attitude leads to nothingness: MANFRED (alone): 'We are the fools of time and terror. Days / Steal on us, and steal from us; yet live, / Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.' Zarathustra too inhabits the peaks of isolation; but Nietzsche's own lot was despair and collapse. Indeed, Durkheim, in his classic treatise, identifies one genesis of suicide as precisely the isolation of the individual from the group: we may call egoistic the special type of suicide springing from excessive individualism; for such suicide is an awareness of the complete emptiness of an egoistic life.3 On the other hand, too much communality leads just as inexorably to nothing-