ABSTRACT
Kant provides powerful, if far from straightforward backing, for the (currently widely criticised) view that the human subject, when called upon to identify itself, is conceptually bound to do so at a fundamentally dualist point of tension and intersection between the universal and the particular. On such a Kantian-type view of the human situation, it is also and by the same token an essentially moral one of which the subject finds itself at a point of always potential conflict between its built-in obligation to the universal and the commitments of its own particular situation. Seen in this light, the complex Jewish identity, (in which, of course, I have my own share), rooted on the one hand in the claim to the universal truth of the Jewish religion and on the other in that to the particular status of the Jewish people in their relationship to God represents, in its own particular way the universally conflicted situation of human self-identity as such.
