ABSTRACT
The autonomous, self-constituting person, the much vaunted “I” of the Enlightenment, seems now to have had its day. The solitary cogitating mind, formulating itself and truth from the ground up—the icon of modernity—turns out to have been an illusion born of privilege. In actuality, it was typically only those with sufficient means to pay others to take care of “life” who could deceive themselves into thinking that they were the sole determiners of their own future. Self-determining modern “man” was in fact nothing apart from the relationships he relied upon but failed to see, the various quills with which he wrote his own story: the wife, the housekeeper, the gardener, the environment, the servant, the slave, the worker, the child. In our time, however, in what is a late modern or perhaps already postmodern moment in the West, the image of the “I” as prior to and independent of the “We” is receding in favor of a new vision that sees the “I” as a refracted “We.” And, as others from non-Western cultures continue to remind those of us in the West, community as the source of individuality is not actually a new idea. In truth, it is not even a new idea in the West.
