The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

but enables us to see things, is not somewhere outside us, but becomes a living part of us and yet is peculiar to our structures of brain and nerves, having been incarnated in each of us individually, and is manifested only in our acts of applying our consciousness to concrete situations.

If our acceptance of this system of patterns of culture, as Ruth Benedict calls them, imprinted upon us by the society we live in, is a blind, passive acceptance without critical awareness, this turns us into fanatical, intolerant, dogmatising individuals and makes it impossible for us to understand other people—which here means simply those whose way of thinking and acting is not identical with our own. This, as it works out in terms of individual lives, of societies, and of the relations between peoples of widely differing cultural traditions, is the prime source from which flow the majority of the troubles and disasters of mankind in our time. Misunderstandings, pathological isolation, imperialism, destructive fanaticism are all symptoms of one single failing: lack of critical sense concerning ourselves and our ways of thinking and behaving.

If, instead, we take pains to make ourselves critically aware of the different factors which go to make up our own thinking, we are more likely to understand why those other people think differently. We can do this if we learn to see the patterns of culture we use in our thinking as solutions—socially codified and verified —of life problems, solutions to the problems typical of our particular society and our particular cultural tradition, and as guiding principles of behaviour that are valid only insofar as they correspond to the realities of these problems. And if we thus succeed in understanding other people’s life problems, we shall then be able to understand why they think in a way that is different from ours. And in the end, when we have discovered that there are some crucial problems in which we are all equally involved, we may even be able to achieve close co-operation. There are indeed some human problems that are universal: survival, reproduction, the education of the young, social co-operation, personal and creative self-expression in art, in science, in politics, in religion; all these are universal problems bound up with our human condition itself. But as historical conditions change, so the solutions found for these problems keep changing with the times;