Колективният човек
The Collective Man

Summary/Abstract: The text begins with the statement that every crisis in life is a human crisis. A human crisis is referred to whenever the unity of man’s spiritual being is violated. That crisis has a historical character when the causes that give rise to it are not individual but collective ones, i.e. when they affect the spiritual environment in which the individual consciousness is rooted.There are two moments of particular interest in the relationship between the individual and the collective consciousness: the moment of sufficient compliance and the moment of contradiction between them. In the first case there is a total unity of the collective and also of the individual consciousness; all values including the vital, aesthetical, moral and religious ones are absolute; the individual lives with them naively untroubled by any skepticism, without his critical consciousness having been awakened; the individual is a completely integral part of the whole and his life fully coincides with the life of that whole. Such is the collective man. In the second case the individual consciousness is extorted from the collective consciousness and is more or less at odds with it. Since the unity of the collective has been violated all values have become conventional quantities; their absolute validity has been replaced by another – relative one; the naive faith has been replaced by the general doubt of criticism, the individual ceases to be a part included in the whole and strives to be outside that whole, often even fighting with it so as to be established as a sovereign being. Such is the individualist.

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