One may well say that antiquity lacked both the broadest and purest conception of objectivity and the deepest and most precise conception of subjectivity. The concept of natural law as an absolutely substantive, universal rule, indifferent to all "values," was as foreign to antiquity as the real concept of the ego, with its productivity and its freedom, its problematics, and its value that outweighs the world. The psyche neither went so far beyond itself nor so deeply into itself as it later did via the synthesis—or also the antithesis—of the Christian ethos with modern natural and historical sciences. This cannot have been without internal and at least indirect connection with the sociopolitical structure of the Greek world. The enormous internal prerogatives of the narrower state circles bound the individual by and large to a certain intermediate image of life and the world that fell between universality and ultimate personality; and the whole form of existence inherent in these restrictions had to be abolished in order to make room for development toward those two extremes.

XREF: Relates to broader discussions of ancient Greek epistemology and the sociology of knowledge connecting political structure to philosophical concepts.

XREF: Connects to tension between universal/particular and objective/subjective that recurs in philosophical history and modernist thought.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 697