The specification of that base in terms of the broadest categories of life can now be completed somewhat as follows. Every human being emerges as a certain combination of predetermination and accident; of received material for, and unique formation of, his life; of social inheritance and the individual administration of it. In each person, we see the stereotypings of his race, his stratum, his traditions, his family, in brief, of everything that makes him a bearer of preexisting contents and norms; we see these combined with the incalculable and the personal, with free autonomy. The earlier factors are the a priori, as it were, and the latter are the singular givenness, which combine to produce the empirical phenomenon.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 520