How did we become a culture of unbridled egoism? And how does our culture of the self, with its daily calls for self-expression and self-transformation, co-exist wiht our world of modern science and its implicit determinism? This essay offers a new and strikingly original interpretation of Western thought. It argues that the contemporary secular view of what it means to be a human being has been shaped by the philosophy of German idealism. It shows how the major schools of today's self-understanding, including the social sciences, psychology, pragmatism and the many forms of existentialism...