Claes Ryn on the Concrete Universal

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"Whenever goodness, truth and beauty are realized, universality and particularity are mutually implicated in each other. Universality manifests itself through the particular. This synthesis does of course shun particularity incompatible with itself, but, to become itself, universality requires its own kind of particularity. The more adequate the concrete instantiation, the more profound the awareness of universality that it yields. Universality is transcendent in the sense that none of its particular manifestations exhausts its inspiring value, but without historical particularity universality also is not a living reality, but is only an empty theoretical abstraction created by ahistorical reasoning."
-- Claes Ryn, "Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator"

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