The themes — war's attractive and destructive power; the thin line between comradeship and antagonism; the foot soldier's very narrow, very intense view — are not particular to Iraq, but universal.
He wants a new Jewish identity focused not on the particular but on the universal, asserting that "if we do not establish modern Israeli identity on foundations of optimism, faith in humans and full trust in the family of nations, we have no chance of existing".
The result is that it is dense but not long, dramatic but not melodramatic, particular and universal, shocking but reassuring, new but at the same time closely connected to the tradition of the novel, and likely to mould or change a reader's sense of the world.
In the judgment "this is a cow", even the 'subject' of the judgment does not refer to the object of perception, since words do not refer to perceived particulars but to universals which extend across space and time.
And finally, common notions such as substance, truth, goodness, equity, and God, as well as axioms such as the same thing cannot be and not be, are innate, that is, they proceed from the mind alone, since all corporeal motions are particular but these notions are universal.
Rather, it is a matter of moving from the particular to the universal, but without a universal at hand by which this move can be justified.
His story is memorable and strange, but it feels particular, not universal.
The opening claim, for instance, might be rendered "Every particular instantiates a universal, but universals do not instantiate universals".
His existential solitude is at once particular and universal: it invites sympathy for all outcasts.
And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal.
