Dilemma
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Whether the goal of life is reached one soul at a time or by the community together — or whether neither is the right frame.
Context
Religious and philosophical traditions disagree sharply about whether the ultimate human goal — salvation, liberation, enlightenment, eudaimonia, fulfillment — is reached individually or communally. Some traditions hold that each soul stands before God alone; others that the community is saved together or not at all; others that liberation is collective historical work; others that the question itself misframes a goal that is cosmic or species-level.
Why it matters
This commitment shapes practice as much as doctrine: whether faith is most fully expressed in private interior life, in communal ritual, in political action, or in ecological stewardship. It also shapes what counts as a religious or moral failure — solitary unbelief, communal apostasy, complicity in oppression, or species-level catastrophe.
The coordinates that split the schools
The stances
Each soul stands before God alone.
9 schoolsSalvation is fundamentally between the individual person and the absolute.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 100% No — continuous divine sustaining act, the Tao that knows no joints, the One's self-disclosure. on Is reality fundamentally digital?
- 100% No — continuous divine presence; consciousness is the unbroken witness. on Are there indivisible units of experience?
- 100% Held in continuous divine or ancestral remembering — neither stored discretely nor purely reconstructed. on Is memory stored or reconstructed?
- 100% The discrete person is the moral primary. on Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
- 89% A soul continues into another mode of being. on What happens to "you" when you die?
The community is saved together or not at all.
29 schoolsSalvation is constituted in the body of the faithful, the umma, the sangha, the people.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 100% The community of persons is the moral primary. on Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
- 86% A soul continues into another mode of being. on What happens to "you" when you die?
- 86% The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. on Do you really choose?
- 86% The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. on Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
- 86% An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
Liberation is the collective historical work of the oppressed.
9 schoolsSalvation is real but happens through class-historical liberation, not individual conversion.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 100% Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural. on Could causation work backwards?
- 100% The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction. on Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
- 100% The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description. on Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
- 100% The class or historical movement is the moral primary. on Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
- 89% Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation. on Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Liberation is the realization of cosmic or species self.
30 schoolsThe "self" that is liberated is not the individual person but the cosmic Self, the Buddha-nature, the species.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 77% Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all. on Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
- 73% The species or biosphere is the moral primary. on Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
- 60% The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. on Do you really choose?
- 60% The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. on Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
- 60% An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
Schools the coordinates don't place
These schools don't satisfy any stance's coordinate pattern strongly enough to be assigned — either because they decline to commit on the question (Confucianism is famously silent on what comes after; Pyrrhonian and pragmatist traditions suspend judgment), or because their attribute signature crosses categories in a way the five buckets don't capture.