According to Gellner, the transformation of the ''closed, intimate communities'' in which most people once lived into open, large-scale market systems produced ''the central problem facing contemporary societies,'' the seemingly irresolvable conflict between an individualistic mode of thought and the desire for the spiritual comfort of community. Gellner argues that ever since Descartes responded to the clash between religion and 17th-century science by trying to create a body of knowledge on the basis of nothing but his own experience and reason, philosophy has called into question the claims of culture over the mind and even the sense of self of an individual in the social world. It also, however, called into being its opposite, he says, a romantic insistence on community and culture as the necessary matrix of selfhood, knowledge and ethical life. Neither view, according to Gellner, provides an adequate picture of human society and knowledge. But both tell partial truths.
Individuals derive their aims and needs from the cultures they live in.
On the other hand, the idea of independent truth put together by rational individuals made possible the development of modern science and the world-changing power of industrial society. Because, Gellner thinks, of the particular society from which he came and his position in it. In its last decades the Hapsburg empire held together a seething collection of would-be states with a strange combination of Catholic absolutism and cosmopolitan liberalism. The ''Tractatus'' sketches a world peopled only by the philosophical self, whose experience is structured only by the flattened-out schemata of logic. Culture, in other words, does not exist.