The text centers on the issue of individual identity, its relationship to other individuals, its social value and ultimately the „self worth“ as a criterion for evaluating all values and diverse societies. Nonetheless the problem of individual self identity is multi-layered and requires an investigation of diverse factors, such as the nature of cultural determinants, the specific social structure which might supress any kind of individual presence, or a social structure that promotes individual identity. Social structures and cultural factors lead to the question of civilizational contexts wherein such structures and factors find their limits. To reach such limits, the text offers methodological procedures that allow a disclosure of the „essential“ aspects of societies and cultures, their inherence in civilizational logics, and the way that the latter provide qualitative differences for interpreting the meaning of identity. At the methodological level, the text offers arguments for the primacy of qualitative understanding over the modern Western quantitative procedures and their limitations. Finally, the question is addressed and articulated as to the civilizational conditions that permit individual identity to unfold, and the way such unfolding might take diverse routes either in one‘s own native land or in diaspora. The latter is quite significant for the Baltic nations, and specifically for Lithuania which is losing significant numbers of citizens to immigration
