Abstract
One of the most powerful values of the word 'Occident' is perfection. In order to understand how it became that important, it is necessary to look at how civilizations evolved and what conveys the creation of perfection in our everyday life. Indeed, perfection has had numerous different meanings according to the past population's way of thought through times. First of all, we have to notice that civilizations are surrounded by the quest of perfection. In fact, civilizations are mostly the illustrations of abstraction and homogeneous reality and they highlight people. Before civilizations, there are people and we have to respect individualities even if human beings are mainly influenced by our immediate environment. Secondly, in the western civilization, all Occidentals have not been and are still not up to what their system value expects. Here, we want to point out that it is not because the western world is based on such a value system that westerners are all pure and close to perfection. This is probably because Occidentals questioned the Western civilization that they left their value system in which it proceeded, that they reconsidered themselves in relation to the rest of the world and finally that they stopped to be considered as universal references. Thirdly, Western culture is not born alone but by the contribution of many different civilizations: Greek, Roman, Christian and also Muslim. Saint Thomas d'Aquin is the symbol of this so common heritage of knowledge, experiences and diverse principles. Occidental civilization is not born from exclusion but from mergers. These three steps allow us to avoid any ambiguity which encloses the 'western civilization' expression and fallacious interpretations (Intercollegial Studies Institute, 1996).
