Upon approaching the new century, we learn daily how deeply we have been conditioned by the Cold War extremes of the last 50 years. As with any war, these worked in two directions. In vast regions one ideology, in order to affirm the totality, laid waste to intermediate levels of association, treating people as masses. In reaction, contrary ideologies so stressed individual autonomy and rights as progressively to dissolve the bonds of community, neighborhood, and even family, thereby projecting ever greater responsibilities upon the state. Whether out of allegiance to the state or to the individual, to the whole or to the part, there emerged a world of communal living and lonely crowds, overshadowed by a faceless and increasingly bureaucratic state.

Upon reflection, it is not surprising that the new initiatives have generated new problems, but it is truly frightening to find that the responses reflect a return to old ‘solutions’. This does violence to the emerging personalist aspirations and threatens to compound the tragedies of the 20th century for the 21st century about to begin.

On one level, a reductivist or reactionary focus on individual rights tends to sweep away shared traditional standards of human decency and with them the social bonding they reflect. As a result new (market) expressions of individual initiative give way to irresponsible greed and corruption. Instead of responding by developing a moral sense proportionate to the newly acquired freedom, the technology of government control is expanded. Thus, individual corruption threatens to be extrapolated into a battle of commercial interests at the national level, where, corruption being joined to coercive power, people and their needs are trammelled.

On another level, there is a new awareness of the national and ethnic identities of peoples. This calls for a creative integration of diversity, but it also generates fear and chauvinism and evokes responses which range from legal restrictions on the liberties of all to ruthless military suppression of minorities.

In these circumstances there is a renewed call for the redevelopment of civil society as a way both old and new to draw upon, and realize more perfectly, the passionately held values of the recent past. What is sought is a new stage overcoming and superseding the conflictual contraposition of values so that their complementarity can emerge and the deep concerns they reflect can be protected and promoted.

- that it can expand the active participation of citizens,

That those who express such varied concerns converge upon the notion of civil society as the hopeful bases upon which a response to their varied problematics can be built suggests strongly that it provides a special vantage point to examine and organize ways of developing a more adequate social life in the coming century.

Carrying out such a search longitudinally through time promises to provide a cumulative sense of the meaning which can be accessed through this term, the possibilities and difficulties of a range of approaches to its conceptualization and realization, and even a suggestion of a new approach appropriate to the challenges and new opportunities of our times.

We shall begin our study of civil society from the earliest modes of social life as it emerged in totemic and mythic forms and then look to its philosophical articulation by the Greeks. In this our concern will be to work toward uncovering its basic elements and dynamism. We shall seek not simply the bare historical facts with all their happen-stance, but the creation of the meaning of social life sought by people living together in their many circumstances. This is the basic social good which is struggled for when absent, and celebrated when attained. As the basic concern which moves people to respond to their circumstances meaning mediates the multiple events to a life goal. If well-conceived it is the key to constructive responses to the challenges of each age; if ill-conceived it assures that the responses will be at best ineffective or even conflictual. It is precisely here then that philosophical reflection is needed and promises to make an especially important contribution.

We note then an intensive social unity or community, symbolized by the totem with which people identified in an immediate manner. Life was little differentiated; everyone did everything. As differentiation of roles had not yet arisen, there was no need for a more complex symbol system. Though found quite universally throughout the world and lasting over vast lengths of time, the simplicity of this model, even in its various analogous configurations catalogued by Claude Levi-Strauss in his Totemism, would not be sufficient for the emerging complex diversity of life.

With the development of differentiation in roles there came a point at which it could be appreciated that the unique and unitive principle of a differentiated society needed to be free from, and in that sense transcendent to, the many realities it unites. With this came gradually the sense of multiple gods each transcending the realities they symbolized, yet united genetically among themselves in anthropomorphic patterns. As the varied myths expressed the meaning of life and shaped its realization, this period came to be termed rightly the age of myth.

What is important philosophically here is that this created and expressed a sense of unity among persons, while allowing none-theless for their individual distinctiveness. Together, these bespoke a sense of complementarity or sociality. If there was conflict among the gods there was also a basic hierarchy and overarching unity in which humans participated as their descendants and expressions.

This symbol system for society was so significantly varied and enriched that it was possible for Homer to write in its terms his enduring statements of the nature and meaning of human life, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

What then does primitive and mythic life yield for an eidetic reduction of the notion of civil society? It gives first an insight into the basic character of unity in social life and enables us to see something largely unintelligible to those in an individualist culture, namely the foundational character of social unity for human life. Second, it enables us to see how differentiation can be had within a social unity and in such wise that it promotes rather than destroys it as a community. Thirdly, it provides a context within which an extended number of people can provide for the complexity and direction of their life through some degree of stratification.

The philosopher is concerned especially with the point at which myth could be transcended through the development by reason of a capacity to articulate the basic character of reality no longer in symbolic, but in proper terms. This made it possible to reason discursively and thereby to discover the nature of reality in its multiple, including its social forms.

As regards civil society this comes to: how can human beings establish a social unity which promotes, rather than subverts, the unique dignity and self-realization of all who are its members. This remains the basic issue to our day. It could be expected that whoever would open the way to resolving this issue would be the father of the Greek, and hence the Western, tradition in philosophy. This proved to be Plato and Aristotle.

There was, however, a fatal weakness which showed up in his description of an ideal state in his Laws (in some contrast to his Republic). In response to the chaotic situation of his times, Socrates had sought a pattern of virtues which could provide real guidance in actual intuitions of human action. Plato, seeking greater clarity in their regard, reduced them to ideal forms in relation to which the many individual instances were but passive formal images. This made room for diversity between different forms, but left the many instances of any one form as basically identical—just as all number threes are the same among themselves and in relation to threeness itself. As a result the ideal state he described in the Laws had a shocking absence of any sense of the uniqueness of human beings. It reduced social life to a communal form in which all was determined by and for the state.

To the degree possible, and in terms of the sense of reality of the times, this image of society was corrected by Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, who first mapped out the field of philosophy as a science and a wisdom. It is here that we shall attempt to advance our eidetic reduction of the notion of civil society and to observe the contribution that philosophy can make to the development of that notion.

With regard to civil society Aristotle took three preliminary steps. Speaking thematically rather than chronologically, he first developed the science of logic in order to make it possible to control the steps of the mind in extended and complex reasoning. The result was the first elaboration of the structure of scientific knowledge in both the theoretical and the practical orders. Second, he proceeded actually to design the sciences for the first time. He developed Physics as an appreciation of the active character of physical reality and, by implication, of all being. In his de Anima, the science of living beings, he identified intelligence and freedom as the distinctive characteristics of human life. These found the proper dignity of human beings and imply a civic union of human communication and cooperation. But the practical creative work of developing and directing these cooperative unions is the topic of ethics and politics as sciences of the practical order.

We find immediately that most properly the political bespeaks governance or directive action toward the goal. Significantly this is expressed by the term arché which originally means beginning, origin or first source. Secondly, this is extended to governance in the sense of sovereignty, that is, directing others toward a good or a goal but not oneself being necessitated by others. It is the point of beginning or origin of social action, and as such bespeaks responsi-bility for the overall enterprise. This is what is characteristically human as an exercise of freedom by individuals and groups in originating responsible action. Though most actions of humans at the different inorganic and organic levels can be performed by other physical realities, it is precisely as these actions are exercised under the aegis of freedom that they become properly human acts. This issue of corporate directive freedom—its nature and range—is then the decisive issue as regards civil society. How this is needed and how it can be effectively exercised today is the heart of the issue of civil society for our times.

The polis is then a species of community. It is a group, which as human and hence free and self-responsible, comes together in governance to guide efforts toward the achievement of the good life. Community and governance are not the same or tautological, but they do go together, for persons are united as a community by their common orientation to the same end, and as free they rightly guide or govern themselves toward that end. In this way Aristotle identifies the central nature of the socio-political order as being a koin nia politika or "civil society".

Civil society then has three elements. First there is governance: arché, the beginning of action or the taking of initiative toward an end; this is the exercise of human freedom. But as this pertains to persons in their various groups and subgroups there are two other elements, namely, communication or solidarity with other members of the groups and the participation or subsidiarity of these groups or communities within the whole. In the search for the goal or end, that is, for the common good, the participants form communities marked by solidarity and interrelated in subsidiarity. Thus to understand a civil society we must seek to uncover the solidarity and subsidiarity of the community as its members participate in the governance of life toward the common good.

Solidarity and Community

Through time societies have manifested an increasing diversity of parts; this constitutes their proper richness and strength. As the parts differ one from another, this increase is numerical, thereby bringing quantitative advantage as with an army. But it is even more important that the parts differ in kind so that each brings a distinctive concern and capability to the common task. Further, differing between themselves, one member is able to give and the other to receive in multiple and interrelated active and receptive modes. This means that the members of a society not only live alongside others, but that their shared effort to realize the good life thrives through their mutual interaction.

Such solidarity of the members of society is one of its essential component characteristics. Plato would use the terms methexis and mimesis or participation for this. But Aristotle feared that if the individual were seen as but another instance of a specific type or an image of the primary form their individuals would then lose reality. So he soon ceased to use this term; the term ‘solidarity’ which recognizes the distinctive reality of the parts seems better to reflect his thought.

In the human body, where there is but one substantial form, the many parts exist for the whole and the actions of the parts are actions of the whole (It is not my legs and feet which walk; I walk by my legs and feet). Society also has many parts, and their differentiation and mutuality pertains to the good of the whole. But in contrast to the body, the members of a community have their own proper form, finality and operation. Hence their unity is an accidental one of order, that is in terms of the relation or order of their capabilities and actions to the perfection of the body politic or civil society and the realization of its common good.

But there is more than solidarity to the matter of order of which a civil society is constituted. Community in general is constituted through the cooperation of many for the common goal or good, but the good or goal of a community can be extremely rich and textured. It can concern nourishment, health maintenance, environmental soundness; it includes education both informal and formal, both basic and advanced, and retraining; it extends to nutrition, culture, recreation, etc., all the endless manners in which human beings fulfill their needs and capacities and seek "the good life". As each of these can and must be sought and shared through the cooperation of many, each is the basis of a group or subgroup in a vastly varied community.

When, however, one adds the elements of governance (arché), that is, the element of freedom determining what will be done and how the goal will be sought, then the dimension of subsidiarity emerges into view. Were we talking about things rather then people it would be possible to envisage a technology of mass production in a factory automatically moving and directing all the components automatically toward the final product. Where, however, we are concerned with a community and hence with the composite exercise of the freedom of the persons who constitute its membership, then it is crucial that this not be substituted for by a command from outside or from above. Rather governance in the community initiating and directing action toward the common end must be exercised in a cumulative manner beginning from the primary group, the family, in relation to its common good, and moving up to the broader concerns or goals of more inclusive groups considered both quantitatively (neighborhood, city, nation, etc.), and qualitatively (education, health, religion) according to the hierarchy of goods which are their concerns.

The synergetic ordering of these groups, considered both quantitatively, and qualitatively and the realization of their varied needs and potentials is the stuff of the governance of civil society. The condition for success in this is that the freedom and hence responsible participation of all be actively present and promoted at each level. Thus, proper responsibility on the family level must not be taken away by the city, nor that of the city by the state. Rather the higher units either in the sense of larger numbers or more important order of goods must exercise their governance precisely in order to promote the full and self-responsible action of the lower units and in the process enable them to achieve goals which acting alone they could not realize. Throughout, the concern is to maximize the participation in governance or the exercise of freedom of the members of the community, thereby enabling them to live more fully as persons and groups so that the entire society flourishes. This is termed subsidiarity.

Thus through considering phenomenologically Aristotle’s analysis of the creative activity of persons striving consciously and freely toward their goals it is possible to articulate the nature and constituent elements of civil society as a conscious goal of persons and peoples. It is a realm of persons in community solidarity and through a structure of subsidiarity participating in self-governance.

This manifests also the main axes of the unfolding of the social process in Greece, namely:

(a) from the Platonic stress upon unity in relation to which the many are but repetitions, to the Aristotelian development of diversity as necessary for the unfolding and actualization of unity;

(b) from emphasis upon governance by authority located at the highest and most remote levels to participation in the exercise of governance by persons and groups at every level and in relation to matters with which they are engaged and responsible;

(c) and from attention to one’s own interests to attention to the common good of the whole.

Following progress along these axes will be the key to efforts to develop civil society and will provide guidance for efforts to promote a proper functioning of social life.

If these be the original components of the notion of civil society, as first systemized philosophically by Aristotle, we should look to the major subsequent stages in the evolution of philosophy for the unfolding of this notion of civil society as the heart of social life. We shall do so first in the classical medieval synthesis of Aquinas, then in the turbulent reality of modern thought. This should put us in position to look at the new avenues along which civil society can be pursued in our day.

This development required transcending the Greek notion of being which had meant simply a specific type or kind to an explicit awareness of the act of existence (esse) in terms of which being could be appreciated in its active and self-assertive character. The precise basis for this expansion of the appreciation of being from form to existence is difficult to identify in a conclusive manner, but some things are known.

First, it was a period of intensive attention to the Trinitarian character of the divine. To understand Christ to be God Incarnate it was necessary to understand Him to be Son sharing fully in the divine nature. The Son, like the Father, must be fully of one and same divine nature. This made it possible to clarify, by contrast, the formal effect of God’s act in creating limited and differentiated beings as constituted in their own right. This pointed to the meaning of existence, which for humans means human life, and for society is the issue of how life in community can truly be lived humanly.

Cornelio Fabro suggests that another factor in the develop-ment of this awareness of being as existence was reflection upon one’s free response to the divine redemptive invitation. This response goes beyond any limited facet of one’s reality, any particular consideration of time, occupation, or the like. It is a matter of the self-affirmation of one’s total actuality. Its sacramental symbol, baptism, is not merely that of transformation or improve-ment, but of passage through death to radically new life. This directs the mind beyond my specific nature or individual role. It focuses rather upon the unique reality that I am as a self for whom living freely is to dispose of my act of existence and living socially is to do this in cooperation with others. This opens the way to a new seriousness and great potential progress as regards the realization of civil society.

It took many centuries for this evolution in philosophical awareness from essence to existence to emerge clearly and for its implications vis-a-vis the Christian Platonism, which had reigned from Augustine to Bonaventure, to be brought clearly to light.

The catalyst for this was the new availability of the texts of Aristotle in the 12th and 13th centuries. His work on civil society was taken up immediately by Thomas Aquinas and effectively elaborated upon in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:

In a sense this is an insightful synthesis of Aristotle, but in the light of Thomas’ existential emphasis it signifies considerably more. We saw above in Aristotle the principles of human freedom, solidarity and subsidiarity. We saw also how in terms of reality as primarily act, existence and freedom came to be much more than the choice between different forms or contrasting natures; it became the creative affirmation by which things were made actual or brought into reality.

Thus, one was not simply taking part in a process of cyclical return such that no matter how hard one struggled all ultimately returned to its original state. Life is much more significant: it has history and directedness, radical newness and definitive meaning. It has a uniqueness and creativity, such that the exercise of human freedom is always momentous with sacred meaning which has eternal import. This is a vastly deepened sense of the dignity of human freedom and the reason why its exercise must be protected and promoted.

Further, in terms of existence this can be seen not only from the teleological point of view of the goal or end as with Aristotle, or from the formal point of view as with Plato, but from the point of view of its origin in, and from, existence itself. This did not take away the importance of natures in ordering to an appropriate end, which allowed the contribution of the Stoics regarding natural law to be integrated. But it transformed this from pattern to which we surrendered to a wise and loving source by which our more limited but yet decisive powers should be measured and inspired. The Stoics had seen moral life as simply a matter of following the laws of nature; Kant would see it as living up to laws which we ourselves autonomously decreed. But for Thomas to assimilate and act upon the laws of a God-given nature was to participate in and express the wisdom and love from which all came and toward which all was directed. Moral action in a civil society was creatively to mediate this ideal pattern into concrete cooperative action by the members of society in the many and myriad ways in which they intersected in their lives.

For human solidarity this had great import. In this light, community was even less than for the Greeks a matter merely of a shared specific form and of harvesting all human power in a quantitatively cumulative manner, as might an army. It was rather the enablement of each person to express this freely and hence in a thoroughly unique action, and to do this actively by contributing effectively as a cause to their life and its actuation. This takes us far beyond the notion of a unity merely of order which evolves into a dynamic unity of action and graded interaction in patterns of subsidiarity.

But how is this not to destroy the uniqueness of each person but to intensify it, and in the process how is it not to destroy the unity of society but to intensify that? Thomas’ answer is to redevelop Plato’s notion of participation, but in the sense of Aristotle’s notion of being as act and of its Christian sense as existence. In this light all exist by sharing in a common source of existence. This is reflected through time in their active conscious cooperative commitment to striving toward a common goal. This is inspired by conviction regarding their transcendent origin and purpose, and made actual in the hope and mutual love which this engenders.

The bonds of solidarity which this builds and which spread out, beyond family and blood relations, to strangers we meet and hopefully even to peoples afar are deep and vast. Indeed, from tribal to medieval times the great challenges of mankind have always been at the border of these felt unities where other persons or groups appear as markedly "other", alien, and threatening. Given present mobility, this defines the major problem of immigrant peoples who become aliens within. Hence, the transcendent and active principle of unity, solidarity and cooperation between persons and communi-ties is the more necessary in our task of binding together increasingly different groups.

For subsidiarity too the deepening of the notion of reality opened a major new opportunity. For to the degree that reality could be seen in terms not of closed forms but of the act of existence, then the forms and structures could become, as it were, translucent one to the other. Each was constituted not in terms of its opposition to others, as are material blocks or contrasting forms such as red and brown, but rather in terms of the degree to which the original source of existence was reflected in their actuality and through their efficient causality was communicated to others. The paradigm of an original gift of being in which all were created meant that the significance of life lies in sharing or giving in turn. In social terms this means that the significance of a level of society lies not in holding all exercise of governance to itself but in enlivening other groups and subgroups in the exercise of their own freedom.

For civil society this meant not deadening the initiative of other groups by holding power to oneself, but enlivening and empowering the multiple communities to direct or govern their own life or area of activity and to train people progressively in guilds and other forms of comity to live and exercise responsibility in their own sphere of community life.

(a) Circumstantial freedom of self-realization: "To be free is to be able, under favorable circum-stances, to act as one wishes for one’s own individual good as one sees it;"

(b) Acquired freedom of self-perfection: "To be free is to be able, through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as one ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature;" and

(c) Natural freedom of self-determination: "To be free is to be able, by a power inherent in human nature, to change one’s own character creatively by deciding for oneself what one shall do or shall become."

 

The suggestion which follows is that the Enlightenment explored the first two senses of freedom and in attempting to develop the notion of civil society has manifested its own limitation for the task. This will imply for our final section an exploration of ways of developing civil society at the third level of freedom, and doing so in a way which integrates and thereby humanizes, rather than simply dismisses, the earlier two levels of freedom.

The opening of modern times is marked by, and probably consists in, a characteristic shift in governance. This no longer was shared by all or at least by the notable number of free men as in the ideal of the Athenian polis, but had been concentrated in Roman Emperors, kings and nobles. Later, while great empires emerged in the East, in the West governance was highly divided in small kingdoms led by local princes, as is reflected today in the abundance of castles in Italy, Austria, etc. They had broad responsibility, yet were held to moral standards, if not legal norms, with regard to the concerns, if not the rights, of the people they ruled.

The story of the emergence of the citizenry—from the Magna Carta to the American "Declaration of Independence", to the French "Rights of Man", to the United Nations Charter and its "Declaration of the Rights of Man", to the Chinese Revolution of 1949—is, of course, the defining context of the evolution of civil society in modern times. This can be followed in many terms such as population, health or sovereignty. But it is significant that in philosophy and political theory the modern age has been charac-terized above all as the Enlightenment or Age of Reason. This suggests that underneath, or at least in close and controlling tension with the development of the notion of freedom there stands a development in the understanding of knowledge. We are faced then, as it were, with a series of boxes. To understand and prescribe philosophically regarding the notion of civil society we need to be aware of the notion of freedom; but in order to grasp this notion of freedom we need to be aware in turn of developments in the meaning of understanding. Hence, in order to explore the development of the notion of civil society in modern times and to understand its present problematic we shall take three steps in both British and Continental Enlightenment thought. First, we shall investigate their sense of knowledge which enables the awareness of meaning and the interests of people; second, we shall investigate their notion of free-dom; thirdly, we shall see how this defines the mode of governance in the society referred to as civil.

On the one hand, as an ex-Augustinian, friar Martin Luther was educated in a loosely Platonic, rather than an Aristotelian, tradition. As seen above, this favored the ideal pattern over the concrete and differentiated. On the other hand, as a follower of Ockham, and hence of nominalism, he held closely to knowledge of single things and rejected a capacity of the intellectual for knowledge of natures and universals. These came together to constitute a fideism in order to bring out the importance of faith in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Luther focused upon the damage done to humankind by the Fall seeing it as not merely weakening, but corrupting human nature and its capacities for reason. On this theological, rather than philosophical, basis human reason was seen as no longer capable of knowing the divine or thinking in terms of being or existence as the proper effect of His causality. Suddenly, the world became very opaque. Knowledge of natures and hence of natural law was no longer possible, a study of human life could reveal at best what was, but not what ought to be. The morally good, could be known not from an understanding of the nature of things themselves, but only from the will of their creator, which, in turn, could be known only by special revelation as communicated in Scripture. In the important matters of life, faith firmly held was substituted for reason; theology replaced philosophy, which shrunk suddenly to external knowledge of accidental happenings.

The questions of the time, however, were not shrinking but expanding and becoming more pervasive. They included not only what one could know, but how one could redevelop the socio-economic order in view of the vastly expanded resources of a farflung empire and the newly invented industrial capabilities. No less importantly there was question of how all this could be managed by the new parliamentarian manner of governance which soon would be institutionalized by the American and French revolutions. The issue of civil society (the koin nia politika) would have to be rethought on this new basis but by very narrow bands of knowledge and correspondingly narrow understandings of freedom.

Early on John Locke was an assistant to the Earl of Shaftsbury who would soon become the Lord Chancellor of the British Empire—and literally loose his head in the complex political eddies of those changing times. In these circumstances, in a regular series of discussions with colleagues he came to see how progress on political and other issues required further clarification of what we could know. Thus, Locke’s thought moved from issues of gover-nance to community, and hence to knowledge. Facing the issue of how the arché, origination and sovereignty in political decision-making could reside not in the single person of the king, but in a group or parliament communication became central in importance. How could the members of such a group think together in order to come to agreement upon decisions on public policy and thereupon exercise their will in legislation? For Locke this meant that all needed to have equal access to the same foundations of knowledge.

Thus knowledge sedulously avoided any consideration of the nature of one’s own reality or of other persons and things. Interpersonal bonds of civil society and human community based on an intimate appreciation of the nature of the person and on respect for the dignity of other human beings were replaced by external observations of persons as single entities wrapped in self-interests. This lent itself to the construction only of external utilitarian relations based on everyone’s self-interests. Mutual recognition constituted a public order of merely instrumental relations assured by legal judgements rendered by the courts. In this way there came to be established a system of rights and of justice to protect each one’s field of self-interested choices and of action against incursion from without. This field was progressively defined through legal judge-ments and legislation and enforced by the coercive power of the state. Through the combination of industrial and colonial expansion, property or wealth was vastly expanded as was the public impact of the self-interested decision-making based thereupon. In turn, the state by legislating these private interests into public law and engaging its coercive power created a legal pattern which defined the meaning of justice for its time.

The restrictions implicit in this appear starkly in Rudolf Carnap’s "Vienna Manifesto" which shrinks the scope of meaningful knowledge and significant discourse to describing "some state of affairs" in terms of empirical "sets of facts." This excludes speech about wholes, God, the unconscious or entelechies; the grounds of meaning, as well as all that transcends the immediate content of sense experience, are excluded. All of these would be absent from the construction of the public order.

This first level of freedom is reflected in the contemporary sense of "choice" in North America. As a theory, this is underwritten by a pervasive series of legal precedents following Justice Holmes’ notion of privacy, which now has come to be recognized as a constitutional right. In the American legal system the meaning of freedom has been reduced to this. It should be noted that this derived from Locke’s politically motivated decision (itself an exercise of freedom), not merely to focus upon empirical meaning, but to eliminate from public discourse any other knowledge. Its pro-gressively rigorous implementation, which we have but sampled in the references to Hume and Carnap, constitutes an ideology in the sense of a selected and restrictive vision which controls minds and reduces freedom to willfulness. In this perspective, liberalism is grossly misnamed, and itself calls for a process of liberation and enrichment.

Here a strong and ever deepening gap opens between, on the one hand, what reason could ascertain, namely, a set of self-interested single agents interacting in the Hobbes manner as wolves to wolves, and, on the other hand, what would undergird the construction of a public social order.

Where in this mechanism was civil society to be found? Due to the restriction of knowledge to the empirical reporting and managing of facts, the moral realm was no longer an effort at rational ordering of all toward the common good of the overall society and its variously articulated sub-groups. The newly restricted reason could provide no basis for a public moral order of duty and obligation. Instead, all moral life was located in the private, interior sphere as a matter not of reason, but of feeling, affectivity and emotions.

In this manner the moral warrant for the civility of civil society is separated from reason, from the creator as source of society, and from the substance and end of society. Its warrant is left as self-justifying and self-motivating. While moral sentiment can generate a certain conception of a way of life and a conviction that this is a good way to live, these are hard pressed by the internalized motivation of self-interest based on the drive for material possessions. These even receive divine sanction in the complex, convoluted, puritan rationa-lization described by Max Weber.

Is this motivation for a separated civil society adequate to harmonize all the elements in the full breadth of human life? In the context of the first level of freedom as developed in early British empiricist philosophy following Locke, with its external utilitarian structure for human relationships, Adam Smith developed a corresponding economic theory. His goal was social promotion and protection of the economically disadvantaged. These, he thought, could best be achieved by the untrammelled development of economic forces under the guidance of their own inner logic, namely, free market interchange working as an invisible hand. Being blind to realities other than its material, economic self, however, it was inevitable that this would trammel inadvertently upon the broader human and social reality which needed and deserved to be protected. Hence he turned with full and equal seriousness, if with less success, to the elaboration of another realm—civil society. This was neither the economic order nor the state, but was needed in order to provide a "safety net" for those endangered or damaged by the interplay of market forces and the dislocation and unemployment which they generate.

It could and should be argued further that in this understanding, civil society is not merely a matter of protecting the victims of the economic system, but even more of providing a human context for the lives of all who do participate in that system. It would be a field in which they could as community exercise their humanity and hence their freedom. Here the exercise of freedom need not be limited to its first level; thus the early modern Scotch theorists, responding to Locke, developed their theme of civil society as a realm of altruistic activity guided by moral affectivity. This stood in constant contrast to the self-interested and self-seeking management of property in terms of its own maximization. It was inspired both by such religious motifs as the example of divine providence and benevolence, and the desire to be seen and appreciated by one’s peers as a good and morally sensitive person. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sensitivity was a natural, integral and typical part of this crucial early modern development, though he seemed over time to have moved to stress justice over benevolence.

Finally, it should be noted that civil society was conceived not only as a refuge from the economic realm both for its victims and its participants, but also as a wellspring of economic abilities. Without health and basic education there cannot be a successful work force; without further education and communication there will not exist the creative inventiveness to generate more products and to compete successfully; without a sense of self-worth, human dignity and social concern the invisible hand will be left to destroy its own environment and the human potentialities it requires.

All of this argues for a civil society on the basis of economic interchange exercised not reductively at the first level of freedom, but essentially transcending that dimension. Even those who would attempt to hold reductively to the first level would refer to civil society in terms of "enlightened" self-interest play loosely with words, for in effect it means exercising self-interest with levels of insight and meaning which transcend the empirical and utilitarian. This is to say that for utility to be maximized and really succeed it needs to be situated in a context of meaning and a set of values which transcend it. The Scots recognized this and drew insight from other, especially religious, sources in order to humanize their world and support their system.

But is this sufficient to ward off the deleterious effects of leaving the economic order of production and distribution to a non-human "hidden hand"? Marx’s world shattering analysis of the conditions of mill workers in 19th century England was a resounding "no". While these condition have since been seriously attenuated, his indictment of the system itself that generated them, though fought over in wars hot and cold, has never been truly answered. The difficulties increase as the material stakes and self-interest increase, and as not only workers but management becomes more distant from ownership, and communication slips ever more toward the inadequate language of the economic balance sheet.

And what can be expected of this arrangement as we move from the industrial to the information age in which the focus of material self-interest will shift to competencies possessed by the technically sophisticated few? This promises to catapult large numbers of people out of industrial production which previously had absorbed massive numbers, and thus out of the economic web, leaving them to wander and search for their survival in that inter-mediate field called civil society.

This does not exclude that people might yet be inspired and motivated by values held in private behind the "veil of ignorance", but these are not a matter of public concern which is only that a field of action and equal competition be guaranteed by an agreed structure of rights protected by the state. This is the self-styled "the free world"; Kant would consider it a field of lawful right (rechts) worked out by practical reason concerned with defining its own prerequisites; in the common law areas it would be constituted by legislative or judicial will as exercised in resolving conflicts. In either case it would not be a properly moral field of ethical action, for that is relegated to the private and the personal.

But perhaps this exclusion of the ethical from the public arena and its relegation to the private realm is what is most important here for the issue of civil society. For if the point of civil society is to constitute a realm for the full exercise of a richly textured social life, this approach implies strong limitations. It creates a notion of the private, but does so in a negative manner, that is, not in terms of full personal self-expression but as that which is excluded from public expression and engagement. Further, even when defined as the realm of the private, civil society is in a precarious situation for the requirements that one abstract from gender, age, race, religion, etc., which the liberal approach imposes upon the public order, are continually extended to the private. More and more it becomes difficult to express one’s identity in a school or club, all of which come under the strictures of the public domain if they participate in any public funding or are important for social or professional advancement. Anti-federal paranoia in Oklahoma was an aberrant sign of the sense of threat created by this invasive depersonalization not only of the public but of the private realm, as is fundamentalism in many lands.

In sum, certainly we need guarantees of equal participation by all in social life. The fight against discrimination and the calls for a society of law rather than of men have primarily that meaning. But where this has not already evolved over time, what forces will generate it; and where it already exists is it sufficient? The critics of Rawls would note that his political liberalism does not provide the motivation for its own implementation, and thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel and Marx would see what motivation there is as lying captive to self-interest in terms of material possessions and Adler’s first level of freedom. Most serious this reflects their separation of morality and of religious and other integrating views of the meaning of life from the public sphere. As this progressively expands it pervades all and promises to subvert the bases for civil society as well.

This suggests some important elements for any development of the notion and reality of civil society. First, it must not be relegated to a private realm defined by exclusion from an ever expanding domain of public life and meaning. Second, the ethical must not be separated from the public exercise of freedom lest social life be a mere voluntarism. Third, the ethical must not be separated from reason and hence from reasoned discourse or from the experience and shared traditions of a people. The last section of this paper must look for how this can be done.

In the previous section we saw how in the Anglo-American context the reduction of understanding to sense knowledge and the corresponding reduction of freedom to the choice among external objects first reduced civil society to the realm of sentiment and then marginalized it on public life. On the continent a more rationalist philosophical context had an analogous effect.

In Western cultures since Plato clarity of reason has been endowed with a special, almost fetishistic, value. Time after time this has led to a dismissal of what did not possess that clarity, or to its reduction to what could be presented with a high degree of rational clarity. This resulted in the marginalization of the insights of Pascal in favor of the search for rigorous clear and distinctive ideas following Descartes; the same was true of the insights of Kierkegaard in the aftermath of Kant. It is not surprising then to note that the proposals of a civil society based upon moral sentiment would not survive in the renewed rationalization of philosophy by Kant, Hegel and Marx.

But then we face the dilemma of freedom. If, in order to have value, it must be ordered, can freedom be truly autonomous and, hence, free; conversely, if to be free is to be autonomous, will it be surely a value. In either case, how can freedom be free? The dilemma is how persons can retain both meaning and value, on the one hand, and autonomy or freedom, on the other. One without the other—meaning without freedom, or freedom without meaning—would be a contradiction. This is the kind of question that takes us to the intimate nature of reality and makes possible new discovery. I will suggest in the last section that eventually this could allow us to appreciate from within the more intuitive insight of Confucius and, thereby, to engage this in new ways particularly adapted to present times. To see this, we must look at the structure of the three critiques which Kant wrote in the decade between 1781 and 1790.

It is unfortunate that the range of Kant’s work has been so little appreciated. Until recently, the rationalist impact of Descartes directed almost exclusive attention to the first of Kant’s critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason, which concerned the conditions of possibility of the physical sciences. Its rejection of metaphysics as a science was warmly greeted in empiricist, positivist and, hence, materialist circles, as a dispensation from any search beyond what was reductively sensible and, hence, phenomenal in the sense of inherently spatial and/or temporal.

Kant himself, however, quite insisted upon going further. If the terms of the sciences were inherently phenomenal, then his justifi-cation of the sciences was precisely to identify and to justify, through metaphysical and transcendental deductions respectively, the sets of categories which enable the phenomenal world to have intelligibility and scientific meaning. Since sense experience is always limited and partial, the universality and necessity of the laws of science must come from the human mind. Such a priori categories belong properly to the subject inasmuch as it is not material.

We are here at the essential turning point for the modern mind, where Kant takes a definitive step in identifying the subject as more than a wayfarer in a world encountered as a given and to which one can but react. Rather, he shows the subject to be an active force engaged in the creation even of the empirical world in which one lives. The meaning or intelligible order of things is due not only to their creation according to a divine intellect, but also to the work of the human intellect and its categories. If, however, man is to have such a central role in the constitution of his world, then certain elements will be required, and this requirement itself will be their justification.

In sum, it is the task of the reproductive imagination to bring together the multiple elements of sense intuition in some unity or order capable of being informed by a concept or category of the intellect with a view to making a judgment. On the part of the subject, the imagination here is active, authentically one’s own and creative. Ultimately, however, its work is not free, but is necessitated by the categories or concepts as integral to the work of sciences which are characterized by necessity and universality.

How realistic is talk about freedom? Do we really have the choice of which so much is said? On the one hand, we are structured in a set of circumstances which circumscribe, develop and direct our actions. This is the actual experience of people which Marx and Hegel articulate when they note the importance of knowledge of the underlying pattern of economic and other laws and make freedom consist in conforming thereto.

On the other hand, we learn also from our experience that we do have a special responsibility in this world to work with the cir-cumstances of nature, to harness and channel these forces toward greater harmony and human goals. A flood which kills thousands is not an occasion for murdering more, but for mobilizing to protect as many as possible, for determining what flood control projects need to be instituted for the future, and even for learning how to so construct them that they can generate electricity for power and irrigation for crops. All of this is properly the work of the human spirit which emerges therein. Similarly, in facing a trying day, I eat a larger breakfast rather than cut out part of my schedule; instead of ignoring the circumstances and laws of my physical being, I coordinate these and direct them for my human purposes.

This much can be said by pragmatism and utilitarianism. But it leaves unclear whether man remains merely an instrument of physical progress and, hence, whether his powers remain a function of matter. This is where Kant takes a decisive step in his second Critique.

Beyond the set of universal, necessary and ultimately material relations upon which he focuses in his first Critique, Kant points out the fact of human responsibility in the realm of practical reason. If one is responsible, then there must be about him a distinctive level of reality irreducible to the laws of physical nature. This is the reality of freedom and spirit; it is what characterizes and distinguishes the person. It is here that the bonds of matter are broken, that transcendence is affirmed, and that creativity is founded. Without this nature would remain a repetitive machine; peoples would prove incapable of sustaining their burgeoning populations, and the dynamic spirit required for modern life would die.

Once one crosses this divide, however, life unfolds a new set of requirements for reality. The definitiveness of human commit-ments and the unlimitedness required for its free creativity reflect characteristics of being which soar far beyond the limited, fixed and hypothetical relations of the physical order. They reflect rather the characteristics of knowledge and love: infinity, absoluteness and commitment. To understand the personal characteristics experienced in our own life, we need to understand ourselves not as functions of matter, but as loving expressions of unlimited wisdom and creative generosity.

Locke had tried too hard to make everything public by reducing everything to the physical dimensions and concrete circumstances of human life. Instead, in order to understand the proper place of man in the universe, we must read ourselves and our situation from the opposite end, as expressions of conscious life, progressively unfolding and refining.

Many materialist philosophies of a reductionist character, such as positivism and other materialism, would remain at the level of Kant’s first Critique. The necessity of the sciences provides control over one’s life, while their universality extends this control to others. Once, by means of Kant’s categories, the concrete Humean facts have been suffused with the clarity of the rationalist’s simple natures, the positivist hopes with Descartes to be able to walk with confidence in the world.

For Kant, however, this simply will not do. Clarity which comes at the price of necessity may be acceptable and even desirable for works of nature, but it is an appalling way to envisage human life. Hence, in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant proceeds to identify that which is distinctive of the moral order. His analysis pushes forcefully beyond utilitarian goals, inner instincts and rational (scientific) relationships, precisely beyond the necessitated order which can be constructed in terms of his first Critique. None of these recognizes that which is distinctive of the human person, namely, freedom. For Kant, in order for an act to be moral, it must be based upon the will of the person as autonomous, not heterono-mous or subject to others or to necessary external laws.

This becomes the basic touchstone of his philosophy; every-thing he writes thenceforward will be adapted thereto, and what had been written before will be recontextualized in this new light. The remainder of his Foundations and his Critique of Practical Reason will be composed in terms of freedom, and in the following two years he would write the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment in order to provide a context enabling the previous two critiques to be read in a way that protects human freedom.

In one sense Kant would appear to agree with Hume by developing as two separate critiques his treatment of pure and practical reason. The first provided an epistemology for scientific reason which does not attain to the nature of things. According to this, one could not define a pattern of natural law nor determine a set of ends in relation to which one could construct a teleological ethics. In contrast, in the second critique he began afresh to develop a distinctive order of practical reason and to define the formal conditions of such reason. It is precisely on this that principles such as never treating a person as a means rather than an end are formulated and founded.

In this way he makes a twofold transformation. One is to translate much of the content of the realm of moral sentiment, which had been the moral warrant for the virtues of civil society in the thought of the Scots, into patterns of universal reason and thereby to provide them with rigor and universality. The second is to move these elements from the realm of the subjective and private to that of the objective and public. This was of central import for Kant, as it was through the civil structures of political interchange that his central notion of human autonomy was established. This was a noble effort, a landmark for the sense of the person, and for a high standard in the exercise of freedom. It enshrined as a condition of freedom the public right to rational debate and critique in the realm of civil society seen now as distinct from the state.

With regard to civil society this provides some cognitive preconditions for community and for participation, but it omits any actual meeting of hearts such as Aristotle considered central and it allows for only a selectively restricted meeting of minds. As to freedom and governance, especially in its basic sense of initiating and directing action, the concern for ends or goals and the motivation and conviction these evoke—all are left in the privacy of the heart. Natural sympathy has no place in the public order and virtue is seen to be a purely private. How could these elements be reintroduced? Efforts to do so are very significant for the issue of civil society today, because their success or failure will indicate the degree of sufficiency of the basic modern projects of knowledge and freedom. Even should these prove unsuccessful that fact may bear clues as to how we can proceed to the future. This is the special interest for us of the attempts of Hegel and Marx to respond to this challenge and thereby to save civil society, even if in Europe both seem in the end to have taken the notion down dangerous paths without exit.

At the present juncture we find ourselves at the end of the Cold War between the individualist and communalist ideologies and in search of ways to proceed. Civil society as understood in modern terms has experienced a check. But this may be more a check of the modern rationalist context itself. For it can be said that the individualist ideologies reflected the British tradition of working in empiricist terms (from Locke, the Scots and Hume to Rawls) on the one hand, while the communalist ideologies reflect the continental traditions (of Hegel and especially Marx), on the other (both lines drawing on the first two critiques of Kant). From different perspectives they took up the perennial quest for ways to realize the dignity of persons as free, self-determining and sharing in governance, not only in one mass society, but with respect to the variegated levels and modes of human comity. Both appear to have pushed the logic of their own positions and can be proud of real achievements. But the destructive and paralyzing isometrics into which they fell could be the judgement of history confirming the philosophical assessment above that neither line provided an adequate route for human progress. This perennial question returns now in the new and more potent circumstances of greater property, people and needs.

All of this, together with the existential and post-modern critiques of rationalism suggests that the task of developing a more adequate notion of civil society must be taken up, but on a new, more open and inclusive basis. To do so will require a richer notion of reason and of freedom capable of integrating the personal dimensions of moral sensitivity in a broader sense of human life and meaning such as is suggested by the new hermeneutics of culture.

If then there is agreement on the need for civil society in the broad terms cited in the introduction, but disagreement on its feasibility in the terms of modern rationalism, this suggests that we need to continue the effort to redevelop the notion of civil society, but to do so at a new level of freedom. Adler’s third level natural freedom of self-determination is: "to be able, by a power inherent in human nature, to change one’s own character creatively by deciding for oneself what one shall do or shall become." It is significant that it is to this, rather than the proceeding two levels of freedom that Adler adjoins political liberty and collective freedom.

But there are a number of indications that this new level of freedom will require and reflect a new level of knowing: the result of Adler’s search of philosophical literature shows how closely the levels of freedom correspond to those of knowledge; modern times has been defined by technical reason above all; the Enlightenment whether the 16th and 17th centuries have worked in terms of empirical knowledge and in the 18th century in terms of Kant’s first two levels of reason; finally it is particularly significant that post-modern attention has shifted to the third critique of aesthetic reason. Following the pattern used to analyze the modern notions of civil society, let us first look at this third level of knowledge or critique, then proceed to the new ambit of freedom, and finally see what this can mean for the development of civil society. The above progression followed that of the earlier British-French Enlightenment in which the limitations of knowledge implied a corresponding limitation on freedom. This meant, in turn, that civil society was a realm of moral sentiment separated from economic and political life. For the later continental Enlightenment, it was constituted of necessary prerequisites of reason, whether the properly ethical was relegated to the private inner life of individuals. Here we shall look once again to Kant for indications of new dimensions of meaning for social life which will draw upon the resources of the culture of a people and find there moral authority for governance. This will be based upon the rich store of their cumulative experience and free commitments and reflect the solidarity and subsidiarity of their society.

In initiating the decade in which he wrote his three critiques Kant did not have the third one in view. He wrote the first critique in order to provide methodologically for the universality and necessity of the categories found in scientific knowledge. He developed the second critique to provide for the reality of human freedom. It was only when both of these had been written that he could see that in order to protect and promote freedom in the material world there was need for a third set of categories, namely, those of aesthetic judgement integrating the realms of matter and spirit in a harmony which can be appreciated in terms not of a science of nature as in the first critique nor of society as worked out from the second, but of human creativity working with the many elements of human life to create human life and meaning which can be lived as an expanding and enriching reality.

This can be seen through a comparison of the work of the imagination which he provides in the first and the third critiques. Kant is facing squarely a most urgent question for modern times, namely: how can the newly uncovered freedom of the second critique survive when confronted with the necessity and universality of the realm of science as understood in the Critique of Pure Reason?

- Will the scientific interpretation of nature restrict freedom to the inner realm of each person’s heart, where it is reduced at best to good intentions or to feelings towards others?

- When we attempt to act in this world or to reach out to others, must all our categories be universal and hence insensitive to that which marks others as unique and personal?

- Must they be necessary, and, hence, leave no room for creative freedom, which would be entrapped and then entombed in the human mind? If so, then public life can be only impersonal, necessitated, repetitive and stagnant.

- Or must the human spirit be reduced to the sterile content of empirical facts or to the necessitated modes of scientific laws? If so, then philosophers cannot escape forcing upon wisdom a suicidal choice between either being traffic directors in the jungle of unfettered competition or being tragically complicit in setting a predetermined order for the human spirit.

Freedom then would, indeed, have been killed; it would pulse no more as the heart of mankind.

Before these alternatives, Kant’s answer is a resounding No! Taking as his basis the reality of freedom—so passionately and often tragically affirmed in our lifetime by Ghandi and Martin Luther King—Kant proceeded to develop his third Critique of the Faculty of Judgment as a context within which freedom and scientific necessity could coexist, indeed, in which necessity would be the support and instrument of freedom. Recently, this has become more manifest as human sensibilities have opened to awareness that being itself is emergent in time through the human spirit and hence to the significance of culture.

There is something similar here to the Critique of Pure Reason. In both, the work of the imagination in assembling the phenomena is not simply to register, but to produce an objective order. As in the first critique, the approach is not from a set of a priori principles which are clear all by themselves and used in order to bind the multiple phenomena into a unity. On the contrary, under the rule of unity, the imagination orders and reorders the multiple phenomena until they are ready to be informed by a unifying principle whose appropriateness emerges from the reordering carried out by the productive imagination.

In the first Critique, however, the productive work was done in relation to the abstract and universal categories of the intellect and carried out under a law which dictated that phenomena must form a unity. The Critique of Pure Reason saw the work of the imagination in assembling the phenomena as not simply registering, but producing the objective order. The approach was not from a priori principles which are clear all by themselves and are used to bind the multiple phenomena into a unity. On the contrary, in the first Critique, under the rule of unity, the imagination moves to order and reorder the multiple phenomena until they are ready to be informed by a unifying principle on the part of the intellect, the appropriateness of which emerges from the reordering carried out by the reproductive imagination.

Here in "The Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment," the imagination has a similar task of constructing the object, but not in a manner necessitated by universal categories or concepts. In contrast, here the imagination, in working toward an integrating unity, is not confined by the necessitating structures of categories and concepts, but ranges freely over the full sweep of reality in all its dimensions to see whether and wherein relatedness and purpo-siveness or teleology can emerge and the world and our personal and social life can achieve its meaning and value. Hence, in standing before a work of nature or of art, the imagination might focus upon light or form, sound or word, economic or interpersonal relations—or, indeed, upon any combination of these in a natural environment or a society, whether encountered concretely or expressed in symbols.

Throughout all of this, the ordering and reordering by the imagination can bring about numberless unities. Unrestricted by any a priori categories, it can nevertheless integrate necessary dialectical patterns within its own free and, therefore, creative production and scientific universals within its unique concrete harmonies. This is properly creative work. More than merely evaluating all according to a set pattern in one’s culture, it chooses the values and orders reality accordingly. This is the very constitution of the culture itself.

It is the productive rather than merely reproductive work of the human person as living in his or her physical world. Here, I use the possessive form advisedly. Without this capacity man would exist in the physical universe as another object, not only subject to its laws but restricted and possessed by them. He/She would be not a free citizen of the material world, but a mere function or servant. In his third Critique Kant unfolds how man can truly be master of his/her life in this world, not in an arbitrary and destructive manner, but precisely as creative artists bring being to new realization in ways which make possible new growth in freedom.

Developing the level of aesthetic sensitivity enables one to take into account ever greater dimensions of reality and creativity and to imagine responses which are more rich in purpose, more adapted to present circumstances and more creative in promise for the future. This is manifest in a good leader such as a Churchill or Roosevelt—and, supereminently, in a Confucius or Christ. Their power to mobilize a people lies especially in their rare ability to assess the overall situation, to express it in a manner which rings true to the great variety of persons in their many groupings in a pattern of the subsidiarity characteristic of a civil society, and thereby to evoke appropriate and varied responses from each according to the circumstances. The danger is that the example of such genius will be reduced to formulae, become an ideology and exclude innovation. In reality, as personable, free and creative, and understood as the work of the aesthetic judgment, their example is inclusive in content and application as well as in the new responses it continually evokes from others.

Kant’s third Critique points in another direction. Though it integrates scientifically universal and necessary social relations, it does not focus upon them, nor does it focus directly upon the beauty or ugliness of concrete relations, or even directly upon beauty or ugliness as things in themselves. Its focus is rather upon our contem-plation of the integrating images of these which we imaginatively create, that is, our culture as manifesting the many facets of beauty and ugliness, actual and potential. Here Marx makes an important contribution in insisting that this not be left as an ideal image, but that it be taken in its concrete realization of a pattern of social relations. As we appreciate more and more the ambit of free activity in the market and other levels of life, this comes to include those many modes of solidarity and their subsidiary relations which constitute civil society. In turn, we evaluate these in terms of the free and integrating response of pleasure or displeasure, the enjoyment or revulsion they generate most deeply within our whole person and society according to the character of our culture.

Confucius probably would feel very comfortable with this if articulated according to the sense of peace generated by an appreciation or feeling of harmony. In this way, he could see the sensibility of which the Scots spoke as freedom at the height of its sensibility, not merely as an instrument of a moral life, but as serving through the imagination as a lens or means for presenting the richness of reality in varied and intensified ways. Freedom as social sensibility, understood not only morally but aesthetically, is both spectroscope and kaleidoscope of being. As spectroscope it unfolds the full range of the possibilities of social freedom, so that all can be examined, evaluated and admired. As kaleidoscope, it continually works out the endless combinations and patterns of reality so that the beauty of each can be examined, reflected upon and chosen when desired. Freely, purposively and creatively, imagination weaves through reality focusing now upon certain dimensions, now reversing its flow, now making new connections and interrelations. In the process reality manifests not only scientific forms and their potential interrelations, but its power to evoke our free and socially varied responses of love and admiration or of hate and disgust.

In this manner harmony becomes at once the creative source, the manifestation, the evaluation and the arbiter of all that imagina-tively we can propose. It is goal, namely to realize social life as rational and free, united and peaceful in this world; it is creative source, for with the imagination it unfolds the endless possibilities for social expression; it is manifestation, because it presents these to our consciousness in ways appropriate to our capabilities for knowledge of limited realities and relates these to the circumstances of our life; it is criterion, because its response manifests a possible mode of action to be variously desirable or not in terms of a total social response of pleasure or displeasure, enjoyment or revulsion; and it is arbiter, because it provides the basis upon which our freedom chooses to affirm or reject, realize or avoid this way of self-realization. In this way, freedom emerges as the dynamic center of the creation of civil society.

There is much in the above which evokes the deep Confucian sense of the harmony and the role of the gentleman in society in unfolding its implications for daily life. This uncovers new signifi-cance in the thought of Confucius for the work of implementing in a mutually fruitful manner science and democracy in our times. Looking to the aesthetic sense of harmony as a context for uniting both ancient capabilities in agriculture with new powers of industri-alization and for applying these to the work of building society is a task, not only for an isolated individual, but for an entire people. Over time, a people develops its own specific sensibilities and through the ages forms a tradition and a culture, which is the humane capital for such a project. In this sense, one can look to the Confucian cultural heritage for its aesthetic sense of harmony as a way to carry forward civil society in our day.

The Confucian sense of harmony is not a rationalist law whose unfolding would suggest an attempt to read all in an a priori and necessitarian manner. Its sense of life and progress is not that of a scientific view of history after the dialectic of Hegel and Marx. Rather, the Confucian way of understanding humans brings people together in relation to other persons and in the concrete circum-stances of everyday life. In this sense, it is not massively program-matic in the sense of a rationalist scientific theory of history. This may be very much to the good, for it protects against efforts to define and delimit all beforehand, after the manner of an ideology.

Further, one must not underestimate the cumulative power which the Confucian sense of harmony and resonance can have when it brings together creatively the many persons with knowledge of their circumstances and in an effort together or socially to provide for life in its many modes. This extends from those farmers who know and love their land intimately and are committed to its rich potentialities (and analogously from all phases of productive economic life), to family members and villagers—teachers, store-keepers and health workers—who love their kin and neighbors, to citizens who are willing to work ardently for the welfare of their people and nation. If the exercise of freedom is a concrete and unique expression of the distinctive reality of its authors, then the task is not how to define these by abstractive and personally stifling universal laws as in some enlightenment theories, but how to enliven all persons to engage actively in solidarity in the multiple dimensions of their lives.

Philosophically, the Confucian attitude is of great importance. For if harmony and resonance enable a more adapted and fruitful mode of the realization of being, then the identity and truth, dynamism and goodness of being are thereby manifest and proclaimed. In this light, the laws of nature emerge, not as desiccated universals best read technically and negatively as prohibitions, but as rich and unfolding modes of being and of actualization best read through an appreciation of the concrete harmony and beauty of their active development in patterns of social subsidiarity. This, rather than the details of etiquette, is the deeper Confucian sense of the gentleman and sage; it can be grasped and exercised only with a corresponding aesthetic, rather than merely pragmatic, sensibility.

Nor is this beyond people’s experience. Few can carry out the precise process of conceptualization and definition required for the technical dialectics of Platonic and Aristotelian reasoning. But all share an overall sensibility to situations as pleasing and attractive or as generating unease or even revulsion. Inevitably, in earlier times, the aesthetic Confucian mode lacked the technical precision which is now available regarding surface characteristics of physical phenomena. But, in its sense of harmony, it possessed the deep human and social sensibility and ability to take into account and integrate all aspects of its object. This is essential for the contem-porary humanization of our technical capabilities for the physical and social mobilization of a richly textured and harmonious civil society.

From this it appears that it is not reason as working according to the necessary laws of the physical world (as in the first Critique) or as working out the necessary order of the prerequisites and conditions of freedom (as in the second Critique), but the active and creative work of freedom which takes up the constructive work which must be done in the social order and which focuses upon the work of freedom in governance as that constitutes the origin or sources (arché) of the pattern of social interaction of which civil society is constituted.

Ernest Gellner stumbles upon this, without recognizing it in his Conditions of Liberty: Civil society and Its Rivals when he speaks of the deep commitments of a people which generate strong emotive responses when touched, such as patriotism which unites and mobilizes a country for a revolution as in 1777 and 1949, or outrage at a patently unjust judicial decision, as in the first case of Rodney King (significantly, it could not be the last).

In the same context Burke developed the conditions of reform:

In a sense he mocks Locke by calling it a criminal presumption to treat one’s country as a blank sheet on which one may scribble whatever one will. The social life of human kind is much deeper and richer than that.

Here Burke raises some important issues for the development of the notion of civil society in aesthetic terms. If, as Manfred Riedel suggested, the components of civil society are best manifest through an eidetic reduction that leads to meaning, then how do patterns of meaning come together socially; if civil society requires governance then how can these patterns of meaning be endowed with the authority needed in order that governance not be arbitrary and wilful; and if times change, how can this pattern of meaning which constitutes a culture adapt to new times and be articulated with an appropriate order of sociability and subsidiarity.

These questions point to the new hermeneutic sensibility opened by the work of Husserl, and developed by Heidegger and especially Gadamer (to cite the key figures over three generations) as a new road to the appreciation of civil society for our time.

This phenomenologically based approach would take account of the free and creative work of inspiring, social cooperation. Working out the aesthetic level it promises to be able to harmonize and direct social cooperation. And as with Kant’s third Critique, it would integrate rather than omit the natural basis and political coordination of social life. This directs us therefore to a hermeneutic procedure interpreting the human social creativity of civil society through time.

For the drama of self-determination and the development of persons and of civil society one must look to their relation to the good in search of which we live, survive and thrive. The good is manifest in experience as the object of desire, namely, as that which is sought when absent. Basically, it is what completes life; it is the "per-fect", understood in its etymological sense as that which is completed or realized through and through; once achieved, is no longer desired or sought, but enjoyed. This is reflected in the manner in which each thing, even a stone, retains the being or reality it has and resists reduction to non-being or nothing: the most that we can do is to change or transform a thing into something else, but we cannot annihilate it. Similarly, a plant or tree, given the right conditions, grows to full stature and fruition. Finally, an animal protects its life—fiercely, if necessary—and seeks out the food needed for its strength. Food, in turn, as capable of contributing to animal’s realization or perfection, is for the animal an auxiliary good or means.

In this manner, things as good, that is, as actually realizing some degree of perfection and able to contribute to the well-being of others, are the bases for an interlocking set of relations. As these relations are based upon both the actual perfection things possess and the potential perfection to which they are thereby directed, the good is perfection both as attracting when it has not yet been attained and as constituting one’s fulfillment upon its achievement. Goods, then, are not arbitrary or simply a matter of wishful thinking; they are rather the full development of things and all that contributes thereto. In this ontological or objective sense, all beings are good to the extent that they exist and can contribute to the perfection of others.

The moral good is a more narrow field, for it concerns only one’s free and responsible actions. This has the objective reality of the ontological good noted above, for it concerns real actions which stand in distinctive relation to our own perfection and to that of others—and, indeed, to the physical universe and to God as well. Hence, many possible patterns of actions could be objectively right because they promote the good of those involved, while others, precisely as inconsistent with the real good of persons or things, are objectively disordered or misordered. This constitutes the objective basis for values and disvalues.

Nevertheless, because the realm of objective relations is almost numberless, whereas our actions are single, it is necessary not only to choose in general between the good and the bad, but in each case to choose which of the often innumerable possibilities one will render concrete. However broad or limited the options, as responsible and moral, an act is essentially dependent upon its being willed by a subject. Therefore, in order to follow the emergence of the field of concrete moral action, it is not sufficient to examine only the objective aspect, namely, the nature of the persons, actions, and things involved. In addition, one must consider the action in relation to the subject, namely, to the person who, in the context of his/her society and culture, appreciates and values the good of this action, chooses it over its alternatives, and eventually wills its actualization.

This constitutes the basic topology of a culture; as repeatedly reaffirmed through time, it builds a tradition or heritage about which we shall speak below. It constitutes, as well, the prime pattern and gradation of goods which persons experience from their earliest years and in terms of which they interpret their developing relations. Young persons peer out at the world through a lens formed, as it were, by their family and culture and configured according to the pattern of choices made by that community throughout its history—often in its most trying circumstances. Like a pair of glasses it does not create the object; but it focuses attention upon certain goods involved rather than upon others. This becomes the basic orienting factor for the affective and emotional life described by the Scots as the heart of civil society. In time, it encourages and reinforces certain patterns of action which, in turn, reinforce the pattern of values.

This process of deliberate choice and decision transcends the somatic and psychic dynamisms. Whereas the somatic dimension is extensively reactive, the psychic dynamisms of affection or appetite are fundamentally oriented to the good and positively attracted by a set of values which evoke an active response from the emotions in the context of responsible freedom. But it is in the dimension of responsibility that one encounters the properly moral and social dimension of life. For, in order to live with others, one must be able to know, to choose and finally to realize what is truly conducive to one’s good and to that of others. Thus, persons and groups must be able to judge the true value of what is to be chosen, that is, its objective worth both in itself and in relation to others. This is moral truth: the judgment regarding whether the act makes the person and society good in the sense of bringing authentic individual and social fulfillment, or the contrary.

In this, deliberation and voluntary choice are required in order to exercise proper self-awareness and self-governance. By determining to follow this judgment I am able to overcome determination by stimuli and even by culturally ingrained values and to turn these, instead, into openings for free action in concert with others to shape my community, as well as my physical surroundings. This can be for good or for ill, depending on the character of my actions. By definition, only morally good actions contribute to personal and social fulfillment, that is, to the development and perfection of persons with others in community. When this is exercised or lived, patterns of action develop which are habitual in the sense of being repeated. These are the modes of activity with which we are familiar; in their exercise, along with the coordinate natural dynamisms they require, we are practiced and, with practice, come facility and spontaneity. Such patterns constitute the basic, continuing and pervasive shaping influence of our life. For this reason, they have been considered classically to be the basic indicators of what our life as a whole will add up to, or, as is often said, "amount to". Since Socrates, the technical term used for these especially developed capabilities is `virtues’.

The development of values and virtues and their integration as a culture of any depth or richness takes time and, hence, depends upon the experience and creativity of many generations. The culture which is handed on, or tradita, comes to be called a cultural tradition; as such it reflects the cumulative achievement of a people in discovering, mirroring and transmitting the deepest meanings of life. This is tradition in its synchronic sense as a body of wisdom.

This sense of tradition is very vivid in pre-modern and village communities. It would appear to be much less so in modern urban centers, undoubtedly in part due to the difficulty in forming active community life in large urban centers. However, the cumulative process of transmitting, adjusting and applying the values of a culture through time is not only heritage or what is received, but new creation as we pass this on in new ways. Attending to tradition, taken in this active sense, allows us not only to uncover the permanent and universal truths which Socrates sought, but to perceive the importance of values we receive from the tradition and to mobilize our own life project actively toward the future.

Two attempts to break out of this have proven ultimately unsuccessful. The one, in order to recognize historical sequence while retaining the ideal of clarity and distinctness, attempted to attain detailed knowledge of each period, relativizing everything to its point in time and placing historicity ultimately at the service of the rationalist ideal. The other, the Romantics, ultimately adhered to the same revolutionary Enlightenment ideal even in appearing to oppose it, for, in turning to the past and to myths, they too sought clear and distinct knowledge of a static human nature. Tradition thus became traditionalism, for all was included in the original state of nature and our only way of obtaining a firm grounding for human life was simply to return thereto.

In the rationalist view, any meaning not clearly and distinctly perceived was an idol to be smashed (Bacon), an idea to be bracketed by doubt (Descartes), or something to be wiped clean from the slate of the mind as irrational and coercive (Locke and Hume). Any judgement—even if provisional—made before all had been examined and its clarity and distinctness established would be a dangerous imposition by the will.

If, on the contrary, the cumulative experience of mankind in living together in peace is to make a contribution to the development of modern life, then it will be necessary to return human knowledge to the ongoing lived process of humane discovery and choice, within a broad project of human interaction and an active process of reception by one generation of the learning of its predecessors. The emerging consciousness of the importance of this effort has led to broadening the task of hermeneutics from the study of ancient, often biblical, texts to a more inclusive attention to the integral meaning of cultures. There it has found, not a mere animal search for survival, but a sense of human dignity which, by transcending survival needs enables human creativity and encourages a search for ever higher levels of human life.

The reference to the god, Hermes, in the term "hermeneutics" suggests something of this depth of the meaning which is sought throughout human life and its implication for the world of values. For the message borne by Hermes is not merely an abstract mathe-matical formula or a methodological prescription devoid of human meaning and value; rather, it is the limitless wisdom regarding the source and, hence, the reality, and regarding the priorities and, hence, the value of all. Rather than evaluating all in terms of reductivist clarity and considering things in a horizontal perspective that is only temporal or totally changing,—with an implied relativization of all—hermeneutics or interpretation opens also to a vertical vision of what is most real in itself and most lasting through time, that is, to the perennial in the realm of being and values; this it does with a view to mobilizing life accordingly.

If, however, one can look to tradition in order to find general inspiration for life, will this be sufficient for civil society which must have not only a certain tenor or quality of life, but governance as well? In the past the solution has been to centralize authority which then became autocratic and voluntaristic, and under the cover of efficiency and equality ruled by general decrees. This subverted the rich differentiation of solidarity and subsidiarity essential to civil society. Is it possible for tradition to bear sufficient authority to provide coordinated governance?

In Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer undertook, on the basis of the work of Martin Heidegger, to reconstruct the notion of a cultural heritage or tradition as: (a) based in community, (b) consisting of knowledge developed from experience lived through time, and (c) possessed of authority. In order to analyze the genesis of a cultural tradition we shall look at each of these in turn. Further, because tradition sometimes is interpreted as a threat to the personal and social freedom essential to a democracy, attention will be given here to the way a cultural heritage is generated by the free and responsible life of the members of a concerned community and enables succeeding generations to realize their life with freedom and creativity.

Similarly, through the various steps of one’s development, as one’s circle of community expands through neighborhood, school, work and recreation, one comes to learn and to share personally and passionately an interpretation of reality and a pattern of value responses. The phenomenologist sees this life in the varied civil society as the new source for wisdom. Hence, rather than turning away from daily life in order to contemplate abstract and disem-bodied ideas, the place to discover meaning is in life as lived in the family and in the progressively wider social circles into which one enters. As persons we emerge from birth in a family and neighbor-hood from which we learn and in harmony with which we thrive.

If it were merely a matter of community, however, all might be limited to the present, with no place for tradition as that which is "passed on" from one generation to the next. In fact, the process of trial and error, of continual correction and addition in relation to a people’s evolving sense of human dignity and purpose, constitutes a type of learning and testing laboratory for successive generations. In this laboratory of history, the strengths of various insights and behavior patterns can be identified and reinforced, while defi-ciencies are progressively corrected or eliminated. Horizontally, we learn from experience what promotes and what destroys life and accordingly make pragmatic adjustments.

But even this language remains too abstract, too limited to method or technique, too unidimensional. While tradition can be described in general and at a distance in terms of feedback mechanisms and might seem merely to concern how to cope in daily life, what is being spoken about are free acts that are expressive of passionate human commitment and personal sacrifice in responding to concrete danger, building and rebuilding family alliances and constructing and defending one’s nation. Moreover, this wisdom is not a matter of mere tactical adjustments to temporary concerns; it concerns rather the meaning we are able to envision for life and which we desire to achieve through all such adjustments over a period of generations, i.e., what is truly worth striving for and the pattern of social interaction in which this can be lived richly. The result of this extended process of learning and commitment constitutes our awareness of the bases for the decisions of which history is constituted.

Tradition, then, is not as in history simply everything that ever happened, whether good or bad. It is rather what appears significant for human life: it is what has been seen through time and human experience to be deeply true and necessary for human life. It contains the values to which our forebears first freely gave their passionate commitment in specific historical circumstances and then constantly reviewed, rectified and passed on that content, generation after generation progressively over time. The content of a tradition, expressed in works of literature and all the many facets of a culture, progressively emerges as something upon which character and community can be built. It constitutes a rich source from which multiple themes can be drawn, provided it be accepted and embraced, affirmed and cultivated.

Perhaps the greatest point of tension between a sense of one’s heritage and the Enlightenment spirit relates to authority. Is it possible to recognize authority on the part of a tradition which perdures, while still asserting human freedom through time? Could it be that a cultural tradition, rather than being the negation of freedom and, hence, antithetic to democracy, is its cumulative expression, the reflection of our corporate access to the bases of all meaning, and even the positive condition for the discovery and realization of needed new developments?

One of the most important characteristics of the human person and societies is their capability for development and growth. One is born with open and unlimited powers for knowledge and for love. Life consists in developing, deploying and exercising these capabilities. Given the communitary character of human growth and learning, dependence upon others is not unnatural—quite the contrary. Within, as well as beyond, our social group we depend upon other persons according as they possess abilities which we, as individuals and communities, need for our growth, self-realization and fulfillment. 

This dependence is not primarily one of obedience to the will of others, but is based upon their comparative excellence in some dimension, whether this be the doctor’s professional skill in healing or the wise person’s insight and judgment in matters where profound understanding is required. The preeminence of wise persons in the community is not something they usurp or with which they are arbitrarily endowed; it is based rather upon their abilities as these are reasonably and freely acknowledged by others.

Further, this is not a matter of uniform universal law imposed from above and uniformly repeated in univocal terms. Rather it is a matter of corporate learning developed by the components of a civil society each with its own special concerns and each related to the other in a pattern of subsidiarity.

All of these—the role of the community in learning, the con-tribution of extended historical experience regarding the horizontal and vertical axes of life and meaning, and the grounding of dependence in competency—combine to endow tradition with authority for subsequent ages which is varied according to the components and their interrelation. 

There are reasons to believe, moreover, that tradition is not a passive storehouse of materials simply waiting upon the inquirer, but that its content of authentic wisdom plays a normative role for life in subsequent ages. On the one hand, without such a normative referent, prudence would be as relativistic and ineffective as muscular action without a skeletal substructure. Life would be merely a matter of compromise and accommodation on any terms, with no sense of the value either of what was being compromised or of that for which it was compromised. On the other hand, were the normative factor to reside simply in a transcendental or abstract vision, the result would be devoid of existential content. 

The fact that humans, no matter how different in culture, do not remain indifferent before the flow of events, but dispute—even bitterly—the direction of change appropriate for their community reflects that every humanism is committed actively to the realization of some common—if general—sense of perfection. Without this, even conflict would be impossible for there would be no intersection of the divergent positions and, hence, no debate or conflict.

Conversely, it is this sense of the good or of value which emerges through the concrete, lived experience of a people through-out its history and constitutes its cultural heritage, which enables society in turn to assess and avoid what is socially destructive. In the absence of tradition, present events would be simply facts to be succeeded by counter-facts. The succeeding waves of such disjointed happenings would constitute a history written in terms of violence. This, in turn, could be restrained only by some utopian abstraction built upon the reductivist limitations of modern rationalism. Eliminating all expressions of democratic freedoms, this is the archetypal modern nightmare, 1984.

The truly important battle at the present time is, then, not between, on the one hand, a chaotic liberalism in which the abstract laws of the marketplace dictate and tear at the lives of persons, peoples and nations or, on the other hand, a depersonalizing sense of community in which the dignity of the person is suppressed for an equally abstract utopia. A victory of either would spell disaster. The central battle is, rather, to enable peoples to draw on their heritage, constituted of personal and social assessments and free decisions, and elaborated through the ages by the varied communities as they work out their response to their concrete circumstances. That these circumstances are often shifting and difficult in the extreme is important, but it is of definite importance that this people’s response be truly theirs in all their variety and of their society with all its interrelated sub-units. That is, that it be part of their history, of the way they have chosen to order and pattern their social life and in these terms to shape their free response to the good. This is the character of authority in a civil society. It reflects and indeed is the freedom being exercised by a people in all the varied groupings in which they have chosen to live and to act.

As an active process tradition transforms what is received, lives it in a creative manner and passes it on as a leaven for the future. Let us turn then from the cumulative meaning and value in tradition, its synchronic aspect, to its diachronic or particular meaning for each new time, receiving from the past, ordering the present and constructing the future. This is a matter, first of all, of taking time seriously, that is, of recognizing that reality includes authentic novelty. This contrasts to the perspective of Plato for whom the real is the ideal and unchangeable forms or ideas transcending matter and time, and of which physical things and temporal events are but shadows. It also goes beyond rationalism’s search for clear and distinct knowledge of eternal and simple natures and their relations in terms of which all might be controlled, and beyond romanticism’s attention to a primordial unchanging nature hidden in the dimly sensed past. A fortiori, it goes beyond method alone without content.

Certain broad guidelines for the area of ethics and politics serve in the application of tradition as a guide for historical practice and vice-versa. The concrete exercise of human freedom as unique personal decisions made with others in the process of their social life through time constitutes a distinctive and ongoing process. Histori-city means that responses to the good are made always in concrete and ever changing circumstances. Hence, the general principles of ethics and politics as a philosophic science of action cannot be purely theoretical knowledge or a simple accounting from the past. Instead, they must help people consciously exercise their freedom in concrete historical circumstances and groups which change and are renewed.

Here, an important distinction must be made from techné where action is governed by an idea as an exemplary cause that is fully determined and known by objective theoretical knowledge (epistéme). As in the case of an architect’s blueprints, skill, such as that of the engineer, consists in knowing how to act according to that idea or plan; and, when it cannot be carried out perfectly, some parts of it are simply omitted in the execution. In contrast, civil society and its ethics and politics, though similar in the possession of a practical guide and its application to a particular task, differ in important ways. First, in moral action subjects and especially societies which are constituted by shared action toward a common end constitute them-selves, as much as they produce an object: agents are differentiated by their action, societies are formed or destroyed by their inner interaction. Hence, moral knowledge, as an understanding of the appropriateness of human action, cannot be fully determined independently of the societies in their situation and in action.

Secondly, adaptation by societies and social groups in their application of the law does not diminish, but rather corrects and perfects the law. In relation to a world which is less ordered, the laws, rules and regulations of groups are imperfect for they cannot contain in any explicit manner the adequate response to the concrete possibilities which arise in history. It is precisely here that the creative freedom of a people is located. It does not consist in arbitrariness, for Kant is right in saying that without law freedom has no meaning; nor does it consist in an automatic response determined by the historical situation, for then determinism and relativism would compete for the crown in undermining human freedom. Freedom consists, rather, in shaping the present according to the sense of what is just and good which we have from our cultural tradition, and in a way which manifests and indeed creates for the first time more of what justice and goodness mean.

In this as a social work the guiding principle is to maintain a Confucian harmony through time. The notion of application allows this tradition to provide guidance in facing new issues and developing new responses to changing times. With rising numbers and expecta-tions economic development becomes an urgent need. But its very success could turn into a defeat if this were not oriented and applied with a pervasive but subtle and adaptive human governance sensitive to all forms of human comity and orienting all suavely to the social good in which the goal of civil society consists.

This will require new advances in science and economics, in education and psychology, in the humanities and social services, that is, across the full range of social civic life. All these dimensions, and many more, must spring to new life, but in a basic convergence and harmony. The values and virtues emerging from tradition applied according to freedom exercised in solidarity and subsidiarity can provide needed guidance along new and ever evolving paths. In this way the life of civil society can constitute a new birth of freedom.

In these circumstances there is a call for the redevelopment of civil society as a way to realize more perfectly the passionately held values of the cultural traditions, human rights and democratic pro-cesses. What is sought is a new stage overcoming and superseding the conflictual contraposition of these two so that their complemen-tarity can emerge and the deep classical and contemporary concerns they reflect can be protected and promoted.

First there are works written from a notably individualist perspective such as Ernest Gellner’s Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals and Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society. The former begins by writing off civil society out-of-hand as something "we" would not approve of, seemingly because it questions individualism and implies a stronger relation between peoples after the pattern of segmented societies, but would appear to remain entrapped in an individualism as an ideology.

Seligman, after reviewing the modern history of the notion, concludes that civil society is not up to facing the challenges of our times. But he supposes that one remains encased within the confines of the Enlightenment as defined by the abstractive and reductivist steps of Descartes, Bacon and Locke (precisely as these were criticized by J.B. Vico). But then the critique of civil society becomes less a question of civil society itself than of the stricture of the Enlightenment context and points back to Vico’s protocritique and to the need to recapture the roots of social life in the various cultural traditions.

An alternate approach by J. Cohen and Arato in their Civil society and Political Theory is based on the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas with neo-Marxist roots, which they attempt to enrich by elements of liberal theory from John Rawls. Their work is indicative of what can be done through a serious attempt to harvest and combine the best contributions of the two parties in the Cold War. The limitations of the work seem derived from their failure to question its Enlightenment presuppositions (or in Gadamer’s sense, "prejudices") which generated the ideologies of individualism or communalism.

Hence, there is special interest in work which opens new paths by drawing upon the integral experience of human life as this has been reevaluated, applied and reaffirmed by successive generations, constituting thereby the cultural traditions of the various peoples. For this approach the work on hermeneutics by H.-G. Gadamer can be especially suggestive. He shows a way in which the cultural values of a people can be developed from their own experience and yet bear moral authority for them. He indicates the way in which over time the realities of person, solidarity and subsidiarity can emerge in concrete forms and in the social consciousness of a people. This can constitute a truly new epiphany of being through the evolution of a rich civil society in all its plurality and forms of participation.

The implications of this for civil society could be approached either from the individualist perspective of modern liberalism or from the more social orientation of the classical cultures.

If the meaning of "political" in Rawls’ more recent theory could be deepened to include not only the changing flow of arbitrary preferences, but the exercise of creative freedom with its existential content and import, then it could be part of the effort to move beyond the rationalist formalism of Rawls’ Theory of Justice in order to take more serious account of the distinctively human exercise of freedom in society. That this is Rawls’ conscious intent is far from clear, but the work of Bridges would seem to open the way to this interpretation and especially to the philosophical effort required in order to work it out in detail and to provide the social character to the sense of person which appears lacking in Rawls. Perhaps the main interest here is that it provides a pathway by which the more individualist liberal side of the Cold War can transcend the limits which had previously stood in the way of a growth of civil society.

The way in which the more social orientation of the classical cultures can provide the needed resources for a renewal of civil society and hence how the cultural resources of the Andean peoples can be of decisive importance for their future and that of others is expertly analyzed in a recent article of Miguel Manzanera "Critica filosofica del neo-liberalismo" in Yachay (n. 18, 1994), 13-67. He draws upon the long line of investigations opened by the team of Professor Koch some half century ago and elaborated progressively by Juan Carlos Scannone and others over the years in the pages of Stromata and many other publications. Finding the essentially social and dynamic character of the sense of reality of the Andean peoples as expressed in the phrase "nosotros estamos", Professor Man-zanera’s critique of liberalism underlines the social resources of the Andean vision in contrast to the individualism of the liberal tradition.

At the beginning of this paper we recalled Vico’s protocritique of the Enlightenment, not for its development of technical reason, but for what it consciously excluded or marginalized, namely, the cultural and historical dimensions of the lives of persons and peoples. It is not surprising then to see the convergence of subsequent problems along these very lines. The civil society of the Scots strung of sentiment was too weak a safety net to protect against the harsh invisible hand of the market place; the focus by the Kantian strain of liberalism upon universal and necessary prerequisites of moral reason without motivation or goal led inevitably in Hegel and Marx to the state as the only power capable of directing economic forces and passions and to the subordination or suppression of all other social forms. What was lacking was precisely: (a) the development of that pattern of values and virtues which constitutes a people’s sense of the good life of the community (the common good), (b) the evolution of passionate commitment thereto, and (c) the personal comity or solidarity and the social structures of subsidiarity which enable a true mobilization of cooperative efforts to that end. All these are the contribution of culture in all its textured variety.

Finally, Juan Carlos Scannone has described two other characteristics of the extensive work being done in Latin America which reflect the challenge and opportunities for Latin America and which promise to be important to the efforts to redevelop civil society in other parts of the world.

On the one hand, he reports on the extensive interdisciplinary studies which have been carried on with regard to the relation of society and state. Where in Eastern Europe these have focused upon governments of the left, in Latin American recent experience has been with governments of the right. Each study requires the other; together they give much greater promise of authentic discovery regarding the proper role of civil society in interchange with the state.

On the other hand, the search for civil society is essentially an effort to enliven the proper competencies the people, to return to them their proper responsibilities and to engage their participation in the governance of the many sectors of social life: health, education, environment, etc. All of this can benefit richly from the experience of forming informal community organization by the poor in response to their concrete needs when marginalized by formal economic and political structures. Hernando de Soto’s, The Other Path: The In-visible Revolution in the Third World, describes such organization in housing trade and transportation.

Professor John Kromkowski, as coordinator of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, has guided a major effort at recon-structing civil society in North America. His early studies were on José Carlos Mariátegui whose Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality put the economic issue first and followed with the issues of ethnicity, land, education, religion, regionalism and litera-ture. Professor Kromkowski suggests a reordering which would not determine all by the economic or the political, and which would not suppose that human consciousness could be understood ideologically ahead of time. Rather, civil society can allow for a multifaceted engagement in the full range of issues each recognized in its distinctive, though not isolated, reality. This process of facing the many challenges of life constitutes a more organic and realistic exercise of human freedom. Gradually it constitutes a revolution in which the unique genius and freedom of a people progressively emerge and cumulatively over time constitute a culture.

As we move into the next millenium such an emergence of a civil society could constitute a revolution consisting not in violence and oppression, but a true liberation as new birth of freedom.

1. Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil society (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 2-3.

2. Michael Walzer, "The Idea of Civil society", Dissent (1991), 293-304.

3. Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil society", Public Culture, 3 (1990), 95-118.

4. Daniel Bell, "American Exceptionalism Revisited: The Role of Civil society", The Public Interest, 95 (1989), 38-56.

5. Vladimir Tismaneanu. Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe after Communism (New York: Free Press, 1992).

6. Manfred Riedel, "In Search of a Civil Union: The Political Theme of European Democracy and Its Primordial Foundation in Greek Philosophy", Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 10 (1983), 101-102.

7. Robert E. Wood, "The Phenomenologist", in George F. McLean, Reading Philosophy for the XXIst Century (Washington: University of America Press, 1989), p. 136.

8. H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Cross-roads, 1975), pp. 235, 332. G.F. McLean, Tradition and Contempo-rary Life (Madras:The University of Madras, 1986), chapter I.

9. G.F. McLean, Plenitude and Participation: The Unity of Man in God (Madras: The University of Madras, 1978), chapters I and II.

10. L. Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (New York: Washington Square, 1966), chapter II.

11. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), Chapter IV.

12. Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (London: Oxford, 1967), Chapter I.

13. Republic, VI 509-527.

14. Politics, 263b.

15. Cfr. note 7 above.

16. Politics, I, 1, 1252a22.

17. Politics, III, 7.

18. Politics, III, 8.

19. Nichomachean Ethics, IX, 6, 1167b13.

20. Politics, I, 2, 1253a20-37.

21. John Mavone, "The Division of Parts of Society According to Plato and Aristotle", Philosophical Studies, 6 (1956), 113-122.

22. Nichomachean Ethics, VII, 9, 1159b25-1160a30.

23. Ibid., V, 3.

24. Metaphysics, VII, I, 1028a29-b4.

25. Plotinus, Enneads, II 5 (25), chapter v.

26. Maurizio Flick and Zoltan Alszeghy, Il Creatore, l’ inizio della salvezza (Firenze: Lib. Ed. Fiorentina, 1961), pp. 32-49.

27. In X Libros Ethicorum ad Nichomacum, I, II (Opera, XXI, part 2).

28. Ibid.

29. Community of the Free, trans. W. Trask (New York: Holt, 1947).

30. A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962).

31. Mortimer J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 187.

32. Seligman, pp. 36-41.

33. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 1959), Book II, chapter I, vol. I, 121-124.

34. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Under-standing (Chicago: Regnery, 1960).

35. Locke, An Essay, Book II.

36. The Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

37. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A.C. Fraser, ed. (New York: Dover, 1959), II, chapter 21, sec 27; vol. I, p. 329.

38. Skeptical Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), p. 169.

39. Adler, p. 187.

40. J.S. Mill, On Liberty, ch. 5, p. 15.

41. Adler, p. 193.

42. A. MacIntyre, "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals" in Hume’s Ethical Writings (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), appendix I, p. 131.

43. Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: University Press, 1960).

44. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

45. (Edinburgh: Kincaid and Bell, 1767); (New York: Garland, 1971).

46. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

47. An Essay on the History of Civil society. See Seligman, pp. 31-36.

48. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971).

49. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

50. Adler, p. 253.

51. Ibid., p. 257.

52. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A 112; cf. A 121.

53. Ibid., A 121.

54. Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1974), pp. 87-90.

55. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 192-93.

56. Crawford, pp. 83-84.

57. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. R.W. Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), Part II, pp. 38-58 [421-441].

58. Plato, Republic, 519.

59. Foundations, III, p. 82 [463].

60. The Theory of Communicative Action vol. I and II, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1981 and 1987); cfr. R. Badillo, The Emancipative Theory of Jürgen Habermas and Metaphysics (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1991), chapter IV.

61. Susan Meld Shell, Rights of Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 83.

62. Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller and G.N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

63. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), n. 183, p. 123.

64. Ibid., n. 185, p. 123.

65. Ibid., n. 187, p. 124.

66. L. Kolakowski, "The Myth of Human Self-Identity" in L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal (New York: Basic, 1975).

67. The Idea of a Civil society, 199-206.

68. Conditions of Liberty: Civil society and Its Rivals (London: Penguin,1994); "The Civil and the Sacred" in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), XII, 301-349.

69. J.L. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992).

70. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1968), pp. 205-339.

71. Ibid., pp. 37-200.

72. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A112, 121, 192-193. Donald J. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1974), pp. 83-84, 87-90.

73. See Kant’s development and solution to the problem of the autonomy of taste, Critique of Judgment, nn. 57-58, pp. 182-192, where he treats the need for a concept; Crawford, pp. 63-66.

74. See the chapter by Wilhelm S. Wurzer "On the Art of Moral Imagination" in G. McLean, ed., Moral Imagination and Character Development (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, in preparation) for an elaboration of the essential notions of the beautiful, the sublime and taste in Kant’s aesthetic theory.

75. Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, trans. J. Haden (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

76. William James, Pragmatism (New York: Washington Square, 1963), Ch. I, pp. 3-40. For notes on the critical hermeneutics of J. Habermas see G. McLean, "Cultural Heritage, Social Critique and Future Construction" in Culture, Human Rights and Peace in Central America, R. Molina, T. Ready and G. McLean, eds. (Washington: Council for Research in Values, 1981), Ch. II. Critical distance is an essential element and requires analysis by the social sciences of the historical social structures as a basis for liberation from determination and dependence upon unjust interests. The concrete psycho- and socio-pathology deriving from such depen-dencies and the corresponding steps toward liberation are the subject of the chapters by J. Loiacono and H. Ferrand de Piazza in The Social Context and Values: Perspectives of the Americas, G. McLean and O. Pegoraro, eds. (Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1988), Chs. III and IV.

77. "The State and Civil society as Objects of Aesthetic Appreciation", British Journal of Aesthetics, 16 (1976), 237-242.

78. Edmund Burke, Reflections in Works (London: Bohn, 1954-57), II, 349.

79. Ibid., II, 307.

80. Correspondence (1844), Works IV, 465.

81. (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994).

82. Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 48-50; "The Person: Subject and Community," Review of Metaphysics, 33 (1979-80), 273-308; and "The Task of Christian Philosophy Today," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philo-sophical Association, 53 (1979b), 3-4.

83. Laches, 198-201.

84. J.L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1976), pp. 90-91.

85. V. Mathieu, "Cultura" in Enciclopedia Filosofica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1967), II, 207-210; and Raymond Williams, "Culture and Civilization," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), II, 273-276, and Culture and Society (London, 1958).

86. Tonnelat, "Kultur" in Civilisation, le mot et l’idée (Paris: Centre International de Synthese), II.

87. V. Mathieu, "Culture".

88. V. Mathieu, "Civilta," ibid., I: 1437-1439.

89. G.F. Klemm, Allgemein Culturgeschicht der Menschheit (Leipzig, 1843-52), x.

90. E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1871), VII, p. 7.

91. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 5.

92. Ibid., p. 10.

93. Ibid., p. 13.

94. Ibid., p. 85.

95. R. Carnap, Vienna Manifesto, trans. A. Blumberg in G. Kreyche and J. Mann, Perspectives on Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 485.

96. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1975), 305-310.

97. R. Descartes, Discourse on Method, I.

98. Gadamer, pp. 305-310. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, tr. E. Haldare nd G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), I.

99. John Caputo, "A Phenomenology of Moral Sensibility: Moral Emotion," in George F. McLean, Frederick Ellrod, eds., Philosophical Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development: Act and Agent (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), pp. 199-222.

100. Gadamer, pp. 245-53.

101. Ibid. Gadamer emphasizes knowledge as the basis of tradition in contrast to those who would see it pejoratively as the result of arbitrary will. It is important to add to knowledge the free acts which, e.g., give birth to a nation and shape the attitudes and values of successive generations. As an example one might cite the continuing impact had by the Magna Carta through the Declaration of Independence upon life in North America, or of the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the national life of so many countries.

102. Ibid., p. 254.

103. Ibid., p. 245.

104. Ibid., p. 258.

105. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 12-13.

106. Dimensions of Moral Creativity: Paradigms, Prin-ciples and Ideals (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).

107. After Virtue, 29-30.

108. "The Idea of Confucian Tradition," The Review of Metaphysics, XLV (1992), 803-840.

109. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. T. Bergin and M Fisch (Ithica: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988).

110. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), vol. I, p. 72.

111. "Hsun Tsu and the Unity of Virtues," Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 14 (1978), 92-94.

112. Ibid., pp. 281-286.

113. Ibid., pp. 278-279.

114. Ibid., pp. 281-286.

115. (Albany: New York University Press, 1994).

DISCUSSION I

This chapter, "Philosophy and Civil society: Its Nature, Its Past and Its Future", is built upon the notion of freedom in order from that vantage point to uncover the basic nature and components of civil society and the need for its development in our times.

Freedom can be understood in a number of ways, related also to the epistemological context which extends or restricts the extent of the capacity for understanding and hence for implementing and appreciating freedom. Being concerned with civil society as a construction by people, freedom here is understood not as a negative "freedom from" (except as it applies to overcoming unwarranted and stifling restrictions), but as a positive "freedom for." This, however, must be further differentiated between the three levels unveiled in the analysis of the body of the writings of Western philosophers by the team of Professor Adler at the Institute for Philosophical Research. The first, notably in the positivist and liberal traditions, is a freedom to choose whatever one pleases; the second, typically in the Kantian tradition, is to choose as one ought; the third, in the Aristotelian tradition, is to build one’s character in order to be able to attain one’s proper goal.

The three are not mutually exclusive, but build one upon the other, the latter shaping and orienting the former. Thus, freedom is truly the power to choose, but as a human reality it should be exercised according to appropriate laws or rules, which indeed are applied with a view to the realization of the good life which befits human persons and communities. As social this is not only the good of the individual understood merely as autonomous in his or her actions, but of the person as a member of society. For one must choose responsibly in a manner proportionate to one’s human dignity, and hence not only for one’s individual welfare, but for that of the community/communities in which one participates.

It should be noted further that, as one moves from the first level of freedom which is concerned with selecting between external realities, i.e., activities or objects, to the second and especially to the third level, the horizon changes to become a matter not of external objects, but of interior, properly human, subjectivity lived with reflective consciousness and commitment. This is Heidegger’s dasein, the point at which being most properly emerges into time. Essential to this is the deployment of human imagination, generating a creativity which opens new possibilities for integrating the human with the physical world and building social relations between persons and peoples. These are conceived, evaluated, appreciated and evolved in the integral exercise of human freedom.

Thus, as one moves to this third and deeper sense of positive freedom, the horizon changes from that of an individual selecting among various objects which he or she then acquires and subjects to his or her will, to that of a social being emerging in terms of the minds and hearts of people engaged through time in opening and extending their life to other things and persons. This is the cooperative work of realizing oneself and one’s world—especially one’s social world with other persons—with unity and truth, goodness and beauty. Following freedom thus understood promises to open from within insight into the nature and components of civil society.

For this, however, an appropriate methodology is required. It has been customary, especially in the modern rationalist West, to contrast subject and object, and then sedulously to exclude the former in order to learn about the object. It is increasingly evident that the attempt to ignore the subject, even in a subject-object relation, distorts knowledge of the object as well. When, as regards civil society, the concern is to appreciate how persons can interrelate freely, especially in the third sense of freedom, it is necessary to focus upon the order of intentionality and of meaning. For this, Husserl developed the method of eidetic reduction in order to follow, not the external given, but the internal convergence of the dynamism of being into consciousness, affective relation and commitment.

This, of course, is not all that is included in the making of a civil society. According to the pattern of the four causes the goal of human fulfillment guides freedom and indeed is the first of the causes. There are also the formal cause, namely the pattern or structure of the society, and the material cause or the components of social life. Those include not only persons and groups, but the material dimension of their lives and the world in which they are engaged. All of these are studied as objects by the various sciences, human and physical. In studying civil society this chapter looks especially to the efficient cause by which the general goal is sought and which shapes that particular pattern of human life called culture. This is created in and by the creative exercise of human freedom, by which the material causes are prepared and shaped according to the formal social structures freely and creatively elaborated by the exercise of human freedom.

To uncover this work of human freedom the phenomenological method can be used not only in the sense of Husserl to identify the nature of freedom, but in the sense of Heidegger to uncover its existential reality as the properly human mode of emerging into time and space, and in the sense of Gadamer who follows this as the emergence and contribution of the cultural context. This implies approaching freedom through its concrete exercise, which is always the actual experience of a person or, as here, a people. As free this must be exercised from within: each people must do this for itself. As a result each people can carry to the whole of humankind the unique contribution of its own discovery/creation, which by analogy can prove suggestive and be drawn upon by others.

In the West a special object for such a phenomenological approach is found among the Greeks at the point at which they developed a capacity for philosophical reflection and for articulating in proper terminology what already had been lived in the classic golden age of Pericles. The ability to analyze, order and articulate was developed classically by Socrates and Plato, and especially Aristotle. This was not without its restrictions, of which we are more conscious today and are now able to introduce proper correctives. Nevertheless, for Western experience the Greeks offer rich written and well-ordered materials with which to work.

The world in which they wrote may not have been as pluralist as today, though interaction and trade were intensive. Also, those considered citizens were often a minority due to the institution of slavery. It should be remembered, however, that in the modern West suffrage was extended and accorded only very gradually and reluctantly beyond landowners to workers, slaves and only in this century to women. This reflects the uneven pattern of such progress, which even now is being restricted with regard to immigrants, other ethnic groups.

What ancient Greece does provide, nevertheless, is a concrete example in which, with the structures in hand, there was developed very active participation by citizens in the public life of the city. It provides also a philosophical analysis of this in such works as the Republic and the Laws of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle, and the many Constitutions. These provide ready material for a phenome-nological approach which can uncover the basic components of civil life. This is not to imply that these elements were not present in other cultures, or indeed in Greece prior to the fourth century. Each people must investigate its own heritage diachronically as well as synchroni-cally. The hermeneutic methods for interpreting prehistoric and oral traditions are now undergoing active elaboration.

This chapter is topical in that it identified and asserted the importance of elements whose lack or deficiency have distorted recent social life. It is also analytic and hence distinguished the specific components of civil society. Finally, being concerned also with social reconstruction it focuses on freedom as the efficient cause in this work. Each of these factors evoked helpful annotations, generally from more synthetic points of view.

Thus, it was noted that one could begin from the final cause or goal of such reconstruction. What would be a good society, what would be the nature of fulfillment which would satisfy human striving, asked those with an Indian background. Indeed, the final cause is the first of the causes in intention; it moves and guides all the others. Aristotle began his ethics in these terms, looking into what constitutes happiness as that which is sought by all. Work in terms of the final cause or goal will be important if the mind is to be open to the full range of goods and to avoid reductionism to, e.g., economic concern. But it must not overlook the dignity of the one who seeks these goods and the proportion thereto of the means by which they are sought, as can be the case in an utilitarian perspective. Further, one must integrate also the material cause by which provisions are set aside and employed, and the formal cause as the structure or disposition of these materials. All four causes are necessary; only a defective and unsatisfactory result will eventuate if any one is deficient.

In human life freedom holds a special place, for the human being is specially the one who lives consciously and responsibly. Moreover, freedom is essential to the final goal or human fulfillment, for only a situation in which freedom is exercised fully can fit the description of human fulfillment. Similarly, the realization of the material and formal causes must correspond to human freedom if the result is to be a truly human accomplishment which promotes human dignity. But the perspective of the chapter is especially that of the efficient cause, for its concern is to introduce the issue of how one can work to reconstruct civil society.

It was observed that if one distinguishes civil society from the political and economic order, these must not be considered antithetic or competing factors. Of course, in the aftermath of situations in which absolute power resided in the state or the economy and suppressed or excluded civil society, the development of civil society constitutes a break from such illegitimate absolutes. However, the intent and the result is not to inhibit, but to promote the proper functioning of both state and economy through the development of an active life by citizens in the groups in which they live and act. They bring their special experience and competency to the promotion of their dimension of human welfare.

Finally, reference was made often to the importance of culture, which was treated separately. It was noted, however, that culture should be within our ability to understand since it is something that human groups have made. Such understanding promises to take us beyond a passive state under the impact of culture, and to enable true freedom and responsibility. New developments in hermeneutics make possible such understanding so that one now can see how this culture is shaped through the work of the imagination and how this operates. One can see as well how, in reflecting the choice made through long generations, this constitutes a cumulative embodiment of the creative freedom of a people.

This points to a final dichotomy which appears in the history of civil society, namely, between affectivity at the individual level and universal rationality. When the exercise of rationality is situated within human life it becomes apparent that its direction is provided and its openness secured by its social, historical and cultural contexts in which all dimensions of human life, cognitive and effective, are included. How else explain the distinctive historical phases of the work of reason or how things most present and obvious, e.g., the extension of "full and equal" recognition to slaves and to women could remain unappreciated for so long? This implies then the need to integrate attention to affectivity and to culture in efforts to reconstruct civil society.

Should one attempt to provide a definition of civil society at the beginning of its investigation? Certainly if one knew exactly what one was looking for it would be much easier to identify and organize its components. And from an a priori grasp of its nature it would be relatively easy and secure to delineate its characteristics analyti-cally.

On the other hand a prior definition would have to depend upon and reflect knowledge and hence outlooks possessed in the past. This would hold any work on civil society to patterns which, being from the past, would be relatively unsuited for the present and would stifle the human creativity needed to move ahead with the times.

But perhaps more deeply the call for a prior definition reflects more the problem than the solution. Modern times are characterized by the Enlightenment devotion to reason, as a radical reduction of human horizons to what is clear and distinct not to intellect or reason as such but to the human mind, that is, as existing in the body. Thus, it proceeds not merely in relation to the senses, as Aristotle noted, but was limited to sense knowledge. Thus Bacon would destroy what he called "idols" but which Vico noted were the accumulated wisdom of a people. Locke proceeded on the supposition of the mind as a blank tablet on which was written solely ideas from the sense and their various permutations. Descartes would put all under doubt except the indubitable idea of his own existence.

The result divided between the individualist empiricism of the great British philosophers or the more communal rationalist con-tinental route typified by Kant, Hegel and Marx. In either case reason allowed for only a narrow range of evidence, sought to manage all either as atomic individuals or through universal and necessary laws, and rigorously rejected all else. We had not philosophies seeking a wisdom which would integrate all but ideologies bent rather on a reduction of the human spirit and the suppression of all but its chosen idea, namely ideologies. The 20th century was the natural culmination of the limitations of this approach. Attention to society developed rapidly into totalitarianism; attention to the particular person developed rapidly into individu-alism. These ideologies recombined in order to defend an Hegelian inspired fashion, only to divide immediately into the Cold War conflict between the two ideologies.

Now, following the collapse of Marxism it is possible to look back not simply to adopt the opposing ideology but to ask what was omitted in the Age of Enlightenment which led us to such a violent and bloody 20th century. This could be a negative process of critiquing and deconstructing the past, or it could be a positive process of reconstructing the future. Where both of these elements are required would focus rather on the latter and understand in that sense the broadly shared view that we are in a post-modern period.

If so, then it may be less promising to begin our work on civil society from a definition, which would be limited in content to past vision and in method to an ideological approach, but to reopen the question in a way that makes possible the rediscovery and integration of what was available but rejected in choosing the path of modernity. This corresponds to Heidegger’s notion that the real step forward is not a merely incremental advance along the path well trodden, but a return to factors which had been available but were consciously not included in concentrating upon the historic choice of the way of reason by Descartes and the characteristically rationalist Enlighten-ment of modern times.

This suggests the method of the present paper which returns rather to the freedom which marks human action as responsible and creative, to look for the characteristics of the exercise of freedom with regard to social life. This enables two subsequent steps with regard to civil society: The first is to follow its exercise in modern times in order to uncover what has been accomplished there. The second is to take the step backward to culture as the cumulative and integrative exercise of freedom and on that basis to attempt a preliminary sketch of a development of the notion of civil society for the 21st century.

This should integrate such painfully achieved advances of the modern period as the universal declarations of human rights, while freeing the sense of reality from that of a merely technical construct in which individuals are enclosed. In its place is a sense of an unfolding of human freedom as people interact in the various dimensions of their life. This will include and build upon the richness of the humanizing cultures which had previously been omitted and often suppressed and build upon that new way of living our freedom with other persons and groups in society.

This must transcend the economic order and the exercise of political power, but set their standards and direction precisely as humane engagements in the world. Just as we have learned that democracy means that it is important to have civilian control of military and state powers, so we have learned that it is essential that the economy be directed not by a hidden material hand but by a conscious human concern.

The relation then between civil society and the economic and political orders is a major issue to be worked out. In some places the urgent present task is to make room for civil society; in others it may be to revive consciousness of its existence and roles. Beyond both, however, a progressive humanization of life for the next century will depend upon the way in which this mobilization of the freedom of a people can pervade, transform and inspire all phases of social life.