The first lecture distinguished three levels of freedom: (a) to choose as I want, (b) to choose as I ought, and (c) to construct one’s life project in the common good. It directed attention especially to the third, creative or existential life project and the way in which over time a people develops a culture and a cultural tradition. This involves the exercise of freedom in concrete circumstances which develops a pattern of values and of virtues that coalesce to constitute a consistent whole. This is tradition taken cumulatively and synchronically. The ethics of Aristotle may be thought of as just this — a pattern of virtues constituting a consistent whole for practical action and the exercise of life.

His study of the social application and implementation of this ethics constitutes his Politics. There he developed the notion of governance as basically a matter of freedom understood as arché, to which he adds to the virtues of friendship for solidarity and subsidiarity. This provides the basic architecture of the social life of a culture in which people coalesce in groups according to their interests and capabilities for the common good. The result as passed through time constitutes a tradition into which people are born and which they receive as a good way to live.

In modern times the notion of civil society was developed especially by the Scottish philosophers, Adam Smith and Adam Fergerson. Today civil society often is thought of in terms of those Scottish origins or in terms of its theoretical elaboration on the continent by Hegel and Marx. The issue of civil society was raised by the Chinese philosophers in the series of annual joint colloquia sponsored jointly with The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. But if they sensed the need to follow the opening of the market by a corresponding development of civil society, it is not probable that they can or would want to model themselves on the Scots of two centuries ago or on the Europeans a bit later. If civil society is to be an exercise of the freedom of a people it must be developed on their own basis, in terms of their own values and virtues, and hence of their own cultural tradition. Hence the opening paper for the colloquium with the Chinese on civil society began with Aristotle and followed with a history of the modern European notions of civil society. But the second half of the paper was entitled: "Opening a new space for civil society". This developed the sense of the cultural tradition of a people as providing the basis for the orientation of its public life.

Its implication is that each people must look into its own tradition as the basis for the development of its pattern of civil life. That begins from below in the groupings of the people and on the basis of their exercise of freedom gradually builds a pattern for democratic participation.

But here a central question emerges: Is tradition a barrier to progress? Indeed, if one sees life only in terms of the first level of freedom as consisting in random choices between external objects any prior commitments or orientations can be seen as impediments. Hence, it becomes the not too subtle project of a liberal market economy, which would totally control peoples lives, to see that nothing orients the choice of objects to be purchased other than the advertising media. Any advance to further levels of freedom concerned with choosing as I ought or allowing for the concerns of a life project that goes beyond economic profit is considered by that ideology a threat to be suppressed by all means. Perceived in these terms it is possible for some to see the development of a cultural tradition as a barrier to "progress."

Conversely, it is the task of an enlightened business ethics to see how values and social concerns relate positively to economic progress. Here our task will be to confront the issue directly and to reexamine the notion of tradition, this time not only as a synchronic pattern of cumulative freedom, but as a diachronic project for a people and a society. Hence I would turn now to tradition as the basis for progress.

Our problem today is how to move from a strong concentration of power which seemed to depersonalize life without moving to the other side of the Cold War, namely, a chaotic struggle ruled by the equally depersonalizing laws of the market. In other words can we engage the exercise of freedom in the development of values and virtues by a people based on their history with their commitments. This must be done in a way that does not point into the past, but rather provides a basis for a creative and prospective project for the future.

This is a philosophical problem on which work by teams of philosophers today, each in their own context, is indispensable and urgent. It is the issue of time as a characteristic of human life lived not ideologically but existentially. It is the appreciation that time means not just an empty frame that measures anything, nor mere repetition of the same events, but the development of authentic newness or novelty that is the essence of human life as project. Human tradition has its perfection not in the past as something fixed and static, but as the unfolding or blossoming of reality through the free exercise of life in our time and by our creativity.

What is important here is recognition of the reality of the temporal, that is, of authentic novelty. One would think that for us temporal beings this would be obvious. But as humans we are in the ambiguous position of being at once responsible to the whole and engaged in the particular. Indeed it might be said that this is the heart of the human reality and of the whole of creation. Our glory is that we can reach out to the whole of being and meaning in its highest, eternal and infinite realization and in these terms engage in the delicate yet momentous uniqueness of the exercise of responsible freedom.

For this, many steps in philosophy, while of vital importance in themselves, remain insufficient. For Plato’s unchangeable forms the temporal was only a shadow. For rationalism’s search for the clear and distinct what was real was the abstract, eternal and unchangeable natures and laws. For the romantic it was the ideal past. For yet others, most common in our day, it is method or process without content.

In contrast, human tradition has its perfection not in the past, but as the temporal unfolding of reality. Human persons and groups are not detached intellects grasping abstractly at laws or patterns, but incarnate in matter and time and both forming and enabled by their changing social universe. Hence, socio-political values express the striving of people to realize their lives. These must be formed into institutions which do not destroy human freedom, but regulate and promote its exercise.

In this light the reality and reason of human freedom is not arbitrary choice — as Kant noted freedom requires law for its rational orientation — nor is it determinism either from the historical or economic situation or even from tradition. Instead the work of freedom is the shaping of the present according to the sense of what is just and good. This is discovered in and from the cultural tradition, considered not so much as a horizontal project of sequential trial and error, but as a vertical ever deeper penetration into what justice and goodness mean.

Marx was very concerned with the ongoing dialectical process. But he may have tried too hard to develop a scientific notion of progress. For in so doing he identified necessary laws of human history, but did not allow adequately for the distinctive activity of each person and people to contribute to this ongoing process.

This is not a new phenomenon. Spinoza tried to develop freedom in a rationalist context; Leibriz tried again. Both failed because they tried too hard to impose the clarity of human reason on a human life which was much more creative, rich and varied. Hence, they did not succeed in allowing for the full dynamism of human freedom.

The task of the third sense of human freedom, that is, freedom as an existential project is then neither to develop a realm of arbitrary choice nor to develop a realm of determinism, but rather to shape the present according to the sense of what is just and good which has been discovered by a people in their cultural tradition, and to do this in a way that enables them to continue to manifest more of what justice and goodness mean.

In the hermeneutics made possible by the recent development of phenomenology there are helpful ideas regarding the application to the present of vision developed in the past. This does not mean that we have a clearly defined objective notion of justice which, like a blueprint, we simply replicate in the same way at each time, no matter what the circumstance. Rather we have a sense of the all pervading importance of justice which is not an empirical observation, but truly the work of the intellect. Through time and the experience of humankind, human consciousness goes more deeply into what life is about and finds the importance of it being lived with justice, love, etc.

This is not the same as seeing ahead of time all that life implies and entails — to do so would kill freedom and make human life simply the automatic unfolding of an abstract formula. That was the limitation of even dialectical utopias which suppressed freedom. It is the limitation as well of attempts to spell out marriage agreements in legal documents. Instead marriage is contracted in opposite terms: in sickness or health, for richer or poorer — that is, in whatever circumstances one promises to love and cherish one’s partner.

Thus justice and love are appreciated, honored and valued and can be a strong directive force in the social exercise of freedom whenever they can be convincingly appealed to and applied.

An example of this in Washington is the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves almost 150 years ago. His memorial expresses ideal of justice and equality inherent in the whole American experience. In the 1960s when the black people of the country felt that they had not received justice and were unfairly treated and demeaned, Martin Luther King assembled a huge group, black and white, before the Lincoln Memorial. There he gave a speech, at the end of which he said:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

. . .

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

. . .

If America is to be a great nation this must become true. So

- let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

- Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

- Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

. . .

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

 

Those words will remain always in the heart, perhaps even more than in the mind; for they are words that move to actions that reform life.

Once I visited this Lincoln Memorial with Janusz Kukzynski, then editor of the Polish Philosophical Review. As we walked around the memorial we could see in the distance the Capital in which the legislature sits, beside which is the Supreme Court. He turned to me and said: "This Memorial is more important than the Capital and the Supreme Court; Congress and the Court can make a mistake, this building, which embodies the country’s principles of equality and justice for all, never makes a mistake."

This illustrates the way in which a tradition can bear a deep sense of the values by which a people lives. This is not a specific determinant of the particular decisions of a legislature or of the rulings of the Supreme Court, but is rather that in terms of which the people lives and strives, that according to which laws are made and interpreted, and in the end that to which one appeals when the system does not live up to, or keep up with, the ongoing aspirations of a people. One could appeal to an abstract principle, but as abstract that would leave out and be indifferent to the particular and the concrete. One could think of this as of the past, but that would not take account of its power in the present. The sense of justice, as of the other virtues, is rather a living reality which transcends any particular time or instance; it inspires and rules the living action of a people simply and as a whole. This is tradition as diachronic moving through time and helping to shape the future.

For the application of this to the particular case hermeneutics, as developed by H.G. Gadamer, points to two important virtues. One is phronesis, the ability to adjust one’s existential concerns to the circumstances. The other is sunesis, that is, the ability to understand the other person and to be concerned for him or her, the ability to undergo or to live with the other person or people the difficulties they are experiencing. That is not just an abstract law, but is crucial for free cooperation between persons and groups including ethnic groups in society. It is necessary if that society is to be truly personal, rather than depersonalizing.

Application then is not a subsequent or accidental addition to an ideal that is perfectly known and then applied as with techné: the notion of justice is not laid out as an architect’s plans. There, when difficulties are encountered in exactly replicating the architect’s plans, the builder simply omits some parts. Rather it is a matter of discerning the good of concrete persons and peoples in their complex and evolving relations to others. This is not a matter of expediency, compromise or diminishment, but rather of the more perfect concrete application of the law. Justice is realized only in the application which takes account of personal experiences and circumstances. Justice flowers and is fulfilled in its application.

Living through time we naturally create tradition, which is not only synchronic but diachronic. But whence the authentic newness that this requires? Hermeneutics as developed by such philosophers as Paul Ricoeur and H-.G. Gadamer points up the importance of the metaphysics which undergirds one’s understanding.

Hermeneutics is basically the interpretation of texts such as the Koran or the writings of Plato, but can be as well of the traditions of a country. In Africa the tradition is not written, but oral and found in proverbs and popular stories, as well as in rituals and dances.

If tradition and cultural heritage are taken as texts , then the question is how they are to be interpreted. To read the cultural tradition developed by a people as an object that is out there, fixed and immobile, is to go about killing something, which, in fact, was realized in and as life. On the other hand, can we proceed simply in terms of the subject and ask, for example, what was going on in the mind of a Plato when he wrote that text? This would be to try to see with the eyes of Plato which have long been closed in death. To see the text as a living tradition we must see it with our eyes, living now and in our circumstances, asking our question. This brings the text to life by developing new and creative applications for our world. As noted above, Jaroslav Pelican has said this famously: "Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living; tradition is the living faith of the dead."

Our tradition can be living only if we are living; it can be creative only if we are creative. We must approach our tradition then, not retrospectively as something from the past to which we must conform, but rather as a wealth of vision which is a resource for the future we are now building.

One real difficulty in doing this is that we often think wrongly of being. One cannot do without a sense of what it means to be; as we live and act we operate on the basis of our understanding of what it means to be. Unfortunately, we often think not only of our tradition as dead; we think of everything as dead. That is, we think in terms of a set of atoms fixed and immobile, able simply to collide one with another as was thought by Hobbes, Descartes and their traditions. In that case everything is a separate moment, confusing, chaotic and conflictual. The best one can do is to join the conflict or struggle. Some see this as the nature of the market economy or of democracy. Indeed, it is the only way democracy or anything else could be seen by Democritus, and the subsequent atomistic, individualistic positivist and nominalist traditions of the first level of freedom. But that is not the major tradition of philosophy from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to Gadamer and Ricoeur.

Being is not something dead, chaotic or conflictual. Being needs to be thought of, not in its least realization, but in its highest realization. If we experience ourselves not as mechanical robots, but as living beings, then our notion of what it means to be real must be primarily that of a being unfolding in time. We need to appreciate our freedom not merely as random collection of objects, but as a creative project unfolding the meaning of being through our time and for our children.

Nicholas Chavchavadze was long the Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Georgian Academy of Science. In the early 1900, his father, Ilya Chavchavadze was the founder of Georgia as an independent state, before being killed as Georgia was absorbed by Russia. Another Ilya from the same family line was, it is said, assassinated in a car collision of Georgia when he began to call for independence in the 1980s. Paul Peachey, who had visited the Soviet Union many times, when he asked where he could find thinking about the human person, was directed to Chavchavadze and his Institute of Philosophy in Tbilisi because of its tradition of work in phenomenology. The authorities, knowing that Paul was coming, sent home all the members of the Institute. Nevertheless, Prof. Chavchavadze invited him to a banquet held under trees on a hilltop where they had the fabled ritual toasts of a Georgian banquet. After the banquet as they were coming down the hill Paul received his answer. Prince Chavchavadze turned to him and said "You know, Paul, without a transcendent man is definitively a slave."

We have the principles now to see why Chavchavadze, Director of the major school of phenomenology of the USSR, would come to that conclusion. In order for our traditions to be open and creative we need an understanding of being that is open, living and creative. This sense of the transcendent, discovered in tradition as synchronic and reinforced by religion, does not leave us fixed in the way in which things were in the past, but assures that there is radical newness, new ways and new possibilities to be lived. It draws us forward into possibilities of human life which have not yet been realized. It founds life and inspires it creatively because it means that we need not merely repeat what has already been done, but that it is possible for us to do things absolutely new, never before done or even thought. It makes possible radical newness in a cultural tradition. Tradition then is not a matter of the past, but an invitation to our creativity to develop new applications; it is not retrospective but prospective.

Awareness of transcendence is developed through two types of learning. The first is horizontal learning or trial and error by which we learn how to get what we want. Primarily, this is a question of practical means which can be realized by specific human tactics to achieve specific goals. Beyond or perhaps through these many tactical moves, however, there emerges a broader and deeper sense of what life is about. We learn to distinguish between what is only temporarily distractive or temporarily satisfying, in contrast to that which fulfills or perfects in a more ample sense.

This is not remote from the experience of life. It is noted that in comparison to animals and birds humans are born quite prematurely. When born, an infant is totally dependent upon family and remains so for years. There is required on the part of others a commitment to love and care that is without preset limits and conditions. Indeed, as noted above, it is precisely by uttering such words — "in sickness or in health, for richer or poorer" — that one engages oneself in marriage from which children emerge. That is to say, human life is and must be lived in terms not of utilitarian calculation, but of open and limitless commitment that transcends anything we can define, contrast or distinguish over against others. Paradoxically, the only thing that is clear about human life is what is not distinct in terms of Descartes’s notion of the components of science which are able to be distinguished and contrasted to all else.

This can be appreciated only in terms that are not fixed as formal, abstract or ideal, but of reality or being that is living, creative and loving. This is rooted in, by and as the act of creation by which we are made to be or to exist, In these terms our mind and heart is open to the transcendent by which we are and are loved, and to which we respond in love. This is what is understood as religion, and is diversely symbolized and ritualized in the various cultures and at the various stages of the emerging human consciousness.

We have here the great paradox of humanity and of philosophy, namely, that philosophy about the human person becomes dehumanizing unless we think of the human person with transcendence. That is, the human person by him- or herself or as a group is not adequately human. What distinguishes human life is its ability to transcend and live in a positive relation of love to what is beyond oneself — to others and to the absolute Other. This is the ambit of freedom. To be human is to transcend in heart and mind; to be closed in oneself is to atrophy and decay.

The notion of Chavchavadze should be extended not only to the political order, but also to tradition. In order, for a political order or tradition to be truly life-giving it needs to be lived in the open sense of being as living and transcending. This invites and urges us to move ahead in the sense of commitment to our family and to our people. It is the key to the creation of a new nation.