There is another question here. If cultures as human are a work of freedom, this is not exercised by isolated individuals, but by persons acting in relation one to another, as was stressed by Buber and Marcel. As an essential character of human life this relationship cannot be random in sequence with each act negating the others. This would neutralize and destroy human existence, which by nature must be affirmative and cohesive. Ethics and politics, first authored by Aristotle, are the classical disciplines in which this is analyzed; more recently it has come to be identified as civil society.

This essentially is the question of how human beings can 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 weakness which showed up in his description of the 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 the actual situations 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 had at the time, 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 not only found the proper dignity of individual human beings, but imply a civic union of communication and cooperation between persons. The practical creative work of developing and directing these cooperative unions is the topic of ethics and politics as sciences of the practical order.

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, of directing oneself and others toward a good or a goal, while not being necessitated by other persons or things. Arché is the point of beginning or origin of social action; as such it bespeaks responsibility for the overall enterprise. This exercise of freedom by individuals and groups in originating responsible action is characteristically human. 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 today. How this is needed and how it effectively can be exercised is the heart of the issue of civil society.

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 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 that of 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 an 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 their 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.

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 one another, 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 as but an image of the primary form, individuals would lose their reality. So he soon ceased to use this term; the term ‘solidarity’ which recognizes the distinctive reality of the parts seems to reflect better 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 constitution of a civil society. 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, initial 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 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 and groups which 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 or basic 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 their participation in governance, that is, the exercise of freedom by 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 groups or community solidarities which, through a structure of subsidiarity, participate in self-governance.

This reflects 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.

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. This, in turn, is the concrete social manner in which people live their lives together.

These converge in the motion of subsidiarity where the pattern of groups and the higher decision making bodies are in principle to promote, rather than suppress, the smaller groups. Hence, it is no accident that when the European Union needed a way of understanding a union which would promote, rather than absorb, its members it took up the notion of subsidiarity, theretofore a characteristic element of Catholic social thought.

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. Under the cover of efficiency and equality this ruled by general decrees and subverted the rich differentiation of solidarity and subsidiarity essential to civil society. Is it possible for tradition as cumulative freedom to bear sufficient authority to provide, as an alternate, coordinated governance through freedom itself as this is exercised popularly in the various groups which people form for the realization of their lives.

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 human persons 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 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 contribution 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. This is varied according to the different components of tradition 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 throughout its history and constitutes its cultural heritage, which enables society, in turn, to evaluate its life in order to pursue its true good and to 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. Such elimination of all expressions of democratic freedoms is the archetypal modern nightmare, 1984.

Nor is it accidental that as examples the founders of the great religious traditions come most spontaneously to mind. It is not, of course, that people cannot or do not form the component groups of civil society on the basis of their concrete concerns for education, ecology or life. But their motivation in this as fully human goes beyond pragmatic, external goals to the internal social commitment which in most cultures is religiously based.

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 issue of how life in community can truly be lived humanly.

Cornelio Fabro suggests that another factor in the development 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 improvement, 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 it 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 communities 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 circumstances, 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 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 characterized 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 the notion of the modern of freedom; but in order to grasp this notion of freedom we need to be aware in turn of developments in the meanig 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 freedom; 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 in view of the vastly expanded resources of a far flung 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.

Sense knowledge. 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 edies 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 governance 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 judgements 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 progressively 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 rationalization 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 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 Scotts 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 members 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 intermediate 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 have important for social or professional advancement. Recent anti-federal paranoia in Oklahoma is 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 other 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 cases, 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 justification 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 circumstances 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 commitments 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 heteronomous or subject to others or to necessary external laws.

This becomes the basic touchstone of his philosophy; everything he writes thence forward 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 Scotts, 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 Scotts 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 fulfill the human 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 modern 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 postmodern critiques of rationalism suggest 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 look at this third level of knowledge or critique and proceed from there to the new ambit of freedom, and thence to what this can mean for the development of civil society. Above the 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 necessarity 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 can be 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 purposiveness 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 contemplation 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 Scotts 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 possiblities 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 imaginatively 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 significance 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 industrialization 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 circumstances of everyday life. In this sense, it is not massively programmatic 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, storekeepers 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 contemporary 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).

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.