If everything humans can do they can do badly then the same is true with regard to tradition. On the one hand, some would hold to it slavishly, seeing the ideal as the past and lacking confidence in the ability of human reason, often because of a sense of human nature as corrupted by sin. The result is holding to the past and an attempt to replicate it without deviation or development. This attitude where found among Christians has been called fundamentalism, a term which has been applied, perhaps by dubious analogy, to other branches of Christianity and to some Islamic groups as well.

Others would respond by seeing fidelity to a tradition as at best not important and hence destined to atrophy with time, or at worst a deterrent to progress which must be suppressed and removed. They miss the vital importance of culture and tradition for human life and are surprised when peoples defend their cultures as they defend their lives, indeed their souls. Both attitudes can be expected to exacerbate the problem.

Instead, there is need to recognize the vital importance of identity for a people and at the same time to show that this is not static or retrospective, but rather living and prospective. That is, cultural traditions must be engaged consciously in the projects of persons, peoples and nations.

Such consideration of tradition not synchronically, but diachronically through time has important implications for two key issues of our day; one reflects the multiplicity of peoples and tradition, namely, pluralism, the other is the interaction of so diverse a world with the emerging global horizon.

In the previous lectures we have seen how a tradition grows from the experience of a people and how it includes not only horizontal pragmatic discoveries about the means for living or what works, but also vertical discoveries regarding limitless transcendent meaning and values. This implies that I have not yet exhausted the meaning of such terms as justice or love, nor have my people. If that is the case, then the question is how I can discover more of what my tradition means, and of the value included in my tradition.

This is the positive importance of pluralism, that is, of being able to meet people who share a different tradition and have different stories and texts. To hear repeatedly only one’s own stories leaves one within the confines, not only of one’s own tradition, but of what is generally already appreciated of that tradition. Thus, to meet someone of a different tradition with different stories enables one to look with fresh eyes into one’s own tradition. This stimulates one’s imagination in its work as spectroscope and kaleidoscope as described above and thereby enables one to draw out more of one’s own tradition. Rather than being a circumstance in which my tradition is compromised or limited, meeting a person or people from a different tradition gives one the possibility of going more deeply into one’s own tradition and drawing out more of its meaning.

This was my conscious intent when I had a first sabbatical opportunity to spend time in research away from teaching. It seemed at that time that it would be helpful to go outside of the Western tradition to a totally different culture, which I did by going to India. The intent was not to find there something strange which I would juxtapose to my own tradition, horizon or studies, but rather to be stimulated by Hindu insights in order to go more deeply into my own metaphysical tradition, the better to understand its meaning.

The results for me were striking. I had always followed the Aristotelian pattern of beginning from the physical as that which was most obvious to the senses and proceeding from that to God. On contrary, I found Shankara and the Sutras beginning from the Absolute which was self-sufficient and self-evident as the basis for the reality and intelligibility of all else. Upon reflection I came to understand this to be the essential message of Thomas Aquinas’ classical five ways to God. The effect was not to invert my order of teaching and of discovering, but to deepen immeasurably my understanding of the nature and role of Thomas’ five ways to God as a key to metaphysical meaning and to the relation (re-ligatio or religion) of all things to God.

Similarly, hermeneutics speaks of the importance of dialogue as the interchange between persons and peoples. This is not at all the same as argument. In an argument one looks for the weakness in the position of the other in order to be able to reject it as a threat to one’s own position. In contrast, in hermeneutics one looks for the element of truth in the other’s position in order to be able to take account of it. Indeed one looks for how that can be strengthened and extended. For even if that position is not entirely true, whatever element of truth is there is very important and precious for me. It suggests ways to go more deeply into my own tradition and bring out more if what it means to be, e.g., just, peaceful, truthful, etc.

But even this would not be truly liberative if it meant only going in search of means by which I might overcome other persons in order to gain some advantage and control. This would be still to proceed in terms of contraries as characteristic of the first level of freedom. I would be attempting not to free myself from my limitations, but to solidify them by imposing them on others.

Moreover, to assume a more positive attitude toward other cultures does not suppose that one rejects one’s own tradition or considers one’s own position to be wrong. It suggests only that one’s appreciation of one’s tradition is limited, that I have appreciated and made explicit only part of my tradition. This is to honor one’s own tradition by the conviction that it has more to say to me than thusfar I have unveiled. In other words, other persons with other experiences are precious in order to liberate me from my restrictions in relation to my own tradition in my circumstances. They enable me to get beyond these limitations, to escape what has deceived me or held me captive and to learn from new experiences. This is to be liberated or free most deeply and personally and in that way to progress. The ability to listen to others is the ability to assimilate the implications of their answers for unfolding my own tradition.

This is the strength of a democracy which allows for the expression of different ideas. A pluralistic society is rich in the cumulative potentialities of peoples with different traditions. Democracy is a situation in which the many come together and interchange their ideas, thereby sharing different horizons and approaches to meaning. Again, it is not to imply that my tradition is deficient, but only that it is historical and that at this moment I have managed to bring to light only part of what my tradition contains and implies.

In sum, this means that to be faithful to my tradition I should work with others, listen to others, live with others. To dialogue with others is not to compromise my commitment to my tradition, but only to recognize that I am limited and that with my people, however rich our vision, we have failed to exhaust the full richness of our tradition. By listening to someone from another tradition one is enabled to go more deeply into the resources of one’s own tradition and draw on it in new ways for new times.

There is another contemporary condition which I would like to add in conclusion to this series of lectures, namely, globalization. This is especially significant for our own times as we escape earlier limitations.

Until recently the world had been divided between various absolute nations or great empires which were often at war one with another. Gradually these coalesced in ideological terms until there was but the bipolar world structure of the cold war. With that now ended we find ourselves in a single geopolitical world system. Some read this in the economic terms of material profit, others in the political terms of power and control. Both are limited essentially to the first level of freedom as competition and conflict. In these terms a global unity essentially suppresses freedom and imposes domination and control. It is necessary, indeed essential, then for freedom in our time to open to the third level of existential freedom in which unity does not mean suppression of difference.

This may have been stimulated as well by the development of space exploration and the ability to go beyond the world and to look back upon it as one. In launching the program to go to the moon by the end of that decade, President Kennedy spoke of going beyond the divisions of the world and uniting all in this great adventure. Technically this was a great achievement, but philosophically the challenge it produced may be even greater. What does it mean for humankind to be able to look at the globe as a whole; what does it mean philosophically to be able to look at this world whole and entire.

There is a thinker I would like to point to in this regard, namely, Nicholas of Cusa who lived in the mid-1400s. This was the time at which the Islamic peoples first took possession of Constantinople, which in the West was seen as a great catastrophe. The Pope sent Nicholas of Cusa, a young lay lawyer from Germany, to Constanti-nople as his legate. He returned to Rome suggesting that perhaps it might not be so bad, in fact it might be good. We might ask what kind of thinking was going on in the mind of Nicholas of Cusa and whether this would be helpful to us today in thinking about a world become increasingly one.

Knowledge: Nicholas of Cusa distinguished two capabilities of the human mind. The first is discursive reasoning in which the mind moves from one thing to another. As one observes some one thing and moves to another object, one could leave out or abstract the distinctiveness of one vis-a-vis the other in order to obtain a certain unity. But this would be to leave out what is most unique. In particular it would leave out the uniqueness essential in the exercise of freedom by the various persons, and simply add individuals together endlessly without ever really arriving at a whole.

In contrast Cusa would identify another capability of the human mind. It is not locked to the senses and hence to the district sequence of the realities one encounters, but rather grasps the total reality of the whole in which we stand. In the order of intellect it would be similar to observing a city from a tall building and grasping it as one, with the particulars being perceived as participants in the overall scene.

In this, however, it is necessary to find the correct balance; on the one hand, were one to think of this as providing comprehensive or exhaustive knowledge of each thing, that knowledge would be available only to a divine mind. On the other hand, were one to think only in the empirical terms of the first level of freedom one could gather and combine only a few things. Instead Cusa refers to a knowledge which he describes as a learned ignorance (docta ignorantia).

In simple ignorance one does not know; one simply does not recognize that something is there. In docta égnoratia, in contrast, one knows that one cannot attain something. This consideration is very important for freedom, because freedom is so personal that it is unique to each person and not available directly to anyone else. Hence, one’s thinking does not comprehend the freedom of another. To act on simple ignorance, would be to ignore and override the other’s freedom, treating others as if they were not free. Learned ignorance by contrast takes account of the other’s uniqueness and freedom while recognizing that I cannot comprehend this but must leave room for it.

Here I know both that you are unique and that I cannot exhaustively appreciate that uniqueness. Hence, I recognize your freedom and value, protect and promote it. I project what I cannot conceive clearly, namely, your freedom, the whole and the Absolute. This protects what one can only acknowledge, namely, the creative freedom both of myself and of others as well. It promotes the potential growth which still is hidden in our future.

This notion is not that distant from us. One might consider one’s children as having no understanding, importance or will and then treat them as things or objects of manipulation. It has been the experience of people in our times that various great systems have ignored the distinctive moral freedom of people either by understanding only the community and not recognizing the significance of the person, or by recognizing the individual but not taking account of community.

Increasingly, however, people are now recognized as free, whose will, experience and concerns are very important. Raising children is now seen essentially as the delicate process of enabling the exercise of freedom to evolve in a unique manner in each young person. Only God can make someone to be free; humans, however, can evoke this freedom by love.

Being: Nicholas of Cusa had distinguished from discursive reasoning which grasped being serially, intellection which was able to appreciate the whole, in terms of which individuals are integrated as participations. To this corresponds a new sense of the reality of multiple things. As in the simile of observing a city from a high building, the many realities are seen in terms of the whole.

In this light, individuals are not only singles juxtaposed to others in order to constitute an external composite. Instead the individuals are conceived from the beginning in terms of the whole, each being a unique contraction of the whole.

This implies not only that each is important for what it alone is, but that each in itself contains the whole and thus its relation to each and all of the others, and of the whole to each.

Consequently multiple realities are not contradictory one to another, but are essentially complementary. That is to say, each provides an element of the whole which is missing to all the others. Thereby each helps the others to live more fully; the particulars are enhanced by the whole and by each of the other members of that whole.

In this light the reality of the many components is essentially relational to the whole and hence to the other components, just as the father is not father except in relation to the son and vice verse. Here the differences are by definition relative both to the whole and to the others.

Hence the particular person or peoples are not simply different and contrary to each other, but stand in positive relations of complementarity one to another. We are not contradictory or indifferent to others, but positively interrelated and complementary. One is concerned about the other and shares with the other. Our relations are more positive than conflictual or even competitive, for they are marked not by opposition, but by love and generosity, sharing and unity.

One acts then not only with the others as in a football team, but for others. This is a deep moral and humane relationship. We saw how Aristotle spoke of democracy as requiring the cooperation of many for the common good. Cusa sees this relation as inherent and constitutive of the many. It is not a matter of self-interest or self-seeking as understood in an empiricist individualism at the first level of freedom. This would not be a democracy, but a situation of violent competition and of exploitation of the weak by the strong. Rather, a culture and civilization is a way of living with, not against, each other. The metaphysics of Nicholas of Cusa provides a way of understanding one’s reality or being as complementary to others and as sharing their concerns.

Moreover, whereas at the level of the absolute and infinite perfection of the divine it is unity that is essential, it is the opposite among finite beings. Just as time is required for the unfolding of human life, so multiplicity is necessary for the more ample realization of being at the finite level. The whole is made fruitful by multiplicity; plurality is not detrimental to unity and the whole, but perfective thereof.

Finally, considered not only formally but existentially, being unfolds through efficient causality whereby it realizes new reality, and through final causality or teleology whereby this new reality is ordered toward the realization and perfection of being. This dynamism is stimulated by the contrast between the limited character of the whole as a point of departure and the more perfect realization of the whole toward which things are directed and drawn.

This seems fully consistent with, but perhaps a deeper sense of, what Aristotle spoke of when he noted that a democracy was conceivably a good form of government provided each was acting for the common good. In this light the thought of Cusa can be a foundational contribution to the development of democracy, not as a mere matter of expediency or of structure, but as a basic issue of being human and its realization in and as community.

In the past philosophy emerged from the integral life of the people and constituted its reflective dimension. Cumulatively, it was said that philosophers stood on the shoulders of their predecessors.

At the time of the Renaissance a new experiment was undertaken with extremely varied results. The attempt was made to establish absolute control of life by human persons while they restricted themselves to clear and distinct ideas and rejected the significance of anything else. The result was a precise and rich technical analysis for implementing human life. Done in terms of the senses in the Anglo-Saxon manner, this generates the first level of freedom according to which democracy is a matter of reconciling or engaging conflicting individual interests. Done in terms of the intellect in the continental manner this led to a sense of community and of scientific laws of history in which personal freedom counted little, indeed anything else other than the system can only be irrational. It became evident soon after 1989 that freedom could not be lived if philosophers continued to remain within that structure of earlier rationalism and continued to refer to all else as irrational.

It is then the heart of liberation that the mind now broadens its interests and engages fruitfully new dimensions of life. This is shown by the rapid unfolding of interest in values and culture, in minorities and women, and in freedom. The result is the unique yet convergent exercise of existence by individuals and across the globe. This calls now for the development of aesthetic capabilities to integrate the new appreciation of the whole as constituted progressively by the persons and peoples of the entire globe.