The issue of human rights is first of all one of human dignity and the respect due to the human person as such, and hence to every and any human person. They are classified into three, reflecting their progressive articulation in the United Nations declarations: negative as rejecting actions that violate human dignity, e.g., torture; positive as affirming the goods to which all humans should have access, e.g., food, work and education; and cultural as extending to the spiritual dimension integral to the full development of human beings.

This latter group takes on special interest as we enter a global age in which peoples intersect and interact, not only along with their cultures, but in terms of these cultures. Thus, to treat of the theoretical foundation of human rights as the progress of the sense of person in a global age we must look at the nature of the interaction of cultures and civilizations.

This would appear to require two steps which will be the structure of this chapter. Part I provides the bases by considering the opening of human awareness of subjectivity in the last half of the last century and the access this provides for appreciating the nature and formation of cultures. Part II takes up the relations between civilizations, especially in their religious roots, for which it will be necessary to study: (a) the new global unity and a proportionate mode of thinking this unity (Nicholas of Cusa), (b) the way in which this is differentiated from within by each culture in its process of self-definition and transformation (analogy of proper proportionality), and (c) the relation between these cultural traditions and civilizations (the notions of participation and analogy of attribution).

In 1900, Whitehead would later write, he thought that physics was complete as a science and that only some details remained to be worked out. At the time atoms were considered the smallest building blocks of the physical world. During the succeeding century, however, physicists broke into the atom and managed in that radically new and totally unknown dimension to work out the yet more basic components of the atom and their interrelations. The result was a total transformation of physics and radically new human capabilities for transforming the physical world through this more basic level.

What would it mean, we might ask then, if we could discover not merely the interior make up of the lonely atom, but that of the human being? And what if this understanding could be had not merely for the human genome, but for the inner constitution and operation of the life of human consciousness with its capacities for creative freedom and social interaction?

This indeed is precisely what has happened in the last century. It explains why we are able now to talk of cultures and face the issue of intercultural relations in new, at times tragic, yet potentially hopeful ways.

Later in his search for the foundations of arithmetic Husserl was led ineluctably to the essential operation of human consciousness. Where objectively the number 3 may consist of three units, arithmetic is rather a matter of being able to hold these three simultaneously and to manipulate them through patterns of relationships.

But where some had classified this as psychology and interpreted it in the external objective categories of the sciences, Husserl, by following with great acuity the notion of intentionality received from Brentano, was able to discover the distinctive character of human consciousness and develop a pattern of techniques for uncovering it or bringing it to light – as indicated by the etymology of the term ‘phenomenology’: phe (light)-nomen-ology.

All of this is present in the human person, who adds self-consciousness and self-determination. When to this is added the imagination, the human person is able to work out endless ways of responding to the environment – physical, social and spiritual – in pursuit of self-realization or perfection at all these levels.

In the light of this emergence of being in the complex unities which are human persons and communities, it is possible now to garner a deeper sense of the reality that is culture. If it be true that the human person and community as self-conscious and imaginative have multiple, almost limitless ways of pursing their perfection, then it becomes necessary to set priorities, that is, to give greater weight to some than to others. Etymologically, to weigh more (valere) is the root of ‘value’. This might be a matter of external objects of preference, but here it is especially of those more internal and spiritual qualities which shape our action.

In turn, a pattern of values and actions will develop a set of special capabilities or strengths (virtus, whence "virtue"). Virtues interlock with values in a mutually reinforcinig symbiosis that progressively shapes the overall context of personal and social life. Concretely this is the way children can be raised or cultivated; hence the term "culture" as the way to cultivate the soul.

But, of course, circumstances change; new challenges and opportunities arise. Hence the culture is under continued reevaluation by each generation which must decide what to pass on to its children and how to adapt it in order that it be life giving for them. The content of this continued process of testing over time, reevaluation, adaptation, application, and passing on (tradere) is termed the "tradition".

A cultural tradition is marked then by three characteristics:

- First, it is fundamentally a creative work of freedom. As freedom is the inner exercise of the unique human existence, it is a unique expression of the life of a people as consciously lived and freely committed. This then needs to be understood as it were from within as one’s deepest life commitment.

- Second, as it is the only real possibility available to a person or people for a life of meaning and dignity for themselves and their children, nothing will be defended more rightly or more fiercely when necessary.

- Third, as a culture is the effect of the exercise of human freedom exercised consciously at the level of spirit, it can be said rightly that culture is the place where the Spirit of a people dwells. The cultural heritage of a people is the proper effect of the work of the Spirit with and through them; it is the cumulative result of divine providence leading the people through history.

The new global reality is essentially a new awareness of unity. This emerged visually with the landing of the astronauts on the moon in 1969. What they found there was uninteresting. But what they did there transformed human seld-understanding, namely expand human consciousness to the earth as a whole – a single globe, round and beautiful.

Since then we have moved inexorably in this wholistic direction. Gradually we have begun to appreciate the environment as one, so that all human planning must take into account the effect which the project will have on the overall ecology, local, national and global. With the end of the cold war this has become true in the economy as it has organized itself as a single world system; in politics as the various regional and overarching unities have developed; and in informatics as a single and integral world outlook is increasingly disseminated and assimilated.

The coordinated impact of all these dimensions constitutes a change of horizon which is not only quantitative and incremental, but qualitative. Life is being lived differently, indeed globally, in our day.

1. the simple unity of any individual being,

2. a complex unity assembling multiple simple individuals,

3. a global whole with its diversity, about which we are directly interested here, and

4. the absolute unity of God himself.

Globalization directs our attention to #3, but as we shall see not without the engagement of the others.

As we noted above the development of human technological capabilities now urges upon us environmental concerns. We have to think of the impact on the overall ecology of the use of rivers for expelling industrial wastes, or of the use of carbohydrates as fuel upon the ability of the ozon-sphere to protect us from the radiation of the sun.

When now we think in contemporary terms of globalization the earlier thought of Nicholas of Cusa finds new application. This appears when we consider globalizaiton as a matter not only of a single economic or political system (hard power), but also of information and communication (soft power). Here hermeneutics is called upon to play a special role. What it suggests is not the imposition of an abstract universal which would suppress the unique differences which are characteristic and indeed essential to the various cultures. Nor is hermeneutics a simple transfer of a component from one culture to another for, as in medicine, the challenge is the way an organic reality rejects any addition from an alien sources and how this can be overcome.

Hence, hermeneutics looks rather for an inner transformation of a culture, stimulated by seeing desirable elements in other cultures, but achieved not by transplantation from without, but precisely by drawing creatively upon one’s own cultural resources.

Note that this respects the freedom and cultural identity of a people. It does not simply adjust their culture according to international or world economic and political dictates, but works to adjust the economic and political order according to what the people want to be and to become, or more probably to achieve a proper accommodation between the two.

Nicholas of Cusa, who often is described as the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns, considered intellection of the whole as the key to understanding. That is, to think in terms of the whole and to retain this as the basis of the meaning of all the particular components of the whole, which then are appreciated precisely as contractions or limited realizations of the whole: the whole as contracted to this or that. This echoes, in reverse, the classical notion of participation, not in its meaning as mimesis or image, but rather in its sense that the multiple images never exhaust the whole.

This has two immediate implications for Cusa. First, that the multiple are complementary one to the other, for the other is that contraction of the whole which I fail to realize myself but which – thinking always in terms of the whole – my meaning requires. Second, that the multiples are therefore essentially related one to the other. Just as the father is such only through the son and vice versa, the very definition of the one includes the reality of the other. This, rather than conflict and competition, can be the basis for human cooperation in a global age.

As works of creative human freedom cultural traditions are differentiated from within. They are similar as being pursuits of their own perfection in their own way. The similarity here is had not by omitting or abstracting elements in order to achieve sameness or univocity between cultures, or by lessening the fervor with which each pursues their own perfection and in their own way. Rather, it lies in the very vigor of the pursuit of perfection by the many peoples each in their own manner.

This reflects the seeming paradox that as free, distinct and unique they are similar in the very uniqueness and distinctiveness of their free pursuit of perfection. How is this to be understood?

What is salient for us is that analogy is first of all contrasted to univocity. Univocous terms have always and only the same meaning. It is the strength of science to proceed exclusively by this manner of term; as a result the conclusions are not only exact, but necessary and universal in application. But such terms are obtained by omitting what is unique to each. Though this is acceptable in the realm of things or objects, cultures, as we have seen, are effectively the cumulative freedom of a people. Freedom, in turn, is precisely and essentially a unique affirmation of a being, and expresses in turn the uniqueness of its author. If it has been the tragedy of the past that this uniqueness has been suppressed and lost, it is the hope of the future that abstractive processes can now be supplemented by other modes of knowledge sensitive to the uniqueness of cultures. Hence for work on culture and their relationships we need to move to another type of term, not univocous but analogous.

Beside univocity there is another type of predication, namely, equivocity, in which what is predicated is simply different in each case. This has a number of types. In one the same term happens to be used of two things only by accident without any relation between them. Thus, the term ‘pen’ is used for an instrument for writing and for a place for holding pigs. But, of course, the cases of equivocity which are of interest to us are those where the same term is used intentionally.

Another type of analogy is that of proper proportionality or a "four term" analogy. This consists of at least two proportions which realities are not identical or equal to each other, but are similar only in the proportion that each represents within itself, i.e., in the relations of A to B and of C to D

A:B :: C:D

Note that this is not metaphor in which what is real is only one of the proportions, of which the other proportion is only illustrative (the real smile on the face being described by an imaginary sun on the valley, or vice versa). In contrast, here in the analogy of proper proportionality both proportions are real.

the existence of A the existence of B

-------------------------- : : --------------------------

the essence of A the essence of B

There is nothing of A in B, neither its existence nor its essence.

This is important for cultures as the products and bearers of human freedom in all of its uniqueness. One is simply not the same as the other in any part. Yet in the midst of the differences the two are somewhat the same in that each is a relation of its unique existence to its proper essence or an actuation of essence by its own proportionate existence. They are differentiated from their deepest principles, yet both are somewhat the same as realizations of existence, each in its own way.

When applied to culture as works of human freedom it can be seen that each culture is differentiated from its deepest origin, that is, in the very nature of its arising from human freedom. Their degree of sameness lies in each culture being a unique way of striving after its own perfection. Consequently, attenuating the exercise of what is proper to my culture or religion is not a way of relating to, being more cohesive with, or being one with other cultures or religions. Rather, it is precisely in the uniquely personal exercise of one’s freedom, i.e., in one’s total effort to realize one’s esse and achieve fulfilment according to one’s own nature and culture, that we are alike. As free humans are similar precisely in and by their free exercise of being by which, paradoxically, they are at the same time most unique in themselves and most distinctive vis or vis others.

What is essential in this existential, transcendental or metaphysical realization of participation is not that each is a replication of the same form in an identity of kind. Rather each is an actual realization of being according to the exercise of freedom that has come to constitute this as a unique culture. Yet each is similar in being related to the one cause on which each depends. Hence there is a similarity in each of the effects of the absolute one in that each depends for its being on the One Creator, source or efficient cause.

If now we reverse the type of causality in order to speak in terms not of the efficient cause or source, but of final cause, end or goal something very interesting emerges that is especially appropriate to the issue of cultures. As seen above cultures are ways of cultivating the soul, i.e., ways in which one’s good or perfection can most appropriately be pursued. When this is deepened to religions – which S. Huntington notes are the basis of civilizations and hence of cultures, as the specific relation (re-ligatio or ‘binding back’, as an etymology of ‘religion’) to the one God – then we find that each religion is totally distinct yet convergent in its direction to the One. In this case, it is not only that the religions are analogous by a proportion of proportions which expresses their intense and unique pursuit of their own perfection, but that all, while coming each from a distinct quarter, converge because they tend toward the same Goal.

In this light, the danger of a relativism in which each is incommensurable and incomprehensible to the other falls away and does so in the very distinctiveness of the pursuit by each which is at root pursuit of the one divine. Rather than being simply isolated from, and against, one another, they are both unique and convergent in their deepest search for perfection and self-realization which is participation in the one divine. From this follows a founded hope, namely, that the more the cultures approach the one goal of their pilgrimages the more they will be able to appreciate the significance and complementarity of each other. In other words the cultures will be natively more cooperative with one another precisely to the degree that they advance in their own realization.

In this way our global age opens new hopes:

First, as seen in terms enriched by human subjectivity the various cultures can be read from within and thereby seen, as with Heidegger’s dasein, as the mega manifestations of Being in time.

Second, cultural traditions as the cumulative freedom of a people are unique to the life project of each and are to be protected and promoted.

Third, employing Cusa’s ability to think in terms of the whole, the many cultures come to be seen as complementary and interrelated one with another.

Fourth, in order to explore this in greater depth the analogy of proper proportionality enables one to appreciate something truly amazing and unexpected, namely, that it is in the very distinctive and unique pursuits of the good by each culture they are similar. This is not in some formal abstraction cut off from life or applied univocously to the destruction of the multiple cultures. Hence, Christians can appreciate and admire the single minded adhesion to the One by Moslems and are able to do so through their own unique experience of devotion to the divine.

Fifth, when the mutual appreciation of cultures in their most basic pursuits is clarified by means of the analogy of attribution taken in terms of final causality as each culture pursues its perfection, the image this forms is that of Isaias in which all peoples of the earth are on convergent pilgrimages to the Holy Mountain, where God will be All in all.