CHAPTER I

THE NOTION OF TRADITION

GEORGE F. McLEAN

            This paper will concern the experience of modernization in the West. While certainly not irrelevant, implications for other regions can be drawn only from within those milieux themselves. In the West, modern times appear marked by two characteristics which have not always been at ease with each other. One is the thrust toward ever greater appreciation of self-determination and responsibility on the part of persons and communities. The other is the development of scientific knowledge. Both have gone through major evolutions and the search for their proper realization and interrelation has been at the heart of the modern project.

            This search has not been easy. After centuries of preparation, by the beginning of the twenty century many thought that science had reached maturity and provided mankind with the ability to usher in a new age of freedom. In fact, however, by the 1930’s the West had come to be threatened by despotic totalitarianism and in turn oppressed other parts of the world through colonialism, against which the history of the last 50 years has been a constant struggle. In the 40’s a Second World War was fought against Fascism "to save the world for democracy." This was followed by decades of struggles for emancipation by peoples, former colonies, minorities, and by women at large.

            If the whole cycle is not to be repeated, it is necessary to discover the roots of the problem in the excessive objectivism in modern thought which has depersonalized all, reducing mankind to a set of things at the disposition of the state or the system. In response we must open access to the store of human subjectivity in tradition, and then clarify the essential role this plays at the heart of democracy. This is the pattern of the three steps which follow.

SCIENCE AND CULTURE: OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

            The origin of the problem might be traced back to Descartes and his goals of a unified objective science predicated upon a pattern of clear and distinct ideas. On the one hand, as demonstrated by the rationalist efforts of Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant’s first Critique, this project searched out necessary laws of process, but left no real room for the concrete person and above all for freedom. On the other hand, the positivist efforts from Locke to Carnap1 to build this unified science upon concrete facts took account only of surface characteristics and led to a rejection of interiority and depth of being.

            Freedom then became either the specious right to follow the necessary laws of the process or, when self-enclosed as a flickering in the closed circuits of history,2 became the stuff of Hobbes’ vicious war of all against all. Everything was object, everything and everyone belonged to the necessitarian system; there was no place for a self-conscious and free subject, for a community bonded by love and respect, or for the creation of anything definitively new and unique.

            Kant suggested a way beyond this in his second and third Critiques concerning the practical reason and the aesthetic and teleological judgements. But in his rationalist context this remained too universalistic and formalistic to recuperate the uniqueness of the concrete exercise of freedom. Nevertheless, he pointed in a promising direction, namely, to subjectivity, to the actual exercise of human freedom as the point at which being emerges consciously and with passionate commitment in our world. This suggests that the moral tradition of a people can be an essential resource and hold great promise for building the future, provided it can be effectively accessed and creatively drawn upon.

            To do so, however, requires an important epistemological step, for it is necessary first to recognize the importance of objectivity without being trapped in a reductionistic objectivism. There are two approaches to this, the one theoretical, the other existential. I shall not stop at the first, but only refer to Feyerabend’s critique of Popper3 as an example of a sophisticated analysis of the particularly fundamental role played by subjectivity in the construction of science.

            To a still greater degree reflection on history and tradition also brings out the importance of subjectivity in addition to the objective considerations and will take us more directly to our issue of the traditional attitude and modernization. If tradition consisted only in objects fixed empirically in the past it would be a distraction from present problems and an impediment to real progress. This, of course, is the way tradition is bound to appear to one trapped in a scientific objectivism, but it cannot be true, for that would belie the dynamic progress of the past. Hence, it is necessary to look to tradition not as a mere storehouse of past customs, but as the dynamic process of human decision-making and commitment in which our life finds both its challenge, its bearings and its hope. Such a search begins in the moral order, but points beyond.

            The moral life does require objectivity for it involves free responses to objective goods; otherwise our actions could not contribute to our own real perfection and to that of others. Hence, many possible patterns of actions are objectively right because they promote the good of those involved, while others, precisely as inconsistent with the real good of persons, are objectively disordered or misordered. This constitutes the objective basis for differentiating between values and disvalues.

            However, because the realm of objective relations is almost numberless whereas our actions are single, it is essential that we choose not only between the good and the bad, but in each case which of the often innumerable possible goods we will render concrete. Therefore, in order to follow the emergence of the field of concrete moral action, it is not sufficient to examine only the objective nature of the persons, actions and things involved. In addition one must consider the subjectivity of the person in the context of his/her society, valuing the good of an action, choosing it over its alternatives, and bringing it into actuality.

            The term ‘value’ here is of special note. Though derived from the economic sphere where it has especially objective content—the good must really "weigh in" and make a real difference—the term expresses this good especially as related to wills which actually acknowledge it as a good and as desirable.4 This places the focus upon the creative capacity of the spirit of a person or people and their ability to work as artists. This is meant not merely in the restricted sense of producing purely aesthetic objects, but in the extended sense of shaping all dimensions of life, material and spiritual, economic and political, into a whole life characterized by unity and truth, goodness and beauty.

            This differs among various groups of persons, and at various periods. Each people or community is sensitive to and prizes a distinct set of goods or, more likely, establishes a distinctive ranking in the degree to which it prizes various goods. By so doing it delineates among the limitless order of objective goods a certain pattern of values, actions and realizations which in a more stable fashion mirrors their corporate free choices.

            This constitutes the basic topology of a culture. The term can be derived from the Latin term for tilling or cultivating the land. Cicero and other Latin authors used it for the cultivation of the soul or mind (cultura animi), for just as even good land when left without cultivation will produce only disordered vegetation of little value, so the human spirit will not achieve its proper results unless trained. This sense of culture corresponds most closely to the Greek term for education (paideia) as the development of character, taste and judgment, and to the German term "formation" (Bildung).5

            A culture constitutes the prime pattern and gradation of goods which persons experience from their earliest years and in terms of which they interpret their developing relations. Young persons peer out at the world through a lens formed, as it were, by their culture, and configured according to the pattern of choices made by their family and community throughout its history—often in the most trying of circumstances. Like a pair of glasses it does not create the object—objectivity perjures; but it does focus attention upon certain goods involved rather than upon others. This becomes the basic orienting factor for one’s affective and emotional life. In time, it encourages and reinforces certain patterns of action which, in turn, reinforce the pattern of values. In relation to these, certain combinations of possibilities, with their natures and norms, take on particular importance and begin thereby to enter into the makeup of one’s world of meaning.

            Freedom then is more than mere spontaneity, more than choice, and more even than self-determination in the sense of causing oneself to act. It shapes—the phenomenologist would say even that it constitutes—one’s world as the ambit of human decisions and dynamic action. This is the making of a person or people, of a community or nation. Through this process we constitute our universe of moral concern in terms of which we struggle to advance or at least perjure, mourn our failures, and celebrate our successes. This is our world of hopes and fears, in terms of which, as Plato wrote in the Laches, our lives have moral meaning.

            Correlatively, the ability to follow one’s conscience and hence to develop one’s set of values and virtues must be protected and promoted by the relevant social entities. This is a basic right of the person—perhaps the basic human and social right—because only thus can one transcend one’s conditions and strive for fulfillment. Its protection and promotion must be the basic concern of any social order which would be democratic.

TRADITION AND CUMULATIVE FREEDOM

            The development of values and virtues and their integration as a culture of any depth or richness takes time and hence depends upon the experience and creativity of many generations. Thus, the culture which is handed on (or tradita) comes to be called a cultural tradition or heritage; as such it reflects the achievements of a people in discovering and mirroring the deepest meanings of life.

            This could be understood merely as a process of trial and error. Continual correction in relation to a people’s evolving sense of human dignity and purpose constitutes a type of learning and testing laboratory for successive generations. In this laboratory of history the strengths of various insights and behavior patterns can be identified and reinforced, while deficiencies are progressively corrected or eliminated.

            But this language remains too abstract, too limited to method or technique. While this can be described in general and at a distance in terms of feedback mechanisms and might seem to concern merely how to cope in daily life, what is being spoken about are free acts expressive of passionate human commitment and sacrifice in responding to concrete danger, building and rebuilding family alliances, and constructing and defending one’s nation.

            Moreover, this wisdom is a not a matter of mere tactical adjustments to temporary concerns as it is on the horizontal plane of the successive ages of history, focused upon a limited number of leaders, with limited historical vision, attempting to manipulate social forces externally by imposing their will. Instead, as our attention is directed vertically to the transcendent ground of being and hence to the limitless basis of our values it takes in the full meaning we are able to envision for life and which we desire to achieve through all such adjustments over a period of generations. Through this extended process of learning and commitment we achieve awareness of the bases for the decisions which constitute history.

            This is not an other-worldly experience, for we have seen it mirrored in the unconditioned love of our grandparents and in the total dedication of the heroes of our revolutions. It is the basis of all the good which mankind has discovered. It is the context of meaning in which we have been raised. Infinite goodness beyond any particular goods, it frees us from being captivated by any particular object, thereby giving us dominion over our actions and reactions. This is at once the root of our freedom and the limitless source of our creativity. Does it come from God or from man; is it a matter of eternity or history? Chakravarti Rajagopalachari of Madras answered:

Whether the epics and songs of a nation spring from the faith and ideas of the common folk, or whether a nation’s faith and ideas are produced by its literature is a question which one is free to answer as one likes.... Did clouds rise from the sea or was the sea filled by waters from the sky? All such inquiries take us to the feet of God trans-cending speech and thought.6

            One thing is sure, having seen this source our mind can never be entrapped or determined by our circumstances or structures. This vision enables us to look afresh at the present, and to evaluate it in terms which transcend any concrete circumstances, anything one can say or any power one can wield. This is the definitive basis of freedom and the source of limitless creativity.

            Our cultural tradition then provides not only models and exemplars, but access to limitless meaning. In the cooperative process of learning, this wisdom was drawn from experience and affirmed in the cumulative free acts of commitment and sacrifice. Defined, defended and passed on through time, tradition is the corporate life of the community?7

            Further, adaptation in our living of this tradition does not diminish it, but rather corrects and perfects it. It is precisely here that the freedom and creativity are located. They do not consist in arbitrariness. for Kant is right in saying that without law freedom has no meaning; nor do they consist in an automatic response determined by the historical situation, for then determinism and relativism would compete for the crown in undermining human freedom. Freedom consists rather in shaping the present according to the sense of what is just and good which we have from our cultural tradition, and in a way which manifests and indeed creates for the first time more of what justice and goodness mean.

            The truly important battle at the present time is, then, not between, on the one hand, a chaotic liberalism in which the abstract laws of the marketplace dictate and tear at the lives of persons, peoples and nations and, on the other hand, a depersonalizing sense of community in which the dignity of the person is suppressed for an equally abstract utopia. A victory by either would spell disaster. The central battle is rather to enable peoples to draw on their heritage constituted of their personal assessments and free decisions, reflective of a transcending Ground of being and meaning, and elaborated through the ages by their community as it worked out its response to its present circumstances. It is of definite importance that this people’s response to its own challenges be truly its own: that it not simply be imposed as part of another’s history, or—worst of all—in function of abstract and depersonalizing structures or utopias, but that it be part of its history as its free response to the Good, for this is to live.

DEMOCRACY, THE HERMENEUTICS OF TRADITION

            It remains for us now to treat the third element in this study, namely, how can people work together to understand and unfold the great achievements of past human awareness in a way that is directive of our life in its present circumstances? In a word, how can we develop democracy? It must not be without the objective clarity of science, yet it must draw upon the richer and deeper resources of freedom to be found in a tradition which contains the experience of a people garnered from life in their families, communities and villages through the ages. Hermeneutics suggests a method for doing this and hence for democracy understood as a process of cooperative action on the part of a people to carry forward their tradition of free decision-making and apply it to new times.

            As a first step in taking up a proposal for social life, a law or a constitution, as with any text, one first projects a conception of its content. This anticipation of meaning is not a fixed content to which we come, but what we produce as we participate in the evolution of the tradition in our times and further determine ourselves and it. This is a creative stance reflecting the content, not only of the past, but of the time in which I stand and of the life project in which I am engaged.

            Of course, our first understandings are seldom sufficient. Hence, it becomes particularly important that they not be adhered to fixedly, but be put at risk in dialogue with others. For this we must maintain a questioning attitude. Rather than simply following through with our initial idea until a change is forced upon us, we must remain sensitive to new meanings in true openness. This is neither neutrality as regards the meaning of the tradition, nor an extinction of passionate concerns regarding action towards the future. Rather, being aware of our own biases or prejudgments and adjusting them in dialogue with others implies rejecting what impedes our understanding of others’ or of our own traditions. The democratic attitude is one of willingness continually to revise our initial projection or expectation of meaning.

            The heart of the democratic process is then not to suppress, but to reinforce and unfold the questions of others. To the degree these probabilities are built up and intensified they can serve as a searchlight. This is the opposite of both opinion which tends to suppress questions, and of arguing which searches out the weakness in another positions. Instead, in democracy understood as conversation and dialogue one enters upon a mutual search to maximize the possibilities of the question, for it is by mutually eliminating errors and working out a common meaning that we dis-cover truth. Democracy then enables one to adjust one’s prior understanding not only of the horizon of the other with whom one is in dialogue, but even of one’s own horizon.8 It is a process of authentic human growth.

            Here, time is not a barrier, separation or abyss, but rather a bridge and opportunity for the process of understanding, a fertile ground filled with experience, custom and tradition. The importance of the historical distance is not that it enables the subjective reality of persons to disappear so that the objectivity of the situation can emerge. On the contrary, it makes possible a new and more com-plete meaning of the tradition through the very process of our dia-logue with others, revelling in our mutual subjectivity, our shared hopes, insights and discoveries.9

            Thus, one’s personal attitudes and interests can be essential. If our interest in developing our horizons is self-centered, human interchange could be reduced simply to the promotion of our own ideas. Thus absolutized they would become an ideology cut off from life. Locked into an absoluteness of one’s prejudices, one would become fixed or closed in the past and disallow new life. In this manner powerful new insights can become with time deadening prejudices which suppress freedom.

            In contrast, an attitude of authentic democratic openness appreciates the nature of one’s own finiteness, and hence both respects the past and is open to discerning the future. Such open-ness is a matter, not merely of new information, but of recognizing the historical nature of man and his relations to an absolute that both grounds and transcends time. This calls on us to escape what had deceived us and held us captive, and to learn deeply from new experiences.10 Only in dying to self, do we find resurrection and new life.

            This suggests that democratic openness does not consist in surveying others objectively, obeying them unquestioningly or simply juxtaposing their ideas and traditions to our own. Rather, it is directed primarily to ourselves, for our ability to listen to others is correlatively our ability to assimilate the implications of their an-swers through delving more deeply into the meaning of our tradition and drawing out new and even more rich insights. In other words, it is an acknowledgement that our cultural heritage has something new to say to us.

            The characteristic hermeneutic attitude of democracy is then not methodological sureness, readiness for compromise or new techniques of social organization; these are matters of social cri-tique and manipulation on the scientific or horizontal level. Instead, democracy is readiness through dialogue to draw vertically new meaning from the roots of a common tradition. Such a life is not a closed structure, but a continual unfolding of the limitless pos-sibilities of Being present to us through our tradition. This is the source of our freedom and of the creativity needed to build the future.

NOTES

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

            2. H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1975), pp. 256-263.

            3. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 164-178, and Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987), 170-174.

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

            5. V. Mathieu, "Cultura" in Enciclopedia Filosofica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1976). II, 207-210; and Raymond Williams, "Culture and Civilization", Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), II, 273-276, and Culture and Society (London, 1958).

            6. Ramayana (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bharan, 1976), p. 312.

            7. Gadamer, pp. 245-253.

            8. Ibid., pp. 232-235.

            9. Ibid., pp. 263-264.