INTRODUCTION

            At this point of transition to the third millennium a profound change appears to be taking place. This has been a long time in the making, but, as with a young bird emerging from its shell, the older more rigid structure of modernity crumbles so that new life can break forth.

            The history of the last half of this century has been characterized by the emergence of the sense of the person against the pressure of universalist ideologies which promoted mass movements through ruthless totalitarian repression. First Fascism was over-thrown, then Colonialism and finally Stalinism. Each fell before a broad movement asserting the dignity of persons and peoples.

            To understand this one needs to turn back to the beginnings of modernity in the Enlightenment. Despite its name, the scientific/mathematical focus of the thought of this period came at the price of extended forgetfulness and marginalization of all that was not manipulable in terms of clear and distinct ideas. This had to include any horizon that transcended humankind itself. Francis Bacon recommended smashing all the idols, John Locke spoke of a beginning from the mind as a blank tablet, holding exclusively to ideas from the senses and strictly controlling all their combinations. Descartes would achieve the same ends through his famous process of doubt, leading albeit to a different series of ideas.

            Shortly thereafter Jean Baptist Vico would describe the resulting mentality as that of an intellectual brute, that is, a dehumanized intellect. The scientific character of this mentality gave it great power, which modern developments amply witness. But these successes themselves now awake the need to rehumanize life for the coming millennium. Thus, it happens that the October, 1996 meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party should take as its theme: "Spiritual Civilization" and Vaclav Havel President of the Czech Republic should describe the meaning of the meeting of the Presidents of seven European countries with the Pope in early June of 1997 as reclaiming their legacy which "includes among other things the spiritual dimension of public life and the moral dimension in politics (and) is as valid today as it was 1,000 years ago."

            Now there is a move beyond the modern universalist calls for equality to an expanding "global" concern for the quality of life and hence for its rehumanization. This is understood both horizontally as taking account of the broad variety of cultures and vertically as rooted in a richer awareness of the human sensibility, creative imagination and freedom from which cultures spring.

            Hence, to find the key to progress in our times the authors of this volume have most properly sought in Part I to understand the philosophical character of this transition and in Part II to build this change of awareness and spiritual commitment upon the dynamics of practical life and its ethical characteristics.

            Chapter I by Yu Xuanmeng, "In Search of Meaning," begins this inquiry by indicating how the search for meaning, even as regards the physical world, focuses upon values and their creation by human beings. For this he draws richly upon Heidegger’s turn to the existential order which, while neither purely objective nor purely subjective, makes it possible to take account of human goals and hence of meaning.

            Chapter II by George McLean, "Tradition, Modernization and Creativity," carries this notion further by studying the way in which modernization should be not a rupture with tradition, but is application in new and creative ways. This is seen as personal and is rooted in society; thus it calls creatively for going beyond modernity to a more fully humane realization of tradition.

            Chapter III by Ghislaine Florival, "Perception and Value: The Affective Basis of An Ethics of Encounter," brings this to the point. By delving deeply into the constitution of the person as essentially relational, and even into the nature of relation as essentially reversible, she suggests the drama of present changes. Beyond the classical realist positions regarding the person built on objective know-ledge of substances as beings in themselves, and beyond the modern abstractive thought built upon an absolute common human nature as the basis for equal and universal rights, she points to the relational character of the person rooted in his or her sexuality. This means that the human person must be appreciated as relational.

            Hence, the new mode of understanding is not a matter of abstract universal uniformities. The modern universalization of rights and norms beyond cultures could bring us only part way. It must not be lost, but now it needs to be transcended in a richer vision. This must not ignore cultures, but build upon them truly personal interrelations and social commitments which enable the person and civil society to emerge. Professor Florival writes in her chapter:

What then is the status of cultures and of cultural values? To be sure, they reflect the surrounding milieu from which proceed personal exchanges; certainly also, they always are interpreted in the collective experience which they inspire afresh. But it is always inside a group or more exactly in the exchange between persons that the mutual respect of the customs and of aspirations is located concretely as an ethical demand for recognition. This recognition inscribes itself along three ethical dimensions: (1) the subject as responsible for others in one’s relation to oneself; (2) the other as recognized by me in his or her otherness, which is to say in his or her responsible liberty with respect to others; and (3) the cultural interrelation constituting the institution or "neutral third party" with respect to which the truth and efficacy of our concrete actions, as well as of social justice, can be constructed, justified and objectively measured.

There are then no universal values which exist a priori, but only values stemming from concrete and differentiated experience in cultures. To be sure every tradition reveals, while repeating, the possibility of the Desein in its "to be as having been"; every existing being has "to be" as his or her destiny, by virtue of his or her power to be, and according to his or her choice, each time and in each situation. To live the tradition can take on different forms, all of which are supported by the experience of being-at-world. But in the last instance it is always the concrete existing being who performs acts, who lives them and is affected by them, even if those acts themselves can also become what Sartre called the "praticoinert", that is to say, can have effects which go beyond the intentions of those who per-formed them. In this way every existing being, as well as every culture, lives in the context of its own values. These delineate a plurality of human projects which intersect precisely in order, through diverse actions, to construct an ethical world.

It is then through confluence in action that there emerges hope of recognizing the values of each culture. This is not to amalgamate their approaches into one, but to detect in each culture the surge toward values as the promise of a better world. As every culture bears its proper tradition, it is up to each to give life again to the intrinsic truth of its tradition and to bring out deliberately the most humanizing aspirations of that tradition. There is no common ground of a uniform mankind; there are only pluralities of ethical forms all working for the recognition of a humanizing fulfillment.

In the same way that historicity enables us to live in the present the temporal destiny of a whole existence, it permeates the history of the world in its emergence under different figures. However, the genesis of the perception of values is parallel to the genesis of culture and of cultures. It has three successive moments, which reformulate the philosophical history of ethics and reverse what philosophy proposes to itself in its present state of second reflection.

1) Archaic societies operate in function of their universe of values located in a weakly differentiated collective interrelation, which Durkheim and Berg-son called closed societies. Institutionally they are static in the distribution of the respective roles of their members. It is the function which determines the individual.

2) But the dignity of the subject sets down the objective reality of the individuals with respect to each other according to a criterion of recognition which provides a foundation for the notions of respect and autonomy for the person. Liberty then is no longer linked merely to the political role and shared by "peers" who have access to the public world of the agora in the Greek sense of that term. Hence-forth, it must be understood according to its ethical dimension: men recognizing each other as equal before the greatness of the law which they bear in themselves as practical reason. That is, the capacity for the subject to rise in his actions to a universal point of view, that is, to be responsible for his acts as human. The Kantian notion of respect, which pro-bably was the first philosophical argumentation radically to denounce slavery, made it possible also to understand the equality of cultural forms, of races, and of sexes which the 20th century has tried to discover through critical reflection upon its philosophical and religious self understanding.

Resituating this in the perspective of metaphysics and of non-critical religious behavior, together with the scientific revolution and the discoveries of technology, can contribute to rethinking the genealogy of values. Abandoning its closed society, the West which had come to consider itself to be the mankind of universal reason, now discovers and recognizes the contributions of other cultures. And though the West claims for itself the prerogative of spiritual universality with regard to "human rights", it should be noted that those rights appear only in the course of a progressive awareness of the other in his or her otherness and hence in his or her proper culture. Interrelational differentiation is at work in the recognition by which everyone becomes a citizen of the world, but it is always against the back-ground of a new otherness operative at the level of racial or sexual differences.

3) In fact, the discovery of subjectivity is recent; it is a contribution from beyond modernity which interprets critically the lived appropriation of subjectivity. The I is no longer a priori the rational subject, but is self in the light of customs and cultural interchange. The I who discovers itself as "oneself like any other" is relevant only to the universal rights of humankind in general. But we must ask if there is not a still more specific distinctiveness or identity relevant not to the simple universality shared by all men, but to a part of humankind whose recognition as properly personal is made possible only by their sexed affectivity. Thus the attainment of the human is not yet "personal" as long as it has not learned to recognize its own differentiation as constitutive of humanity.

The sexual difference is understood immediately as a relational truth, which is spoken in the reciprocal and constitutive openness of the two sexes, male and female, the one calling the other as the other of the self. This new interchange of "sense" makes it possible to rethink values from the interior of the differentiating dimensionality of the sexes for they can be understood constitutively only as relative to each other. This path of understanding oneself as personal interiority passes through the constitutive otherness of every person in his/her embodied being as incomplete, precisely as this is manifested at the edge of desire. As we have seen in the analysis of affectivity, this induces the proper character of differentiated recognition in one’s lived bodiliness, and therefore in the context of a desiring sexuality.

Here the dimension of person is linked to the radical polarity which already is the sexed difference at the dawn of life, and which serves as the foundation of every human relation. As radical, it provides the foundation for the situation of the per-son as person, for the person is always relational with respect to the other sex and, thereby, to the truth of his/her whole behavior. But beyond itself, beyond the very experience of sexuality which is only a sign of the person, the person is also the ultimate goal at which desire aims.

The modernization of values has taken account thus far of the cultural and racial differences of humanity in general, but it is on the way to becoming aware of the sexed difference which is the life of the senses. This is not only the meaning of actual sexual desire, but colors the whole of life with a correlative and reciprocal truth. Every project of a society of persons, be it a socio-political or a religious society, must be rethought in the light of the new awareness of the sexed difference. The hermeneutics of person has radicalized itself: the truth and action of the senses present themselves to us in their primordial reversibility, which is the sexed difference in its cultural multi-dimensionality.

            Chapter IV by Shang Zhiying, "An Axiointerpretation of the Confucian Ethical Spirit," suggests the importance of the hermeneutic approach which this radically relational character of the person entails and begins to sketch the range of its ethical implications.

            Chapter V by Fu Jizhong and Zhou Shan, "On the Origin of Traditional Chinese Forms of Thinking," traces this back to its Chinese sources by showing the origin of the hieroglyph. What emerges from tracing the sample ideographs from their simplest forms to the sophisticated concepts in the thought of Confucius and Lao Tzu is the essentially analogical and hence relational character of thought. In the past this may have raised special difficulties for Chinese thought in relation to the abstract conceptualization of the Greek tradition, but it promises now to enable culture to proceed with special sureness in the global interchange emerging for the new millennium.

            Chapter VI by Arnold Sprenger, "Some Contemporary Re-flections on Science and Religion," speaks also to these new potentialities of culture. He shows that science in its classical origins was not seen as opposed to religion and points out that the attempt now to deepen scientific notions and open them to culture brings up issues of values and hence of the religious source and goal of basic human commitments.

            Part II turns from theory to practice as emerging in the present transition. In chapter VII Shen Enming, "Lao Tzu’s Idea of `Governing with Non-doing’ and Modern Management" shows that "non-doing" is not a merely negative concept, but a matter of holding to the nature of things. It does not force upon them a control which does not respond to the free determination of the other or to the circumstances, but manipulates and distorts. Where the subject is seen as opposed to the object it reaches out only at a loss to itself. Instead what is suggested is an approach which is truly sensitive to the subject. This enables the culture of peoples to emerge and the relation between persons and peoples to evolve in the new global context.

            Chapter VIII and IX by Manuel Dy turn to the economic order. In "Ownership and Social Relations: The Moral Foundations" he carefully traces the nature and especially the history of the notion of ownership. This enables him to come to the key contemporary dilemma of the relation between the values of equality based on access to the resources of nature and equity based upon one’s labor.

            In Chapter IX, "The Economic Structure of Society: Habermas’ Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," Professor Dy studies what can be done on the issue of power and distribution in terms of stages of communication. Habermas is able to arrive only at argumentative speech where norms lose their quasi-natural validity and require justification from universalistic points of view. This is the popular position at the present time, but it runs afoul both of Lao Tzu’s ancient awareness of the need to take account of concrete nature and of G. Florival’s future-oriented phenomenological perspective. She moves away from transcendental reasoning and abstract universalization in order to take account of the analogy of diverse cultures and of their creative natural interrelation, as intimated by the chapters V, VI and VII of Fu Jizhong, Yu Xuan-meng and Shen Enming, respectively. In this light, Dy’s call for "people power" takes us beyond the formal order of Habermas’s ideal speech situation in which argumentation was focused on critique according to justifying norms built on universalizable principles. Dy calls rather for the vision of Florival which does not ignore the human differences by which each is unique, but builds upon them. It is in confluent interchange that a truly responsible civil society consists. This points beyond modernity to a global horizon.

            Chapter X by John Farrelly, "Person, Work and Religious Tradition," applies this to the field of labor through an analysis of the religious tradition and the philosophy of the person in the analysis of work in John Paul II’s document "On Human Work" (appended there). This carries forward the above themes by taking the analysis of work beyond mere concepts of utility, production and con-sumption to situate it in the context of the purpose of the creation of the material universe and its relation to the human person. Farrelly cites the eminent Keiji Nishitani of the Kyoto school of Buddhist philosophy, that "There is no doubt that the idea of man as a personal being is the highest idea of man which has thusfar appeared." The same may be said as regards the idea of God as personal being and the philosophy of subjectivity. This reinforces the dramatic importance of the new developments gradually elaborated in most of the above chapters, especially III, and moves this from philosophical reflection to the sphere of daily activity in the work place.

            The concluding chapters XI, XII and XIII make this still more concrete. The first of these by Prof Zhang Huajin, "Human Quality and Social Progress", provides a statistical base. Professor Wang Miaoyang, in "The Culture of Shanghai and Its Modernization", points out how the opportunities of Shanghai as a great commercial port were followed by developments in writing and publishing, music and theater. There developed what can only be called a new spirit characterized by openness and innovation that is both creative and popular. This exemplifies what can be expected from the new burst of human creativity now emerging and which, it can be hoped, will flourish in the coming millennium.

            Richard Graham in "Cultural Tradition and Modernization: Symbiosis in the Development of Moral Reasoning," suggests that this can be a true rallying of human resources. He looks for a synergy between tradition and modernity by noting the fact of stages in moral reasoning. In this light he regrets the tendency to set one against the other and points to an integrative vision in which "reason and passion are not in opposition; that `enlightenment’, tradition and revelation all can work together for human progress."

            In sum, modernity has accomplished much in affirming the equality of persons and the universality of human rights. However, it is hard put to face the challenges found in the search for an equity that is sensitive to diversity and the effort to add pluralism to universality. These are rooted in a further awareness of human subjectivity and relatedness which requires new spiritual dimensions of human awareness.