CHAPTER I
THE
AESTHETIC AS THE NEW SPACE
FOR
CIVIL SOCIETY
GEORGE F. McLEAN
At
this turn of the millennia it is being said that the modern period is over and
that we are moving--groping our way--into what as yet can only be pointed to by
the catch-all term "post-modern." This suggests that some of the main
guideposts of the last three centuries of Western civilization no longer appear
adequate. We are challenged to seize this rare opportunity to draw up the
lessons learned from the past and to undertake afresh the effort to rebuild
society in a manner that is, at once, more just and free, and which will allow
our cultures to flourish and the hopes of the many peoples to be newly
fulfilled.
It
is essentially in these terms that attention is now turning to the redevelopment
of that vast area of social life between the state above and the masses below,
or between the political order and the market forces. Termed civil society, this
has been the subject of multiple hopes, namely:
-
that it can take us beyond the excesses authoritarianism (V. Tismaneanu),1
by expanding the active participation of citizens,
-
that it can express an achieved synthesis of different values in the search for
the good life (M. Waltzer),2
-
that it points to a more manageable scale of life by em-phasizing
"voluntary associations, churches and communities, based on a conviction
that decisions should be made locally, and should not be controlled by the state
and its bureaucracies" (D. Bell),3 and
-
that as such it is the cutting edge of the search for freedom in the modern
world (C. Taylor).4
We
might sketch out the challenge of responding to these hopes in three steps:
first by delineating the field of civil society through identifying its basic
components, second by surveying the liberal and more communal ways in which
civil society has been thematized in modern times in order to draw upon the
accom-plishments and to learn from their limitations; and third to look for
future ways in which civil societies can be more adequately grounded in the
diverse cultures of the multiple peoples and more creatively realized.
THE FIELD OF CIVIL
SOCIETY
To
get to the root of the notion of civil society and to uncover its key components
with a view to effective action M. Riedel5 suggests a phenomenological approach through an
eidetic reduction after the manner developed by Edmund Husserl. In such a
approach what is sought is not the natural object in itself, but its mode of
appearing in consciousness, that is, its meaning for us.
The
move here from individual objects to essences is called eidetic reduction,
and the path to the essences is through imaginative variation. The empirical in-dividual,
either given in sense experience or con-structed in the imagination, is
considered as one possible instance of the eidos in question. One
imag-inatively varies the different features of this in-stance to discover what
remains necessarily present through all the instances. He will discover in this
way those variations that will lead to a change in the eidos as distinct
from those that lead simply to another possible typical instance within the
limits of the eidos. In this way what pertains to this essence is brought
to immediate evidence in intuition.6
A
more adequate implementation of this approach than there is room for here might
begin from an examination of the principles of social organization during the
primordial periods of totem and myth (see my Plenitude and Participation7).
Carrying out such a longitudinal search through time, promises to provide a
cumulative sense of the meaning which can be accessed through the notion of
civil society, to weigh possibilities and difficulties of the range of past
approaches to its realization, and even to suggest new approaches appropriate to
the challenges and opportunities of our times. It is the task of each people to
assure that such a process takes full account of their own classical experience,
whether beginning therefrom and finding means for its present thematization or
employing the Greek contribution and as-suring that its findings be
appropriately enriched by their own exper-ience of social life.
Following
the latter approach, when we look at Aristotle’s ethics and politics we find
that, most properly, the political bespeaks governance or directive action
toward the goal of social life. Signi-ficantly, this is expressed by the term arché
meaning beginning, origin or first source, and which is extended to governance
in the sense of directing others toward a good or a goal, without being oneself
being necessitated. This is the true beginning or point of origin of social
action; as such it bespeaks both responsibility for the overall enter-prise and
the exercise of freedom by individuals and groups who orig-inate responsible
action. This issue of the nature and range of such corporate directive freedom
is one of two decisive issues with regard to the meaning of civil society.
A
second issue of governance in Aristotle appears in his correction of his
evaluative classification of types of governance. His first classification into
oligarchy and democracy was based upon the number--few or many--of those who
shared in ruling when this was un-derstood as a self-interested search for
material possessions. In place of this he chose instead a normative criterium
based on the search for the common good in which all can participate.8
In this light governance has its meaning as a species of a broader reality,
namely, the com-munity (koinonia), which comes together to achieve as its
end the happiness or good life of the whole.
The
polis is then a species of community. It is a group, which as free and
self-responsible, comes together in governance to guide their efforts toward the
achievement of the good life. Community and gover-nance are not the same or
tautological, but they go together for per-sons are united as a community by
their common orientation to the same end. 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 being a koin nia politika or "civil
society".
Civil
society then has three elements. Governance or arché as the beginning of
action or the taking of initiative toward an end is an exercise by persons
of their human freedom. But persons are not isolated single entities; in
contrast to rocks they are essentially open to others with whom they interact
and communicate in various groups and subgroups. This bespeaks a second element,
namely, communi-cation or subsidiarity, with other members of one’s
group. The third element is participation or subsidiarity between these groups.
As each has its proper sphere of free responsibility what can be taken care of
at a lower or more proximate level should be left to the free creativity of the
community of persons more directly involved. All persons and groups, each
according to their proper competency, are to share in the concern and
responsible action for the common good of the whole.9
The
above reflects the Greek vision enriched by the sense of person developed under
the impact of the Christian kerygma with its heightened sense of
existence and the implications this entails for freedom in and of the community.10
This
may be redone in terms proper to the Andean region and/or enriched by a
phenomenological analysis of the many cultures. In any case, the process
probably should be not one of essences with the external addition of formal
modifiers, but an hermeneutic interrelation of horizons as worked out by H.-G.
Gadamer in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger. We shall see more of this in
the third or last section of this paper.
OPENING A NEW SPACE
FOR CIVIL SOCIETY AT
THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIA
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 pe-rennial
quest for ways to fulfill the human dignity of persons as free, self-determining
and sharing in governance, not only in one mass so-ciety, 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 pa-ralyzing 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.
What
strategy does this invoke for a response? Seligman’s as-sessment upon
reviewing modern field is that civil society is not sufficient for our times11
and Ernest Gellner would seem to agree.12
I believe Seligman to be correct in holding that the modern motions of civil
society he investigates are insufficient for the future and have even been
checkmated, but his work begins from the Stoics and ignores the rich dimensions
of classical thought (Plato and Aristotle are referred to but once and together,
p. 79). Others such as Cohen and Arato13
see civil society as a perennial task which must be taken up. But they would
restrict its ambit to the realm between, but not including, the economy and the
state. But should one simply strike a compromise by cutting off the dimensions
of property/production, on the one hand, and of state, on the other, as areas to
be guided by hidden hands or abstract laws of reason and their prerequisites.
This would be to exclude where full humanness in order to be left in ex-change
with an intermediate realm of varied other forms of human comity. In that case
the effort would be to suffuse this intermediate realm with ethical meaning and
set it as a bulwark against supposed non-ethical realms of productive property
ruled by the hidden hand and the coercive powers of the state. Or more
manipulatively, is it de-sirable, right or feasible to set these two powers
against each other as non-ethical counter balances in order to create the
private sphere of civil society for a properly human life? This would seem to be
neither feasible nor desirable for to leave both these power centers devoid of
ethical direction would be to leave two of the most pervasive di-mensions of
reality unrelated to human dignity as source or arché and as goal. Thus,
Hegel and Marx were correct however in stress the im-portance of the economic
order for human self understanding and in-teraction in our times and to struggle
to define a role of the state in this. We seem to have come to the end of the
possibilities of the present order of things and to be in need of considering
life at a deeper, less abstractive and reductive manner. What is needed is a
level which is more integrative and potentially fulfilling. What could this be?
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 sen-sitivity in a broader sense of human life and meaning
such as is sug-gested 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 deve-lopment of civil society.
Above the progression followed that of the earlier British-French Enlightenment
in which the limitations of know-ledge 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 dimen-sions 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.
AESTHETIC AWARENESS
The Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement
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 necessarily of the ca-tegories 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 mean-ing 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, neces-sitated, 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 Judg-ment as a context within which freedom
and scientific necessity could coexist, indeed, in which necessity would be the
support and instru-ment 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.
To
provide for this context, Kant found it necessary to dis-tinguish two issues,
reflected in the two parts of his third Critique. In the "Critique
of Teleological Judgment",14 he acknowledges that nature and all reality must
be teleological. This was a basic component of the classical view which enabled
all to be integrated within the context of a society of free men working
according to a developed order of rea-son. For Kant, if there is to be room for
human freedom in a cosmos in which man can make use of necessary laws, if
science is to contribute to the exercise of human freedom, then nature too must
be directed toward a transcendent goal and manifest throughout a teleology
within which free human purpose can be integrated. In these terms, nature, even
in its necessary and universal laws, is no longer alien to freedom, but
expresses divine freedom and is conciliable with human freedom. The same might
be said of the economic order and its "hidden hand." The structure of
his first Critique will not allow Kant to affirm this teleological
character as an absolute and self-sufficient metaphysical reality, but he
recognizes that we must proceed "as if" all reality is te-leological
precisely because of the undeniable reality of human free-dom in an ordered
universe.
If,
however, teleology, in principle, provides the needed space, there remains a
second issue of how freedom is exercised, namely, what mediates it to the
necessary and universal laws of science? This is the task of his "Critique
of the Aesthetic Judgment",15 and it is here that the imagination reemerges to
play its key integrating role in hu-man life. From the point of view of the
human person, the task is to ex-plain how one can live in freedom with nature
for which the first critique had discovered only laws of universality and
necessity and especially with structures of society in a way that is neither
necessitated nor ne-cessitating?
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 phe-nomena into a unity. On the contrary,
under the rule of unity, the imag-ination 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
imag-ination.
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.
However,
this reproductive work took place in relation to the abstract and universal
categories of the intellect and was carried out under a law of unity which
dictated that such phenomena as a house or a receding boat must form a unity --
which they could do only if assembled in a certain order. Hence, although it was
a human product, the objective order was universal and necessary and the related
sciences were valid both for all things and for all people.16
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 combin-ation of these in a
natural environment or a society, whether en-countered 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 pro-perly 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.
In
the third Critique, the productive imagination constructs a true unity by
bringing the elements into an authentic harmony. This cannot be identified
through reference to a category, because freedom then would be restricted within
the laws of necessity of the first Critique, but must be recognizable by
something free. In order for the realm of human freedom to be extended to the
whole of reality, this harmony must be able to be appreciated, not purely
intellectually in relation to a concept (for then we would be reduced to the
universal and necessary as in the first critique), but aesthetically, by the
pleasure or dis-pleasure, the attraction or repulsion of the free response it
generates. Our contemplation or reflection upon this which shows whether a
proper and authentic ordering has or has not been achieved. This is not a
concept,17
but the pleasure or displeasure, the elation at the beautiful and sublime or the
disgust at the ugly and revolting, which flows from our contemplation or
reflection.
The Aesthetic and
Social Harmony
One
could miss the integrating character of this pleasure or displeasure and its
related judgment of taste18 by looking at it ideologically, as simply a repetition of past
tastes in order to promote stability. Or one might see it reductively as a
merely interior and purely private matter at a level of consciousness available
only to an elite class and related only to an esoteric band of reality. That
would ignore the structure which Kant laid out at length in his first
"Introduction" to his third Critique19 which he conceived not as merely juxtaposed to the first two
Critiques of pure and practical reason, but as integrating both in a richer
whole.
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
situ-ation, 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 char-acteristic
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 judg-ment, their example is inclusive in content and application as
well as in the new responses it continually evokes from others.
When
aesthetic experiences are passed on as part of a tradition, they gradually
constitute a culture. Some thinkers, such as William James and Jürgen Habermas,20
fearing that attending to these free creations of a cultural tradition might
distract from the concrete needs of the people, have urged a turn rather to the
social sciences for social analysis and critique as a means to identify
pragmatic responses. But these point back to the necessary laws of the first Critique;
in many countries now engaging in reforms, such "scientific" laws of
history have come to be seen as having stifled creativity and paralyzed the
populace.
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 contem-plation 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.
CULTURAL TRADITIONS
AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Here
Burke raises some important issues for the development of the notion of civil
society in aesthetic terms. If as Manfred Riedel suggested the components of
civil society are best manifest through an eidetic reduction that leads to
meaning then how do patterns of meaning come together socially; if civil society
requires governance then how can these patterns of meaning be endowed with the
authority needed in order that governance not be arbitrary and wilful; and if
times change, how can this pattern of meaning which constitutes a culture adapt
to new times and be articulated with an appropriate order of sociability and
subsidiarity.
These
questions point to the new hermeneutic sensibility opened by the work of Husserl,
and developed by Heidegger and especially Gadamer (to cite the key figures over
three generations) as a new road to the appreciation of civil society for our
time.
This
phenomenologically based approach would take account of the free and creative
work of inspiring, social cooperation. Working out the aesthetic level it
promises to be able to harmonize and direct social cooperation. And as with
Kant’s third critique, it would integrate rather than omit the natural basis
and political coordination of social life. This directs us therefore to a
hermeneutic procedure interpre-tating the human social creativity of civil
society though time.
I
have developed this at some length in a set of lectures delivered ar Fudan
University and published under the title: Tradition, Harmony and
Transcendence21
especially lectures I, "Cultural Heri-tage and Contemporary
Creativity" and III, "Harmony as a Contem-porary Metaphysics of
Freedom: Kant and Confucius". Here, I would recall the following with
regard to values and virtues, culture and application.
Values and Virtues
For
the drama of self-determination and the development of persons and of civil
society one must look to their relation to the good in search of which we live,
survive and thrive. The good is manifest in experience as the object of desire,
namely, as that which is sought when absent. Basically, it is what
completes life; it is the "per-fect", understood in its etymological
sense as that which is completed or realized through and through; once achieved,
is no longer desired or sought, but enjoyed. This is reflected in the
manner in which each thing, even a stone, retains the being or reality it has
and resists reduction to non-being or nothing: the most that we can do is
to change or transform a thing into something else, but we cannot annihilate it. Similarly,
a plant or tree, given the right conditions, grows to full stature and fruition. Finally,
an animal protects its life — fiercely, if necessary -- and seeks out the food
needed for its strength. Food, in turn, as capable of contributing to
animal’s realization or perfection, is for the animal an auxiliary good or
means.
In
this manner, things as good, that is, as actually realizing some degree of
perfection and able to contribute to the wellbeing of others, are the bases for
an interlocking set of relations. As these relations are based upon both
the actual perfection things possess and the potential perfection to which they
are thereby directed, the good is perfection both as attracting when it has not
yet been attained and as constituting one’s fulfillment upon its achievement.
Goods, then, are not arbitrary or simply a matter of wishful thinking; they are
rather the full development of things and all that contributes thereto. In
this onto-logical or objective sense, all beings are good to the extent that
they exist and can contribute to the perfection of others.
The
moral good is a more narrow field, for it concerns only one’s free and
responsible actions. This has the objective reality of the ontological good
noted above, for it concerns real actions which stand in distinctive relation to
our own perfection and to that of others -- and, indeed, to the physical
universe and to God as well. Hence, many possible patterns of actions could
be objectively right because they promote the good of those involved, while
others, precisely as inconsistent with the real good of persons or things, are
objectively disordered or misordered. This constitutes the objective basis for
values and disvalues.
Nevertheless,
because the realm of objective relations is almost numberless, whereas our
actions are single, it is necessary not only to choose in general between the
good and the bad, but in each case to choose which of the often innumerable
possibilities one will render concrete. However broad or limited the
options, as responsible and moral an act is essentially dependent upon its being
willed by a subject. Therefore, in order to follow the emergence of the
field of concrete moral action, it is not sufficient to examine only the
objective aspect, namely, the nature of the persons, actions, and things
involved. In addition, one must consider the action in relation to the
subject, namely, to the person who, in the context of his/her society and
culture, appreciates and values the good of this action, chooses it over its
alternatives, and eventually wills its actualization.
The
term ‘value’ here is of special note. It was derived from the economic
sphere where it meant the amount of a commodity sufficient to attain a certain
worth. This is reflected also in the term ‘axiology’ whose root means
"weighing as much" or "worth as much." It requires an
objective content -- the good must really "weigh in" and make a real
difference; but the term ‘value’ expresses this good especially as related
to wills which actually acknowledge it as a good and as desirable.22
Thus, different individuals or groups of persons and at different periods have
distinct sets of values. A people or community is sensitive to and prizes a
distinct set of goods or, more likely, it establishes a distinctive ranking in
the degree to which it prizes various goods. By so doing, it delineates
among limitless objective goods a certain pattern of values which in a more
stable fashion mirrors their corporate free choices.
This
constitutes the basic topology of a culture; as repeatedly reaffirmed through
time, it builds a tradition or heritage about which we shall speak below. It
constitutes, as well, 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 family and culture and configured according to the pattern
of choices made by that community throughout its history -- often in its most
trying circumstances. Like a pair of glasses it does not create the object;
but it focuses attention upon certain goods involved rather than upon others. This
becomes the basic orienting factor for the affective and emotional life
described by the Scotts as the heart of civil society. In time, it
encourages and reinforces certain patterns of action which, in turn, reinforce
the pattern of values.
Through
this process, a group constitutes its of moral concern in terms of which it
struggles to advance or at least perdure, mourns its failures, and celebrates
its successes. This is our world of hopes and fears, in terms of which, as Plato
wrote in the Laches, our lives have moral meaning.23
It is varied according to the many concerns and the groups which coalesce around
them. As these are interlocking and interdependent a pattern of social ends and
concerns develops which guides action. In turn corresponding capacities for
action or virtue are developed.24
Moral Authority and
Governance for Responsible Freedom in
Civil Society
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 the human person 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 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 kill 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 uniform 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 depen-dence in competency -- combine to endow
tradition with authority for subsequent ages which is varied according to the
components 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.
Through
history, communities discover vision which both transcends time and directs our
life in all times, past, present and future. The content of that vision is a set
of values which, by their fullness and harmony of measure, point the way to
mature and perfect human formation and, thereby, orient the life of a person.25
Such a vision is historical because it arises in the life of a people in time.
It is also normative, because it provides a basis upon which past historical
ages, present options and future possibilities are judged and presents an
appropriate way of preserving that life through time. What begins to emerge is
Heidegger’s insight regarding Being and its characteristics of unity, truth
and justice, goodness and love, not simply as empty sideals, but as the ground
of things, hidden or veiled, as it were, and erupting into time through the
conscious personal and social life of free human beings in history. Seen in this
light, the process of human search, discussion and decision -- today called
democracy -- becomes more than a method for managing human affairs; more
substantively, it is the mode of the emergence of being in time.
One’s
cultural heritage or tradition constitutes a specification of the general sense
of being or perfection, but not as if this were chronologically distant in the
past and, therefore, in need of being drawn forward by some artificial
contrivance. Rather, being and its values live and act in the lives of all whom
they inspire and judge. In its synchronic form, through time, tradition is
the timeless dimension of history. Rather than reconstructing it, we belong to
it -- just as it belongs to us. Traditions then are, in effect, the ultimate
communities of human striving, for human life and understanding are implemented,
not by isolated individual acts of subjectivity -- which Gadamer describes as
flickerings in the closed circuits or personal consciousness26
-- but by our situatedness in a tradition. By fusing both past and present,
tradition enables the to component groupings of civil society determine the
specific direction of their lives and to mobilize the consensus and mutual
commitments of which true and progressive community is built.27
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 assess and 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. Eliminating all expressions of
democratic freedoms, this is the archetypal modern nightmare, 1984.
All
of that stands in stark contrast to one’s heritage or tradition as the rich
cumulative expression of meaning evolved by a people through the ages to a point
of normative and classical perfection. Exemplified architecturally in a
Parthenon or a Taj Mahal, it is embodied personally in a Confucius or Gandhi, a
Bolivar or Lincoln, a Martin Luther King or a Mother Theresa. Variously termed
"charismatic personalities" (Shils28),
"paradigmatic individuals" (Cua29)
or characters who meld role and personality in providing a cultural or moral
ideal (MacIntyre30), they supersede mere historical facts. As
concrete universals, they express in the varied patterns of civil society that
harmony and fullness of perfection which is at once classical and historical,
ideal and personal, uplifting and dynamizing in a word, liberating.
NOTES
1Vladimir Tismaneanu. Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe after
Communism (New YorK: Free Press, 1992).
2Michael Waltzer, "The Idea of Civil Society", Dissent
(1991), 293-304.
3Daniel Bell, American Exceptionalism Revisited: The Role of Civil
Society", The Public Interest, 95 (1989), 38-56.
4Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society", Public Culture,
3 (1990), 95-118.
5Manfred Riedel, "In Search of a Civil Union: The Political Theme
of European Democracy and Its Primordial Foundation in Greek Philosophy", Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal, 10 (1983), 101-102.
6Robert E. Wood, "The Phenomenologist", in George F. McLean,
Reading Philosophy for the XXIst Century (Washington: University of America
Press, 1989), p. 136.
7(Madras: University of Madras Press, 1978).
8Politics,
III, 8.
9Aristotle develops this theme richly in chapter 6 "On
Friendship" in Book IX of his Nicomachean Ethics, stressing a theme
which will reemerge later, namely, that the members of a civil society need to
be of one mind and one heart. Toward the end of this chapter he evolves the
importance of this for the common weal.
Aristotle
recognizes the many communities as parts of the political order when he treats
justice and friendship inasmuch as this seeks not particular advantage but that
of the whole. Justice here, as distributive, is not arithmetic but proportionate
to those involved according to the respect and honor that is due to each. In the
Politics in his concern for the stability of the state he stresses the
need for a structured diversity. Groups such as the family and village differ
qualitatively from the state, it is necessary to recognize this and promote
these smaller units as such for the vitality of the whole.
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 promoted
at each level. Thus, the proper responsibilities of the family 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 such wise as 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 the participation in governance, that is, the exercise of
freedom by the groups which form the larger community, thereby enabling them,
and by them the entire society, to flourish. This is termed subsidiarity.
10For the rich development of these elements in the context of medieval
Christian philosophy see G.F. McLean, "Philosophy and Civil Society: Its
Past, Its Present and Its Future", Civil Society and Social
Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and
Philosophy, 1997).
11The Idea of a Civil Society, 199-206.
12Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals
(London: Penguin,1994); "The Civil and the Sacred" in The Tanner
Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), XII,
301-349.
13J.L. Colen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge, Mas.: MIT, 1992).
14Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New
York: Hafner, 1968), pp. 205-339.
15Ibid.,
pp. 37-200.
16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1929), A112, 121, 192-193. Donald J. Crawford, Kant’s
Aesthetic Theory (Madition: University of Wisconsin, 1974), pp. 83-84,
87-90.
17 See Kant’s development and solution to the problem of the autonomy
of taste, Critique of Judgment, nn. 57-58, pp. 182-192, where he treats
the need for a concept; Crawford, pp. 63-66.
18 See the chapter by Wilhelm S. Wurzer "On the Art of Moral
Imagination" in G. McLean, ed., Moral Imagination and Character
Development (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy,
in preparation) for an elaboration of the essential notions of the beautiful,
the sublime and taste in Kant’s aesthetic theory.
19Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment,
trans. J. Haden (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
20William James, Pragmatism (New York: Washington Square, 1963),
Ch. I, pp. 3-40. For notes on the critical hermeneutics of J. Habermas see G.
McLean, "Cultural Heritage, Social Critique and Future Construction"
in Culture, Human Rights and Peace in Central America, R. Molina, T.
Readdy and G. McLean, eds. (Washington: Council for Research in Values, 1988),
Ch. I. Critical distance is an essential element and requires analysis by the
social sciences of the historical social structures as a basis for liberation
from determination and dependence upon unjust interests. The concrete psycho-
and socio-pathology deriving from such dependencies and the corresponding steps
toward liberation are the subject of the chapters by J. Loiacono and H. Ferrand
de Piazza in The Social Context and Values: Perspectives of the Americas,
G. McLean and O. Pegoraro, eds. (Washington: Council for Research in Values and
Philosophy, 1988), Chs. III and IV.
21(Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy,
1994).
22 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 Christian
Philosophy Today," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association, 53 (1979), 3-4.
23 Laches, 198-201.
24For further notes on culture as based also on virtues and tradition
see "Philosophy and Civil Society", pp. 38-44.
25Ibid.,
p. 254.
26 Ibid., p. 245.
27Ibid.,
p. 258.
28 Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), 12-13.
29 Dimensions of Moral Creativity: Paradigms, Principles and Ideals
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).
30 After Virtue, 29-30.
DISCUSSION I
This
chapter, "Philosophy and Civil Society: Its Nature, Its Past and Its
Future", is built upon the notion of freedom in order from that vantage
point to uncover the basic nature and components of civil society and the need
for its development in our times.
Freedom
can be understood in a number of ways, related also to the epistemological
context which extends or restricts the extent of the capacity for understanding
and hence for implementing and appre-ciating freedom. Being concerned with civil
society as a construction by people, freedom here is understood not as a
negative "freedom from" (except as it applies to overcoming
unwarranted and stifling restrictions), but as a positive "freedom
for." This, however, must be further differentiated between the three
levels unveiled in the analysis of the body of the writings of Western
philosophers by the team of Professor Adler at the Institute for Philosophical
Research. The first, notably in the positivist and liberal traditions, is a
freedom to choose whatever one pleases; the second, typically in the Kantian
tradition, is to choose as one ought; the third, in the Aristotelian tradition,
is to build one’s character in order to be able to attain one’s proper goal.
The
three are not mutually exclusive, but build one upon the other, the latter
shaping and orienting the former. Thus, freedom is truly the power to choose,
but as a human reality it should be exercised according to appropriate laws or
rules, which indeed are applied with a view to the realization of the good life
which befits human persons and communities. As social this is not only the good
of the individual understood merely as autonomous in his or her actions, but of
the person as a member of society. For one must choose responsibly in a manner
proportionate to one’s human dignity, and hence not only for one’s
individual welfare, but for that of the community/communities in which one
participates.
It
should be noted further that, as one moves from the first level of freedom which
is concerned with selecting between external realities, i.e., activities or
objects, to the second and especially to the third level, the horizon changes to
become a matter not of external objects, but of interior, properly human,
subjectivity lived with re-flective consciousness and commitment. This is
Heidegger’s dasein, the point at which being most properly emerges into
time. Essential to this is the deployment of human imagination, generating a
creativity which opens new possibilities for integrating the human with the
phy-sical world and building social relations between persons and peoples. These
are conceived, evaluated, appreciated and evolved in the inte-gral exercise of
human freedom.
Thus,
as one moves to this third and deeper sense of positive freedom, the horizon
changes from that of an individual selecting among various objects which he or
she then acquires and subjects to his or her will, to that of a social being
emerging in terms of the minds and hearts of people engaged through time in
opening and extending their life to other things and persons. This is the
cooperative work of realizing oneself and one’s world--especially one’s
social world with other persons--with unity and truth, goodness and beauty.
Following freedom thus understood promises to open from within insight into the
nature and components of civil society.
For
this, however, an appropriate methodology is required. It has been customary,
especially in the modern rationalist West, to contrast subject and object, and
then sedulously to exclude the former in order to learn about the object. It is
increasingly evident that the attempt to ignore the subject, even in a
subject-object relation, distorts knowledge of the object as well. When, as
regards civil society, the concern is to appreciate how persons can interrelate
freely, especially in the third sense of freedom, it is necessary to focus upon
the order of intentionality and of meaning. For this, Husserl developed the
method of eidetic reduction in order to follow, not the external given, but the
internal convergence of the dynamism of being into consciousness, affective
relation and commitment.
This,
of course, is not all that is included in the making of a civil society.
According to the pattern of the four causes the goal of human fulfillment guides
freedom and indeed is the first of the causes. There are also the formal cause,
namely the pattern or structure of the society, and the material cause or the
components of social life. Those include not only persons and groups, but the
material dimension of their lives and the world in which they are engaged. All
of these are studied as objects by the various sciences, human and physical. In
studying civil society this chapter looks especially to the efficient cause by
which the general goal is sought and which shapes that particular pattern of
human life called culture. This is created in and by the creative exercise of
human freedom, by which the material causes are prepared and shaped according to
the formal social structures freely and creatively elaborated by the exercise of
human freedom.
To
uncover this work of human freedom the phenomenological method can be used not
only in the sense of Husserl to identify the nature of freedom, but in the sense
of Heidegger to uncover its existential reality as the properly human mode of
emerging into time and space, and in the sense of Gadamer who follows this as
the emergence and contribution of the cultural context. This implies
ap-proaching freedom through its concrete exercise, which is always the actual
experience of a person or, as here, a people. As free this must be exercised
from within: each people must do this for itself. As a result each people can
carry to the whole of humankind the unique contri-bution of its own
discovery/creation, which by analogy can prove sug-gestive and be drawn upon by
others.
In
the West a special object for such a phenomenological ap-proach is found among
the Greeks at the point at which they deve-loped a capacity for philosophical
reflection and for articulating in proper terminology what already had been
lived in the classic golden age of Pericles. The ability to analyze, order and
articulate was deve-loped classically by Socrates and Plato, and especially
Aristotle. This was not without its restrictions, of which we are more conscious
today and are now able to introduce proper correctives. Nevertheless, for
Western experience the Greeks offer rich written and well-ordered materials with
which to work.
The
world in which they wrote may not have been as pluralist as today, though
interaction and trade were intensive. Also, those considered citizens were often
a minority due to the institution of slavery. It should be remembered, however,
that in the modern West suffrage was extended and accorded only very gradually
and reluctantly beyond landowners to workers, slaves and only in this century to
women. This reflects the uneven pattern of such progress, which even now is
being restricted with regard to immigrants, other ethnic groups.
The
world in which they wrote may not have been as pluralist as today, though
interaction and trade were intensive. Also, those con-sidered citizens were
often a minority due to the institution of slavery. It should be remembered,
however, that in the modern West suffrage was extended and accorded only very
gradually and reluctantly be-yond landowners to workers, slaves and only in this
century to women. This reflects the uneven pattern of such progress, which even
now is being restricted with regard to immigrants, other ethnic groups.
What
ancient Greece does provide, nevertheless, is a concrete example in which, with
the structures in hand, there was developed very active participation by
citizens in the public life of the city. It provides also a philosophical
analysis of this in such works as the Re-public and the Laws of
Plato and the Politics of Aristotle, and the many Constitutions. These
provide ready material for a phenomenological approach which can uncover the
basic components of civil life. This is not to imply that these elements were
not present in other cultures, or indeed in Greece prior to the fourth century.
Each people must inves-tigate its own heritage diachronically as well as
synchronically. The hermeneutic methods for interpreting prehistoric and oral
traditions are now undergoing active elaboration.
This
chapter is topical in that it identified and asserted the importance of elements
whose lack or deficiency have distorted recent social life. It is also analytic
and hence distinguished the specific components of civil society. Finally, being
concerned also with social reconstruction it focuses on freedom as the efficient
cause in this work. Each of these factors evoked helpful annotations, generally
from more synthetic points of view.
Thus,
it was noted that one could begin from the final cause or goal of such
reconstruction. What would be a good society, what would be the nature of
fulfillment which would satisfy human striving, asked those with an Indian
background. Indeed, the final cause is the first of the causes in intention; it
moves and guides all the others. Aristotle began his ethics in these terms,
looking into what constitutes hap-piness as that which is sought by all. Work in
terms of the final cause or goal will be important if the mind is to be open to
the full range of goods and to avoid reductionism to, e.g., economic concern.
But it must not overlook the dignity of the one who seeks these goods and the
proportion thereto of the means by which they are sought, as can be the case in
an utilitarian perspective. Further, one must integrate also the material cause
by which provisions are set aside and em-ployed, and the formal cause as the
structure or disposition of these materials. All four causes are necessary; only
a defective and unsa-tisfactory result will eventuate if any one is deficient.
In
human life freedom holds a special place, for the human being is specially the
one who lives consciously and responsibly. Moreover, freedom is essential to the
final goal or human fulfillment, for only a situation in which freedom is
exercised fully can fit the description of human fulfillment. Similarly, the
realization of the material and formal causes must correspond to human freedom
if the result is to be a truly human accomplishment which promotes human
dignity. But the per-spective of the chapter is especially that of the efficient
cause, for its concern is to introduce the issue of how one can work to
reconstruct civil society.
It
was observed that if one distinguishes civil society from the political and
economic order, these must not be considered antithetic or competing factors. Of
course, in the aftermath of situations in which absolute power resided in the
state or the economy and suppressed or excluded civil society, the development
of civil society constitutes a break from such illegitimate absolutes. However,
the intent and the result is not to inhibit, but to promote the proper
functioning of both state and economy through the development of an active life
by citi-zens in the groups in which they live and act. They bring their spe-cial
experience and competency to the promotion of their dimen-sion of human welfare.
Finally,
reference was made often to the importance of culture, which was treated
separately. It was noted, however, that culture should be within our ability to
understand since it is something that human groups have made. Such understanding
promises to take us beyond a passive state under the impact of culture, and to
enable true freedom and responsibility. New developments in hermeneutics make
possible such understanding so that one now can see how this culture is shaped
through the work of the imagination and how this operates. One can see as well
how, in reflecting the choice made through long generations, this constitutes a
cumulative embodiment of the creative freedom of a people.
This
points to a final dichotomy which appears in the history of civil society,
namely, between affectivity at the individual level and universal rationality.
When the exercise of rationality is situated within human life it becomes
apparent that its direction is provided and its openness secured by its social,
historical and cultural contexts in which all dimensions of human life,
cognitive and effective, are in-cluded. How else explain the distinctive
historical phases of the work of reason or how things most present and obvious,
e.g., the extension of "full and equal" recognition to slaves and to
women could remain un-appreciated for so long? This implies then the need to
integrate atten-tion to affectivity and to culture in efforts to reconstruct
civil society.
DISCUSSION II
Should
one attempt to provide a definition of civil society at the beginning of its
investigation? Certainly if one knew exactly what one was looking for it would
be much easier to identify and organize its components. And from an a priori
grasp of its nature it would be rela-tively easy and secure to delineate its
characteristics analytically.
On
the other hand a prior definition would have to depend upon and reflect
knowledge and hence outlooks possessed in the past. This would hold any work on
civil society to patterns which, being from the past, would be relatively
unsuited for the present and would stifle the human creativity needed to move
ahead with the times.
But
perhaps more deeply the call for a prior definition reflects more the problem
than the solution. Modern times are characterized by the Enlightenment devotion
to reason, as a radical reduction of hu-man horizons to what is clear and
distinct not to intellect or reason as such but to the human mind, that is, as
existing in the body. Thus, it proceeds not merely in relation to the senses, as
Aristotle noted, but was limited to sense knowledge. Thus Bacon would destroy
what he called "idols" but which Vico noted were the accumulated
wisdom of a people. Locke proceeded on the supposition of the mind as a blank
tablet on which was written solely ideas from the sense and their various
permutations. Descartes would put all under doubt except the indubitable idea of
his own existence.
The
result divided between the individualist empiricism of the great British
philosophers or the more communal rationalist con-tinental route typified by
Kant, Hegel and Marx. In either case reason allowed for only a narrow range of
evidence, sought to manage all either as atomic individuals or through universal
and necessary laws, and rigorously rejected all else. We had not philosophies
seeking a wisdom which would integrate all but ideologies bent rather on a
re-duction of the human spirit and the suppression of all but its chosen idea,
namely ideologies. The 20th century was the natural culmination of the
limitations of this approach. Attention to society developed rapidly into
totalitarianism; attention to the particular person deve-loped rapidly into
individualism. These ideologies recombined in order to defend an Hegelian
inspired fashion, only to divide immediately into the Cold War conflict between
the two ideologies.
Now,
following the collapse of Marxism it is possible to look back not simply to
adopt the opposing ideology but to ask what was omitted in the Age of
Enlightenment which led us to such a violent and bloody 20th century. This could
be a negative process of critiquing and decon-structing the past, or it could be
a positive process of reconstructing the future. Where both of these elements
are required would focus rather on the latter and understand in that sense the
broadly shared view that we are in a post-modern period.
If
so, then it may be less promising to begin our work on civil society from a
definition, which would be limited in content to past vision and in method to an
ideological approach, but to reopen the question in a way that makes possible
the rediscovery and integration of what was available but rejected in choosing
the path of modernity. This corresponds to Heidegger’s notion that the real
step forward is not a merely incremental advance along the path well trodden,
but a return to factors which had been available but were consciously not
in-cluded in concentrating upon the historic choice of the way of reason by
Descartes and the characteristically rationalist Enlightenment of modern times.
This
suggests the method of the present paper which returns rather to the freedom
which marks human action as responsible and creative, to look for the
characteristics of the exercise of freedom with regard to social life. This
enables two subsequent steps with regard to civil society: The first is to
follow its exercise in modern times in order to uncover what has been
accomplished there. The second is to take the step backward to culture as the
cumulative and integrative exer-cise of freedom and on that basis to attempt a
preliminary sketch of a development of the notion of civil society for the 21st
century.
This
should integrate such painfully achieved advances of the modern period as the
universal declarations of human rights, while freeing the sense of reality from
that of a merely technical construct in which individuals are enclosed. In its
place is a sense of an unfolding of human freedom as people interact in the
various dimensions of their life. This will include and build upon the richness
of the humanizing cultures which had previously been omitted and often
suppressed and build upon that new way of living our freedom with other persons
and groups in society.
This
must transcend the economic order and the exercise of political power, but set
their standards and direction precisely as hu-mane engagements in the world.
Just as we have learned that demo-cracy means that it is important to have
civilian control of military and state powers, so we have learned that it is
essential that the economy be directed not by a hidden material hand but by a
conscious human concern.