As we come to the close of the 20th century, the turn of the millennium calls for and augurs profound changes. The last millennium has been characterized by an intensive development of human reason. In the West this began in 1000 AD with the reintroduction of the work of Aristotle and was radicalized from 1500 by the age of rationalism and enlightenment. This now has borne its fruits, which in the last century have been both sweet in the improvement of living standards and the emancipation of peoples, and bitter in devastating ideological conflicts both hot and cold.

Now, however, the peoples of the world seem to be moving beyond rationalism to a great project of social reconstruction. This focuses no longer on ideologies and structures, but on people in their natural communities and solidarities, in an effort to become increasingly creative and to take responsibility for their lives. This is, in a way, the utopian vision of Marx as people achieve the conditions of freedom and begin with others to shape their common life after the classical ideals of justice and peace, harmony and cooperation. As a result the focus of attention reaches beyond the political and the economic to include the people. Now, however, they appear no longer as amorphous masses or tools of industry, but as informed and responsible human solidarities acting responsibly, each in its own field. This is the reality called civil society or civil culture emerging as a newly vibrant reality which promises to characterize a post-modern, more globally sensitive, third millennium.

In order to understand this development and how it can be appropriately promoted we will first look back to Aristotle to understand the place of freedom as basic to community; second, consider how this might be redeveloped in ways which surpass the reductionist structures of modern rationalism by taking into account also the more integrative categories of culture and aesthetics, and third face the challenge of how this can provide the normative power needed to weld people together responsibly in a unity that is truly civil both in its members and in their mode of exercising their freedom.

First, governance is expressed by the term arché, signifying beginning, origin or first source. This is extended to governance in the sense of sovereignty, that is, of directing the community toward a good or a goal while not oneself being necessitated by others. The focus then is not on autocratic imposition of self-serving will, as commonly has been interpreted but the beginning or origin of social action, which takes responsibility for the overall enterprise as characteristically human; it is the exercise of freedom by individuals and groups in originating responsible action. Though most actions of humans at the different inorganic and organic levels can be performed by other physical realities, it is precisely as these actions are free that they become properly human acts. This issue of corporate directive freedom — its nature and range — is then the decisive issue as regards civil society. How this can be exercised effectively today is the key to the development of civil society for our times.

Civil society then has three elements. First there is governance: arché, the beginning of action or the taking of initiative toward an end; this is the free and responsible exercise of human freedom. But as this pertains to persons in their various groups and subgroups, there are two other dimensions of freedom, namely, communication or solidarity with other members of the groups and the participation or subsidiarity of these groups or communities within the whole. The key to understanding civil society lies then in the solidarity and subsidiarity of the community as ways in which the freedom of its members is shaped into the governance of life toward the common good.

Solidarity and Community

Through time societies have manifested in increasing diversity of parts; this constitutes their proper richness and strength and brings quantitative advantage. It is important that the parts differ in kind so that each brings a distinctive concern and capability to the common task. Further, differing between themselves, one member is able to give and the others to receive in multiple and interrelated active and receptive modes. This means that the members of a society not only live their freedom alongside each other, but share in the effort to realize the good life through the mutual interaction of their freedom.

In the human body, where there is but one substantial form, the many parts exist for the whole and the actions of the parts are actions of the whole (it is not my legs and feet which walk; I walk by my legs and feet). Society also has many parts whose differentiation and mutuality pertain to the good of the whole. But in contrast to the body, the members of a community have their own proper form, finality and operation. Hence, their unity is one of the order of their capabilities and actions to the perfection of the body politic or civil society and the realization of its common good.

But there is more than solidarity to the constitution of civil society. Community in general is constituted through the cooperation of many for the common goal or good, but the good or goal of a community can be extremely rich and textured. It can concern nourishment, health maintenance, environmental soundness; it includes education both informal and formal, basic and advanced, initial and retraining; it extends to nutrition, culture, recreation, etc. — all the endless manners in which human beings fulfill their needs and capacities and seek "the good life". As each of these can and must be sought and shared through the cooperation of many, each is the basis of a group or subgroup in a vastly varied community.

When, however, one adds the elements of freedom as governance (arché) determining what will be done and how the goal will be sought, subsidiarity emerges into view. Were we talking about things rather then people it would be possible to envisage a technology of mass production in a factory automatically moving and directing all toward the final product. Where, however, we are concerned with a community and hence with the composite exercise of the freedom of the persons who constitute its membership, then it is crucial that this responsible freedom not be substituted for by a command from outside or from above. Rather governance in the community initiating and directing action toward the common end must be exercised in a cumulative manner beginning from the primary group or family in relation to its common good, and moving up to the broader concerns or goals of more inclusive groups considered both quantitatively (neighborhood, city, nation, etc.), and qualitatively (education, health, religion) according to the hierarchy of goods which are their concerns.

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 present and promoted at each level. Thus, proper responsibility on the family level 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 order 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 or the exercise of freedom of the members of the community, thereby enabling them to live more fully as persons and groups so that the entire society flourishes. This is termed subsidiarity. Thus civil society is a realm of persons in solidarity who through a structure of subsidiarity participate in self-governance.

This manifests also the main axes of the unfolding of the social process in Greece, namely:

(a) from the Platonic stress upon unity in relation to which the many are but repetitions, to the Aristotelian-Thomistic development of diversity as necessary for the unfolding and actualization of unity;

(b) from emphasis upon governance by authority located at the highest and most remote levels, to participation in the exercise of governance by persons and groups at every level and in relation to matters with which they are engaged and responsible;

(c) and from attention to one’s own interests, to attention to the common good of the whole.

This thought of Aristotle bore great potentiality which would unfold as the sense of being and of person were enriched philosophi-cally in the context of a Christian culture. This is marked by elements of human dignity based upon creation in the image of God and of human community in the image of the Trinitarian sharing of life as knowledge and love.

Limitations of Enlightenment Rationalism

Today, as much is said of a post-modern global culture, there is an emerging consensus that philosophy may have overreached itself in the Enlightenment in requiring that all be subjected solely to the technical requirements of clarity before human reason. It should have been noted sooner that this requirement led almost immediately to the two contrary results of Anglo-Saxon empiricism and continental intellectualism. Together these constituted a Kantian antinomy manifesting rationalism to be reductionist, and to that degree dehumanizing.

It is essential to diagnose not the symptoms, but the illness in order to undertake the truly new project of the coming millenium. If the Enlightenment in its achievements has in the end come to prove insufficient, what did it omit which now has emerged as essential — and what new dimension of philosophy must now be developed in order to take it into account.

Moreover, we find a new approach common to philosophers of the period. They thought it not possible to build upon the foundations laid by the millennia of human experience in its multiple forms. Instead each felt it necessary to remove all previous content of human awareness in order to build a new with clear and distinct ideas. Hence, we live the heritage of the great projects of: (a) Descartes in submitting all to doubt except, and in as much as, it could be established in terms of clear, distinct and indubitable ideas; (b) Bacon in smashing all the idols which bore the long acquired wisdom of the tradition and the broad range of human sensibilities; and (c) Locke in erasing all until there remained but the mind and that as a blank tablet. All three would construct an asceptic laboratory. In which there was allowed to enter only the clear and distinct ideas coming alternately in the Anglo Saxon tradition from the senses, or in the continental sense from the intellect. The task of the mind was to construct a new self-understanding using exclusively these materials. These new laboratory humanoids were fascinating and in many ways useful instruments. However, as became evident in the Cold War the products of these two traditions were unable to comprehend each other, not to mention peoples from non-Western culture. Possessed of great, but less than fully human, powers their potential for destruction was symbolized in their mutual threat to annihilate not only each other but all human kind. What G.B. Vico saw 70 years after Descartes, — namely, that this would generate an intellectual brute — we came to experience bitterly in the hot and cold ideological wars of the last century.

Aesthetic Awareness as A Further Dimension of the Human Spirit

In initiating the decade in which he wrote his three critiques, Kant did not have the third critique in view. He wrote the first critique in order to provide methodologically for the universality and necessity of the categories found in scientific knowledge. He developed the second critique to provide for the reality of human freedom. But when both of these had been written 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. These integrate 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 personal freedom as worked out from the second critique, but of human creativity working with all elements to create life and meaning as an expanding and enriching reality.

Kant was facing squarely a root dilemma of 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? If held to the terms of the first two critiques alone, he faced the following challenges:

- 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, necessitated, repetitive and stagnant.

- 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 was 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 Judgment as a context within which freedom and scientific necessity could coexist, indeed, in which necessity would be the support and instrument of freedom.

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, as well as scientific universals within its unique concrete harmonies. This is properly 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 and ongoing development of the culture itself; it is the productive rather than merely reproductive work of the human person living in his or her physical world. Here, I use the possessive form advisedly. Without this capacity one would exist in the physical universe as another object, not only subject to its laws but restricted and possessed by them. One would be not a free citizen of the material world, but its mere function or servant. In his third Critique Kant unfolds how human persons truly can be master of their lives in this world, not in an arbitrary and destructive manner, but precisely as creative artists bringing being to realization in new harmonies which make possible further growth in freedom.

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, super-eminently, in a Confucius or Christ. Their power to mobilize a people lies especially in their rare ability to assess the overall situation, 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 characteristic of a civil society, and thereby to evoke appropriate and yet varied responses from each according to the circumstances. The danger is that the example of such a genius will be reduced to formulae, become an ideology and exclude innovation. In reality, as personable, free and creative, and under-stood as the work of the aesthetic judgment, their example is inclusive in content and application as well as in the new responses it continually evokes from others.

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 contemplation 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.

Freedom as social sensibility, understood not only morally but aesthetically, is both spectroscope and kaleidoscope of being. As spectroscope it unfolds the full range of the possiblities of social freedom, so that all can be examined, evaluated and admired. As kaleidoscope, it continually works out the endless combinations and patterns of reality so that the beauty of each can be examined, reflected upon and chosen when desired. Freely, purposively and creatively, imagination weaves through reality focusing now upon certain dimensions, now reversing its flow, now making new connections and interrelations. In the process reality manifests not only scientific forms and their potential interrelations, but its power to evoke our free and socially varied responses of love and admiration or of hate and disgust.

Our next task is to uncover how human persons in exercising this third level of freedom emerge in the communities of family, neighborhood and people and in so doing create their public life and its culture. This calls not merely for a sociological description of culture as the compilation of whatever mankind does or makes; it is rather the conscious weaving of the fabric of human symbols and interrelations through which a human group chooses to live its unique process of unveiling being in time. This requires attention to a number of specific issues:

1. the nature of values, culture and tradition;

2. the moral authority of a cultural tradition and its values for guiding life; and

3. the active role of every generation in creatively shaping and developing its tradition in response to the challenges of its times.

If being stands against nonbeing, then living things survive by seeking the good or that which perfects and promotes their life in the sense of Kant’s third Critique and its description of the work of the imagination. A basic exercise of this third level of human freedom therefore is to set an order of preferences among the many possible goods. Those are the "preferred" or "values" in the sense that they "weigh more heavily" in making decisions than do other possible goods. Gradually, one becomes practiced in the arts of realizing and/or achieving these values, which competencies are our moral strengths or "virtues". Cumulatively, our values and corresponding virtues set a style for our action. Together the values and virtues, artifacts and modes of human interaction constitute an integrated pattern of human life in which the creative freedom of a people is expressed and implemented. This is a "culture" taken synchronically as a context in which human life can be cultivated and perfected.

"Tradition" is the further diachronic and cumulative process of transmitting, adjusting and applying the values and virtues of a culture through successive generations. It is at once both heritage or what is inherited or received, and new creation as we pass on these traditions in new ways. Tradition then is not against freedom, but is rather the cumulative freedom of a people. Attending to tradition taken in this active sense allows us not only to uncover the permanent and universal truths sought by Socrates, but: (a) to perceive the importance and proper weight of the choices or valuations made by preceding generations, and (b) actively to mobilize our own life choices toward the future. Let us look more closely at each of these.

The Moral Authority of Cultural Traditions

In the context of tradition as a people’s cumulative freedom persons emerge from birth into a family and neighborhood from which they learn, and in harmony with which they thrive. Horizontally, individuals and groups learn from experience what promotes and what destroys life, and accordingly make pragmatic adjustments through feedback mechanism. Vertically, and more importantly, they learn values, i.e. what is truly worth striving for and the pattern of social interaction in which this can be richly lived. This, rather than all that happens (history), is what is passed on (tradita, tradition). The importance of tradition derives from the cooperative character both of the learning by which wisdom is drawn from experience — even of failure — and of the cumulative free acts of commitment and sacrifice which have been defined, defended and passed on through time to form the corporate life of the community.

Through time there evolves a vision of actual life which transcends time and hence can provide guidance for our life: past, present and future. The content of that vision is a set of values which points the way to mature and perfect human formation and thereby orients the life of a person. Such a vision is historical because it arises in the life of a people in time and presents an appropriate way of preserving that life through time. But it is also normative because it provides a harmony and fullness which is at once classical and historical, ideal and personal, uplifting and dynamizing, in a word, liberating. For this reason it provides a basis upon which past historical ages, present options and future possibilities are judged.

What then should we conclude regarding the values and culture in which we have been raised, which give us dominion over our actions and enable us to be free and creative? Do they come from God or from man, from eternity or from history? To this question Chakravarti Rajagopalachari of Madras answered:

As an active process tradition transforms what is received, lives it in a creative manner and passes it on as a leaven for the future. Taken diachronically the process of tradition as receiving and passing on does not stop with Plato’s search for eternal and unchangeable ideals, with the work of techné in repeating exactly and exclusively a formal model, or with rationalism’s search for clear and distinct knowledge of immutable natures by which all might be controlled. Rather, in the application of a tradition according to the radical distinctiveness of persons and their situations tradition continually is perfected and enriched. It manifests the sense of what is just and good which we have from our past by creating in original and distinctive ways more of what justice and goodness mean. J. Pelican said it well: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."

Further, if one takes time and culture seriously one must recognize that he or she is situated in a particular culture and at a particular time; hence all that can be seen from this vantage point constitutes one’s horizon. This would be lifeless and dead, determined rather than free, if one’s vantage point were to be fixed by its circumstances and closed. This points to the necessity of meeting other minds and hearts, not simply to add information incrementally, but in order that one might be challenged in one’s basic assumptions and enabled thereby to delve more deeply into one’s tradition and to draw forth more pervasive truth.

This hermeneutic mode of openness does not consist in surveying others objectively, obeying them in a slavish and unquestioning manner, or even in 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 answers in order to delve more deeply into the meaning of our own traditions and draw out new and ever more rich insights. In other words, it is an acknowledgement that our cultural heritage has something new to say to us and that we are the ones who can enable it to speak.

Here hermeneutic, democratic and critical attitudes converge. The attitude is not one of methodological sureness which imposes its views, nor is it a mere readiness for new compromises or new techniques of social organization — for these are subject to manipulation on the horizontal level. Instead, it is readiness to draw out in open dialogue new meaning from a common tradition. Seen in these terms our heritage of culture and values is not closed or dead; rather, democratic interchange can enable life to remain ever new by becoming more inclusive and more rich.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS AS PRINCIPLES OF PEACE AND COOPERATION

The previous sections have enabled us to locate the specific existential level of freedom at which we are able to create a culture and hence the origin, nature and content of a cultural tradition. We saw, as well, the essentially open and dialogic character of cultural progress. It remains now for us to look more closely at the open attitude toward other peoples and cultures to see whether this be a matter of self enhancement in order to dominate and control others or of love and concern for others within an integrating horizon and, indeed, an integrating reality?

Kant himself could say only that to be authentically human life had to be lived "as if" all is teleological. But then its exercise would be restricted to the confines of the human imagination; freedom would be not only self-determining but self-constituting and self-limited. In contrast, if the human spirit strives deeply to realize the life of persons then the transcendent principle it requires must be the most real in heaven and earth; if freedom presents us with a limitless range of possibilities, then its principle must be the Infinite and Eternal, the Source and Goal of all possibility. This Transcendent is the key to real liberation: it not only gives absolute grounding to one’s reality and certifies one’s right to be respected, but evokes the creative powers of one’s heart, frees them from the confines of one’s own slow, halting and even partial creative activity, and plunges them into infinite possibility and power.

This can be approached through the steps of phenomenological reflection on the person as gift. First, our self-identity and interpersonal relatedness are not made by us, but are givens with which we work. Second, if we reflect on the character of a gift we note that it has a radical character: to attempt to pay for it in cash or in kind would destroy its nature as gift. As gratuitous, a gift is based primarily in the freedom of the giver, not in the merit of the one who receives.

There is here striking symmetry with the ‘given’ in the sense of hypothesis or evidence in the line of hypothetical and evidential reasoning. This is not explained; rather it is that upon which explanation is founded. Here, there is also a first, as spontaneity which is not to be traced to another reality but upon which the reality of the gift is founded. This symmetry illumines what is distinctive of the gift, namely, that the act from which it is not traced back further, but is precisely free or gratuitous. Once again, our reflections lead us in the direction of that which is Self-sufficient, Absolute and Transcendent as the sole adequately gratuitous source of the gift of being.

In a certain parallel to the antinomies of Kant which show when reason has strayed beyond its bounds, many, from Plotinus to Leibniz and beyond, have sought knowledge, not only of the gift and its origin, but of why it had to be given. The more they succeeded the less room was left for freedom on the part of man as a given or gift. Others attempted to understand freedom as a fall, only to find that what was thus understood was bereft of value and meaning and a source of violence in human life and its cultures. Rather, the radical non-reciprocity of human freedom must be rooted in an equally radical generosity on the part of its origin. No reason, either on the part of the given or on the part of its origin, makes this gift necessary.

The African spirit, especially in its great reverence for family, community and culture — whence one derives one’s life, one’s ability to interpret one’s world, and one’s capacity to respond — may be uniquely positioned to grasp this more fully. In contrast to Aristotle’s classical ‘wonder,’ these philosophers do not situate the person over against the object of his or her concern, reducing both to objects for detached study and manipulation. They look rather to the source from which reality is derived and are especially sensitive to its implications for the mode and manner of life as essentially open, communicative, generous and sharing.

Seen in terms of gift, freedom at its third level has principles for peaceful cooperation, not only with one’s people whose well-being is in a sense my own, but with increasingly broader sectors, and potentially and in principle, with the whole of mankind. First, the good is not only what contributes to my perfection; being received, it is essentially out-going. The second principle is that of complementarity. As participants in the one, self-sufficient and purely spontaneous source, the many are not in principle antithetic or antipathetic one to another. Rather, as limited images they stand in a complementary relation to all other participants or images. This means that others and their cultures are to be respected simply because they too have been given or gifted by the one Transcendent source. This is the essential step which Gandhi, in calling outcasts "harijans," i.e., "children of God," urged us to take beyond the first sense of freedom which sees others only as contraries against whom we choose. Conversely, it means that as complementary we need each other.

Thirdly, as one does not first exist and then receive, but one’s very existence is a received existence or gift, to attempt to give back this gift, as in an exchange of presents, would be at once hopelessly too much and too little. On the one hand, to attempt to return in strict equivalence would be too much for it is our very self that we have received as gift. On the other hand, to think merely in terms of reciprocity would be to fall essentially short of my nature as one that is given, for to make a merely equivalent return would be to remain centered upon myself where I would cleverly entrap, and then entomb the creative power of being.

Rather, looking back I can see the futility of giving back, and in this find the fundamental importance of passing on the gift in the spirit in which it has been given. One’s freedom as given calls for a creative generosity which reflects that of one’s source. This requires breaking out of oneself as the only center of one’s concern. It means becoming effectively concerned with the good of other persons and other groups, and for the promotion and vital growth of the next generation and of those to follow.

Will this indeed eventuate? Can we overcome the violent conflicts which the recent emergence of a sense of self-identity appears to have engendered? To attempt to do so through suppressing freedom at this third level would destroy life as human. The history of the last half century consists in a studied and consistent rejection of such attempts at social engineering at the cost of freedom. The most recent history in Eastern Europe shows that even the most extreme attempts at forced socialization did not resolve problems of peaceful cooperation between peoples, but merely covered them over, isolated them from the requirements and achievements of human progress, and left them to reemerge in ever more intractable modes.

The alternative is to refuse to allow freedom to be reduced to its first level as an isometrics of violent conflict or to stop at the passive and universalist formalisms of the second level. Rather to be human is to take up the burden of freedom at its existential level and to search deeply into its source and nature for principles of unity and open cooperation. The truth of these principles will be manifest most of all in their call for ever more inclusive patterns of social equilibrium. The progress of cultures will consist in their genius in responding creatively to this call.

1. Politics, I, 1, 1252a22.

2. Politics, III, 7.

3. Politics, III, 8.

4. Nichomachean Ethics, IX, 6, 1167b13.

5. Politics, I, 2, 1253a20-37.

6. John Mavone, "The Division of Parts of Society According to Plato and Aristotle", Philosophical Studies, 6 (1956), 113-122.

7. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 1.

8. Mortimer J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 187.

9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1968), pp. 205-339.

10. Ibid., pp. 37-200.

11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A112, 121, 192-193. Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1974), pp. 83-84, 87-90.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, trans. J. Haden (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

15. William 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.

16. Ramayana (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1976), p. 312.

17. Schmitz, pp. 44-56.

18. R. E. Allen, "Participation and Predication in Plato’s Middle Dialogues" in his Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics (London: Routledge, Keegan Paul, 1965), pp. 43-60.

19. Juan Carlos Scannone, "Ein neuer Ansatz in der Philosophie Lateinamerikas," Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 89 (1982), 99-116 and "La Racionalidad Cientifico-Technologica y la Racionalidad Sapiencial de la Cultura Latino Americana," Stromata (1982), 155-164.

20. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967), pp. 532-535.

21. Joseph Kockelmans, "Thanksgiving: The Completion of Thought," in Manfred S. Frings, ed., Heidegger and the Quest for Truth (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), pp. 175-179.

22. Schmitz, 84-86.