CHAPTER I
CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONTEMPORARY CREATIVITY
The constant and universal thrust of modern human striving appears to be centered in self-determination in participation with other persons and peoples in the disposition of social affairs. This places us at the vortex of a number of mankind's deepest issues: it is self-determination, yet essentially with others; it must create the future, yet not dissolve the identity a people has developed in the past; it must manage the multiple crises of ongoing life, yet, through them, unpack the deep and perduring meaning of life.
Hence, to look into human development in our day it should prove helpful to enhance the character of heritage as the deep learning regarding human life developed over the millennia and now available. This is the grounds upon which we have developed our identity as a people. Further, we should study the process by which, in concert with others, we advance into the future. This suggests three issues: first, the nature of values, culture and tradition and their moral authority for guiding our life; second, our role in creatively shaping and developing this tradition in response to contemporary issues, and third, its implication for the relation of democratic attitudes to progress in our times.
VALUES AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS
Values
For the drama of self-determination and the development of persons and peoples one must look to their relation to the good in which search 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; and, 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 ontological 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. 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 one's affective and emotional life. In time, it encourages and reinforces certain patterns of action which, in turn, reinforce the pattern of values. Through this process, we constitute our universe of moral concern in terms of which we struggle to advance or at least perdure, mourn our failures, and celebrate our successes. This is our world of hopes and fears, in terms of which, as Plato wrote in the Laches, our lives have moral meaning.
Virtues
Martin Heidegger describes a process by which the self emerges as a person in the field of moral action. It consists in transcending oneself or breaking beyond mere self-concern and projecting outward as a being whose very nature is to share with others for whom one cares and about whom one is concerned. In this process, one identifies new purposes or goals for the sake of which action is to be undertaken. In relation to these goals, certain combinations of possibilities, with their natures and norms, take on particular importance and begin thereby to enter into the makeup of one's world of meaning. Freedom then becomes more than mere spontaneity, more than choice, and more even than self-determination in the sense of causing oneself to act as described above. It shapes--the phenomenologist would say even that it constitutes--one's world as the ambit of human decisions and dynamic action. This is the making of a person or people in a community of persons or of nations.
This process of deliberate choice and decision transcends the somatic and psychic dynamisms. Whereas the somatic dimension is extensively reactive, the psychic dynamisms of affection or appetite are fundamentally oriented to the good and positively attracted by a set of values which evoke an active response from the emotions in the context of responsible freedom. But it is in the dimension of responsibility that one encounters the properly moral dimension of life. For, in order to live oneself and with others, one must be able to know, to choose and finally to realize what is truly conducive to one's good and, to that of others. Thus, the person must be able to judge the true value of what is to be chosen, that is, its objective worth both in itself and in relation to others. This is moral truth: the judgment regarding whether the act makes the person good in the sense of bringing authentic individual and social fulfillment, or the contrary.
In this I retain that deliberation and voluntary choice whereby I exercise my proper self-awareness, self-possession, and self-governance. By determining to follow this judgment I am able to overcome determination by stimuli and even by culturally ingrained values and to turn these, instead, into openings for free action in concert with others to shape myself, as well as my physical surroundings and community. This can be for good or for ill, depending on the character of my actions. By definition, only morally good actions contribute to the fulfillment of the person, that is, to one's development and perfection as a person with others in community. It is the function of conscience, as man's moral judgment, to identify this character of moral good in action. Hence, moral freedom consists in the ability to follow one's conscience.
This work of conscience is, then, not a merely theoretical judgment, but the exercise of self-possession in one's actions. Here, reference to moral truth constitutes one's sense of duty, for the action that is judged to be truly good is experienced also as that which I ought to do. When this is exercised or lived, patterns of action develop which are habitual in the sense of being repeated. These are the modes of activity with which we are familiar; in their exercise, along with the coordinate natural dynamisms they require, we are practiced and, with practice, comes facility and spontaneity. Such patterns constitute the basic, continuing and pervasive shaping influence of our life. For this reason, they have been considered classically to be the basic indicators of what our life as a whole will add up to, or, as is often said, "amount to". Since Socrates, the technical term used for these especially developed capabilities is `virtues'.
But, if the ability to follow one's conscience and, hence, to develop one's set of virtues must be established through the interior dynamisms of the person, it must be protected and promoted by the related physical and social realities. This is a basic right of the person--perhaps the basic human and social right--because only thus can one transcend one's conditions and strive for fulfillment. Its protection and promotion must be a basic concern of any order which would be democratic and directed to the good of its people.
Culture
Together these values and virtues set the pattern of our life through which our freedom is developed and exercised. This is called our "culture". On the one hand, the term is derived from the Latin word for tilling or cultivating the land. Cicero and other Latin authors used it for the cultivation of the soul or mind (cultura animi), for just as even good land, when left without cultivation, will produce only disordered vegetation of little value, so the human spirit will not achieve its proper results unless trained. This sense of culture corresponds most closely to the Greek term for education (paideia) as the development of character, taste and judgment, and to the German term "formation" (Bildung).
Here, the focus is upon the creative capacity of the spirit of a person or people and the ability to work as artist, not only in the restricted sense of producing purely aesthetic objects, but in the more involved sense of shaping all dimensions of life, material and spiritual, economic and political. The result is a whole life, characterized by unity and truth, goodness and beauty, and, thereby, sharing deeply in meaning and value. The capacity to do so cannot be taught, although it may be enhanced by education; more recent phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiries suggest that, at its base, culture is a renewal, a reliving of origins in an attitude of profound appreciation. This leads us beyond self and other, beyond identity and diversity, in order to comprehend both.
On the other hand, "culture" can be traced to the terms civis (citizen and civilization.) These reflect the need for a person to belong to a social group or community in order for the human spirit to produce its proper results. By bringing to the person the resources of the tradition, the tradita or past wisdom produced by the human spirit, the community facilitates comprehension. By enriching the mind with examples of values which have been identified in the past, it teaches and inspires one to produce something analogous. For G.F. Klemm, this more objective sense of culture is composite in character. Tyler defined this classically for the social sciences as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits required by man as a member of society."
Each particular complex whole or culture is specific to a particular people; a person who shares in this is a civis or citizen and belongs to a civilization. For the more restricted Greek world in which this term was developed, others (aliens) were those who did not speak the Greek tongue; they were "barbaroi", for their speech sounded like mere babel. Though at first this meant simply non-Greek, its negative manner of expression easily lent itself to, perhaps reflected, and certainly favored, a negative axiological connotation; indeed, this soon became the primary meaning of the word `barbarian'. By reverse implication, it attached to the term `civilization' an exclusivist connotation, such that the cultural identity of peoples began to imply cultural alienation between peoples. Today, as communication increases and more widely differentiated peoples enter into ever greater interaction and mutual dependence, we reap a bitter harvest of this connotation. The development of a less exclusivist sense of culture must be a priority task.
Tradition
The development of values and virtues and their integration as a culture of any depth or richness takes time and, hence, depends upon the experience and creativity of many generations. The culture which is handed on, or tradita, comes to be called a cultural tradition; as such it reflects the cumulative achievement of a people in discovering, mirroring and transmitting the deepest meanings of life. This is tradition in its synchronic sense as a body of wisdom.
This sense of tradition is very vivid in premodern and village communities. It would appear to be much less so in modern urban centers, undoubtedly in part due to the difficulty in forming active community life in large urban centers. However, the cumulative process of transmitting, adjusting and applying the values of a culture through time is not only heritage or what is received, but new creation as we pass this on in new ways. Attending to tradition, taken in this active sense, allows us not only to uncover the permanent and universal truths which Socrates sought, but to perceive the importance of values we receive from the tradition and to mobilize our own life project actively toward the future.
The recognition of the value of tradition would appear to constitute a special problem for all heirs of the enlightenment and it may be helpful to reflect briefly on why this is so. The enlightenment rationalism idealizes clarity and distinctness of ideas both in themselves and in their interconnection; as such, it divorces them--often intentionally--from their existential and temporal significance. Such an ideal of human knowledge, it is proposed, could be achieved either, as with Descartes, through an intellect working by itself from an intellectually perceived Archimedean principle or, as with Locke and Carnap, through the senses drawing their ideas exclusively from experience and combining them in myriad tautological transformations.p. 485. In either case, the result is a-temporal and consequently non-historical knowledge.
Two attempts to break out of this have proven ultimately unsuccessful. The one, in order to recognize historical sequence while retaining the ideal of clarity and distinctness, attempted to attain detailed knowledge of each period, relativizing everything to its point in time and placing historicity ultimately at the service of the rationalist ideal. The other, the Romantics, ultimately adhered to the same revolutionary enlightenment ideal even in appearing to oppose it, for, in turning to the past and to myths, they too sought clear and distinct knowledge of a static human nature. Tradition thus became traditionalism, for all was included in the original state of nature and our only way of obtaining a firm grounding for human life was simply to return thereto.
In the rationalist view, any meaning not clearly and distinctly perceived was an idol to be smashed (Bacon), an idea to be bracketed by doubt (Descartes), or something to be wiped clean from the slate of the mind as irrational and coercive (Locke and Hume). Any judgment--even if provisional--made before all had been examined and its clarity and distinctness established would be a dangerous imposition by the will.
This raises a number of problems. First, absolute knowledge of oneself or of others, simply and without condition, is not possible, for the knower is always conditioned according to his or her position in time and space and in relation to others. But neither would such knowledge be of ultimate interest, for human knowledge, like human beings, develops in time and with others. This does not exclude projects of scientific knowledge, but it does identify these precisely as limited and specialized views: they make important but specific, rather than all-controlling, contributions.
Secondly, according to Descartes, reason is had by all and completely; authority, therefore, could be only an entitlement of some to decide issues by an application of their will rather than according to an authentic understanding of the truth or justice of an issue. This would be the over-hastiness of Descartes' fourth Meditation. Further, the limited number of people in authority means that the vision of which they dispose would be limited by restricted or even individual interests. Finally, as one decision constitutes a precedent for those to follow, authority must become fundamentally bankrupt and hence corruptive.
In this manner, the choice of clarity as an ideal, first by Plato and then Descartes, has generated an exclusivist mind-set ruled by a reductivist mechanism. It is not only that what is not clear is put aside as irrelevant but that the dynamism whereby we reflect the love by which we have been made and respond to it with openness and generosity comes to be seen in a negative cognitive light as blind, while freedom appears in a negative affective light as arbitrary. The only way these could achieve a redeeming clarity for the human mind is to be reduced to the unambiguous and simple viscerial violence of Hobbes' struggle for survival.
If, on the contrary, the cumulative experience of mankind in living together in peace is to make a contribution to the development of modern life, then it will be necessary to return human knowledge to the ongoing lived process of humane discovery and choice, within a broad project of human interaction and an active process of reception by one generation of the learning of its predecessors. The emerging consciousness of the importance of this effort has led to broadening the task of hermeneutics from the study of ancient, often biblical, texts to a more inclusive attention to the integral meaning of cultures. There it has found, not a mere animal search for survival, but a sense of human dignity which, by transcending survival needs enables human creativity and encourages a search for ever higher levels of human life.
The reference to the god, Hermes, in the term "hermeneutics" suggests something of this depth of the meaning which is sought throughout human life and its implication for the world of values. For the message borne by Hermes is not merely an abstract mathematical formula or a methodological prescription devoid of human meaning and value; rather, it is the limitless wisdom regarding the source and, hence, the reality, and regarding the priorities and, hence, the value of all. Hesiod had appealed for this in the introduction to his Theogony: "Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are forever. . . . Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be."
Similarly, Aristotle indicated this concern for values and virtues in describing his science of wisdom as "knowing to what end each thing must be done; . . . this end is the good of that thing, and, in general, the supreme good in the whole of nature." Such a science will be most divine, for: "(1) God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and (2) such a science either God alone can have, or God above all others. All the sciences, indeed, are more necessary than this, but none is better." Hence, rather than evaluating all in terms of reductivist clarity and considering things in a horizontal perspective that is only temporal or totally changing,--with an implied relativization of all--hermeneutics or interpretation opens also to a vertical vision of what is most real in itself and most lasting through time, that is, to the perennial in the realm of being and values; this it does with a view to mobilizing life accordingly.
At the same time, while still echoing Socrates by searching for the permanent structures of complex entities and the stable laws of change, in redirecting attention to being in time, contemporary attention is open to the essentially temporal character of mankind and, hence, to the uniqueness of each decision, individual and corporate. Thus, hermeneutics attends to the task of translation or interpretation, stressing the presentation to the one who receives the message, their historical situation, and, hence, the historical character of human life. It directs attention not merely to the pursuit of general truths, but to those to whom truth is expressed, namely, persons in the concrete circumstances of their cultures as these have developed through the history of human interaction with nature, with other human beings and with God. It is this human history as heritage and tradition which sets the circumstances in which one perceives the values presented in the tradition and mobilizes his or her own project toward the future.
THE GENESIS AND MORAL AUTHORITY OF CULTURAL TRADITIONS
In "The Idea of Confucian Tradition", A. S. Cua traces the attention in Anglo-Saxon ethics and theory regarding moral traditions Ludwig Wittgenstein's development of the notion of "forms of life" in his Philosophical Investigations. He notes its implicit presence in J. Rawle's relation of the sense of justice to one's history and traditions. However, formal attention to the role of tradition in ethics is due to A. MacIntyre's After Virtue, though its sociological role in providing regularities in social life had been observed earlier by Karl Popper.
In the German tradition, the notion has much longer roots in the transcendental move of Kant and its development by such neo-Kantians as Ernst Cassirer into a whole theory of symbolic forms. In the development of phenomenology Martin Heidegger provided this with a metaphysical base. In Truth and Method, his successor, Hans Georg Gadamer, undertook, on this basis, to reconstruct the notion of a cultural heritage or tradition as: (a) based in community, (b) consisting of knowledge developed from experience lived through time and (c) possessed of authority. In order to analyze the genesis of a cultural tradition we shall look at each of these in turn. Further, because tradition, sometimes is interpreted as a threat to the personal and social freedom essential to a democracy, attention will be given here to the way a cultural heritage is generated by the free and responsible life of the members of a concerned community and enables succeeding generations realize their life with freedom and creativity.
Community
Autogenesis is no more characteristic of the birth of knowledge than it is of persons. One's consciousness emerges, not with self, but with its relation to others. In the womb, the first awareness is that of the heart beat of one's mother. Upon birth, one enters a family in whose familiar relations one is at peace and able to grow. Just as a person is born into a family on which he or she depends absolutely for life, sustenance, protection and promotion, so one's understanding develops in community. It is from one's family and in one's earliest weeks and months that one does or does not develop the basic attitudes of trust and confidence which undergird or undermine one's capacities for subsequent social relations. There one learns care and concern for others independently of what they do for us and acquires the language and symbol system in terms of which to conceptualize, communicate and understand.pp. 199-222.
Similarly, through the various steps of one's development, as one's circle of community expands through neighborhood, school, work and recreation, one comes to learn and to share personally and passionately an interpretation of reality and a pattern of value responses. The phenomenologist sees this life in community as the new source for wisdom. Hence, rather than turning away from daily life in order to contemplate abstract and disembodied ideas, the place to discover meaning is in life as lived in the family and in the progressively wider social circles into which one enters. As persons we emerge from birth in a family and neighborhood from which we learn and in harmony with which we thrive.
Experience: Horizontal and Vertical
If it were merely a matter of community, however, all might be limited to the present, with no place for tradition as that which is "passed on" from one generation to the next. In fact, the process of trial and error, of continual correction and addition in relation to a people's evolving sense of human dignity and purpose, constitutes a type of learning and testing laboratory for successive generations. In this laboratory of history, the strengths of various insights and behavior patterns can be identified and reinforced, while deficiencies are progressively corrected or eliminated. Horizontally, we learn from experience what promotes and what destroys life and accordingly, make pragmatic adjustments.
But even this language remains too abstract, too limited to method or technique, too unidimensional. While tradition can be described in general and at a distance in terms of feed-back mechanisms and might seem merely to concern how to cope in daily life, what is being spoken about are free acts that are expressive of passionate human commitment and personal sacrifice in responding to concrete danger, building and rebuilding family alli-ances and constructing and defending one's nation. Moreover, this wisdom is not a matter of mere tactical adjustments to temporary concerns; it concerns rather the meaning we are able to envision for life and which we desire to achieve through all such adjustments over a period of generations, i.e., what is truly worth striving for and the pattern of social interaction in which this can be lived richly. The result of this extended process of learning and commitment constitutes our awareness of the bases for the decisions of which history is constituted.
This points us beyond the horizontal plane of the various ages of history and directs our attention vertically to its ground and, hence, to the bases of the values which mankind in its varied circumstances seeks to realize. The historical and prophetical books of the Bible are an extended, concrete account of one people's process of discovering wisdom in interaction with the divine.
The impact of the convergence of cumulative experience and reflection is heightened by its gradual elaboration in ritual and music, and its imaginative configuration in such great epics as the Mahabharata or in dance. All conspire to constitute a culture which, like a giant telecommunications dish, shapes, intensifies and extends the range and penetration of our personal sensitivity, free decision and mutual concern.
Tradition, then, is not as in history simply everything that ever happened, whether good or bad. It is rather what appears significant for human life: it is what has been seen through time and human experience to be deeply true and necessary for human life. It contains the values to which our forebears first freely gave their passionate commitment in specific historical circumstances and then constantly reviewed, rectified and passed on that content, generation after generation progressively over time. The content of a tradition, expressed in works of literature and all the many facets of a culture, progressively emerges as something upon which character and community can be built. It constitutes a rich source from which multiple themes can be drawn, provided it be accepted and embraced, affirmed and cultivated.
Hence, it is not because of personal inertia on our part or arbitrary will on the part of our forbears that our culture provides a model and exemplar. On the contrary, the importance of tradition derives from both the cooperative character of the learning by which wisdom is drawn from experience and the cumulative free acts of commitment and sacrifice which have defined, defended and passed on through time the corporate life of the community.
Authority
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 is one's 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 skill 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. 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 dependence in competency--combine to endow tradition with authority for subsequent ages.
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. 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 ideals but as the ground of things, hidden or veiled, as it were, and erupting into time through conscious and 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 our 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 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 consciousness--but by our situatedness in a tradition. By fusing both past and present, enables us to determine the specific direction of our lives and to mobilize the consensus and mutual commitments of which true community is built.
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 us 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" (Shils), "paradigmatic individuals" (Cua) or characters who meld role and personality in providing a cultural or moral ideal (MacIntyre), they supersede mere historical facts. As concrete universals, they express that harmony and fullness of perfection which is at once classical and historical, ideal and personal, uplifting and dynamizing in a word, liberating.
Confucian Tradition and Life
Anton T. Cua traces to Vico attention to the unreflective cognitive consensus on common needs and to Shaftesbury the affective sense of common partnership with others that all this entails. The result is the constitution of a community of memory whose members revere and commemorate the same saints and personages who have sacrificed to build or exemplify the community's self image. This results in a community of vision or self-understanding, as well as of hope and expectation. A cultural tradition, in this sense, is the context of one's conscious life and striving; it is life in its fullest meaning, as past and future, ground and aspiration.
In this light, Cua notes that, in the Great Learning, Chu Hsi stresses the importance of investigating the principles at great length, until one achieves "a wide and far-reaching penetration (kuan-t'ung)." Read as Kuan-chuan, this suggests an aesthetic grasp of the unique interconnection of the various components of the tao as the unique unifying perspective of the culture. This is not only a contemplative understanding, however; it implies active engagement in the conduct of life and an accumulation of good deeds done according to li or ritual propriety and i or sense of rightness. "For the adherents of the Confucian tradition, the tradition is an object of affection and reverence, largely because the tradition is perceived as an embodiment of wisdom (chih), which for Chu Hsi is a repository of insights available for personal and interpersonal appropriation, for coping with present problems and changing circumstances."
The truly important battle at the present time is, then, not between, on the one hand, a chaotic liberalism in which the abstract laws of the marketplace dictate and tear at the lives of persons, peoples and nations or, on the other hand, a depersonalizing sense of community in which the dignity of the person is suppressed for an equally abstract utopia. A victory of either would spell disaster. The central battle is, rather, to enable peoples to draw on their heritage, constituted of personal assessments and free decisions, and elaborated through the ages by the various communities as the working out of their response to their concrete circumstances. That these circumstances are often shifting and difficult in the extreme is important, but it is of definite importance that this people's response be truly theirs. That is, that it be part of their history, of their free and democratic response to the good, and not simply the imposed effect of another's history, or--worst of all--of abstract, impersonal and depersonalizing structures, slogans, utopias or ideologies.
CREATIVITY AND TRADITION
Application and Adaptation
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. Let us turn then from the cumulative meaning and value in tradition, its synchronic aspect, to its diachronic or particular meaning for each new time receiving from the past, ordering the present and constructing the future. This is a matter, first of all, of taking time seriously, that is, of recognizing that reality includes authentic novelty. This contrasts to the perspective of Plato for whom the real is the ideal and unchangeable forms or ideas transcending matter and time, and of which physical things and temporal events are but shadows. It also goes beyond rationalism's search for clear and distinct knowledge of eternal and simple natures and their relations in terms of which all might be controlled, and beyond romanticism's attention to a primordial unchanging nature hidden in the dimly sensed past. A fortiori, it goes beyond method alone without content.
In contrast to all these, the notion of application is based upon an awareness that "reality is temporal and unfolding". This means that tradition, with its inherent authority or normative force, achieves its perfection in the temporal unfolding of reality. Secondly, it shows human persons and peoples, not as detached intellects, but as incarnate and, hence, enabled by and formative of, their changing physical and social universe. Thirdly, in the area of socio-political values and action, it expresses directly the striving of persons to realize their lives and the development of this striving into attitudes (hexis) and institutions. Hence, as distinct from the physical order, human action is a situation neither of law nor of lawlessness, but of human and, therefore, developing institutions and attitudes which do not determine and, hence, destroy human freedom, but regulate and promote its exercise.
Certain broad guidelines for the area of ethics and politics serve in the application of tradition as a guide for historical practice and vice-versa. The concrete exercise of human freedom as unique decisions lived with others through time constitutes a distinctive and on-going process. Historicitymeans that responses to the good are made always in concrete and ever-changing circumstances. Hence, the general principles of ethics and politics as a philosophic science of action cannot be purely theoretical knowledge or a simple accounting from the past. Instead, they must help people consciously exercise their freedom in concrete historical circumstances which are ever changing and new.
Here, an important distinction must be made from techné where action is governed by an idea as an exemplary cause that is fully determined and known by objective theoretical knowledge (epistéme). As in the case of an architect's blueprints, skill, such as that of the engineer, consists in knowing how to act according to that idea or plan; and, when it cannot be carried out perfectly, some parts of it are simply omitted in the execution. In contrast, ethics and politics, though similar in the possession of a practical guide and its application to a particular task, differ in important ways. First, in moral action subjects--whether a person or a people--constitute themselves, as much as they produce an object: agents are differentiated by their action. Hence, moral knowledge, as an understanding of the appropriateness of human action, cannot be fully determined independently of the subjects in their situation and in action.
Secondly, adaptation by moral agents in their application of the law does not diminish, but rather corrects and perfects the law. In relation to a world which is less ordered, the law is imperfect, for it cannot contain in any explicit manner the response to the concrete possibilities which arise in history. It is precisely here that freedom and creativity are located. They do not consist in arbitrariness, for Kant is right in saying that without law freedom has no meaning; nor do they consist in an automatic response determined by the historical situation, for then determinism and relativism would compete for the crown in undermining human freedom. Freedom consists, rather, in shaping the present according to the sense of what is just and good which we have from our cultural tradition, and in a way which manifests and indeed creates for the first time more of what justice and goodness mean.
The law is not diminished by its application in the circumstances but corrected and enriched. Epoché and equity do not diminish, but perfect the law; without them the law would be simply a mechanical replication doing the work not of justice, but of injustice. Ethics or politics is not only knowledge of what is right in general but the search for what is right in the situation and the choice of the right means for this situation. Knowledge about the means is not then a matter of mere expediency; it is the essence of the search for a more perfect application of the law in the given situation. This is the fulfillment of moral knowledge.
Application of Tradition and Human Concern
It is important to note that this rule of the concrete (of what the situation is asking of us) is not known by sense knowledge, which simply registers a set of concrete facts on the horizontal level. In order to know what is morally required, the situation must be understood in the light of what is right, that is, in the light of what has been discovered vertically through tradition with its normative character about appropriate human action. Only in this light can moral consciousness as the work of intellect (nous), rather than of sensation, go about its job of choosing the right means.
Therefore, to proceed simply in reaction to concrete injustices, rather than in the light of one's tradition, is ultimately destructive. It inverts the order just mentioned and results in manipulation of our hopes for the good. Destructive or repressive structures would lead us to the use of correspondingly evil means, suited only to producing evil results. The true response to evil can be worked out only in terms of the good as the highest discovery by our people, passed on in tradition and applied by us in our times.
The importance of application implies a central role for the virtue of prudence (phronesis) or thoughtful reflection which enables one to discover the appropriate means for the circumstances. This must include, also, the virtue of sagacity (sunesis), that is, of understanding or concern for the other. For what is required as a guide for the agent is not only technical knowledge of an abstract ideal, but knowledge that takes account of the agent in relation to other persons. One can assess the situation adequately only inasmuch as one, in a sense, undergoes the situation with the affected parties, living and suffering with them. Aristotle rightly describes as "terrible" the one who is capable of manipulating the situation, but is without orientation towards moral ends and without concern for the good of others in their concrete situations.
In sum, application is not a subsequent or accidental part of understanding, added on after perfect understanding has been achieved; rather it co-determines this understanding from the beginning. Moral consciousness must seek to understand the good, not as an ideal to be known and then applied, but rather through discerning the good for concrete peoples in their relations with others.
Cua finds similar notions in the distinctions of Chu Hsi in the neo-Confucian tradition regarding the diachronic sense of tao as residing between the substantial (t'i) and the operational (yung), the stable basic or latent schemata and its operational sense in changing circumstances (fei). Hsün Tzu distinguishes the constant (ch'ang) and the changing (pien), and Mencius the constant rule (ching) and the sliding scale (ch'üuan). Use of the latter as an exercise of moral discretion based on li is essential for moral life due to the imperfections of our knowledge and the urgent complexity of life. In these circumstances, to hold to a static mean would undermine the realization of the holistic goal of the tao.
Creativity in the application of the tradition in the concrete circumstances of life thus becomes essential. In this context Cua deftly cites J. Pelican's aphorism: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
The Roots of Tradition and Creativity
The notion of application can help in sorting out the human dilemma between an absolutism insensitive to persons in their concrete circumstances and a relativism which leaves the person subject to expediency in public and private life. Indeed, the very statement of the dilemma reflects the deleterious aspect of the Platonic view of ideas. He was right to ground changing and historical being in the unchanging and eternal. This had been Parmenides' first insight in metaphysics and has been richly developed in relation to human action through the medievals' notion of an eternal law in the divine mind.
But it seems inappropriate to speak directly in these terms regarding human life, for in all things individual human persons and humankind as a whole are subject to time, growth and development. As we become increasingly conscious of this, the personal character even of our abstract ideals becomes manifest and their adapted application in time can be seen, not as their rejection, but as their perfection. In this, justice loses none of its force as an absolute requirement of human action. Rather, the concrete modes of its application in particular circumstances add to what could have been articulated in merely abstract and universal terms. A hermeneutic approach directs attention precisely to these unfoldings of the meaning of abstract principles through time. This is not an abandonment of absolutes, but a recognition of the human condition and of the way in which this continually and, in endless marvelous manners, unfolds the ultimate richness of the source and principle of social life.
For Confucius, the aesthetic vision is integrated in drama, of which dance is one moment. In the actual performance of li (ritual or liturgy), there is a combination of poetry, liturgical action and music. Confucius saw that in the poem our spirit can rise and stand in reality to achieve complete transcendence in the ecstasy of the spirit. This gives access in aesthetic terms to a source, not only of inspiration, but of vision that both draws one to aspire to greater perfection and opens the way for creative thought regarding ways in which this can be achieved (see chapter II).
Some suggest, however, that Confucius may have looked upon aesthetics more as a matter of appreciation and conservation, rather than as original, creative and free expression. This suggests that, in the works of Confucius, there are resources important for developing a modern vision which were unmined by Confucius himself and his schools.
If so what should be the attitude of a philosopher in our day to this mode of aesthetics? If it be itself appreciative and conservative, is one who interprets it subject to the same approach and limited to the same content, or can interpretation legitimately open up new meaning in old texts? In other words, must ancient texts be read only with an ancient outlook? Indeed, is it even possible today to have an authentically ancient outlook--to see with eyes long closed--or does the attempt to do so require so much make-believe as to be in effect impossible? Even if one were to succeed in reconstituting the past, would one be faithful to the text which was written as a vital expression of the process of life, or would one instead be rendering lifeless a living text (not unlike the biologist who makes a slide of once living tissue)?
It would seem, therefore, that our goal should be not simply to reiterate ancient times in reading ancient texts, but to recognize that we come to them from new times, with new horizons and new questions. We should allow them to speak anew to us; in so doing, the texts and philosophies are living rather than dead--and, therefore, more true. Texts read in this sense are part of living tradition in which is situated our struggle to face the problems of life and build a future worthy of those who follow.
Some would fear that to give such importance to the horizon of the reader of a text might constitute a relativism and lose the permanent significance of the insights of the author. But this would seem to reflect a material and mechanical model ruled by successive discrete moments of time in which universality is a function only of abstraction. This leaves what is universally applicable as relatively vacuous and reduces one to pragmatism as one's only response to concrete and changing circumstances.
Here, the real issue regards one's metaphysics: what is the nature of being, what does it mean to be? If the answer, as the Confucian sense of community would be the first to suggest, is not that reality is reductively matter trapped in time but at least the human spirit living through time, then to look for meaning in terms of the reaches of the spirit across time is not to lose but to find meaning. This is the sense of being emerging through the consciousness of Heidegger's person as dasein. Being is not merely what was, but what blossoms ever fresh in the human heart. In the same way, philosophy in reading ancient texts is not archeology but, like every human act, a creative unfolding of being in time. This creative freedom is the essential characteristic of the person.
What, then, should we conclude regarding the root of the actuality, the good or the perfection of reality which mankind has discovered, in which we have been raised, which gives us dominion over our actions, and which enables us to be free and creative? Does it come from God or from man, from eternity or from history? Chakravarti Rajagopalachari of Madras answered:
Whether the epics and songs of a nation spring from the faith and ideas of the common folk, or whether a nation's faith and ideas are produced by its literature is a question which one is free to answer as one likes. . . . Did clouds rise from the sea or was the sea filled by waters from the sky? All such inquiries take us to the feet of God transcending speech and thought.
DEMOCRACY AS DIALOGUE IN THE TRADITION OF A CULTURE
Thus far, we have treated the character and importance of tradition as bearing the long experience of persons interacting with their world, with other persons and with God. It is made up not only of chronological facts, but of insights regarding human perfection and its foundations which have been forged by human efforts in concrete circumstances, e.g., the Greek notion of democracy and the enlightenment notions of equality and freedom. By their internal value, these stand as normative of the aspirations of a people.
Secondly, we have seen the implications of historicity for novelty within the context of tradition, that the continually unfolding circumstances of historical development not merely extend or repeat what went before, but constitute an emerging manifestation of the dynamic character of being that is articulated by the art, religion, literature and political structures of a cultural tradition.
It remains for us now to treat the third element in this study of tradition, namely, the hermeneutic method. How can earlier sources which express the great achievements of human awareness be understood or unfolded in a way that is relevant, indicative and directive of our life in present circumstances? In a word, how can we interpret or draw out the significance of tradition for present action?
Interpretation of a Cultural Tradition
If we take time and culture seriously, then we must recognize that we are 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 our 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 to be challenged in our basic assumptions and enabled thereby to delve more deeply into our tradition and draw forth deeper and more pervasive truth. How can this be done?
First of all, it is necessary to note that only a unity of meaning, that is, an identity, is intelligible. Just as it is not possible to understand a number three if we include only two units rather than three, no act of understanding is possible unless it is directed to an identity or whole of meaning. This brings us to the classic issue of the hermeneutic circle in which knowledge of the whole depends upon knowledge of the parts, and vice versa. How can this work for, rather than against the development of social life?
The experience of reading a text might be suggestive. As we read we construe the meaning of a sentence before grasping all its individual parts. What we construe is dependent upon our expectation of the meaning of the sentence, which we derived from its first words, the prior context, or more likely, from a combination of the two. In turn, our expectation or construal of the meaning of the text is adjusted according to the requirements of its various parts as we proceed to read through the parts of the sentence, the paragraph, etc., continually reassessing the whole in terms of the parts and the parts in terms of the whole. This basically circular movement continues until all appears to fit and to be clear.
Similarly, in regard to our cultural tradition and values, we develop a prior conception of its content. This anticipation of meaning is not simply of the tradition as an objective past or fixed content to which we come; it is rather what we produce as we participate in the evolution of the tradition and, thereby, further determine ourselves. This is a creative stance reflecting the content, not only of the past, but of the time in which I stand and of the life project in which I am engaged. It is a creative unveiling of the content of the tradition as this comes progressively and historically into the present and through the present, passes into the future.
In this light, time is not a barrier, separation or abyss, but rather a bridge and opportunity for the process of understanding, a fertile ground filled with experience, custom and tradition. The importance of the historical distance it provides is not that it enables the subjective reality of persons to disappear so that the objectivity of the situation can emerge. On the contrary, it makes possible a more complete meaning of the tradition, less by removing falsifying factors than by opening new sources of self-understanding which reveal in the tradition unsuspected implications and even new dimensions of meaning.
Tradition and Discovery: Openness to Being Questioned
Of course, not all our acts of understanding about the meaning of a text from another culture, a dimension of a shared tradition, a set of goals or a plan for future action are sufficient. Hence, it becomes particularly important that they not be adhered to fixedly, but be put at risk in dialogue with others.
In this, the basic elements remain the substances or persons which Aristotle described in terms of autonomy and, by implication, of identity. Hermeneutics would expand this to reflect as well the historical and hermeneutic situation of each person in the dialogue, that is, their horizon or particular possibility for understanding. As an horizon is all that can be seen from one's vantage point(s), in dialogue with others it is necessary to be aware of our horizon, as well as that of others. For it is precisely when our initial projection of their meaning will not bear up under the progressive dialogue that we are required to make needed adjustments in our projection of their meaning.
This enables one to adjust one's prior understanding not only of the horizon of the other with whom one is in dialogue, but especially of one's own horizon. Hence, one need not fear being trapped; horizons are vantage points of a mind which in principle is open and mobile, capable of being aware of its own limits and of transcending them through acknowledging the horizons of others. The flow of history implies that we are not bound by our horizons, but move in and out of them, and it is in making us aware of our horizons that hermeneutic consciousness accomplishes our liberation.
For this, we must maintain a questioning attitude. Rather than simply following through with our previous ideas until a change is forced upon us, we must remain sensitive to new meanings in true openness. This is neither neutrality as regards the meaning of the tradition, nor an extinction of passionate concerns regarding action towards the future. Rather, being aware of our own biases or prejudices and adjusting them in dialogue with others implies rejecting what impedes our understanding of others or of traditions. Our attitude in approaching dialogue must be one of willingness continually to revise our initial projection or expectation of meaning.
The way out of the hermeneutic circle is then not by ignoring or denying our horizons and initial judgments or prejudices, but by recognizing them as inevitable and making them work for us in drawing out, not the meaning of the text for its author, but its application for the present. Through this process of application we serve as midwife for culture as historical or tradition, enabling it to give birth to the future.
The logical structure of this process is the exchange of question and answer. A question is required in order to determine just what issue we are engaging--whether it is this issue or that--so that we might give direction to our attention. Without this, no meaningful answer can be given or received. As a question, however, it requires that the answer not be settled or determined. In sum, progress or discovery requires an openness which is not simply indeterminacy, but a question which gives specific direction to our attention and enables us to consider significant evidence.
If discovery depends upon the question, then the art of discovery is the art of questioning. Consequently, in working in conjunction with others, the heart of the democratic process is not to suppress, but to reinforce and unfold the questions of others. To the degree that these probabilities are built up and intensified they can serve as a searchlight. This is the opposite of both opinion which tends to suppress questions, and of arguing which searches out the weakness in other's positions. Instead, in democracy, understood as conversation and dialogue, one enters upon a mutual search to maximize the possibilities of the question, even by speaking at cross purposes, for it is by mutually eliminating errors and working out a common meaning that we discover truth.
Pluralism and Progress
Further, it should not be presupposed that a text, such as a tradition, law or constitution, will hold the answer to but one question or can have but one horizon which must be identified by the reader. On the contrary, the full horizon of the authors is never available to the reader, nor can it be expected that there is but one question to which a tradition or document holds an answer. The sense of the texts reaches beyond what the authors intended because the dynamic character of being as it emerges in time means that the horizon is never fixed but is continually opening. This constitutes the effective historical element in understanding a text or a tradition. At each step new dimensions of its potentialities open to understanding, so that the meaning of a text or tradition lives with the consciousness and hence the horizons--not of its author--but of people in dialogue with others through time and history. This is the essence of democracy as a process. It is the process of broadening horizons, through fusion with the horizons of others in dialogue, that makes it possible to receive from one's cultural tradition and its values answers which are ever new.
In this, one's personal attitudes and interests remain important. If our interest in developing new horizons is simply the promotion of our own understanding then we could be interested solely in achieving knowledge, and thereby domination over others. This would lock one into an absoluteness of one's prejudices; being fixed or closed in the past, they would disallow new life in the present. In this manner, powerful new insights can become with time deadening pre-judgments which suppress freedom.
In contrast, an attitude of authentic democratic openness appreciates the nature of one's own finiteness. On this basis, it both respects the past and is open to discerning the future. Such openness is a matter, not merely of new information, but of recognizing the historical nature of man and his basis in an absolute that transcends and grounds time. This enables us to escape what had deceived us and held us captive and to learn deeply from new experiences.
This suggests that democratic openness does not consist in surveying others objectively, obeying them in a slavish and unquestioning manner or simply juxtaposing their ideas and traditions to our own. Rather, it is directed primarily to ourselves, for our ability to listen to others is correlatively our ability to assimilate the implications of their answers for delving more deeply into the meaning of our own traditions and drawing out new and even more rich insights. In other words, it is an acknowledgement that our cultural heritage has something new to say to us.
The characteristic hermeneutic attitude of effective historical consciousness is, then, not methodological sureness, readiness for new compromises or new techniques of social organization, for these are subject to social critique and manipulation on the horizontal level. Instead, it is readiness to draw out in democratic dialogue new meaning from a common tradition. Seen in these terms our heritage of culture and values is not closed or dead, but, through a democratic life, remains ever new by becoming more inclusive and more rich.