In the watershed years of 1989-1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union a whole new life emerged across the vast lands stretching from Berlin and the Iron Curtain in the West to Vladivostok and the Pacific Ocean in the East. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe once again found their independence, Russia remerged from its long hybernation, and the Republics of Central Asia found themselves as newly independent states.

Now some 15 years later The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) is publishing a brace of books which state eloquently the subsequent creative efforts of the peoples involved to forge their pathway into their new and uncharted future. One work is by the UNESCO Chair in the Culture of Peace and Democracy, Professor Jurate Morkuniene, of the Law University of Lithuania. This is entitled: Social Philosophy: Contemporary Paradigm of Thinking. The other is effectively, though not intentionally, a companion volume by Professor Abdumalik Nysanbayev, Director of The Institute of Philosophy and Political Science of the Academy of Social Sciences of Kazakhstan and entitled Cultural Heritance and Social Transformation in Kazakhstan. Both are being published in the RVP series "Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change".

In the search for the path ahead people have been exploring different approaches. All are needed for all is to be redone, and to this each makes its own essential contribution. The series bringing these in a complementary manner is the fruit of an intensive RVP project integrating local team research, regional meetings and world colloquia. This process invoques insight from the many peoples of the world and brings these together at progressively higher or broader levels. The effect is to replace the previous deductive method of modern ideologies with a more inductive ground-up process that harvests the combined genius of the many peoples.

In this it is truly a tour de force. It proceeds from the nature and sources of contemporary social cognition with special attention to issues of method and the revival of the tradition of critical thinking. On this basis it reviews the goal of social philosophy and the related issues of person, culture and globalization.

The work is truly wondrous in the resources it brings to the effort to build the future and the promise it projects. This makes it a book that must be read and without which no reconstruction of life in this vast post communist region can hope to succeed. It can, however, be no slight to suspect that no one path can do all; indeed it is often said that philosophers are endemically more correct in what they affirm than in what they reject. Certainly the affirmation of the recent heritage of humanistic reason and the identification of the new ways in which this is opening marvelous new dimensions would seem to be the great and indispensable strengths of this work.

It is in this light that one sees the crucial importance of work along the lines of the book by Professor Nysanbaev, Cultural Inheritance and Social Transformation in Kazakhstan. For in Central Asia, as well as in Lithuania, other much needed efforts are underway to complement the effort to salvage the humanistic content of modernity in this post modern, post Soviet age and to render it more deeply humane. These are of numerous hews, but perhaps the most different and hence the most complementary to the above work of Professor Morkuniene is that which looks into the cultural traditions of the people to harvest its long experience of human life in these circumstances over the centuries. As succeeding generations reviewed the lessons received from the often all-too-harsh life experiences of preceding generations, proceeded creatively to adapt these to the present, and passed them on to the following generations, a proper form in which life could be cultivated emerged and came to be called simply "culture." As continually and creatively corrected, adjusted and passed on by each generation, this was the cultural tradition or cumulative freedom of a people.

Indeed, this was central to the claim of Lithuania in Soviet days to be not a Soviet Republic, but a sovereign nation. Upon independence this sense of a shared cultural heritage was so strong that there soon emerged the question of whether it left room for personal creativity – hence the title of a work from Lithuania published in the RVP series in 1994: Personal Freedom and National Resurgence: Lithuanian Philosophical Studies I.

The work of Professor Nysanbaev shows brilliantly how in Kazakhstan the importance of the cultural heritage of the nation now stands out in special relief. There we find some of the greatest scientists, philosophers and jurists of the golden medieval age of Islamic civilization. Their contributions subsequently were overlaid by the special virtues of a nomadic society. This combination now is challenged to provide the cultural identity and humane resources for the new nation of Kazakhstan as it works in its own way to develop the structures of a new nation at the beginning of the new millennium.

Professor Nysanbaev, himself one of the great scientists and philosophers of science of the past Soviet Union, understands from within the vast potentialities of modern science. But he understands as well its inability to defend itself against the political perversions by which this was denigrated and at times even twisted into an instrument of oppression. Beneath all this he is able to identify as well the dangers of a humanism which shuts out the humane and transcendent horizons and can threaten a new form of the dark night of the soul.

It is with this acute experience from the past and enlightened concern for the future of his people that he undertakes this work, short in length but truly great in vision. He examines the origins of Kazakh philosophy, the cultural inheritance and the traditional legal structure of the past. These he relates to the formation of the person and of the country as it emerges as an active participant in the newly global world.

In all of this he stays close to the traditional resources. We look to other of his works applying his eminent competencies in the fields of science to clarify what the new and properly contemporary competencies of reason promise for the great constructive efforts in which all peoples – Kazakh and Lithuanian not least – are now passionately engaged. In the meantime the brilliant work of Professor Morkuniene will suggest much that is becoming available. Together these two neatly balanced works provide not only a natural mutual critique, but even more the mutual reinforcement in which lie the true promise of the future of their great peoples, as of us all.