Ethics as philosophical discourse studies the articulation and evolution of human behavior, especially the habits commonly accepted by the community at a certain cultural moment. This idea of ethics stresses two important dimensions of human behavior: the cultural and the temporal. Like the tongue we speak, our behavior is a living and developing reality; and as living it grows, matures and can die.

Being rooted structurally in both the cultural and the temporal, behavior is not based merely on human interiority or subjectivity, as has been taught in the history of ethics. Contemporary ethics considers community to be the most important and radical foundation of our behavior; it is the soil from which behavior grows.

In effect, the behavior of the community is prior to persons. Each person is born and grows in a preexistent setting and structure of behavior which, in turn, becomes the source of their own behavior. Consequently, the first source of ethics is not human nature characterized by intelligence and free will, but the cultural milieu formed by the living behavior that is approved in some way by the historical community.

Generally communities reflect two main trends in human behavior. The first is a conservative bent: persons react cautiously in matters of behavior. This conservatism is inspired by metaphysics which supports the concept of an immutable essence or nature of human beings, from which one deduces that human behavior will be immutable in its basic expressions.

The second tendency is innovative. This is the effect of new conditions of life in community, especially the recent concentration of millions of persons and the development of efficient media of communication. Due both to the numbers of persons and the mass media as impersonal masters of society, it has become difficult to transmit behavior by teaching principles, as was done in past generations. Especially in the last thirty years, our habits, knowledge and beliefs have been transformed. Despite new opportunities and better living conditions, we have created economic, cultural and military systems of domination. These new life conditions have created serious difficulties for a system of ethics which tends to preserve human behavior in the name of an immutable nature.

An ethics based upon a changing community must take account of the global sense of history, especially the new possibilities to be developed in the future. The second trend reflects this historicity of existence by considering ethics as a system which is historical and based upon the process of transforming the community. Indeed, such an ethics as historical will always be part of the process of the innovation and revelation of new behavior.

As these two tendencies have very different methods, goals and ideas, we shall present a summary of their roots and goals.

THE ROOTS OF ETHICS IN HISTORY

Characteristics of Metaphysical Ethics

In elaborating the first treatise on ethics Greek philosophers deeply influenced occidental culture. Their point of departure was metaphysics which defines the essence of human nature in relation to other beings. From this emerges the first principle of ethics, which can be announced as follows: ethical action is that which is controlled by a rational structure (intelligence and will). As the supreme goal of rational behavior is the contemplation of the supreme being, behavior directed by instinct and sensibility is excluded from the field of ethics.

Christian philosophy and theology operated with these same principles. Rather than creating a new philosophical model, Christian thinkers oriented Greek metaphysics to God as creator of every being and every nature. This relationship between Creator and creature is the basic idea of Christian philosophy. In ethics one finds the same reorientation. God is the basis of the morality of human action. The first pages of the Bible report the fall of man and the New Testament reports divine grace recreating human beings through the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus, this great interpretation of human behavior was supported by both metaphysical and theological structures.

Little by little this interpretation lost its capacity to explain the new ways of life created by scientific and philosophical cultural movements. Dominated by science, the modern age created its own way and proclaimed its independence vis a vis philosophy and theology. While theology became increasingly dogmatic, philosophy experienced a new beginning as philosophers tried to find new answers to the new problems proposed by science.

In this turbulent period, ethics, as the philosophical study of human behavior, became "temporary" and provisional. Descartes in his Discourse on Method was the first great thinker to question classical metaphysics and, consequently, the bases of ethics. Kantian criticism laid a new beginning of ethics by introducing the "categorical imperative," which in fact favored individual and formal ethics.

Consequently, ethics, founded in both metaphysics and individuality, became increasingly unable to interpret the movement of science and the cultural process. The scientific interpretation of the cosmos, the evolutionary theory of life and, recently, psychoanalytic therapy revealing the great role of instinct in human behavior shook the bases of rational ethics.

In contrast, contemporary socio-political theories about human existence suggest a new vision of human ethics. Many philosophers consider the new point of departure for ethics to be the personal existent living in community. In sum, cosmological, biological, psychological and sociological challenges all call for a new manner of philosophical and ethical thinking.

Trends in Contemporary Philosophy

Science and technology direct the organization of the contemporary world. Certain nations dominate the mass media and the sophisticated instruments of communication elaborated by electronic technology. Correlatively, nations and communities without technical development become increasingly dependent upon developed countries. Underdeveloped countries are dependent in such crucial areas as education, politics, economy and information. As a result, the power of decision becomes the privilege of a few nations.

Furthermore, the instruments of communication create artificial needs, after the manner of consumerism. This focuses human attention on secondary problems and leads to the neglect of such decisive questions as happiness, a sense of community, participation, justice, education, health for all, etc. The gigantic industrial structures benefit few people, while they exploit and destroy nature and its ecological equilibrium. The dissemination of technology and communication has transformed human behavior.

Contemporary society needs, therefore, to develop new premises, new principles, especially in the field of ethics. In this sense, phenomenology, existentialism, and social philosophy have articulated some very important questions about the sense of the person, community, history, temporality, and the human condition. Psychology and sociology have contributed extensively to the elaboration of these concepts. As a result, the person today is understood as a human existent in relation with other persons who, in turn, are related to nature and culture. This means that the person taken in his/her own interiority and subjectivity is insufficient and incomplete. The notion of person must be completed by relationships to other persons and to the community. Thus, persons find their fulfillment in community, which is integrated by political structures: political structures are the place of full realization of human beings living in a temporal process.

By moving from the concept of the individual to the analysis of the person living in a community and its political context, contemporary philosophy has developed the ontological structure of the historicity of human existence. Historicity and temporality have become the most important concepts in contemporary philosophy. Elaborated during a very long period beginning with Heraclitus, and extending through Augustine to Hegel, these concepts of temporality and historicity have thrust philosophical discourse into the flux of human existence. Philosophical reflection is no longer a strange discourse, coming after the events; it is contemporary to the events and, with its global vision, even anticipates in certain ways the general trends of the influence of culture upon civilization.

Temporality and historicity change the way of considering human beings. In this light the person is not merely an incarnate nature, nor a mere individual in and of him/herself (in se et per se), nor a mere thinker of subjectivity. The person is especially a being-in-the-world, an historic being so constituted by the movement of the culture.

The concepts of time and historicity enable one to form a better idea of history, not as a fated and cyclical process, but as the process of human creativity and liberty essential to the constitution of the person and the community. Through science and technique man sets free the forces of nature and integrates them into the global process of liberation.

This process of liberation is made difficult by many obstacles and contradictions, for the articulation of human history includes nonsense and negation. In other words, besides the impulse to create positive structures, we find the organization of destructive impulses appearing in dictatorship, economic oppression, and cultural hegemony. While the destructive impulses operate with a quantitative concept of time (here and now), the process of liberation works with a concept of temporality which involves the experience of tradition (the past), the contemporary situation (the present), and the dimension to come (the future). The creativity of freedom is not merely an idea, but especially an activity transforming and liberating human history. History is made by human work taken in a very large sense: work builds history.

Therefore, human beings, nature, culture and all kinds of technical organization make temporal existence a process of liberty. Temporal existence is a vivid totality formed by human experience of the past and human expectation and possibilities of the future, working in present conditions. The process of liberation reinterprets past human experience and projects temporal existence in the direction of new future possibilities.

TRENDS IN HISTORICAL ETHICS

The analysis of human behavior must be founded in an hermeneutic of human experience. Ethics can no longer depend upon the metaphysical concept of the nature and structure of the individual; today it must follow the process of creative and responsible freedom. Ethics is, so to speak, the eye of liberty and of the historical process; it foresees the direction of the movement of human existence.

As the light of history, ethics is not an ensemble of ethical rules, but a movement of human experience capable of bringing some light to bear upon the route of human pilgrimage. Our life is not determined, our world does not exist; we need to discover it and build it all the time. This discovery is possible through the historical experience of person and community. In fact, there is a deep analogy of human experience through the generations. This historical analogy relates human archeology, as articulation of the past, with teleology as articulation of the future or of new possibilities. Ethics is exactly a double view, both retrospective and prospective. From analyzing the experience of life retrospectively it enlightens decisions about the future possibilities of persons and community. These possibilities constitute the positive goals of history: happiness, liberty, peace, love and justice are the possibilities and goals of human beings in all cultures and ages.

When will humanity attain these goals? Is an historical moment of real peace and justice possible in the world? Intellectualist theories hold that only thinkers, especially philosophers, can attain a happiness which is had through contemplation. Religions reserve the eternal life for persons who live according to revealed principles. Contemporary philosophy developed the idea of achieving happiness and justice in the process of history. Happiness is a human possibility and human beings need to construct values in history during the process of the development of humanity. Liberty and happiness have sense only in the history of the human community.

In order to attain this goal, human beings need to develop work and all the systems and subsystems produced by science, culture, politics, and religion: all are necessary in order progressively to develop human historical existence. Cultural, technological and economic systems and subsystems should be coordinated politically, for politics is the center of decision-making by the community. Historical analogy and the contributions of science, philosophy, psychology, religion, and politics are needed to enlighten the teleological horizon of this human existence.

Man as Historical Being

Above we saw the study of ethics moving from metaphysics to historical analysis. This shifts the roots of ethics to human beings as, above all, temporal beings. Today the diverse sciences and methods, and the mutual collaboration between different systems of knowledge, help philosophy to analyze human existence as a temporal structure, ontologically finite and historically limited.

Historical ethics finds its roots in this human finitude; it depends upon the historicity of human beings. Teilhard de Chardin noted that thinking began when primordial energy attained its the "highest complexification" in human beings; with this began also history or the organization of meaning. Before human beings there existed only the blind movement of nature; the advent of thinking inaugurated a realm of liberty and indeterminism. From this moment on, things and events could be oriented in different ways according to the directions of thought. Science, culture, philosophy and religion summon nature to take part in the realm of liberty: the human mission is to construct a free world.

The evolutive process is founded in human thinking which transforms nature into the cultural world in which man lives. Human thinking also involves work in the cyclical relation or dialectic between thinking and work called praxis, which has built the sense of history. The historical process is not a triumphal procession; on the contrary, the process of liberty has many obstacles, questions, great darkness and conflicts. It can be concluded therefore that history does not have a definite route preestablished by divine powers, but is a field of liberty, constructing itself constantly through human experience.

Now and again in history there are new moments of insight. Thus, in philosophy, Kant raised new problems when he put the questions: What can we know; what should we do; what can we hope; what is a human being? Today we know that there are no answers to these questions, but that further insight is attained at certain periods. In science there is a new beginning with the theories of relativity. In religion there is a continual rethinking of the foundations in order to interpret new human situations. Philosophy, science, and religion all articulate historical experience with the aim of creating more liberty, autonomy and happiness in human community.

Knowledge is neither determined by a fatal power, nor spontaneous. Between these two extremes of determinism and relativism lies historical knowledge of the process of human existence. This is more practice than theory: it is the practice of elaborating concepts, dates and socio-political experience. Today, a variety of sciences elaborate different interpretations of being human, some of which are described below.

Metaphysical Man (Homo Metaphysics). The metaphysics of human existence elaborated by Plato and Aristotle lasted more than 2000 years. It considered man, like other beings, to be composed of matter as the chaotic or indetermined element and form as the specific element. These two elements govern and command such potentialities of the human being as instinct, sensibility and imagination, especially linked with matter. Form especially commands intelligence and will, that is, rationality, which gives human beings their capacity for thinking and deciding. This is the divine (intellectus agens) and immortal power in human beings

Ancient philosophy never managed to link rationality with sensibility. It saw human behavior as governed by rationality, while all actions which cannot be controlled by reason were excluded from the field of ethics. This division between reason and the senses continued until the advent of psychoanalysis.

Psychological Man (Homo Psychicus). Along with metaphysics there developed the idea of the spirituality of the soul and of an interior life. In the Christian era, Augustine especially cultivated this tendency, seeing the soul and human interiority as the place of encounter with God who lives in human interiority: God is closer to me than I am to myself (Deus est intimior meipso). For Augustine temporality is a dimension of our interiority. Whereas in common life and language we speak about time as past, present and future,for Augustine the soul lives in three dimensions: memory, which keeps alive the experiences of the past; expectancy, which anticipates our future projects; and situation, which is the whole of present events. Therefore, time is precisely memory, expectancy and situation as living human experience vividly present in our interiority.

The study of human interiority gained new life with experimental psychology, which elaborated a more scientific and less metaphysical approach. Psychoanalysis carried the study of human interiority still further by giving a large place to instinct as governing much of the human behavior formerly considered a field of reason. Ethics would no longer be controlled simply by reason and metaphysics; the analysis of the unconscious would take a decisive place in judging human behavior.

Economic Man (Homo Oeconomicus). In the technological era human beings, especially on the material or sense level, are considered to have a great capacity for consumption. Industrial technology and mass media, linked with political power and concentrations of wealth, constitute a powerful system which acts upon the human being. This is the era of production, building and making (homo-faber) in which the human being is urged to consume what is produced. This distracts man from his subjectivity and interiority and makes him live on the surface, as it were, in terms of the common and external occurrences of everyday life. As a result, the quality of life has diminished and people are increasingly absorbed by the structures of production, industrialization and communication. Because our civilization lives in economic and military dependence, two thirds of humanity live in the misery of hunger, disease, ignorance, and bad housing. This situation has generated such suspicion and antipathy between persons, communities and nations that our civilization has lost its confidence.

In spite of this situation, economic man (homo-oeconomicus) has attained fantastic results in the scientific field, dominating the macro-cosmos by space travel, the micro-cosmos by dividing atoms, the biocosmos by genetic exploration. Today it seems possible to "construct" "artificial man"--a surrogate to serve as the slave of economic man.

Human behavior, formerly studied primarily by metaphysics and later in terms of psychoanalytical theories, today may become a scientific field in the department of genetics as the biological code reveals more of one's future behavior.

Therefore scientific and technological progress, on the one hand, and extreme human misery, on the other, have made ethical problems a universal challenge. They are questions of living and not merely theoretical problems; they regard personal and especially community life. Particular problems must be located in the broader context of community, and solved on the basis of broader principles which involve the social context. Science, technology and industrialization all need to be defined in terms of the community. The most important point of departure for contemporary ethics is the person-living-in-community and attempting to develop, above all, structures of justice, solidarity and participation as the major bases for a new society involving all nations and cultures.

Homo-historicus

Metaphysical ethics created a solitary man searching for happiness through the contemplation of the idea of perfection. Psychological ethics explored human interiority as distinct and separated from the external world. The ethics of economic man (homo oeconomicus) produced a crisis by the extreme exteriorization of man as a consumer of products and a slave in structures of domination. In this way mankind has been falling into the slavery to its own systems.

Today philosophers, psychologists and theologians are developing an ethical structure based upon the concept of the person involving, not only the rational, but the instinctive and sensitive dimensions as well. Unconscious sexual and biological tendencies are seriously considered: one's personality is accepted as a whole. Further, because one's personality is intrinsically incomplete and finite, we must be open to others, constituting thereby the interpersonal horizon in which persons understand one another.

The most recent development in ethics involves not only interpersonal relations, but especially the world of cultural structures. Here, phenomenology helped unveil the structures of comprehension (verstehen): situatedness (befindlichkeit), openness (erschlossenheit), and truth (warheit) as human-beings-existing-with-others (mitsein). Through these structures we find temporality (zeitlichkeit) at the root of human existence. From them the human being emerges as a relational-being constituted of social relations in an historical process.

Life then is a process or movement which over the millennia has achieved the power of thought in human beings who are the result of both a natural process and historical development. Culture, science, politics, religion and philosophy were built through a dialectical relation of human thought and work. Natural determinism fell under the influence of historical indeterminism, manifested in freedom, creativity, science and technology. The human being became the conductor of history, as nature became culture; this, in turn, revealed new and hidden dimensions of nature.

Human beings can construct a just or unjust world, peace or war, liberty or slavery: nature and history can be humanized or de-humanized. In a positive sense, in building the world, human beings create liberty and transform the process into an immense movement of liberation realized by human work and thought. This process is based on a relation with nature and community, for without community there is no man, no nature, no process, no history. Community, therefore, is not the realm of impersonality, but the horizon of personalization. All this forms the idea of temporal or historical man (homo-historicus). Temporality is the radical force moving the human being and, through him/her, nature.

Historical time is evidently different from cosmological time. Cosmological or chronological time is quantitative and artificial; through it science and technology calculate the age of nature and the years of a human being. It can be an object that we buy and sell: `time is money.' In contrast, languages and discourse are founded on chronological time: we can form a sentence using three times, but it is impossible to build a sentence without time.

Historical time is a living movement of liberation and is simultaneous. For example, our studies of the past are a present exercise of our culture: personal history and the history of community permit the living exercise here and now of our past experience. We can live here and now with sentiments provoked by future events. Consequently, historical time exists simultaneously as a living experience and as the wisdom of community.

Learning from historical wisdom enables a community to prepare future events. Though difficult, especially when we want to project the future, this is possible when science, technology, philosophy and economics are shaped by a broad political vision which is inspired by the experience of the community. The wisdom of the community needs help from thinkers and scientists in finding the path of liberation.

All this forms the ethical dimension of life which, in turn, sheds light upon the community. The ethical illumines both the general behavior of society and persons and the human-life-in-community as the first value and the basis of all others. Cultural movements, technical organizations and social structures will be ethically positive to the degree that they promote the life of community. Consequently, social behavior is more important than individual behavior. We need an historical awareness which enables us to see that personal realization is radically connected to the realization of the community inspired by a concept of justice.

FOUNDATIONS OF ETHICS

We saw that the human community as involved in the historical process of liberation is the foundation of contemporary ethics. Today we cannot speak of absolute and evident foundations. Science undergoes evolution even in its foundation and principles; logic, mathematics and philosophy also evolve. Therefore, the different fields of human knowledge prefer the model of an open space or field rather than of a foundation, for all modes of knowledge are open and progress indefinitely. Hence, the image of a substantial foundation is substituted by the image of future being (advenant) as a milieu or open space in which science, mathematics, philosophy and religion organize their scientific structures, which remain always temporary.

The image of a foundation is replaced also by the image of an abyss (abgrund). Knowledge is indefinite in its directions because reality is always moving and future (advenant). Events come and disappear in the process of time: reality as elaborated by human knowledge is precisely this movement of coming and disappearing. The same is true of the movement of culture: beyond the determinism of natural law we find that the world of freedom is organized by culture. This lifts nature from its foundations and situates it in the movement toward the future.

In this sense, the phenomenological movement tries to draw ethics beyond a static foundation. Ethics is based upon the community as it comes-to-be: community, historical conscience, and temporal process inspire the conception of an historical ethics which articulates human history as a process directed toward the general goal of creating liberty and happiness, but without definite structures. Its general orientation is found in the experience of community, in the sayings of philosophers and religious persons. It does not have a definite organization, but must be invented and re-invented by community in every historical situation.

Historical ethics, however, is not a spontaneous movement; on the contrary, it depends upon a serious analysis and reflection on human experience, the human condition and human aspirations. In this reflection, persons and the community find motivations for which it is worth living or dying. These, in turn, enable people to triumph over such historical deviations as dictatorship, commercialism, sensualism and other limited vision. In this, historical ethics must be aided by sociological, political, scientific and religious studies which can enlighten the human community in its movement toward a telos that is always present but never definitely attained. That telos is happiness in the most radical sense.

Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil