The historicity of values is manifested in our time in the liberation movement of peoples, notably in Third World countries. Theologians have not lagged behind in reflection upon this movement, finding justification in biblical sources, from the Old Testament to the letters of St. Paul. The Christian churches have even gone as far as leading the movement itself. Philosophers, however, are just beginning to be explicit and emphatic in their reflection on this historical experience. But if the concept of freedom is the key to understanding the historicity of values, then the liberation movement cannot escape the philosopher's scrutiny.
Two pitfalls are to be avoided in a philosophical reflection on liberation. One simply equates liberation with violent revolution, with overthrowing a regime, usually unjust, by force. The historical examples of recent times attest that it is not always the case that a revolution liberates a people; rather, in many cases, it leads to further and worse oppression of a great majority of people. Besides, as Merleau-Ponty says, "before being thought (a revolution) is lived through as an obsessive presence, as possibility, enigma and myth."1 The other pitfall treats liberation in the abstract, as devoid and withdrawn from the complexity and dynamism of the historical situation, by limiting it to either the economic or the political or even to the religious dimension of the situation. But, liberation, after all, "is a historical, not a mental act," says Marx.2 If our reflection is to be truly philosophical and moral, it must take into consideration the totality of the historical situation and focus upon society as a moral agent, a collective or social person.
Our main task is to capture the movement of freedom as found in people, taken as moral agents, and to make explicit the values involved in this movement. This must be done without specifying in a deterministic sense the path and terminus of this movement, for that would be contradictory to the notion of freedom. Our presupposition here is that society is not simply a conglomeration of individuals such that a dichotomy and then conflict arises between the individual and the common good--though this constitutes a moral problem itself--but that it is constituted by persons who can act freely and responsibly. The person constitutes society just as he or she is constituted by society (as the Confucianists are known to view man). Every finite person is as much a collective or social person as an individual person. In the words of Max Scheler,
not only does everyone discover himself against a background of, and at the same time as a `member' of, a totality of interconnections of experience which have somehow become concentrated, and which are called in their temporal extension history, in their simultaneous extension social unity; but as a moral subject in this whole, everyone is also given as a `person acting with others,' as a `man with others' and as `co-responsible' for everything morally relevant in this totality. We must delegate as collective persons the various centers of experiencing (Er-lebens) in this endless totality of living with one another.3
This paper then is divided into three parts. First, we will examine the notion and movement of freedom on the level of the individual person. Second, we will apply this movement on the societal level. Third, we will explicitate the values and their interconnections found on those two levels.
THE NOTION OF FREEDOM
Soren Kierkegaard paved the way for a new understanding of the reality of freedom as reconcilable with determination4 by pointing out that the opposite of freedom is not determinism, but indifference and lack of commitment. But what is the relation of freedom as commitment to the person?
Existential and phenomenological writings abound with descriptions and discussions on the person.5 Gabriel Marcel contrasts the person with the ego.6 The ego is characterized by self-enclosure, by an attitude of having in its relationship with things, ideas, persons and God. The person, on the other hand, is characterized by disponibilité, by an attitude of being, a participation in things, ideas, persons and God. Having divides, whereas being unifies. Along the same vein, Max Scheler describes the person as a center and unity of diverse acts; he contrasts this to functions which happen, but are not actuated.7 Freedom is the act by means of which the individual passes from having to being. More than having freedom, we are called to being or becoming free, as persons integrated and whole. Freedom as a fact, as something we as human beings have, points to freedom as a value that we intend. Freedom is not an end in itself,8 but as an intentionality points to values of the person.
Thus, just as Scheler distinguishes values from goods, we can differentiate two kinds of freedom: free choices or horizontal freedom, and the fundamental option or vertical freedom. In the Schelerian sense, "values are qualities experienced in things, but they are not identical, with them."9 They are given first of all in feeling; strictly speaking, we do not think of values, we feel them.10 Goods, on the other hand, are carriers or bearers of values and are subject to change. Values as qualities do not change. The color-quality blue is still blue, even if I decide to paint the blue board with red. Friendship as a value remains a value, even if I cease to be a faithful friend to another or become his enemy. This objectivity of values, especially the higher ones, explains why the failure to realize a higher value results in the degradation of the person, rather than of the value itself. (In Plato, "it is worse to do injustice than to suffer injustice.")
When we speak of free choice, we refer to goods. We choose to actualize certain possibilities because we see a value in them or because they carry a certain worth for us. But in choosing horizontally, we prefer vertically one value over another. For example, if I choose to use the remaining three hundred dollars in my possession to buy a colored television set instead of allocating this for the food of my children, I am preferring the value of the pleasant over the values of the vital and of love. Generally speaking, in relation to the task of becoming moral persons, there can be only two fundamental options open to a person: that of love (in Scheler's philosophy, the movement towards higher values) and that of egoism or hatred (the movement towards lower values).
Both forms of freedom necessitate a dialectic with the historical situation or with nature. Again, the presence of human freedom is not the absence of determinism, but active involvement in a situation and commitment to a project. To quote Merleau-Ponty in his classic critique of Sartrean freedom:
What then is freedom? To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted but never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both at once. There is, therefore, never determinism and absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness. In fact, even our own pieces of initiative, even the situations which we have chosen, bear us on, once they have been entered upon by virtue of a state rather than an act. The generality of the `role' and the situation comes to the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the `share contributed by the situation' and the `share contributed by freedom'.11
The dialectic of freedom and the situation leads us to see the positive side of freedom, namely responsibility. In the Eastern tradition, freedom is never talked about so much as is responsibility, rights never so much emphasized as is obligation. But to talk of response-ability, to be response-able, is to take up a certain project in time, a presence to what is. This is at once a consciousness of what was or has been and what is possible or coming-to be.
It is by being unrestrictedly and unreservedly what I am at present that I have a chance of moving forward; it is by living my time that I am able to understand other times, by plunging into the present and the world, by taking on deliberately what I am fortuitously, by willing what I will and doing what I do, that I can go further . . . so freedom flounders in the contradictions of commitment, and fails to realize that, without the roots which it thrusts into the world, it would not be freedom at all.12
Project then opens up possibilities in the world by the very commitment which binds it. "As long as I do not project anything, I do not chart possibilities within the actual," Paul Ricoeur would say.13
The art of taking up a project is at once a determination both of myself and of the situation. In being committed, I bind myself to a future appearance: "I objectify myself in a way, as I objectify myself in a signature which I will be able to recognize as mine."14 The world is no longer a brute fact, the paper no longer a blank sheet, but contains my gesture. There is no way for me to affirm myself, no way for me to wake up from anonymity except through my acts.15 The person exists in and through his diverse acts, although he can never be completely identified with any one of them.
Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of situated freedom has often been characterized as a philosophy of ambiguity, for it is impossible to delineate precisely the contribution of freedom in a project from that of the situation. In the end, "what is required is silence, for only the hero lives out his relation to men and the world."16 Nevertheless, he sees the task of philosophy as none "other than to teach us once more to see them clearly."17
It is Paul Ricoeur who picks up this task of tracing the movement of freedom, the dialectic of freedom and the situation which he terms as "nature." He sees the dialectic of freedom and nature as twofold: first, as a negation of nature and second, as a re-affirmation of nature. In each there exist three movements.18
1. As a negation of nature, freedom affirms itself first as a threefold conquest of nature by means of tools, language, and institution. To protect oneself with the basic necessities of life, the person interacts with fellowmen and physical nature, establishes institutions, produces tools, creates the arts. Society is thus as much a product of the person as the person is a product of society.19
The second movement is the mathematization of the real constructed by man through experimentation, science and technology. With the formulation of the principle of inertia, the person is able to establish interconnections of things and effect a causality that is the anti-thesis of natural causality. The technological world in effect is an "abstract" world created by the person to control and harness the forces of nature.
The two movements lead to the third, the negation of human nature itself. The domination of physical nature further carries an attempt to negate the nature of human beings conceived as essences, the sedimentation of the self in temporality, with the result that the Cogito is an abyss in the world of things. The classic Sartrean assertion "man is nothing but what he makes himself to be" is testimony of this movement.
2. But freedom, on secondary reflection, is also a reaffirmation of nature, and again in three movements: Nature is affirmed first of all in action, when the subject affirms his or her own existence by bringing out the possibilities of the body in a concrete project. One cannot act without nature for nature, as Marx would say, is in a way the subject's body. In the second movement, freedom takes on the character of desire, motivation, spontaneous will. Freedom becomes a "way of life"--not an isolated act, but the power to act with consistency. This entails maintaining a relation with nature which is not exhausted in fleeting moments of passions, but a stable persistence of character, a "habitus," virtue, or character, so to speak.
Finally, nature is affirmed in the third movement of freedom as objectification of freedom in the spheres of economics, politics and culture. The "works" of freedom are the products of human activity, the condensation of my ability to work, to relate, and to express myself. Two histories can be detected in any cultural object: the ascending genesis of libido and the descending genesis of freedom. Indeed, nature or situation is the other of freedom; more fundamentally, nature is the mediation of freedom.
What is noteworthy in the above summary of Ricoeur's description of the movement and dialectic of freedom and nature is its historical and social character. Keeping in mind the two directions of freedom, horizontal and vertical, let us follow this movement of liberation in its societal dimension.
LIBERATION OF PEOPLES
On the societal dimension, the movement of freedom is the liberation of people from something and for/to something. In other words, the negative and positive aspects of liberation correspond to the negation and re-affirmation of nature. This dialectic of freedom and nature in the social dimension expresses itself historically in the search for cultural or national identity by a people, often unarticulated but manifested in the different tensions of the social fabric. In a sense we can refer to these social tensions as diverse "acts" taken in the general sense of the social person, and the search for cultural or national identity as the development of a people--their "becoming" a social person.
Jurgen Habermas has provided us with a conceptualization of these tensions in society through his categories of the three "human interests."20 Although these interests are cognitive for Habermas, considered from the perspective of the different kinds of inquiry (empirical-analytic sciences, historical-hermeneutic sciences, and critically oriented sciences), they have their basis in the natural history of man, and in the socio-cultural evolution of the human species.21 The three interests correspond to the means of social organization: work, language, and power; to Ricoeur's threefold conquest by man: tool, language, and institution; and to the "works" or objectification of freedom in economics, culture, and politics. In a note of warning to hermeneutic philosophy, Ricoeur himself reminds us always to keep in mind this trilogy of work-language-power.22
1. Technical interest refers to the drive in the person for instrumental action to master and control nature. The human being learns to acquire and exercise this purposive-rational control of the conditions of existence leading to a "fixation of beliefs" and the establishment of a habit. The aim of empirical-analytic inquiry in this regard is the production of technically exploitable knowledge that discloses reality as technically controllable. This is the sphere of labor relations in society that Marx attempted to analyze and comprehend.23 The failure of Marx, however, lies in regarding the development of the human species as taking place solely in the dimension of social labor in the relations of production, and eliminating theoretically and practically the second interest.
2. The practical interest of the social person refers to his or her symbolic interaction in cultural tradition(s). While technical interest is born from the necessity of the person to work in order to survive in a material world, practical interest answers an equally important need to relate intersubjectively in ordinary language communication. The scientific inquiry involved into this interest is called hermeneutics.24 It is worth quoting Habermas himself in describing this interest:
In its very structure hermeneutic understanding is designed to guarantee, within cultural traditions, the possible action-orienting self-understanding of individuals and groups as well as reciprocal understanding between different individuals and groups. It makes possible the form of unconstrained consensus and the type of open intersubjectivity on which communicative action depends. It bans the danger of communication breakdown in both dimensions: the vertical one of one's own individual life history and of the collective tradition to which one belongs, and the horizontal one of mediating between the traditions of different individuals, groups and cultures. When these communication flows break off and the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding is either rigidified or falls apart, a condition of survival is disturbed, one that is as elementary as the complementary condition of the success of instrumental action: namely the possibility of unconstrained agreement and non-violent recognition. Because this is the presupposition of practice, we call the knowledge-constitutive interest of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) `practical'.25
Note that intersubjectivity is embodied in ordinary language, in what Dilthy calls "life expressions," namely linguistic expressions, actions, and non-verbal experiential expressions like gestures, glances, interactions and the like. All three are integrated and interpret one another in a given culture.26 This is similar to Merleau-Ponty's key insight into language as being, not a clothing of ideas but embodied thought or thinking, or culture itself.27 The task of hermeneutics is to interpret language and disclose reality for the sake of mutual understanding and recognition, but always against the background of the cultural world.
Technical control and communicative interest, however, are not enough. The socio-cultural world has a tendency to contain invariant regularities and to express "ideologically frozen relations of dependence."28 Technology and science can become ideological in the sense of dominating the entire sphere of social relations.29 This calls for the third interest.
3. The emancipatory interest criticizes the ideological tendencies of the first two interests. The task of the critical sciences is to unmask the forces of domination, dogmatism, and repression lying behind the reproduction of labor and the institutionally secured forms of general and public communication. Emancipatory interest seeks to break the barriers to open communication between social groups and persons, raising their self-consciousness "to the point where it has attained the level of critique and freed itself from all ideological delusions."30 Both technical and practical interests are brought to the fore of self-reflection, and subjected "to the criterion of what a society intends for itself as the good life."31 The technical interest of self-preservation cannot be segregated from the cultural conditions of human life: social persons must first interpret what they consider as life. And these symbolic interpretations must likewise be subjected for evaluation to ideas of the good life. This entails an open communication, for the notion of the ideal is not a fixed essence or pure and unconditioned convention, but depends on symbolic interaction and material exchange with nature.32 Emancipatory interest thus is of the order of anticipation, of hope and of an eschatology.33
It would be a mistake, therefore, to isolate these three interests one from another, or even to envisage a simplistically strict one-to-one correspondence of each of them with work, language, and power. The process of liberation is precisely the tension and interpenetration of all three; freedom cuts across these three spheres of human and social existence.
How then are we to describe the movement of social liberation in these three spheres? Since the movement of liberation contains both negative (liberation from) and positive (liberation for/to) aspects, I propose here to cite the negative, without claiming to be exhaustive,34 rather than the positive. The last section of this paper, societal values, will serve as the positive dimension of the process of liberation.
1. It is to the young Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that we credit recognition of the importance of work for the liberation of person. Work is the humanization of the person and of nature; it is that whereby the person becomes more human and nature is humanized or brought under the control of the person. Insofar as person is body one needs to work in order to survive, but as embodied subjectivity one expresses and communicates oneself through labor; in this sense, work is also culture revealing the worker. To be deprived of work then is to be deprived not only of the means to survive, but also of a means of self-expression.
In the social dimension, the process of liberation involves, first of all, an economic liberation from the material deprivation of hunger, poverty and disease. More often than not these are tied up with unemployment, the lack of opportunities for work, and an unjust economic system of distribution in whatever form, whether capitalism or socialism. Social disparity can, of course, be extended beyond the national level to international relationships where economic dependence and manipulation become the rules of the game. The truth of the Marxist critique of capitalism is based upon the insight that freedom is not without responsibility, that it is not the same as licentiousness, and that in the concrete the laissez-faire system does not necessarily bring about a more equal distribution of goods and opportunities. On the other hand, while in theory socialism promises a common basic security, in practice it equates equality with having rather than being, and the freedom of the person is supplanted by the "freedom" of the state. Be that as it may, both systems give credence to the intertwining of wealth and power, and to the fact that economic liberation is not all of liberation.
Technology as the "scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes"35 may indeed satisfy the material needs of society, but it can also give rise to what Marcel calls "technocracy." Means can become ends in themselves; and the social person can be reduced to an efficient mechanical tool, if not a number or stage of production. Relationships cease to be interpersonal and become functional; one is identified and objectified by that for which he or she functions. In highly technologically advanced countries work becomes monotony and depersonalizes man. The individual person is subjected to the enormous apparatus of production and distribution and deprived of free time. This repression of the person can disappear from the consciousness of the populace by a kind of legitimation of domination--the "constantly increasing production of nature which keeps individuals . . . living in increasing comfort."36 Thus, the domination of nature by technology can lead to the domination of man by man.
2. Technical control has to be subjected to social emancipation, for technical control of physical and social conditions for preserving life and making it less burdensome does not lead automatically to social emancipation.37 In this sphere, liberation is cultural liberation: Particularly today, it is from a neo-colonialism that is more subtle than the previous territorially expansive colonialism for neo-colonialism takes the form of technology which "provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture."38
The social person must come to an interpretation or re-interpretation of his/her culture in the face of modernization and the imposition of a dominant culture. One must first liberate oneself from being subjected to, and absorbed in a foreign culture if one is to dialogue with it. This "coming to terms" first with oneself entails what Martin Heidegger calls a "creative repetition." Creative repetition is a sort of digging into one's past or tradition, not for superficial externalization, but for inner symbolic meanings and values in the light of present and future possibilities. Language plays a crucial role in this movement of freedom because language recuperates the meaning of the past, carries it forward to the present in act of communication and throws open the possibilities of the future--all in the unity of a mode of thinking, acting, and interacting. The word can compensate for the enslavement of the work.39
But words too can be a source of misunderstanding in the sense that they can take the place of action and experience. "Language is only the locus for the articulation of an experience which supports it, . . . everything, consequently, does not arrive in language, but only comes to language."40 True, culture is the objectification of the will of our predecessors, but to interpret it from the finitude of the present in order merely to understand it but not critique it, is to remain in the nostalgia of the past. This can lead to a romanticism and, in the extreme, to an ultranationalism of a violent kind. The values unearthed from a tradition may be claimed by an authority in order to bind a people against another class or in order to legitimize itself in power. The problem of legitimation links itself naturally to a different kind of social disparity from that of the economic gap of the rich and the poor, namely the disparity between authority and citizenry, or between the intellectual elite and the masses.
3. The movement of social liberation this reaches its peak in the dimension of power; indeed freedom has always been associated with inner capacity. (Note the Kantian formula for the derivation of the postulate of freedom: "I ought, therefore I can.") In this sphere of emancipation, society must be on guard against despotism, the abuse of power, whether of the technical or the cultural type, or both. What this calls for is a critique of ideologies and, with regard to the re-interpretation of one's culture, an act of distantiation that leads to self-criticism with a view to open communication. Self-consciousness and self-reflection which constitute self-criticism are particularly necessary in order to liberate oneself from excessive manipulation by the media and/or a regime that wishes to perpetuate itself. In many developing countries, the masses are depoliticized so that power can maintain itself and prevent the people from exercising their freedom of self-determination. The despot, of course, wants to give a semblance of rationality by means of technical/economic progress and holding elections that are only appellative in character, if not downright rigged and dishonest. Where these means fail, militarization is utilized to keep the social groups from asserting themselves.
How is one to liberate oneself from the destructive use of violence? The movement of liberation in this sphere necessarily involves the complex problem of the use of violence for the sake of freedom. The question does not have a simple, ready-made answer. What has to be kept in mind is the many forms that violence can take in the human realm and the overwhelming structure of resistance it sets against freedom. In its explicit manifestation, it is murder and war, the will to inflict harm on the other, imperialism and racism. In more subtle forms, it is manipulative persuasion, flattery, blackmail, fraud, monopoly of information and discussion, and even simply the inaction of apathy. But,
what unifies the problem of violence is not the fact that its multiple expressions derive from one or another form that is held to be fundamental, but rather that it is language that is its opposite. It is for a being who speaks, who in speaking pursues meaning, who has already entered the discussion, and who knows something about rationality that violence is or becomes a problem. Thus violence has its meaning in its other: language. And the same is true reciprocally. Speech, discussion, and rationality also draw their unity of meaning from the fact that they are an attempt to reduce violence. A violence that speaks is already a violence trying to be right: it is a violence that places itself in the orbit of reason and that already is beginning to negate itself as violence.41 [Italics mine.]
The solution to violence then is meaningful discourse, which is non-violent. Violence is justified only when all recourse to meaning is exhausted and when the taking up of violence is itself meaningful. The state, after all, in the Hegelian sense is the overcoming of private violence by subordinating it to the rule of law, the common will, or universal reason. "Politics exists because the city exists,"42 the place of discourse. Meaningful discourse is the opposite of violence because meaningful discourse respects the other's freedom. The non-violent man's openness to dialogue is not a surrender to his freedom, but rather an overcoming of a private violence. Against the violence of the other his non-violence serves as testimony of an inner strength, of an inner freedom.
SOCIETAL VALUES
We must now return to our previous distinction between horizontal and vertical freedom. In the dialectical movement of freedom through the interpenetrating spheres of work, language, and power, vertical freedom makes manifest the values that adhere to the historical situation; these are justice, truth, and love or care. Each of these belongs to all three of the spheres of liberation we discussed in the last section, but in an interpenetrating manner.
1. Justice is often said to be the overriding value of the social order. Too often, however, it has been mistakenly identified with the legal order. Debate over economic systems betrays a misconception of justice as identified with equity or with an isolated just demand.43
What is legal obviously is not necessarily or always what is just. We revise laws and make constitutional amendments precisely to meet the demand of justice, but legalism can be a great source of injustice. The identification of justice with a chart of punishments of some sort raises the question, how just are our laws and the authority that imposes them? In many developing countries the demand for justice is overwhelming in the face of massive arrests of persons without charges, in the savaging or massacre of persons suspected of subversion, in the hamleting of communities away from their land--all in the name of law and order. Clearly, justice has to do with respect for the rights of persons.
Nor can justice be equated with equity or equal distribution of goods. The mother dividing the cake into equal pieces among her children is a classic example of justice misconceived as equity. What if one of her children due to hunger and malnourishment needs a bigger slice? Could it not be the case that dividing the cake into equal parts betrays her fear or playing safe, rather than a genuine spirit of concern? In the social realm, would the socialist system of equal distribution of basic necessities at the expense of individual initiative be, as it claims, more just than the capitalistic system? Would the welfare system in a society meet the demand of justice? On the international level, is it just for a highly developed nation to give economic aid to a developing country in the interest of getting cheap labor and raw materials, or of dumping junk surplus products on their market? These questions among others point to another essential quality of justice--genuine justice is inspired by non-partisan interests.
Nor can justice be equated with the satisfaction of an isolated just demand. To give in to the demand of workers striking for a higher wage in the long run may lead to a greater injustice such as massive lay-offs, higher prices of commodities or foreclosure of the firm. Justice to be genuine cannot remain abstract, but must take into consideration the total existential situation--the concrete relationship of a person with other persons. The relationship of person and physical nature becomes an issue of justice only in the light of this inter-human relationship.
The value of justice, thus, has three features: respect for the rights of the human other, non-partisanship, and consideration of the total existential situation.
2. Truth as value is not simply the equation of judgment with reality, but truth for which one is willing to live and die. What does it mean to live and die for the truth? Marcel offers us an enlightening description.
To live according to truth means not to live according to one's moods. How so? Moods are variable, even for the individual who lives his whole life according to them. But when we use the word `truth,' no matter how we define it, it always refers to something that shows consistency and absolute stability. In any case, living according to truth means bringing oneself into agreement--but not only with oneself (as this would perhaps mean only a formal coherence). No, it means bringing ourselves into agreement with a demand which has to express itself in us and cannot be stifled. While experience shows that we can stifle it if we want to, it nonetheless resides in the very nature of this demand that it should be clarified. This does not necessarily mean that the demand must press forward into consciousness in entire universal character. Most probably it will only take shape when a particular situation demands it, or when an action is required, regardless of the personal risk involved.44
Marcel gives as an example the taking of an oath or the act of freely coming out into the open to testify to something that one has seen, at the risk of death or torture or of harm to one's family.
Truth is not the same as opinion. In opinion, I do not stake my being; but in truth I participate in the act of understanding. This presupposes that truth is always against a certain background or horizon, perhaps aptly conveyed in the metaphor of light. No one has the monopoly of truth, just as no one possesses light. There is always an intersubjective quality of truth that is irreducible to the quantification of Gallup polls and the counting of heads. The search for truth is a communal search, a "fusion of horizons." But it will always remain a search, for truth is aletheia, according to Heidegger, and therefore includes a mixture of darkness, and perhaps of pain. Still, truth as value liberates: "the truth shall make you free."
3. Love as value is care, in the Heideggerian sense, under the aspect of solicitude. As dasein or man is a being-with (mit-sein), caring by no means involves only incidental acts of kindness towards one's neighbor. Caring is being-ahead-of-itself, while being-already-in-the-world and being-alongside-entities-which-we-encounter. To care is to be continually creatively responsible for the other in time. (In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan did not stop at picking up the victim; he deposited money at the inn and promised to pay for any extra charges.)
One of the paradoxes of love and caring is its quality of being both singular and universal. One never loves humanity in the abstract; one loves concrete individuals in their particularity, and this means giving them the freedom to become themselves. Yet, in willing the free self-determination of the other, one affirms a basic humanity, a common brotherhood (and sisterhood) of mankind. Authentic concern for the other takes cognizance of the uniqueness of the other (whether individual or social) and of his or her own pace and rhythm of growth, which it respects and supports. Love, as Scheler constantly emphasizes, is a movement towards the higher possibilities of a value.
In the language of power, genuine authority flows from an active concern for the total welfare of the community, otherwise authority becomes despotism and obedience becomes servitude. As the abuse of power hides a failure and refusal to take into account the value of the other human person, it is not difficult to see why violence is problematic for the person who is aware of the value of love. Violence may be justifiable at times as an ethics of conviction, but it has to be balanced by an ethics of responsibility.45
The notion of responsibility is the key to the link between love and justice--two seemingly contrasting values--and consequently between justice and truth. The cold hand of justice and the warm heart of love can be expressed in the categories of the socius and the neighbor.46 The socius is the servant of the institution; the neighbor is the person encountered inter-personally. Justice ought to govern our functional relationships, mediated through structures; love spontaneously colors our direct immediate relationships. But justice is genuine only if it is inspired by a non-partisan interest, if it is a beginning love conceived as responsibility. For there can be as much love "hidden in the humble abstract services performed by post office and social security officials" as between friends and intimate persons; the "ultimate meaning of institutions is the service which they render to persons."47 Inversely, love can easily become false charity if the service rendered does not answer to the real demand of justice, or is made an alibi for a lack of justice. Justice is the minimum of love, and love the maximum of justice. The minimum demanded in justice is the basic dignity of the human person which love enhances. Justice and love then have a common root in responsibility.48
The dignity of the human person in turn provides the link of justice to truth.49 Justice and truth (and love) are grounded on the value of the human person as sacred and inviolable. Truth as a value is a call to bear witness to some light, a vocation to shed light on what is revealed. Insofar as man as man is given the word, he shares in the sacredness of this revelation and the response-ability to bear witness to it. To refuse to testify is to do injustice not only to others in the community, but also, and worse, to oneself.
What is the ultimate source of this sacredness of the person or the ultimate foundation of the community of persons? Scheler's hierarchy of values offers us a possible answer in the realm of religion. Because a higher value has the characteristic of founding other values, the highest value is the value of the holy because it founds the other values of the sensory, the vital, and the spiritual. If the value of the holy indeed supports the other values, then the Transcendent is immanent in the human values of justice, truth and love, and historically, in the movement of liberation.50 "The dualistic spiritualities of evasion ought to die."51 Absolute Value can no longer be thought of apart from the dynamism of man's freedom in history; the Transcendent stands at the crossroad of the incarnational and the eschatological. This is the Person who can ultimately and deeply unite all our divergent commitments, give meaning to our actions, and value to our individual and social persons.52 The movement of liberation rests on this call to bear witness to the Transcendent. Justice, truth, and love are inseparable from faith.
A word must be said on the nexus of the values mentioned above; these values find their "home" in the family. The family is not just the means for the biological perpetuation of the human species, but the seat of the creative transmission of values in culture. The network of relationships in the family reflects in miniature the interrelationships of work, language, and power in society at large. There is wisdom to the words of the ancient Confucian text found in The Great Learning: "If you want peace in the world, you must first have peace in the state; if you want peace in the state, you must have peace in the family."53 In the same tradition, Confucius says, "The root of jen (or love) is filial piety and brotherly respect."54 Filial piety is the unity of man and man in time, and brotherly and sisterly respect is the unity of man and man in space. As a micro-society and micro-history, we cannot treat the family merely on an animal level as a shelter for our basic necessities. Neither can we deal with it simply in a formal sense as a rational contractual agreement which can be rescinded whenever conditions become unfavorable.55 It is in the family as home that "I am"-- "I become myself" through "I am with." The societal values of truth, justice, love and faith take root and develop in freedom and responsibility.
We have traced the movement of liberation of the person--in particular, the social person--and the values incarnate in this movement, but by no means have we exhausted the topic. Perhaps, the important lessons in our sketch are the dialectic of freedom and nature in the different but interrelated dimensions of man, and the historicity of values in this movement of freedom. Concretely, the appeal of freedom is the call to participate in something or someone other and greater than ourselves: only then can we claim to be on the way to freedom.
Ateneo de Manila
Manila, The Philippines
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 446.
2. Karl Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 56.
3. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 520.
4. Cf. John D. Caputo, "A Phenomenology of Moral Sensibility: Moral Emotion," in R. Ellrod, G. McLean, et al., eds., Act and Agent: Philosophical Foundations of Moral Education (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research on Values and Philosophy and University Press of America, l986), pp. 199-222.
5. Cf. George F. McLean, "The Person Moral Growth and Character Development," in Act and Agent, pp. 361-398.
6. Gabriel Marcel, "The Ego and Its Relation to Others," Homo Viator (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), pp. 13-28.
7. Max Scheler, op. cit., pp. 29, 62, 77, 85, 288, 370f., 379-86, 390, 430f., 477f., 482, 507, 537.
8. Cf. Frederick E. Ellrod, "Freedom and Moral Choice," in Act and Agent, pp. 117-140.
9. Alfons Deeken, Process and Permanence in Ethics: Max Scheler's Moral Philosophy (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), pp. 14f. (Italics mine.)
10. Max Scheler, op. cit., p. 35.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p. 453.
12. Ibid., pp. 455-456.
13. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1966); also in William L. Kelly and Andrew Tallon, Readings in Philosophy of Man (McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 291.
l4. Ibid., p. 288.
15. Ibid., p. 287.
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p. 456.
17. Ibid.
18. Paul Ricoeur, "Nature and Freedom," Political and Social Essays (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 23-45.
19. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966).
20. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
21. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press, 1978), p. 59.
22. Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Culture," Political and Social Essays, p. 262.
23. Thomas McCarthy, op. cit., pp. 60-64.
24. Ibid., p. 68-69.
25. Jurgen Habermas, op. cit., p. 176, quoted by Thomas McCarthy, op. cit., p. 69.
26. Thomas McCarthy, op. cit. pp. 71-77.
27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 134-139.
28. Thomas McCarthy, op. cit., p. 75.
29. Jurgen Habermas, "Science and Technology as Ideology," Towards a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 85ff.
30. Thomas McCarthy, op. cit., p. 88.
31. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 313.
32. Thomas McCarthy, op. cit., pp. 90-91.
33. Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Culture," Political and Social Essays, p. 257.
34. Cf. chapter VI above.
35. Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society, p. 57.
36. Ibid., p. 83.
37. Ibid., p. 58.
38. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), quoted by Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society, p. 84.
39. Paul Ricoeur, "Work and the Word," History and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 197ff.
40. Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Culture," Political and Social Essays, p. 262.
41. Paul Ricoeur, "Violence and Language," Political and Social Essays, p. 89.
42. Ibid., p. 93.
43. Gabriel Marcel, "In Search of Truth and Justice," in Searchings (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1967), pp. 3-15.
44. Ibid., p. 16.
45. Paul Ricoeur, "The Task of the Political Educator," Political and Social Essays, pp. 287-289.
46. Paul Ricoeur, "The Socius and the Neighbor," History and Truth, pp. 89-109.
47. Ibid., p. 109.
48. Robert Johann, "Love and Justice," in Richard T. de George (ed.), Ethics and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).
49. Gabriel Marcel, op. cit., pp. 15ff.
50. Cf. chapter V above.
51. Paul Ricoeur, "The Task of the Political Educator," Political and Social Essays, p. 292.
52. Robert Johann, The Pragmatic Meaning of God (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1966).
53. The Great Learning, chapter IV (free translation).
54. Analects, l:2.
55. Gabriel Marcel, "The Mystery of the Family," Homo Viator, pp. 68-98.