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DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM Vol. VIII No. 11-12/1998 UNIVERSAL DIALOGUE SELECTED CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THIRD WORLD CONGRESS OF UNIVERSALISM Guest Editor: Albert A. Anderson Part Two. Charles Shepherdson — Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation Thaddeus Metz — Contributions Toward a Naturalist Theory of Life’s Meaning Ronald A. Waite — Dialectic as Ethical Askesis in Plato and Aristotle Stanley R. Carpenter — ‘The Ethics of Sustainability: What Should Be Preserved Tamayo Okamoto — Universalism vs, Particularism in Medical Ethies John F. Quinn, Joseph A. Petrick — The Integrity Capacity Construct as a Framework for Enhanced Universal Dialogue Edward Demenchonok — Philosophy in Search of an Ethics of Universal Dialogue John D. Sommer — Dialogue on Personal Identity Mihai Nadin — Universal—A Continent beyond Tradition Fons Elders — Venus and Liberty: Universalism with a Name and Universalism without a Name Pradeep A. Dhillon — Literary Form and Philosophical Argument in Premodem Texts Andrzej K. Rogalski, Urszula Wiybrantec-Skardowska — On Universal Roots in Logic Andrew Norman — Towards a Logic of Resolution-Oriented Dialogue Donald N. Blakeley — Neo-Confucianista and Universalism Young Sook Lee — Comparative Study of the Taoists and Spinoza on Three Ethical Issues Thomas P. Sullivan — On a Stumbling Block to Inter-Religious Dialogue DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM No, 112/199 Fons Elders VENUS AND LIBERTY: UNIVERSALISM WITH A NAME AND UNIVERSALISM WITHOUT A NAME. ABSTRACT The common root of the humanist and mythological traditions is the projection of a cosmological and spiritual desire, reflected in mythic archetypes such as Venus or the Statue of Liberty in the harbor of New York City, The philosophical companion of Renaissance Venus is Eros as the all-compassing force in nature, and the philosophical correlate of the Statue of Liberty is Immanuel Kant’s das Ding an sich. | focus on the intimate relationship between the domain of artistic imagination and philosophical discourse: the apparent difference is due to the sep- aration between philosophy, science, and the arts since the Enlightenment. Closer scrutiny reveals that the same content is hidden in the various vessels of our mod- ern and postmodern time. Reason and imagination seem to have gone different roads, but I will try to show that they are inseparably interconnected. PREFACE The word “universalism” refers etymologically to the notion “universe,” with the implicit question of how the concept of the universe influences our ideas of human identity and human fate. “Universalism” refers in its profound meaning not only to the universe as logos, but also to the universe as pathos, and as Gthos Universalism as Jogos—the idea of the universe as a whole—leads to the notion of various degrees of unity and dependence of the human being with regard to nature and cosmos. And the realization of the existence of such a universe leads to passion and ethos. When human Jogos, or “reason,” functions in an open- minded, free manner, it oscillates between the intuition, a faculty of direct vision, and the commitment to act upon the insights of intuition and reflective reason. In this sense, there is a striking resemblance between the notion of universalism and the Ciceronian notion of humanitas, which refers not only to the funda- mental unity of all human beings but also to the ethical task of promoting the unity of human beings. 122 Fons Elders INTRODUCTION During my research on mythic archetypes, I have posed the following question to myself: Which mythic archetypes have been playing or could play again a cru- cial role in the humanist tradition of Europe? I decided to select female arche- types, ranging from prehistoric Europe through our own times. My choice encom- passed the Triple Goddess of prehistoric Europe, Athena, Mary, Venus, the Statue of Liberty, and the Princess of Wales, Lady Diana. I was especially interested in the role of Venus and the Statue of Liberty, respectively symbolizing for me the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this essay, I will elucidate the deep dif. ference of the universalist endeavor through an analysis of these two female arche- types in our recent Western history.’ One archetype is Venus in the Renaissance and the other one is the Statue of Liberty in the Enlightenment, the era of progress. The description of both arche- types may help to clarify the profound transformation of the intuitive notion of universalism in Western humanist culture. Venus and Liberty are in my analysis the prototypes and metaphors for two kinds of universalism, for two types of cul- ture, both equally attractive but hardly reconcilable. For Venus and Liberty do rep- resent two kinds of imagination, two kinds of self-understanding, and two kinds. of understanding regarding the cosmos and human nature. The difference between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is often indi- cated as the difference between what is essentially still a magic culture (Renaissance culture) and what represents a scientific mentality and ethos, based upon a more objective ideal of reason (Enlightenment culture). Both cultures have in common that they are oriented toward the universe as an all-embracing reality. In the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola wrote his Oration (1486) on the dig- nity of the human being. The human being has been endowed by the Creator with the gift to shape him or herself according to his or her own will. The self-forma- tion of (wo)man is in its essence not different from the vocation of the artist in creating a work of art. This freedom, however, is not the existentialist freedom of Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom existence precedes essence. The freedom of Renaissance (wo)man is the freedom, that lays embedded in the correspondence between the microcosmos of the human being and the macrocosmos, being the universe. The laws of proportion, symmetry, and mathematical symbolism are the all-embracing depth structure in which nature and (wo)man are encountering each other, recognizing cach other's beauty. The epistemological framework of the Renaissance is imbued with teleological references such as Eros—thus not only with Christian references, but also with hermetic, orphic and cabbalistic ones. The outburst of natural beauty, human nakedness, and pagan wisdom in the visual arts, literature, architecture, clothing, and philosophy caused an uproar among many "An archetype is a way of perceiving and understanding, which has its roots in the collective unconscious. Carl Jung says; “The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, bom anew in the brain structure of every individual” (Carl Jung, The Portable Jung. Edited by Joseph Campbell, translated by R. F.C, Hull. New York: Viking Press, 1971, p. 45). Venus and Liberty 123 Christians, and a heavy backlash by the Protestants of the Reformation and sub- sequently by the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church. It was the newly accepted mental and emotional ascesis of the Reformation, especially its Puritanism, that changed the orientation of the European imagination of those days: “the European scientific revolution that leads to the annihilation of the Renaissance sciences is caused by religious factors which have nothing to do with the sciences themselves.” It took another few hundred years before the overall scheme of the ancient, clas- sic paradigm—the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist aim-mean(s) relationships— gave way to the cause-effect scheme of interpretation. This transformation of over- all interpretation is the change from an “active,” magic way of perceiving toward a “passive,” non-personal study of the “laws of nature.” The scientist and the engi- neer of the Enlightenment won the battle for the knowledge and control of the uni- verse from authors and artists such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Blake. The new mechanism of mind saw the bright physical light, while the ancients saw a bright living light, sometimes called the spiritual light. The uni- verse became a gigantic clockwork. Joan Couliano has ventured the bold thesis that “the transition from a society dominated by magic to a predominantly scientific society is explicable primarily by a change in the imaginary.”* The change in the imaginary since the Renaissance implies also a change in the” relationship between the conscious and the unconscious: “The relationship between the conscious and the unconscious has been deeply altered and our abil- ity to control our own processes of imagination reduced to nothing.” If we follow Couliano’s statement about an alteration of the balance between the conscious and the unconscious, we may expect that the Venus from Sandro Botticelli's Primavera and the Statue of the Goddess of Liberty on Liberty Island represent and symbolize something of this change in the imaginary. If we are able to describe some characteristic differences in these works of art, then we may hope to have grasped two worlds of universalism within the humanist tradition, My attempt to understand two types of culture and two types of universalism involves questions about the ontological and epistemological assumptions of both works of art. Specifically, what kind of space and time do these works reveal, that is, in what kind of space-time continuum are these works imagined before they begin influencing millions of people? What kind of knowledge becomes mani- fest? Put differently, how does Aristotle's distinction between /ogos (reason), pathos (passion), and thos (ethos) become visible in these works? Or, to use the distinction made by Robert Pirsig in his Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Joan P. Couliano: Bros and Magic in the Renaissance, Translated by Margaret Cook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. xx * Ibid, p. xix. “Ibid. * Robert Pirsig. Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Morrow, 1974.

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