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 DialogueDIALOGUE 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.