in culture and expressed and sustained in society in networks of relations among individuals. Each of us will die. Each of us stands at the edge of the precipice of groundlessness. Each of us remains subject to the call of wild desire. Each of us must content himself with a particular course of life and a particular place in society, and resign himself to being denied a second chance. However, within the space defined by these unsurpassable limits, we can shape a collective order that is made in the image of our humanity, and by the standards of our concerns, rather than in the image of meaningless nature.
The supreme expression of the social creation of meaning within the meaningless void of nature is law: law understood as the institutionalized life of a people, developed from the bottom up. Through the self-regulation of society as well as from the top down, through state-made order. It is in law that a coercive division of labor becomes an intelligible and defensible plan of cooperation.
Although the struggle over the terms of social life never ceases, it can be contained. Law is the expression of this truce. However, if such an armistice is all that law were, it could be understood only as the repository of a haphazard correlation of forces between the winners and the losers in earlier contests for advantage. Law must be revised and reinterpreted as the repository of a way of organizing social life. Such a scheme will transform the generic idea of society into a series of images of association: views of how the relations among people should and could be arranged in different domains of social life. Such images of association will in turn inform the ideas used to guide the elaboration of law in context.
Our situation and our task
The second component of the humanization of the world is the view of the work to be done: our quandary, our task, and the resources available to us to execute it.
Interdependence and the imagination of others are constitutive features of our humanity. We depend on one another for everything, and remain helpless without the cooperation of others. The development of the capabilities of mankind in every realm and at every level depends on the progress of our cooperative practices and capabilities.
Our imaginative access to other people deepens the significance of interdependence. The consciousness of the individual, however, although expressed by a mind embodied in an individual organism, cannot adequately be understood as a self-sufficient entity, a natural object with a defined perimeter, a fortress from which we anxiously look out on the other citadels around us and try to discern what goes on within them.
The brain is individual. However, the mind as consciousness is from the outset social. The means by which we develop a subjective life, from language to discourse, from ideas to practice, are all a common possession and shared construction. A central paradox of consciousness is that we can be both obscure to one another (in the enigmas of intention and experience) and entirely dependent, even for our self-awareness, on practices and powers, such as language, that must exist socially to exist at all. In a world that is meaningless, except by virtue of the meaning and value that human beings create within it, only the personal is sacred, sacred in the twofold sense of the ancient Indo-European civilizations: of what has commanding value as well as of what presents the greatest danger.
No philosophical vocabulary is wholly complete and adequate as a means with which to describe the sense of this sanctity. In one vocabulary, to recognize the sanctity of personality and of interpersonal relations is to see and to treat the person—both one self and the other—as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. In another vocabulary, it is the view that personality and the interpersonal represent our closest approach to the absolute: that which has value and meaning unconditionally and without limit, and therefore resists comparison, as infinite quantities are incomparable.
This absolute, unconditional good exists, however, only as manifest in the natural incidents of human life—beginning with the facts of birth, ascent, decline, and death, and the sequence of generations—as well as in the practical organization of society. The issue central to this second part of the humanization of the world is how we are to understand and to guide the relation between the facts of interdependence, intersubjectivity, and sanctity of the personal and the building of a real social order against the background of the natural circumstances of social life. There is a danger, and there is a remedy.
The risk is that interdependence, reciprocal subjectivity, and the sacred value of personality will be overwhelmed and degraded in the course of the events by which the social order is made and sustained. The order always has an accidental and violent history. It begins in a struggle, and then in the containment of the struggle: its partial and temporary interruption. The war, interrupted in the large, may continue in the small; the peace may be the continuation of the war in veiled and hamstrung form. Each individual will assume his place and play his part according to the distribution of winners and losers in the conflicts from which the order arose. Stability will result from exhaustion, impotence, and fear. The victorious will be as anxious as the defeated are resentful.
The exercise of oppression may over time be modulated by reciprocity. Subordinates as well as superiors may begin to find advantage in the acceptance of their respective lots. Exchange and power will combine in the same relationships. However, reciprocity will always remain a supervening and accessory influence, circumscribed by arrangements and assumptions that it did not create and cannot reconstruct.
In such a circumstance, interdependence will be shaped in the mold of the grinding hierarchies of power and advantage, transmitted and reproduced from generation to generation, to which the settlement of the struggle gave rise. Our understanding of other people’s experience will take the form of a shared surrender to beliefs that lend a patina of naturalness, necessity, and authority to that settlement. Awareness of the sanctity of the personal will be suppressed, or survive only as a residual hope, clinging to the familiar and to the intimate.
It is not the interpretation of interdependence and intersubjectivity from the perspective of the sanctity of the personal that will turn the social order into something more than the temporary resolution of an ongoing conflict; it is the practical imperative of the division of labor in society. Suppose that the economy has already attained a level in the development of its productive capabilities at which vast combinations of people, put to work in specialized tasks, under stark hierarchical supervision, can yield a large surplus over present consumption. Imagine, however, that society has not yet reached the point at which we have learned how to repeat most of the initiatives needed to produce such a surplus, to express the activities susceptible to repetition in formulas, and to embody the formulas in machines so that we can devote most of our time to the actions that we do not yet know how to repeat.
Such an intermediate situation has been the circumstance of the major historical civilizations, at least until very recently. It was in particular the circumstance of the agrarian-bureaucratic empires that represented, before the last two hundred years, the most important states in the world. The world religions characteristically emerged at the periphery, rather than at the center, of such states.
This situation favored a strongly defined social division of labor: the division of society among distinct classes, estates, or castes, reproduced through the hereditary transmission of advantage, and marked by distinct forms of life and of consciousness as well as by different degrees of access to the key society-making resources of economic wealth, political power, and spiritual authority. A particular way of organizing the social division of labor, and the distinct roles to which it gave rise, reduced the possible forms of cooperation to what the triumphant institutional and ideological settlement countenanced. The characteristic Indo-European distinction between the rulers and priests, the warriors, the merchants, and the workers represented a simplified and widespread instance of such a system.
It is not that this hierarchical ordering of society into hereditary classes was in any sense necessary, given these opportunities and limitations; a much more egalitarian and flexible regime of cooperation might, and sometimes did, face the limitations and seize the opportunities
