Supremacy of Societal Worlds: Determinants of Noumenal
Normativity for Civilizational Transformation
by J Michael Heynen *
I The Function of Cultures
Regardless of the countless definitions and variations of 'culture,' the most crucial function of cultures is arguably a hybrid one: a quantum-physical-metaphysical connection, both horizontally and vertically. For, independent of time and space, cultures ensure the mutual interdependence and balancing syndication of perceiving, cognitive consciousness and potential reality, of transcendence and matter, idea and "reality." In cultures, in their creative processes of will formation and interaction, "mind is enlivened, life is spiritualized." The creative will generates corresponding resonance, dynamizing anticipation and further development. Thus, human cultural activity comes closest to the universal laws of creation and facilitates the human evolutionary process. And even the more the noumenality of cultural, interdisciplinary processes legitimizes the superiority of interconnected societal worlds as determinants of freely ordering worlds.
II Cultures and Societal Worlds
The cultural creation process is always freely and individually generated, yet simultaneously an intrinsic process of civil societies. Individual initiation and societal anticipation, in the sense of synallagmatic, mutually conditioning processes, form corresponding resonances and a dialogically emerging 'common ground,' as well as the driving force behind further development. Ideally, this balancing process can also develop into a non-linear continuum, generating the free and peaceful expression of aesthetics and the normativity derived from it. Its originator, the source of norms, is always mind and imagination. And these are precisely the fundamental and identifying, vision-forming and unifying force of necessarily open societal worlds: individuals create cultures, and cultures create their societies.
III Cultures and World Orders
The causes and effects of cultures are always unlimited, their respective resonances open to shaping and expressions of human freedom of choice. The cultural creative process is always first and foremost noumenal and determines the focus of resonance, the phenomenology in the external world. The potentials of balancing reflection and anticipatory elevation enrich the inner and outer processes of the autonomous subject. This describes the constitutive essence of transnational democracies and, at the same time, the prerequisites for a world order function. For the necessarily always presupposed legitimacy of governance is part of the creative and decision-making process and further development. The human self, the free subject, is creator and facilitator: The object of world order — authentically open to inspiring, anticipating, and shaping, evolutionary, transformative, and interconnected — is in this way an equilibrating platform for humanity's transformative potentials and their coordinating representation of free developmental processes.
IV Institutionalization of Noumenal-Cultural Discourses
When government, and thus states, have become too detached from people, their social processes, and their mandate to the world of states, it is primarily up to society to readjust and redefine the world order, above all to guarantee the highest possible normativity of freedom and peace—especially as a non-static, non-linear, ongoing process, which is suitable for transcending the immanence of existig systems. Therefore the derivation as above also describes the supremacy of cultures and their social worlds; measured against this, the function of any given international states’ system cannot be to successfully manage more than minimal administration. The contemporary constitutional state is rightly secular or laicist. However, the non-religious-ideological processes of societal transcendence are the necessary and appropriate ones — independent of individual interests or "realpolitik" — to be represented, governed, and organized transpersonally. The coordination, syndication, and potential fusion of noumenally guided insights, will formations, and legitimate action processes must thus be institutionalized for a free world order. The organization of this process must ensure constant balancing within its representational systems (see above). Consequently, formal-quantitative majority evaluation alone is not decisive, but rather appropriateness in relation to universal laws of thought, as well as adequate, rational, and convincing quality in the sense of human essentiality. For humankind is the autonomous subject that primarily determines the world order of its future, within and arising from the interconnectedness of its cultural and social worlds.
V Regime Development in Cultural Societal Worlds * *
The globally evident, and in some cases acute, question of humanity's transformation likely points to the highly promising and uplifting path of cultural, and especially noumenal, development of these societies as the primary vehicle for evolutionary progress. This supremacy is based on determining and balancing cultural discourse, which can probably only be achieved in this way. This process can capture and sustain the highest possible level of coordination and governance of processes of freedom. The generation and facilitation of noumenal discourses is fundamentally neutral and transparent, open to design, and interdisciplinary. This also defines the determinants of cultural regimes. The forms of their development are likewise fundamentally open to process, as no historical parallels are discernible. At the same time, this is precisely where the challenge lies, because the societal creation of cultural regimes simultaneously constitutes the essential building governance processing of a humane world order that transformatively promotes the individual and societal emancipation and evolutionary reconnetion of human beings.
* The author is the founding president of the International Senate of Cultures (ISC) http://internationalsenate.org **
The preceding line of reasoning also forms the programmatic background of the introductory ISC organizational policy.
