98 humanizing the worldscheme 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 diff erent 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
Th e second component of the humanization of the world is the view of
the work to be done: our quandary, our task, and the resources avail-
able to us to execute it.
Interdependence and the imagination of others are constitutive fea-
tures of our humanity. We depend on one another for everything, and
remain helpless without the cooperation of others. Th e 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 signifi cance of
interdependence. Th e consciousness of the individual, however, although
expressed by a mind embodied in an individual organism, cannot ade-
quately be understood as a self- suffi cient entity, a natural object with a
defi ned perimeter, a fortress from which we anxiously look out on the
other citadels around us and try to discern what goes on within them.
Th e brain is individual. However, the mind as consciousness is from
the outset social. Th e means by which we develop a subjective life, from
language to discourse, from ideas to practice, are all a common posses-
sion 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 prac-
tices 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 vocabu-
lary, to recognize the sanctity of personality and of interpersonal rela-