Volume 8, Issue 11/12, 1998
Selected Contributions to the Third World Congress of Universalism, Part II
Fons Elders
Pages 121-129
Venus and Liberty
Universalism with a Name and Universalism without a Name
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. I focus on the intimate reladonship between the domain of artistic imagination and philosophical discourse: the apparent difference is due to the separation between philosophy, science, and the arts since the Enlightenment. Closer scrutiny reveals that the same content is hidden in the various vessels of our modern and postmodern time. Reason and imagination seem to have gone different roads, but I will try to show that they are inseparably interconnected.