Sublime

At the same time, communities in developing Asia have also begun to reach back into the values and practices of dialogical transcendence to salvage their worlds.

The greatest obstacles facing the elevation of sustainability to a transcendent level are the untrammeled power of capitalist consumption and the imperative felt by national populaces and their leaders to avoid sacrificing national interests at all – or perhaps, almost all, costs.

It is in this context that we will later try to grasp how older universalisms sustained their ideals, even if the reality fell far short of the rhetoric.

Ultimately, the larger populations and higher population densities of the Roman and Han empires gave them enormous advantages in scale and technological achievements but did not protect them from conquest by more sparsely settled neighbors—the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, the Turkish conquerors of the eastern Mediterranean, and the nomadic t

Nabaneeta Dev Sen, “Crisis in Civilization, and a Poet’s Alternatives: Education as One Alternative Weapon,” paper presented at Tagore’s Philosophy of Education: a conference dedicated to the memory of Amita Sen, Kolkata, India, March 29–30, 2006.

Let us turn to this local–universal tension from a somewhat different but closely related angle to put it in a wider perspective.

How might the concept of national sovereignty be influenced if foundational histories were not linear, exclusive accounts of nations, civilizations or other bounded subjects but rather dispersed, cross-referenced, circulatory and shared histories?

We will return to this recurring problem of the tensions between the local and the universal, which is not unconnected to the problem of the sacred and the rational.

It seems to me, at least as an initial step, that we should be thinking about such modes of commitment through transcendence when we consider the possibilities of a universalism that may emanate from Chinese historical culture.