Introduction

This issue marks a change in name and the beginning of a new series for our journal. For the past 10 years Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society has played a leading role in dialogue within the dialectical tradition and between that tradition and others. The terms of this dialogue were framed, in large part, by the crisis of socialism, which required a global rethinking of the fundamental philosophical principles, the social analysis, and the strategy behind dialectical politics. It was also vitally important to combat neoliberal triumphalism of the sort represented by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the era of ideological struggles was over and that all future politics would simply be about “fine tuning” the mechanisms of the global marketplace which was understood as a sort of vast, spontaneously evolved information processing system. Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society brought to these tasks two principal resources. On the one hand, we drew on our historic roots on the religious left to put forward an analysis of the crisis of socialism which stressed the inability of any atheistic doctrine to adequately ground a critique of the market order and an analysis of the current situation which stressed the importance of regrounding moral discourse in order to mount just such a critique. Many of our contributors came out of the Christian-Marxist dialogues of the 1960s and 1970s and the Christian-Marxist collaborations of the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, we assembled a group of thinkers, many of them from the former Soviet bloc, profoundly formed by recent developments in the sciences, and especially in theories of self-organization, who brought that expertise to bear on the task of rethinking dialectics and especially a dialectical understanding of the physical, biological, and social universe, while combating the neoliberal interpretation of these new sciences.

Many of these same dynamics remain in place and thinkers from these two trends will continue to be central to our work, as two of the articles in the current issue indicate. Boris Goubman argues for the enduring relevance of Social Christian thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Nicolai Berdyaev. Christian Fuchs reads the new science of self-organization as evidence of the enduring relevance of Frederick Engels much maligned Dialectics of Nature.

There can, however, be little doubt that the events of 11 September 2001 marked a shift in the tenor of world events. Francis Fukuyama has given way to Samuel Huntington as the favored ideologue of the US ruling class. The “end of history” has, apparently, been postponed to allow for a protracted “clash of civilizations.” In the light of these developments it seems vitally important to stress that the struggle against nihilism, despair, and injustice is a struggle to which many different traditions have something to contribute, and that indeed the current struggle is not so much a “clash of civilizations” as a contest between the party of civilization and a singularly rapacious sector of the ruling class which seems determined to suck the planet dry before history comes to what, if they have their way, will be a far more literal end than the likes of Francis Fukuyama ever imagined. And while there are, to be sure, secular liberals in the party of civilization, the vanguard of that party belongs to those who can adequately ground the value of human civilization in the context of a larger spiritual vision which gives it meaning.

In the light of this situation we have decided to change the name of both our journal and our organization to Seeking Wisdom, a name which, we think, draws attention to both the pivotal importance we attach to the struggle against nihilism and despair and to our conviction that no one civilization or tradition or trend or tendency or school has a monopoly on the wisdom we seek. We stand for a dialogue, not a clash of civilizations.

Specifically, in terms of the content of the journal this will mean a far greater emphasis on publishing articles which reflect the influence and perspectives of non-European and especially non-Christian wisdom traditions, and/or which are comparative in focus. My own article in this issues lays out in greater detail the reasons for this shift in focus. Our fourth article, by Florentin Smarandache and Feng Liu makes an interesting start by exploring the overlap between “neutrosophy,” a multi-valued logic which derives from dialectics and key concepts in Taoist and Buddhist thought.

We invite our readers to accompany us in this new phase of our journey.