Collective Rationality and Human Self-Realization
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 2 Feb 2026
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
Envisioning Our Common Human Future
27 Jan 2026 – A common human rationality is everywhere becoming apparent as internet communications put people in touch with one another and artificial intelligence opens for all a huge compendium of common human knowledge. The amazing accomplishments of authentic science have demonstrated the power of reason to accumulate objective knowledge, regardless of some “postmodern” attempts to deny what is in front of everyone’s eyes and has simultaneously transformed the world. The concept of “rationality” need not be used reductively as was done by many early-modern 17th century scientists and later by the “positivist” movement, claiming that reason must be limited to the tiny dimension of “empirical facts” and that everything else was “meaningless.”
20th century American philosopher, John Dewey, in his Political Writings (1993), argues that “collective intelligence operating in cooperative action” is the very essence of democracy. And authentic democracy involves free human beings working together in order to “through organized endeavor institute the socialized economy of material security and plenty that will release human energy for the pursuit of higher values.” The result will be, not a planned society, but a continuously “planning society” whose concrete achievements would embody “objective social intelligence.” The fundamental value of democracy, he affirms, is “equality,” an equality of all humans that extends beyond nations, races and religions, and ultimately must result in a “federation of nations” involving an “international order that outlaws war.” With Dewey, the concept of collective rationality takes a great step forward.
Indeed, reason can solve some practical “mysteries,” for example, how can a 500 ton machine be made to fly through the air? However, as Alfred North Whitehead and many others have pointed out, consideration of each finite element of the world necessarily brings in “the infinite…required by each fact to express its necessary elements beyond its own limitations” (1966, 79). Both the Earth, human beings, and the cosmos remain “mysteries” of infinite depth in the face of which authentic rationality flourishes. Nevertheless, Whitehead writes, “faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate nature of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness….To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves…. [Our power of reason] “sounds the utmost depths of reality” (1967, 18).
We need to define the higher rationality in relation to the depths and mysteries that intersect all of existence. American philosopher George Kateb, in his 2011 book, Human Dignity, writes: “Human life at any time and all through time is ultimately incomprehensible. The incomprehensibility is testimony to human stature…. Humanity is too much to be encompassed” (159). Similarly, French thinker Paul Ricoeur declares: “Our working hypothesis concerning the paradox of the finite-infinite implies that we must speak of infinite as much as finitude” (1986, 4). Because of this infinity that intersects our humanity, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas observes that human beings “contain more than is possible to contain.” Authentic reason operates within this understanding of the deeper mysteries of existence.
It is this characteristic of our human situation that leads directly to the concept of human dignity as all three of these thinkers have asserted and as I have elaborated in my 2024 book, Human Dignity and World Order. This book assembles testimony from many thinkers concerning the concept of dignity. A mature rationality recognizes this dignity. It draws on the insights and intuitions of a common rationality permeating our human condition in every culture, language, or religion worldwide. Here we come upon a dimension transcending the reductionist, relativist view that human beings do not and cannot transcend the relativity of their cultures, languages, and religions.
In the foundational philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, we find a distinction between “understanding” and higher uses of “reason.” Understanding involves the practical uses of reason within the context of the everyday world within whose assumptions we normally operate. Reason, in its higher manifestations, transcends these assumptions and opens us to cosmic dimensions not apparent to the understanding. The concept of collective rationality draws upon these distinctions as well as those of a number of “critical social” thinkers, several of whom are cited below. For example, we draw below on the distinction of Jürgen Habermas between “instrumental” forms of rationality and its higher, “communicative,” dimensions.
Although it is always necessary to take our beautiful human diversity into careful account, scientific and visionary thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin points out that the evolutionary direction on Earth has been “hominization” (The Human Phenomenon, 2015). Over some 4.6 billion years, the planetary geosphere evolved to the point of making possible the emergence of a biosphere in which planet and animal life established a layer of organic reality over the geosphere. From there, the evolutionary process gave rise to psyche, consciousness, emerging degrees of mind moving toward the emergence of “the human phenomenon.”
Humanity spread across the planet manifesting a new level of evolutionary reality over and above the biosphere, which Teilhard calls the Noosphere (the sphere of mind). Mind has today encompassed the Earth everywhere. Science itself is a collective and cooperative phenomenon. It constitutes a collective rationality. Reason inherently joins the particular and the universal, operating on the principle of unity in diversity. Humanity, therefore, has a unity that transcends its wonderful and beautiful flower garden of diversities.
Each of us may be a custodian of our personal reason governing the operation of our immediate lives, and each of us draws upon the flower garden in ways that we love and revere, but we also are immersed in an environment of common rationality, a “rationality” pointing forward to a “new heaven and a new Earth” premised on unity in diversity. Today, the world level has been colonized by instrumental forms of reason that have assumed perverse and destructive world-system implications requiring our transformative action and vison.
Collective rationality is a rich concept that cannot be entirely explored in this short paper. Nevertheless, its core consists, as Dewey pointed out, in reasoning from our common humanity and our universal human situation rather than from some partial, individual, or limited perspective. Our common rationality supersedes the false atomism that characterizes thinking from the partial perspectives of the system of sovereign nation-states or the system of private capital accumulation that today is called Neoliberalism. Reason is not simply analysis, but also the higher powers of synthetic vision and deep comprehension. As Teilhard writes: we possess “the prodigious power of thought to draw all the human particles together and combine them on one conscious effort” (2015, 204).
The transformed paradigm emerging from 20th and 21st century sciences reveals a cosmos in evolutionary upsurge bringing human beings toward a synthetic rationality. We must “think globally and act locally” indeed. But we also must think and act globally to transform a world system premised on an outmoded reductionist paradigm of fragmentation consisting of sovereign nation-states and the private accumulation of unlimited wealth. For example, philosopher Jürgen Habermas identifies the dominant forms of reason since the post-Renaissance rise of modernity as “strategic” and “instrumental.” He critiques Max Weber’s conclusion that modernity will end the the “iron cage” of late capitalism with its “loss of meaning” and “loss of freedom.” What Weber missed, hidden within the rationalization of society since the 17th century, was “communicative rationality.”
Communicative rationality transcends instrumental rationality precisely because it is collective and brings together human beings as human, as needing to engage in authentic communication in order to solve our common problems in a universal way embracing both our unity and diversity. Habermas argues that the legitimacy of democratic societies depends upon their degree of “collective will formation” in which unconstrained “dialogue directed toward mutual understanding” leads people to take into account the general interests of all rather than buckling down within a mutual conflict of particular interests. In volume two of his Theory of Communicative Action he observes that “between capitalism and democracy there is an indissoluble tension” (345).
Habermas writes: “In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property…. The logos of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers” (2003, 10-11). The fact that all human beings are language-speaking creatures, and that all languages are translatable into one another, reveals a common rationality inherent in our human condition that portends a universal world-system premised on the common human good. In the words of Teilhard, “we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself” (2015, 154). The human phenomenon embodies a growing cosmic unity of thought and action. The evolutionary upsurge of creating ever greater unities becomes manifest in us.
Capitalism is based on the private accumulation of wealth that, of course, in massive concentrations necessarily destroys democratic will formation and distorts society into an oligarchy, with distorted (manipulative) forms of communication, and ultimately, the totalitarian denial of freedom and dignity. A rational morality requires equality among persons, as Kant, observed: “every person is an end in themselves,” and can never be used “merely as a means.” The task of a hominized humanity (all persons on planet Earth) is to structure planetary institutions in such a way as to make this moral equality into a universal process of democratic will formation within a world-wide polity, that is, a global democracy.
Philosopher Michael Luntley, writes, “for capitalism to flourish, moral agency has to be replaced by economic agency, and therefore it is no good trying to put a ‘human face’ on capitalism” (1989, 47). “Economic agency” is instrumental reason in the service of private wealth acquisition and accumulation. A ‘human face’ would mean moral reasoning based on human equality and dignity, something that capitalism obliterates. Moral reasoning asks how to make possible a good life for all persons. It is universal, synthetic, and embracing of all, rather than personal and acquisitive.
Political scientists Boswell and Chase-Dunn write that “global democracy assumes a democratic and collective rationality that promotes greater equality between as well as within countries, greater international cooperation and an end to war, and a more sustainable relationship with the biosphere” (2000, 6). We begin to think as human beings rather than as ideologues of some institution for wealth accumulation or some nation-state, race, class, or religion. We think as human beings who realize that we must work together to solve our most fundamental problems of war, environmental collapse, exploitation, and inequality. These are the goals of our common rationality.
None of these problems can be effectively addressed through a sovereign nation-state system nor through globalized capitalism. That is why attempts at socialism at the national level cannot succeed as they will always be undercut both by the global capitalist system and by the aggression of rival national entities. Our common human rationality inevitably leads to thinking at the global level and therefore in terms of a constitution for the entire Earth. The present Constitution for the Federation of Earth, completed in 1991 by hundreds of world citizens working together, is a product of collective rationality at a very high level. It will be updated in another constituent assembly very soon, but meanwhile it remains the gold standard of human collective rationality to date.
Boswell and Chase-Dunn point out correctly that undemocratic socialism is not authentic socialism, and that authentic socialism does not demand state ownership of all production and property. Market socialism gives us authentic democracy along with a freedom that can be carefully balanced with the equal right to freedom for all. They also assert that “national sovereignty itself is a principle embedded in the origin and functions of the capitalist world-system” (54). Therefore, a rational and moral world system transcends both capitalism and nation-state sovereignty. This is exactly why the Earth Constitution lays out a template (for the first time) of a morally legitimate world system. It transcends national sovereignty and global capitalism through a system of global public banking in which a market socialism can flourish on behalf of the common good of the whole (of humanity and the Earth) while interfacing with the particular good of local persons and communities.
Human beings are beginning to think in terms of the evolutionary upsurge generating a “noosphere” of common human knowledge, thought, and understanding. We have been gifted by the Cosmos with temporality, that is, we move from a past that we recognize as unsatisfactory, within a dynamic present in which we compare the past with an anticipated future, and act toward that future with its “utopian horizon” (cf. Martin, 2024, Chap. 11). We can see, in other words, how things could and should be better in a fundamentally transformative manner. Boswell and Chase-Dunn point out that “the lack of a ‘utopian’ goal against which to organize criticism and, more importantly, to direct progress, has led erstwhile progressives and leftist intellectuals into the nihilism and endless relativism of postmodernism” (9).
Our utopian horizons represent a cosmic gift that allows our synthetic rationality to envision fundamental transformation of a fragmented and broken world-system in the direction of a flourishing, integrated world-structure that actualizes our common human potential. As the Earth Constitution declares in Article 13.12, the Federation must “assure each child the right to the full realization of his or her potential.” It is high time we overcame our fear of being labeled “utopian” in a negative sense.
All around the Earth our common human intelligence is in the process of merging toward an Earth consciousness, a noosphere in which the personal thought of each is mediated through the embracing rationality of all. The human phenomenon at last comes to fruition with the actualization of a world-network of unity in diversity integrating the freedom and well-being of each with the common good of all. Karl Marx called this our “species-being.”
American socialist thinker Michael Harrington writes: “Indeed, as both Ernst Bloch and Paul Ricoeur have stressed, there is a sense in which Marx’s fundamental methodology is based on a utopian vision…. Marx had to have a notion of what human beings could and should become. Men and women were alienated from that futuristic potential—that possibility of ‘human nature’—that no one has ever seen and that had never existed. It was only in terms of that radical – ‘utopian’—notion of what people could become that Marx could so clearly define their present degradation” (2011, 38).
Our reason discerns the horror of present circumstances at the same time realizing how things could and should be radically different. Here we find the insight that lends meaning to our struggle against all that degrades and dehumanizes human beings. This insight animates our struggle to participate in a collective rationality that envisions the actualization of our higher human potential for truth, love, justice, freedom, and beauty. All of these qualities are possible for a future humanity, but only if there is transformation of the present system, a system that militates against every one of these utopian predicates. This is the dignity of humanity: we contain “more than is possible to contain.” We nurture within ourselves the vision of a fulfilled rationality with its concomitant moral framework.
The Earth Constitution declares correctly that humanity is sovereign, not territorial nation-states, whose authority only legitimately derives from the whole of humanity and our collective rationality. It sets up authoritative structures of checks and balances within a holistic nexus of agencies and administrations establishing world peace and disarmament, universal human social and political rights, and comprehensive protection of our planetary environment. The world system becomes an embracing matrix for eliciting the common rationality of the citizens of Earth. It transforms those who participate in the Earth Federation government from self-interested fragments into participants in the collective will formation of the united peoples of Earth.
As humanity emerges from the age of private egoism into our new age of democratic and participatory will-formation, we discover that the process of emergence and the goal of emergence coalesce. Promotion of the Earth Constitution is simultaneously personal and collective self-transformation. The gift of our utopian horizon lends meaning and purpose to our commitments and actions. We become participants in the cosmic mind, surrounded by depths of infinity and mystery that illuminate and energize all our actions, a cosmic mind that informs the broad processes of hominization and illumination on the Earth. The age of the nation-state is ending, while the age of mankind is just beginning. This new age draws its emergent and transformative energies from our passion, our vision, and our reason.
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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu
Tags: Earth Constitution, Humanity, Philosophy, Rationality, Reason
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 2 Feb 2026.
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