Good Life, Good Society and the Challenges of Evolutionary Flourishing: Global Responsibility, Trans-Civilizational Dialogues and the Calling of Planetary Realizations

The _Good Life_ has been a concern of Humanity since time immemorial. In the Greek tradition, it is related to the vision and practice of _Eudaimonia_. The Good Life has been nurtured in many different cultures, religions, and philosophies of the world. In Indic traditions, _Purusartha_ (ends and excellences of life) consisting of _Dharma_ (right conduct), _Artha_ (wealth and meaning), _Kama_ (desire), and _Moksha_ (salvation) presents us visions of the Good Life. In South America, we find this in _bon vivre_ and in Bhutan in the discourse of the Gross National Happiness. In modern European traditions, especially that of Kant, there is also the challenge of the priority of right over good which thinkers such as John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and Amartya Sen in their unique and related creative and critical ways have worked with and have challenged us to work, walk and meditate with (Rawls 1971; Habermas 1996; Sen 2009). Therefore, our concern with the good life needs to address the challenges of right and good, but we need not be imprisoned in a dualism between the right and the good. At the same time, we need to bring three other engagements here--Rites, Nature, and God, understood in open ways (Divine and open Transcendence; Nature both external and inner Nature). Rite in the Confucian traditions refers to rituals of living and co-existence which is a part of the universal aspect of rituals of life, culture, and society. The rite is not just a site of the habitus of unreflective reproduction or repetition; it is a site of meditative and critical thinking. (Youngmin Kim 2018) Rituals in the Vedic and Vedantic traditions also have this dimension and challenge of meditative self-realization and co-realizations. Discussion of Rights in the Kantian traditions of Rawls, Habermas, and Amartya Sen need to engage with rites and ways of life and living which also point to the limits of traditions of social contract. As Durkheim had challenged us a long time ago to realize that all contracts have a non-contractarian dimension, Amartya Sen recently tells us that the fundamental limits of traditions of the social contract are that it does not realize the need for unconditional support for each other that needs to accompany any vision and practice of social contract (Sen 2020). Sen draws this from his journey with Buddhism, but we can find the resonance of this in many religious and philosophical traditions of the world, including in the philosophical streams nurtured by Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Our journey with good, rights, and rites need not forget God, Goddesses, and varieties of small and big Transcendence in our lives. For this, in our present-day Euro-American dominated worlds and world of European modernity (cf. Uberoi 2004), special conscious cultivation is needed as most of us may still be imprisoned in "an Enlightenment Black Box"--cut off from Nature on the one hand and Divine on the other, as Fred Dallmayr (1998) challenges us to realize. Our journey with Good Lives needs to now make Enlightenment Bridges with Nature and the Divine. Nurturing a good life therefore needs simultaneous engagement with Good, Rights, Rites, Divine / Transcendence, and Nature.