Above the dogmatic ideologies and utopias that have proved illusory, there is a resurgence of ideals of/for humanity in the human spirit's urgent quest after measure and harmony of the dispersed threads of existence. Devalued in the sectarism of postmodern thought, they affirm themselves in their original freedom as the irrepressible swing of the human spirit within the all-embracing new field of the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition. Preceded by the exploration of allegory in aesthetics and the metaphysics of the ontopoiesis of life, the present collection opens with Tymieniecka proposing the `golden measure' as the ideal our present day humanity calls and strives for. Studies of the `Ascension in troubled times', `On the way', `The search for harmony', `European message', and other sections, collect papers by: G. Vajda, M.A. Cecilia, E. di Vito, A. Balan, R. Kieffer, G. Overvold, L. Kimmel, J.B. Williamson, F.P. Crawley, P. Pylkkö, N. Campi de Castro, and others. Introduced by the editor: Marlies Kronegger.