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The “backbone” of intercultural dialogue

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Philosophy and Religion

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

Marietta Stepanyants

Every act of understanding, as the necessary condition of its possibility, presupposes in the individual an analogue of what is to be later understood. In other words, understanding is impossible without having at least something in common. Starting a dialogue, it is not realistic to aim at the uniformity in understanding the meaning of human existence and the norms of human behaviour. In the meantime it is imperative to exert efforts in order to work out common approaches to the issues of world order, the issues which determine the fate of mankind. There is a tradition from the prophet of Islam that says: “We are all travelers on a ship; if one person pokes a hole in it, all of us drown”.

It is not enough just to express willingness to carry on the dialogue. We need to be capable to understand the cultures which are different from our own. The difficulties are not so much in overcoming the lexical differences as in grasping the meaning of the notions, in particular those that make up the “back-bone” of the culture.
Every act of understanding, as the necessary condition of its possibility, presupposes in the individual, in he who understands, an analogue of what is to be later understood: that is the initially posed comparability between the subject and the object (Wilhelm von Humboldt ). In other words, understanding is impossible without having at least something in common, some commonality between the two sides.

Some people reject altogether such commonality. Thus Richard Rorty asserts: “There is nothing deep inside each of us, no common nature, no built-in human solidarity”. Others, on the contrary, consider, as David Hume did that: “There is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature”. The Humean universalism is partly shared by some of our contemporaries. Thus, for instance, the distinguished Indian philosopher Daya Krishna writes: “If philosophy is an enterprise of the human reason, it is bound to show similarities across cultures to some extent and, similarly, as a human enterprise it is bound to be concerned with what man, in a particular culture, regards as the summum bonum for mankind”.

Commonality, but also differences: the example of justice

But it may be supposed that Daya Krishna, while acknowledging the commonality of the human nature, is fully aware of the significance of differences between various cultures. Universals common for all peoples exist but nominally. They do not have meanings which are the same for all and everybody. A dialogue is possible only when and if its participants are capable of understanding those different cultural contexts which loom behind seemingly uniform universals. Let us take for example a notion of justice. Those who consider justice to belong to the set of universal human values in fact ignore existing differences in the interpretations of justice, and thus succumb to illusions about the essential sameness of manners of its realization (democracy). The notion of justice, however, is always enclosed within the framework of a particular value system. The traditional society differs in its approach toward the ideal of justice in at least four respects from the approach taken by the posttraditional society.

1) The source of justice and the ultimate judge, ruling it, is not the people itself, represented by the elected members of parliament and the courts, but the system of ethical norms prescribed by the Tradition that is by a corresponding religious belief (Islam, Hinduism) or by the local authoritarian moral system (China).
2) The realization of justice in traditional societies usually refers not to the present but to the future, by which is meant the life after death.
3)Justice is related to a certain “collective” to which an individual belongs. That could be a caste, a community, a class or a social stratum, a religious confession. While in the West it is expected that everyone should have an equal right to justice in full accordance with his or her own deeds.
4) Justice is regarded rather in terms of duty than of law.

The universals of Weltanschauung

Along with nominally all-human universals, each and every culture has a set of its own universals which form its “spine” (or “backbone”). In a culture, which is an intricately structured set of extra-biological programmes of human behaviour, there are, among other things, the universals of Weltanschauung. They accumulate historically formed social experience, and it is in the framework of their system that the person of a particular culture evaluates, makes sense of and experiences the world, organises in a totality all the phenomena of the reality that is encompassed by his or her activity. For Hindus the universals of this kind are the notions of Brahman, Atman, dharma, moksha, karma etc. The “backbone” of Chinese culture is formed, in the first place, by such categories as Tao and Te, in-yang, Da tong, ren and li. No dialogue with Indians and the Chinese would be possible, if the “other” side do not have at least elementary knowledge about the key concepts of their cultures, if it is not open to perceiving and interpreting these concepts.

Tensions or even conflicts between different cultures are often caused by ignoring the impact of time on a culture. In fact, time has always left its imprints even on what is habitually taken as dogmas. This statement is particularly true and topical when we talk about the time of radical transformation of Oriental societies, of their “joining” modern post-industrial world. The destroying of traditional socio-economical and political structures in countries of the East brings about not just some “corrections”, not exterior modernization, but basically new interpretation of accepted and established ideas. But such an interpretation of the processes of change that takes place in today's East, that is seeing in this process a potential towards reformation, arouses criticism both within the countries of this region itself and outside it as well.

In the former case the criticism is voiced mainly by those who think that their culture, being based on a particular religious faith (for instance, Islam or Hinduism), does not need any reforming, because any reforming threatens to destroy the culture in question and to bring about the loss of national identity. Any reorientation guided by human understanding would mean the acknowledgment of the supremacy of human reason over the omniscience of God. According to the Iranian philosopher S.H. Nasr, “in Islamic civilisation there is no interest in changes and adaptation”. This civilisation is symbolised not by a flowing river, but by “the cube of the Qa'aba, the stability, embodying the stable and immutable nature of Islam”. In the latter case, the potential for reformation in the East is denied by those who share the conviction of Max Weber that traditional religions in Asia in principle do not contain any motives for rational ethical modelling of the world, that these religions accept this world as given for the eternity, as the best of all possible worlds, which belief is the insurmountable obstacle for the development of the countries of the East.

Conservative and reformers

Statements along these lines, asserting, for instance, that a dialogue between the mullahs of the “Islamic world” and the West is impossible, underrate dimensions of history. The history of Islam shows that from the very beginning in this religious tradition there were no persons like officially consecrated priests in Christianity. Nor was there any single, and accepted by all believers, religious centre and organisation. Mullahs have always been and remain the servicemen of the “cult” who are not appointed from above, but are elected by a community of believers. Mullahs very often combine their religious service with mundane occupations, like trade, handicraft, agriculture etc. That way mullahs are much closer to the masses of their coreligionists than Christian priests, Hindu Brahman-priests etc. It also means that mullahs are far from being homogenous in their social status and are capable of sharing the feelings of Muslims belonging to different social groups. Mullahs are susceptible to the influences of time.

There are many examples of this. One of the most remarkable examples is the activity of Muhammad Abduh, called “a prophet of a new day for Egypt and Isalam”. When he was the mufti of Egypt (1898 - 1904), he interpreted the dicta of the Shari a in the light of “the demands of the day”, issuing appropriate fatwa (for instance, a fatwa which admitted putting money into a bank and getting interest on a capital). Muhammad Abduh criticised dogmatically thinking Muslims, saying that they believe and then demand proof, but “only on condition that the proof shall agree with their belief”. The mufti himself thought the contrary way true and righteous: first prove and then believe. He rejected faith based on blindly obeying an authority and urged the believers to base their belief on strong convictions in the truth of religious teachings.
It is not only possible, but indeed necessary to conduct dialogues with mullahs (as well as with the functionaries of other oriental religions), taking into consideration their influence upon their coreligionists and upon public opinion. Starting a dialogue, one must soberly evaluate its prospects. It is not realistic (nor admissible) to aim at the uniformity of Weltanschauung, the uniformity in understanding the meaning of human existence and the norms of human behaviour. In the meantime it is imperative to exert efforts in order to work out common approaches to the issues of world order, the issues which determine the fate of mankind. The advisability and hopefulness of conducting dialogues in such a vein is acknowledged and proclaimed both in the West and in the East. For example, this position has been eloquently substantiated in the writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) from Iran. He is often called “Luther in Islam”, as he is the most remarkable representative of that reforming trend in Islam which was founded by the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, the author of “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”. The ideas of Sorush are evaluated as having a “universal significance” transcending the limits of Islamic world.

Having started his public career as one of the top ideologists of the Islamic revolution, Abdolkarim Soroush in ten years became an enfant terrible of the ruling regime. He criticises the political elite and particularly the Iranian clergy: “There is no question that clerical government is meaningless have argued that no clergy, qua clergy, should have worldly privileges, whether political or economic, over other citizens”. As a result, Soroush is fired from the Academy of Philosophy, deprived the right to teach, limited in his public pronouncements and in publications.
Today Soroush ardently supports the idea of intercultural dialogue, being convinced that “There is a certain category of phenomena that require universal participation. There is a tradition from the prophet of Islam that says: We are all travelers on a ship; if one person pokes a hole in it, all of us drown.” This is an excellent allegory, to see all the inhabitants of the globe as co-travelers on a ship. We Moslems have two kinds of problem, local problems and universal problems that are the problems of humanity as a whole. In my view, right now, problems such as peace, human rights, and women's rights have turned into global problems”. To the list of such global problems should be added those which are connected with ecology and new technologies. All such problems demand, for their solutions, collective efforts, which can be undertaken only as a result of intercultural dialogues.

Philosophy as a self-consciousness of culture

Philosophers can and should play an especially significant role in overcoming the above mentioned difficulties since more than anybody else from the humanities they are capable of bringing understanding between the representatives of different cultures. When I say philosophers, I mean foremost those of them who are involved in comparative philosophy studies. Genuine learning (free from any ideological burden and political purposes as it happened so often in the past) about the philosophical traditions of the “other” culture opens a way to a better understanding of its essentials taken into consideration that philosophy as such is in some way the “self-consciousness of culture”. However the achievements of the scholarly researches if they are shared just between the academics will not be truly helpful. They can bring changes in the minds only by the means of the education which should become multicultural. Knowledge and understanding have been always the best remedies against prejudices and stereotypes which feed tension and hostility.

Marietta Stepanyants is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

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