with special attention to Mall's intercultural hermeneutics (English version)
Wim van Binsbergen
|
Some philosophical aspects of cultural
globalisation -- with special attention to Mall's intercultural hermeneutics (English version) Wim van Binsbergen |
[
rough draft translation ]
A Dutch
version is also available
© 1999 Wim van Binsbergen
paper
prepared for the Dutch-Flemish Day of Philosophy (theme
‘globalisation’)
30 October 1999, Catholic University Tilburg, Philosophical
Faculty;
the original Dutch version was published in the Proceedings of
this conference
From the early
1990s the topic ‘globalisation’ has seen an enormous
expansion, first in economics and soon also in the social
cultural sciences. That today a conference on the topic is held
by philosophers is almost a break-through: philosophers have
largely ignored the topic. If one searches the Internet for the
combination of ‘philosophy’ and
‘globalisation’, using any of the usual search
machines, one can expect only a meagre harvest; considering that
philosophy is in general well represented on that medium, this
appears to be a reliable indication. One hit would be the website
of former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers, now professor of
globalisation studies; in articulating the philosophical aspects
of globalisation is does not proceed beyond Popper and Teilhard
de Chardin, neither of whom use the word
‘globalisation’ in their works.[1]
Already in 1988 Herra came with a ‘Kritik der
Globalphilosophie’.[2]
More recently Paulin Hountondji appealed to members of African
cultures to rise in protest against the globalisation process.[3] In
the same year Richard Rorty honoured a recent South American
collective volume on globalisation studies wit the following
frivolous characterisation of the phenomenon, and to boot one
which entirely concentrates on the economic dimension of
globalisation ignoring the social cultural dimension:
‘...now that the financing of business enterprise is a matter of drawing upon a global pool of capital, so that enterprises in Belo Horizonte or in Chicago are financed by money held in the Cayman Islands by Serbian warlords, Hong Kong gangsters, and the kleptocrat presidents of African republics, there is no way in which the laws of Brazil or the US can dictate that money earned in the country will be spent in the country, or money saved in the country invested in the country.’[4]
In addition to this bad example I can see a number of reasons for
the philosophers’ reticence vis-à-vis globalisation. In the
first place the theoretical status of the concept of
globalisation was initially so poor that the concept was
distrusted for being merely a pretext for the raising of research
funds. Secondly, North Atlantic philosophy is still characterised
by a certain myopia; hence it only hesitantly dares to address
other problematics than those directly derived from the North
Atlantic, urban, industrialised, contemporary society. Except for
a handful of intercultural and comparative philosophers, most
philosophers feel literally ill at home in the field of
globalisation. For even though globalisation can be conceived, to
a considerable extent, as the world-wide penetration -- in
principle conformably recognisable -- of precisely that type of
North Atlantic society, the globalisation process also entails
creative responses in ‘the South’, as well as the
penetration of cultural forms into the North Atlantic part of the
world, from the South in its turn. A third, crucial point is that
in many respects philosophers have not been lagging behind but
have spearheaded the identification of and the reflection upon
themes which are now central in the globalisation process. E.g.
the conceptualisation of the concept of time in Internet, as a
major technological context for globalisation, leans heavily on
theories of post-phonocentric time as formulated, decades ago, by
Derrida and Rorty.[5] A
large part of the problematic which now is addressed under the
heading of globalisation, has been explored for a much longer
time, and much more profoundly, by philosophers, under such
headings as identity, pluralism, relativism, media,
postmodernity, the consumption society, comparative and
intercultural philosophy, the end of the western construction of
subjectivity, the philosophy of information and communication.
Philosophy is the dialogical development of a special language
which expresses, in an innovative manner, aporias of the human
experience in the philosopher’s own historical situation
(although such expression usually include partial references to
other times and other places). Philosophy thus roots is a
concrete spatio-temporal collective situation, whence it derives
its empirical impetus and touchstones. Whether
‘globalisation’ will turn out to be a fashionable sham
problem (as Rorty seems to suggest), or whether on the contrary
it will turn out to sum up one of the core problems of our times,
depends on the empirical answer to the question as to the scope
of the qualitative and quantitative recent changes which are
subsumed under the heading of globalisation. The empirical
research of globalisation is obviously not a the
philosopher’s task, but meanwhile a spate of recent
empirical research did demonstrate that globalisation does indeed
entail profound changes and has far reaching effects.
In the first
instance, globalisation was encountered as transnational
movements of capital along electronic media. Because a recent
transformation of the capitalist mode of production is the
dominant context of contemporary globalisation, the economic
dimension remains of the greatest importance even though we
choose to concentrate, in the rest of the present argument, on
the social and cultural aspects of globalisation.
We could define[6]
globalisation as the social elaboration of the technological
reduction -- brought about towards the end of the twentieth
century of the North Atlantic era -- to practically zero, of time
and place as limiting factors in human communication. In this way
globalisation means a profound transformation of the contemporary
experience:
the panic of
space
the new home is
nowhere, the new boundary is situational and constructed, the new
identity is performative (multiculturality!); the new other is --
as a migrant, an applicant for refugee status, a fellow-European,
a fellow world citizen, a non-co-religionist, as someone who is
somatically specially different, as a disembodied part in
electronic communication - the uninvited messenger of
globalisation. The construction of identities around ethnicity
and culture is one of the most important phenomena in the
contemporary world, as an expression of the need -- constantly
increasing all over the world -- for subjective self-definition.
the panic of
time
discontinuity
vis-à-vis the recent past, but especially the collapse of the
spatial frameworks (the family, the work floor, the
neighbourhood, the community, the country) within which, under
the previous technologies of the past, a person’s activities
were practically confined as a context for the experience and for
the budgeting of time, and therefore an embedding for the
creation of values and meaning
the panic of
language
the specific
language recognised as one’s own provided the communicative
embedding for the many meaning-carrying ‘homes’
constructed under previous technologies so as to exist side by
side; the contemporary assumption of the self-evident
convertibility between language domains,[7]
coupled with the erosion of each domain by the annihilation of
its spatio-temporary technological conditions, produces a tension
between meaninglessness versus the deliberate construction of
distinctive new domains.
rebellion
against old inequalities
more than ever
before the globalisation process has brought together a multitude
of reflexively conscious, and militant, identities within one and
the same political space. A central bone of contention there is
the mutual relationship between partial worlds: is that
relationship co-ordinative, sub-ordinative, evolutionary, based
on class exploitation? The raison d’être of the Black
Athena debate, Afrocentrism, politically radical post-modern
theory,[8] is
that these expression propagate models deviating from the
dominant Eurocentric hierarchical (or hegemonic) model.
the new
object
the subject - as
the historical result of relations of production within a limited
horizon confined by previous technologies - dissolves in the
consumption of commodified objects, whose industrial aesthetics
canalises desire if such desire happens to be gratified, and
stirs up desire if left without gratification.[9]
virtualisation[10]
of the experience
man-machine
interaction, and man-machine-man interaction, are rapidly
replacing the older technologies of direct bodily contact with
one’s surroundings and with other people
the new
inequality
omnipresence and
immediacy of action (once divine attribute) have become the
technological power instruments of a minority (globally under
North Atlantic hegemony, but also -- at a more local scale --
internally, within the North Atlantic society itself); hence the
power inequalities which characterised late capitalism
(labour/capital, citizen/state, colony/motherland, young/old.
woman/man, ignorant/educated) are compressed into contradictions
between (a) those who anonymously control and dictate the
technology; (b) the powerless but privileged users of that
technology, and (c) the globally predominant mass, concentrated
in the South, of people who are excluded. The globalisation
process is thus the expression of fundamental contradictions in
the world today, mirroring a crucial struggle for power.
the new body
globalisation
goes hand in hand with a changing concept of the person; and
especially of the body: as a locus of the experience of freedom
in regard to the older inequalities summed up above, but also as
a local of cultural distinction through consumption, and thus as
the condition for the surreptitious installation of the new
inequalities
proto-globalisation
Previous
technologies of communication and information (from the footpath
and the face-to-face conversation, to taking drums, horse riding
and the sailing ship) constructed narrow horizons, which were
soon to be breached by newer technologies. This is a process as
old as humanity itself. Every successive technological innovation
had as a potential or actual implication the reduction of the
cost of time and space. Therefore many forms of
proto-globalisation can be trace in the millennia which lie
behind us, until round about 3000 BCE we lose track. Such forms
include imperial states; promissory notes, cheques and bonds
amounting to a complete separation between increasingly
virtualised circulation and actual production; trade networks and
cultic networks which may encompass many social cultural local
contexts even though in most other respects these local contexts
may have be very different from one other. However, under these
older technological conditions space and time continued to exact
a heavy tax. Characteristic of the latest few decades only is the
reduction of space and time to practically zero, the massive
communication at near light speed where information and
electronic commands are involved, at speeds of around 1000 km/hr
where persons and material goods are concerned. This is why we
are justified to reserve the time ‘globalisation’ in
the narrower sense to our time and age.
For philosophy
the developments around globalisation mean more than just a
handful of new questions to be approached by the time-honoured
methods of the discipline. For these developments undermine the
very position from which philosophising can take place. Also
philosophy displays the characteristics of previous technologies,
since it is a form of intersubjective language-based
communication, typically using one specific language for each
distinct communication event, and it does so within a
self-evident collective home (the faculty, the school, the
movement, the main stream, the specific continental tradition, of
philosophy) which identifies both by demarcation in space and by
(none too extensive) continuity over time. Such concepts as the
philosophising subject, the I, meaning, truth, presuppose a home,
which is being undermine by the relativistic awareness of the
cultural constructedness of that home. Globalisation confronts us
with the overwhelming plurality of homes, none of which is
entitled any more to claim absolute validity, even though they
may claim such absolute validity more eloquently and forcibly
than ever (Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, human rights,
natural science.).
An important question in all this is the question after the
nature of the distinct parts out of which, under conditions of
globalisation, the global whole of human experience might be
constituted. The general assumption is that we are dealing here
with a plurality of cultures. In my recent Rotterdam inaugural
lecture[11] I
have argued at length that cultures do not exist in the sense of
discrete, bounded units which are closed onto themselves and
which produce a total field of life. In stead what is involved is
a plurality of overlapping cultural orientations, in such a way
that each person is always involved in a multiple of such
orientations at the same time, while none of these orientations
coincides with only one society or only one territory, many of
them having a very wide distribution in space and even in time.
Contemporary conditions of globalisation have brought out more
than ever the fact that no cultural situation in homogeneous, and
that cultural specificity can only occur thanks to effective
boundary management against the inroads of a global field of
cultural alternatives. Nonetheless one is justified to
distinguish as least as many distinct domains of signification as
there are distinct languages available within the globalised
world field.
After our kaleidoscopic introduction of globalisation, this lead
to the central philosophical question of the present argument.
The globalisation process presupposes a plurality of domains
which have been separately constructed and which have been
internally structured by processes of signification which are
predominantly embedded in language. Within a shared social
political field intensive communication is continuously brought
about. The structuring of each of these domains is highly
specific in cultural and linguistic respect. Then how is it
possible that intercultural knowledge is produced at all, and to
boot in the language of only one of the languages involved in the
intercultural encounter.
We shall consider this question in the light of the intercultural
hermeneutics as developed by the German-Indian philosopher Mall.
[12]
No misunderstanding should arise about the stakes of this review. I chose Mall – who in Germany occupies a position which my illustrious predecessor occupied in The Netherlands in the first of the 1990s: that of the leading intercultural philosopher – because Mall’s approach of intercultural hermeneutics offers the greatest promise. Both as an intercultural philosopher and as an empirical social anthropologist I realise only too well the seriousness of the problems with which these colleagues are struggling. If I bring to bear on the argument Mall’s personal situation, it is because anthropologists – in a manner rather different from philosophers, who find the argument ad hominem distasteful – have learned to view intercultural knowledge production as a personal struggle with the total mobilisation of personal identities. Elsewhere[13] I have indicated that I certainly do not consider the anthropological mediation as superior to the intercultural philosophical mediation. But let us simply admit that here we are dealing with one of the greatest problems of our times – we can simply not afford the risk of obscuring underlying complexities and contradictions simply for the sake of social decorum.
Like most intercultural philosophers, Mall appears to subscribe
to the apparently self-evident postulate of humanity as
subdivided in a manageable number of cultures each of which are
assumed to be unproblematically situated in time and space. For
Mall, such cultures are the units between with the
‘understanding’ has to be achieved.
Mall begins his argument on intercultural hermeneutics full of
hope and expectation. Clearly he does not rule out the
possibility of intercultural understanding – and should we
not take him himself as a clear proof, as an Indian with a
Cologne doctorate (1963) and a professorial chair in Germany?
Mall appeals to the development of the hermeneutic tradition from
the 17th century (of the North Atlantic era) onwards, and
stresses a type of hermeneutic model
‘das die Einsicht ‘‘Wir alle sind
Menschen’’ ernster nimst, als es je geschehen is.’[14]
In passing we
note that it is probably only under very special – but still
to be specified -- new conditions that, as Mall says, the
fellow-humanity of the other may be taken more seriously than
ever; especially now, at the end of the twentieth century, which
has seen far more massive wars, genocide, exclusion, organised
interethnic and intercultural hatred than ever before, these
conditions are not self-evident. Here the important thing is to
tolerantly acknowledge that the other differs from that which one
considers one’s own:
‘Die Theorie einer offenen Hermeneutik geht von einen Erkenntnisbegriff aus, der das zu Verstehende nicht einverleibt, nicht der eigenen Denkform anpaßt. Die Tatsache, daß uns Erfahrung lehrt, ist selbst ein kognitives, epistemologisches Element. Es gibt eine auf Erfahrung beruhende Basis für die kognitive Vielfalt. ’[15]
And
misunderstanding is immediately implied in understanding, for
Mall quotes Jaspers affirmatively: just like, in the personal
intercourse – in the general social sense, not per se
sexually -- between people, in the face of all intimacy suddenly
a rift of consciousness of distance may yawn,
‘als ob ein Nicht-anders-sein-Können sich trennte und dies im letzten Grunde doch nicht anerkennen will, weil die Forderung der gemeinsamen Bezogenheit auf die Mitte der Ewigkeit nich aufhört, daher ein besseres Verstehen immer wieder gesucht wird -- so ist es zwischen Asien und Abendland.’[16]
Now this appears to
be only a minimum advance as compared to Kipling’s adage of
one century ago, at the height of colonial society as organised
around social segregation, exclusion and subordination:
‘East
is East and West is West
and never the twain shall meet’.
Here, with Jaspers
and by implication Mall, there is still the same absolutising of
the East and the West as if these were self-evident, workable
categories, each forming a unit onto itself and each absolutely
non-overlapping with the other – as if the experience and
(as forms of cultural programming!) the practical knowledge and
skills of a cab driver in Calcutta or Bombay does not have just
as much in common with those of a cab driver in Rotterdam or New
York, as it has in common with that of many of the Indian cap
driver’s fellow-nationals, e.g. strict Brahmans involved in
Sanskrit studies and ritual leadership in the countryside, or
rich industrialists and merchants who move with the same studied
ease in, and between, London and New York as in their own heavily
guarded mansions in Bombay.
A theoretical position as Mall’s (or of any other person,
for that matter, including my own, or the reader’s) can
scarcely be detached from Mall’s own sociological position
within the world system. Here the tension between his Indian
background and his brilliantly realised German academic
achievements have inspired him to formulate an intercultural
philosophy which combines respect for non-European philosophy
with the application – as self-evident -- of a conceptual
apparatus grown within the North Atlantic tradition, in order to
discuss that non-European philosophy. My suggestion is that Mall
did not have much of an option in occupying the ambiguous
philosophical position that he does. But if this were really true
– if Mall because of the particular social identity which he
has privately constructed for himself could scarcely have
afforded himself a different theoretical option, that the
specific theoretical option which he has taken loses much of it
powers to convince.
Behind this lurks a problematic which is inherent to the language
nature of the type of philosophical understanding which is
aspired at in intercultural hermeneutics. Theoretically we may
take a distance from the medium (in this case contemporary German
and the philosophical conceptualisations of the professional
specialist), arguing that that medium is accidental and merely
local. Yet because of its dictate over the form and the contents
of statements which are expressly intended to be intercultural,
this medium does produce a universalist slant, in fact it does
take the place of a touch stone which is situated at n
unreachably higher and more valid level than that on which the
other which it seeks to comprehend, is situated. Such a medium
can only claim the understanding of the other but it cannot live
up to such a claim -- in fact it insists, perhaps we should say
smugly, on non-understanding. The language and the culturally
programmed format which we use for philosophical communication,
cannot constantly deny its own impact under the pretext of being
accidental, optional, unintentionally structuring, preliminary,
mumbling, stammering... in modern philosophy neologisms and
grammatical oddities are admissible to a limited degree, but even
these are merely relative deviations within a firmly given
phonological, lexical and syntactic structure which dictatorially
penetrates into every philosophical language utterance. At any
rate for the moment itself of the language utterance this
structure lends a hegemonically greater validity to that
utterance than to that which it describes. At the moment that the
interpreter’s language is being used, that language’s
laws rule supreme, creating as it were an illusion of
momentaneous universality. The claimed equivalence between (a)
the person who understands and (b) the person whose expressions
are being understood, is only a rhetorical gesture -- in fact the
old card-players wisdom (however manipulative and treacherous)
applies to the effect that ‘who records the score, wins a
lot more’[17]
-- whoever describes, records, has dominance, and reduces the
other, however respectfully, to a state of being subjugated to
the structuring -- the world architecture -- which is implied in
the recorder’s own language. On second thoughts, once the
utterance has been made, the recorder may seek to deny the
compulsive nature of his own language structuring, and try to
mitigate that one-sidedly imposed ordering - but this can never
be done at the moment of the utterance itself: the utterance is
about something else, not about its own structure, and -- given
the exceptionally high level of regulation typical of language --
dispensing considerably with that structure destroys the
utterance as a well-formed and meaningful utterance in the
recorder’s specific language.
I have the impression that in the last analysis Mall himself sees
the problem of intercultural hermeneutics in similar terms as
sketched by me here: as a balancing act between misplaced
universality and distressing relativistic fragmentation. I derive
this impression from the way in which Mall attempts to dismiss
Habermas’ longing for a non-metaphysical universalism. here
Mall makes an affirmative appeal to an elaborate evocation of the
postmodern situation à la Lyotard.[18] In Mall’s reading of Lyotard
practically all philosophising is stripped of its apparently
compelling scientific validity, its smug appeal to reason is
dismissed, and what is left is recognised as the basically
literary format that it is:
‘Dennoch könnte ein allgemeine Regel uns leiten und lenken, die in den Worten Lyotards heißt: ‘‘Laßt spelen... und laßt uns in Ruhe spielen’’ ’.[19]
Mall
posits that reason, far from having one unique manifestation, has
no concrete local format: the various local forms of reason which
have precipitated in history are in themselves the result of a
becoming, a genesis -- and the same is true for the various
hermeneutic models to which these local forms of reasons are
subjected.[20]
In Mall’s opinion this position is sufficient ground for his
claim that
‘Die postmoderne Hermeneutik priviligiert keine Tradition, keinen Ort, keine Sprache; sie ist ortlos orthaft oder, anders gewendet, orthaft ortlos, weil sie jedes hermeneutische Modell vor den Gefahren einer Verabsolutiering warnt.’[21]
However, I am of
a contrary opinion. However sympathetic we may find Mall’s
point of view, and however much we would like it to be true, his
statement is merely an apotropaic formula, which is to conceal
that fact that, contrary to what Mall claims, localisation
undeniably takes place in this hermeneutic process. This
localisation does not necessarily take the form of any
geographical domain the size of a language region or a nation
state; but localisation certainly in this sense that a home base
is being explicitly constructed through the competent use of
specialist philosophical natural language. In this process at the
same time a rather small set of people is constructed (several
tens of thousands, I estimate, at the most a few hundreds of
thousands) who are philosophical initiates for whom such language
use is familiar and meaningful -- and who at the same time are in
a position to check the specialist language for formal and
substantial impeccability.
In Mall’s work, the ‘placeless local’ character of
intercultural philosophy is complementary to other paradoxical
contradictions: the contradiction between strangeness and
familiarity, and especially that between ‘understanding
misunderstanding’ or ‘misunderstanding
understanding’.[22]
The latter paradoxical formulae sun up Mall’s attractive
alternative to extreme relativism -- attractive nonetheless,
because of its insistence on the possibility of mediation, its
avoidance of total self-projective appropriation but avoidance of
total rejection at the same time. Then, in an amazing turn, Mall
even appeal to a ‘universalism of a modern type’
(notably: one that does way with all claims of absoluteness); he
claims that such universalism points to the desirability of
opening oneself
‘für die unendliche Aufgabe, die die Zusammengehörigkeit aller Menschen in einem möglichen Verstehen, in einem sensus communis philosophicus bezeugt’.[23]
Mall goes on to
creatively summon to the support of his argument a considerable
number of hermeneutically orientated philosophers.[24]
In contradiction to Heidegger Mall affirms explicitly that any
search for a common historical source which may have been shared
by European and non-western thought[25] is besides the point, constitutes
an ontological prejudice: such a common source (which appear to
deny the ‘echte Pluralität’[26] -- ‘the genuine
plurality’) cannot possibly exist, for
‘Kein Denken is vom Sein selbst geschickt, und keine Sprache ist die eigentliche Muttersprache des Seins.’[27]
However, in
stead of accepting the consequence that language-based
philosophical interpretations -- the defective, stammering echo
emulating what is already a defective stammering in the first
place, crude and untranslated, emulating the Language of Being of
which no man is the native speaker -- Mall takes refuge in the
following understatements:
‘Philosophie ist nicht reine Sprachimmanenz. (..) Die Übersetzung ist daher selbst ein Prozeß, der ebensoviel Beachtung verdient wie der Kommunikationsprozeß.’[28]
Whereas
Gadamer’s concept of the merging of horizons is dismissed as
‘something mystical’,[29] Mall fall to recognise the
mystical character of his own apotropaic formula:
‘Eine postmoderne Hermeneutik hat der Versuchung zu widerstehen, aus vielen Sinnen einen Sinn, aus vielen Kulturen eine Kultur, aus vielen Religionen eine Religion, aus vielen Wahrheiten eine Wahrheit zu wollen’.[30]
Here the
irreducible, irrevocable otherness of cultures in a countable
plurality is raised to the central postulate of intercultural
philosophy. Mall merely affirms this postulate as self-evident
and necessary, but does not offer a specific argument in support
of this view. Neither does he investigate whether that postulate
may perhaps owe its existence, not to any technical philosophical
necessity imposed by analytical thinking, but rather to the
political constellation of a democratic postmodern society, whose
credibility and practical functioning, in our time and day,
derive from the ‘politics of recognition’ involving
vocal and strategically operating minority groups.[31]
Recent research on wide-ranging connection in time and space in
such fields as religious and ideological systems, myths, systems
of knowledge, philosophies, forms of early science, board games
and other formal systems,[32]
points in exactly the opposite direction. It does so precisely in
order to explode the political tenets of today’s globalising
multicultural society, in other words in order to confront the
reification of irreducible difference. If in these fields of
research we encounter, everywhere, forms of proto-globalisation,
then this is indicative, not so much of some common primal source
of all knowledge in the Old World, but certainly of a
interconnectivity from specific place to specific place, of
chains of invention and transmission, diffusion and
transformative localisation, across large stretches of space and
time. The painstaking compartmentalisation (each compartment
boasting its own boundary, identity, distinctive attributes,
birth rights, cultivated sensitivities -- each issued with their
own history, or each issued with the politically correct denial
of the significance of an origin) of communal identities in the
contemporary globalising multicultural society then appears as
the recent product of a peculiar historical mode of structuring
socio-political power -- and therefore does no longer appear --
as Mall would have it -- as the manifestation of an eternal dogma
of redeeming difference in the history of mankind. For it is now
becoming increasingly clear that for black, brown and white,
African, Asiatic, European, and if we care to look a little
further afield even for the Americas, Oceania and Australia, and
for the myriad national and ethnic traditions within these
somatic and geographical contexts, a common history and a common
heritage could possibly be constructed to a much grater
degree than would be suggested by the emphatic affirmation of a
difference which is irresolvable and has to stay that way. Mall
does not enter at all into a discussion of these socio-political
backgrounds of identity construction in the contemporary world.
And yet he allows himself to suggest that the absolutising of
difference between culturally constructed worlds is merely the
hallmark of
‘eine in der naiven Einstellung lebende Person’.[33]
Mall’s
hope continues to be inspired by
‘...die Bereitschaft zur Kommunikation, ausgehend von einer orthaften Ortlosigkeit eines erdgebundenen, aber doch meditativ-reflexiven hermeneutischen Subjekts, das weder eine totale Übersetzbarkeit noch eine totale Inkommensurabilität zum Dogma erhebt. Ein solches hermeneutisches Subjekt hat keine bestimmte Sprache als Muttersprache. Inkarniert als ein orthaftes Subjekt, hat es teil an einer bestimmten Tradition und spricht eine bestimmte Sprache. Nur ein solches Subjekt ist in der Lage, eine gewaltsame Aneignung oder eine völlige Vernachlässigung des Fremden zu vermeiden. Dies geschieht in dem Bewußtsein, daß ich als konkretes Subjekt hätte auch ein anderes werden konnen.
Übersetzbarkeit, Verstehbarkeit und Kommunikation sind regulative Ideale, deren schrittweise Realisation die Überwindung der präreflexiven, mundanen Naivität zur Voraussetzung hat. Das Kennzeichen einer solchen Naivität ist das Unvermogen, den eigenen Standpunkt als einen unter den vielen wahrnehmen zu konnen. Die Einstellung, daß es kein konkretes Freisein von Standpunkten gibt, ist ein Ergebnis einer höherstufigen Reflexion und ermöglicht uns, dem Vielfältigen gegenüber tolerant zu sein.’[34]
Manifestly (as
Mall’s play on words already indicates) what is involved
here is a utopia, a Nowhereland, and even an elitist Nowhereland
entry to which is reserved to only a few. I cannot escape the
impression that this position once again owes a lot to the way in
which the author Mall has constructed his own identity in a
subjective attempt at impartiality between East and West --
without being able to admit that he has only reached such a
vantage point at the expense of practically giving up his Indian
language, concepts, modes of expression, contexts, at least -- to
judge by his published works -- in his public philosophical
practice.
Mall then returns to Habermas, and shows how the latter’s
views on communication are based on the assumption that a
fundamental unity of reason, and a formal convergence of
conceptions of rationality, of truth and of justice, underlie all
languages. Mall has little difficulty exposing Habermas’
views on this point as another version of the theory of universal
grammar. Although this does not prevent Mall from borrowing
selectively from Habermas, Mall rightly doubts -- with the later
Wittgenstein and the postmodern philosophy of language -[35]
whether we are dealing here primarily with givens in language and
through language.
But I would like to go even further.
In the first place a self-reflexive moment needs to be built into
our approach to intercultural hermeneutics. This would allow us
to admit that intercultural hermeneutics in an academic context
would usually be language-based, and to that extent would be
incapable of liberating itself from the limitations of an
othering and subordinating, appropriating stammering as discussed
above. Language’s shortcomings for inter-language
understanding cannot be made good within language, not even by
(language-based) self criticism after the fact. The
language-based hermeneutic operation is to fundamentally fail,
precisely if it is justified on paper.
In the second place (and here we are back with Habermas, with his
vision of communicative action) the philosopher attributes to
himself with regard to intercultural hermeneutics a privileged
position which is probably totally unfounded, precisely because
of the philosopher’s entrenchment in formalised language. Of
all human products, language is the most subtly and intolerantly
structured -- allow the pronunciation of one phoneme to fall just
outside the range of tolerance, and an entire word becomes
unintelligible -- put the intonation slightly differently, commit
a minor grammatical error, and an entire sentence is rendered
unintelligible, erroneous, ridiculous, or at least obtains a
totally different meaning. because of the same regulation
competent language use is also the touch stone par excellence of
whether a person has had prolonged and early exposure to
effective socialisation as a member of what one considers
one’s own group, in other words as a touchstone of ethnic
identity:[36]
for practically no non-native speaker ever succeeds in speaking
totally accentlessly and idiomatically any language acquired
later in life. This means that of all human product language is
least suitable as a medium of intercultural communication, and
least reliable as a touchstone of whether such intercultural
communication has in fact been established. There are myriad
forms in which the negotiation, full of compromises, between
various forms of initially unaccommodated otherness may evolve
better and more effectively, may more easily adopt intermediate
forms, may more easily be learned and adjusted, than if we
continue to hold language in the centre of intercultural
communication. Defective language-based communication coupled to
far more competent non-language-based actions -- the latter
structured around clothing, gestures, images, material attributes
and objects especially industrial artefacts: this is the practice
of the globalised world, in pop culture, at sports fields, at the
Internet, during vacations, in the streets, in the pubs, in urban
neighbourhoods, at the counter of formal bureaucratic
institutions, in the doctor’s surgery, and even in bed.
Hence to my mind the most characteristic situations of
intercultural exchange are not those of philosophical
hermeneutics. In stead I would suggest, as more characteristic:
trade transactions of all sorts of degrees of formality and
informality, and often carried by only partially known linguae
francae; the clumsy intercourse (in the social sense, but without
necessarily excluding the narrower sexul sense) with strangers
with whom one can only exchange a handful of words -- such as has
become common experience in the globalising society; and even
anthropological fieldwork (which is far more often undertaken
with very defective linguistic competence than most
non-anthropologists realise -- the anthropological professional
myth of adequate language mastery has been accepted too well).
Here we see a genuine, albeit (luckily) still only very partial,
fusion of publicly constructed identities on a world scale. Such
fusion is the real hallmark of contemporary globalisation. It is
light Malls insistence on cultural boundaries and cultural
distinctness makes an obsolete and rigid impression.
Now when Mall summarises the three main points of his
hermeneutics, we encounter -- next to the rejection of the idea
of one universal world philosophy, and insistence on the
impartiality of any comparative philosophy -- the following
trait:
‘Auf dem Felde der Interkulturalität weist die interkulturelle Hermeneutik mit Nachdruck die vielen expliziten und impliziten Formen der Inkulturation, der Akkulturation zurück und plädiert für eine Art Interkulturation, die die Existenz der vielen Kulturen nicht als eine Bedrohung empfindet. Sie betont nicht nur das spannungsvolle Nebeneinander, sonder ein Füreinander der Kulturen. Zim Begriff der Interkulturation gehört die Überzeugung von der Hermeneutik als einem interkulturellen Postulat.’[37]
Let us
respectfully realise from what background of personal
enculturation or acculturation - from what personal involvement
in the globalisation process, Mall speaks here -- even though he
implicitly denies that background. And let us realise that it is
not the detached, possibly conflictive, parallel co-existence
side by side of distinct cultures (more or less as books
attributes to a specific ‘culture’ stand side by side
in a library for comparative philosophy) which characterises
today’s globalisation. It essence lies in the paradoxical
interplay between
(a) the
strategically confronting construction of performative cultural
diversity, in which people selectively and transformingly draw
from local cultural orientations which however seldom occur in
pure and distinct form
(b) the fact
that people the world over in many respects share in a world-wide
society producing more and more similar environments and similar
experiences at many different places (imagine watching the same
movie or wearing the same jeans in five different continents),
underpinned by technology, manufactured products, and formal
organisations the state, education, health services, media,
enterprises dealing with production, distribution and
consumption).
So far our
exploration of the possibility to approach the problem of
‘intercultural’ knowledge, under contemporary
conditions of globalisation, from the point of view of a specific
intercultural hermeneutics. In fact Mall turns away from the
messy situations of interculturality which are typical of
globalisation. His entrenchment in language and his balancing act
of paradoxes make us suspect the limitations of all intercultural
hermeneutics in the hands of philosophers. Nonetheless his
struggle with the problem proves very inspiring. Maybe it will
indicate the direction along which the problem may be reduced to
more practical and partly resolvable proportions.
[1]
http://www.globalize.org . For Lubbers’ reasons to parade
Popper as a philosopher of globalisation, see there. Moreover cf.
Teilhard de Chardin, P., 1955, Le phénomène humain,
Paris: Seuil ( (where the quasi-mystical term
‘planetarisation’ is being launced, but according to a
natural science model which does not do justice to the agence,
the complex interdependence and the interaction which are
characteristic of globalisation.
[2]
Herra, R.A., 1988, ‘Kritik der Globalphilosophie’, in:
Wimmer, R., ed., Vier Fragen zur Philosophie in Afrika,
Asien und Lateinamerika, Wien.
[3]
Hountondji, P.J., 1997, ‘Afrikanische Kulturen und
Globalisierung: Aufruf zum Widerstand’, E+Z Entwicklung
und Zusammenarbeit, 38, 7.
[4]
Rorty, R., 1997, ‘Global utopias, history and
philosophy’, in: Soares, L.E., ed., Cultural pluralism,
identity, and globalization, Rio de Janeiro: UNESCO/ ISSC/
Educam, pp. 459-471, p. 464.
[5]
Cf. Sandbothe, M., 1998, ‘Media temporalities in the
Internet’, paper, 20th World Congress of Philosophy, 5/9/98,
zie htttp://www.uni-jena.de/ms/mt.html. Cf. Derrida, J., 1967, De
la grammatologie. Minuit, Paris; Rorty, R., 1979, Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
[6]
The literature offers many circumscriptions and definitions of
globalisation. For my contributins to this debate, cf. van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, Virtuality as a key concept in the
study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of
contemporary Africa, The Hague: WOTRO; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1998, ‘Globalization and virtuality: Analytical
problems posed by the contemporary transformation of African
societies’, in: Meyer, B., & Geschiere, P., eds., Globalization
and idenity: Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 273-303; also see my website
http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin .
[7]
This is not to deny or ignore Quine’s principle of the
indeterminacy of translation, but simply to state the empirical
fact that present-day global communicative practices are based on
the implicit assumption that translation is eminently possible
and meaningful; incidentally, contemporary philosophical
practices of multilingual handling of texts are based on the same
assumption, cf. van Binsbergen, Cultures do not exist, note...[
give number ]
[8]
For political-radical postmodern theory, , cf. Rattansi, A.,
1994, ‘ ‘’Western’’ racisms, ethnicities
and identities in a ‘’postmodern’’
frame’, in: Rattansi, A., & Westwood, S., 1994, eds., Racism,
modernity and identity: On the western front, London: Polity
Press, pp. 15-86. For Afrocentrism, cf. Berlinerblau, J., 1999, Heresy
in the University: The Black Athena controvery and the
responsibilities of American intellectuals, New Brunswick
etc.: Rutgers University Press, pp. 133f. For the Black Athena
debate, cf. Berlinerblau, o.c., en: van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After,
Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, ‘Black Athena and Africa’s
contribution to global cultural history’, Quest, 9, 2
/ 10, 1: 100-137.
[9]
Cf. Fardon, R., van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & van Dijk, R., 1999,
eds., Modernity on a shoestring: Dimensions of globalization,
consumption and development in Africa and beyond, Leiden/London:
EIDOS.
[10]
Cf. references to my work on virtuality, footnote above.
[11]
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Culturen bestaan
niet’: Het onderzoek van interculturaliteit als een
openbreken van vanzelfsprekendheden, inaugural lecture,
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Rotterdam: Rotterdamse
Filosofische Studies; English version forthcoming in: Quest,
Winter 1999. also see my website http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin .
[12]
Mall, R.A., 1995, Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen:
Interkulturelle Philosophie, eine neue Orientierung,
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 67f.
[13]
‘Culturen bestaan niet’, o.c.
[14]
Mall, o.c., p. 69. This is possibly an allusion to the
principle of shared humanity or principle of charity as developed
by D. Davidson (1984, ‘Belief and the basis of
meaning’, in zijn: Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press) and R.
Grandy (1973, ‘Reference, meaning and belief’, Journal
of Philosophy, 70: 439-452).
[15]
Mall, o.c., p. 68f
[16]
Mall, o.c., p. 69; cf Jaspers, K., 1980, Die
maßgebenden Menschen, Sokrates, Buddha, Konfuzius, Jesus,
München, 6e druk, p. 131.
[17]
An attempt to render, by an expression which does not exist in
English, the Dutch expression ‘wie schrijft die
blijft’.
[18]
Mall, o.c., p. 69-77
[19]
Mall, o.c., p. 75; cf. Lyotard, J.-F., 1979, La
condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Minuit,
quoted by Mall in the German translation, Lyotard, J.-R, 1982,
Das postmoderne Wissen. Ein Bericht, Bremen, p. 131.
[20]
Mall, o.c., p. 77.
[21]
Mall, o.c., p. 78. This is a recurrent theme throughout
Mall’s work, see the titles in the bibliography in Mall, o.c.
[22]
Mall, o.c., p. 78f.
[23]
Mall, o.c., p. 80.
[24]
Mall, o.c., .pp. 80-88 -- of course (p. 90f) Mall’s
hermeneutics owes less to Hegel, Heidegger and Gadamer than to
more historically inclined hermeneutic philosophers from Vico to
Dilthey -- with whom the distance in time, between intepreter and
the historical producer of utterances to be interpreted, is more
or less equivalent to the distance in space between more or less
localised culutral orientations.
[25]
. As in the Black Athena and Afrocentrism discussions, see above.
[26]
Mall, o.c., p. 90.
[27]
Mall, o.c., p. 89.
[28]
Mall, o.c., p. 89.
[29]
Mall, o.c., 90f.
[30]
Mall, o.c., 92.
[31]
Taylor, C., 1992, Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of
Recognition’, Princeton: University of Princeton Press.
[32]
For a short characterisation of such research, with bibliography,
cf. my ‘Culturen bestaan niet’, pp. 30f. also see my
website: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/2327
[33]
Mall, o.c., .p. 97.
[34]
Mall, o.c., p. 92-93; my italics.
[35]
In this connection we may mention Derrida; Rorty’s thesis of
absolute contextualism is rejected by Mall as being too much of a
western thing, and as an absolutisation of Rorty’s own
relativistic point of view.
[36]
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘Minority language, ethnicity
and the state in two African situations: the Nkoya of Zambia and
the Kalanga of Botswana’, in: Fardon, R. & Furniss, G.,
ed., African languages, development and the state, Londen
etc.: Routledge, pp. 142-188.
[37]
Mall, o.c., p. 99.