GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 3 ● Number 1 ● Winter 2001—The Dialogue of Civilisations
A Gadamerian Perspective on Civilisational Dialogue
FRED DALLMAYR
Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among his books are Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998) and Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (Lexington Books, 1999).
When asked his view of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi famously answered: “It would be a good idea.” His reply reminds us that “civilisation” is not a secure possession but a fragile, ever-renewable endeavour; grammatically, it has the character more of a verb than a noun. This is particularly true of the emerging global or “world civilisation”—what sometimes is called the nascent “cosmopolis”. Here again, caution is imperative. Anyone today who claimed to speak “in the name of” world civilisation would be suspected (with good reason) of harbouring hegemonic or imperialist designs. Contrary to the pretence of a facile cosmopolitanism, civilisation in our time is what grammarians call a plurale tantum (meaning that it exists only in the plural), notwithstanding the undeniable tightening of the network of global interactions. Hence, if there is to be a genuine civilisational encounter, participants have to proceed modestly and soberly, by taking their departure, at least initially, from their own distinct perspective or vantage point—that is, by remembering and bringing to bear their own cultural–historical “pre-judgements”, while simultaneously guarding against any form of cultural or ethnic self-enclosure.
The complexity of global encounter is sometimes recognised even by high-level public officials. Not long ago, the UN General Assembly declared 2001 to be the “Year of Dialogue among Civilisations”.1 While signalling a welcome initiative, the declaration immediately raises, for philosophically minded people, a host of thorny issues. What is the meaning of “civilisation” in the UN announcement? Is civilisation equivalent here to progress in science, technology and industry—perhaps in digital and nuclear technology? If so, how could there be a genuine encounter, given that some civilisations (especially in the past) have not been characterised by such “progress” and that several civilisations today are classified, by UN criteria, as “un-” or “underdeveloped” (hence under-civilised)?
Similar problems beset the notion of “dialogue”. Is dialogue equivalent to commercial transactions and information exchanges carried out via digital computers or the Internet (in accordance with what some analysts call our “informatic age” or age of “informatic civilisation”)? But in this case, quite apart from the great disparity of technical resources, is dialogue not liable to shrivel into a standardised and commodified means of communication (largely reserved for expert elites)? In what follows, I wish to explore the meaning of “civilisational dialogue” by relying at least in part on teachings of the renowned “dean” of contemporary European philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer. My presentation proceeds in three steps. First, I try to clarify the meaning of “civilisation” by highlighting some of its core ingredients and drawing attention to some of its counter-terms or border zones. Second, I seek to illustrate and make concrete that meaning by taking my bearings from my own initial vantage point (or set of hermeneutical “pre-judgements”): that of “Western” civilisation. Finally, my concluding section seeks to delineate the meaning or significance of civilisational “dialogue”, especially a dialogue carried out in the context of the nascent global city or emerging cosmopolis.
I
Boundary Terms
The term “civilisation” is ambivalent and surrounded by dispute. From Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918/22) to Arnold Toynbee’s Civilisation on Trial (1948) to Samuel Huntington’s famous (or notorious) “Clash of Civilisations” (1993), Western intellectuals have puzzled over the meaning of the term, as well as the present and future predicaments of civilised life. In his voluminous writings, Hans-Georg Gadamer has not extensively discussed civilisation and the question of its continued viability. However, his work does provide some helpful clues. Thus, in commenting on Aristotle’s practical philosophy, Truth and Method offers these observations:
Human civilization differs essentially from nature in that it is not simply a place where capacities and powers work themselves out. Man becomes what he is through what he does and how he behaves—that is, he behaves in a certain way because of what he has become. Thus, Aristotle sees ethos as differing from physis in being a sphere in which the laws of nature do not operate, yet not a sphere of lawlessness but of human institutions and human modes of behavior which are mutable and like rules only to a limited degree.2
Gadamer’s comments accentuate an important point, namely, the linkage between civilisation and human modes of behaviour and specifically human institutions, which are basically the institutions of the city or polis. This point is corroborated by etymology. Historically, “civilisation” derives from “civil” and “civility”, which in turn go back to the Latin cives (citizen), the participant in a civitas (Greek: polis). In the English language, “civilisation” is a somewhat recent innovation, dating back not farther than the late eighteenth century. When Samuel Johnson compiled his dictionary of the English language (first edition 1755), his friend James Boswell urged him to include the term “civilisation”. Johnson refused, saying that he preferred the older and more customary “civility”. The story is significant not as a matter of historical curiosity, but because it sheds light again on the central meaning of “civilisation” (at least in the Western tradition): its connection with city life and citizenship. In this way, the contours of the term become clearer (as a concept always acquires focus at its boundaries).
In the case of civilisation, we discover two main counter-terms or boundary dimensions: (1) nature, and (2) the divine. Both dimensions delimit and transgress the city, the first by antedating the city and remaining its permanent substrate, the second by “transcending” the city (seen as a worldly or “temporal” institution). The expression “counter-term” is probably misleading in this context, because there is not necessarily opposition or mutual negation. It might be preferable to speak of corollaries or constitutive supplements, supplements which powerfully impinge upon and sometimes contest the city, just as they are in turn invaded and contested by civilisational demands.
Historically, the relation between civilisation and its two corollaries or supplements has always been complex. In large measure, traditional civilisations can be differentiated by examining the degree to which the relation has been construed more in terms of conflict and antagonism than in terms of complementarity and harmony. (The conventional but by now largely obsolete divide between “East” and “West” might conceivably be explored along these lines.)
Nature
In the West, the relation between civilisation and its corollaries has on the whole been marked by tension or conflict, only intermittently relieved by efforts at reconciliation. Western metaphysics and social theory are replete with categorical distinctions or dichotomies. Gadamer refers to the Greek (Aristotelian) distinction between physis and polis (or physis and nomos)—although at that time the terms did not yet carry antithetical meanings. These connotations, however, did surface subsequently and with growing rigour. Modern anthropologists and social theorists in the West are wont to distinguish neatly between “nature” and “culture” (civilisation) or “nature” and “nurture”, with elaborate theoretical constructs erected on the basis of this distinction. Modern political philosophy is in large measure built on the division between a primordial “state of nature” and a contractually established “civil (or political) state”, with the former populated by pre-civil savages (variously understood) and the latter by citizens enjoying the benefits of civil law, above all, individual rights and freedoms. Modern Western political thought is inconceivable without this dividing line; a major question has been to which extent the “natural state” (or state of nature) can or should penetrate into the civil state, and vice versa.
In the paradigmatic treatment of Thomas Hobbes, the division between nature and city is paralleled by the distinction between two kinds of bodies: natural bodies and the “artificial” body of the state. As the epitome of artefact, the civil state is meant to promote the development of the arts and sciences, especially of scientific discoveries and inventions and their technical (or technological) application for the improvement of human comfort. As a result of the growth of science and technology, natural bodies (and nature at large) are placed increasingly under the tutelage of the city or “civilised” life, with its steadily expanding need for resources and commodities. In anthropological terms, the division between civil and natural states surfaces as the opposition between reason and passion (or unreason). The natural state is seen as being in the grip of pre-rational impulses, and the civil state as being pervaded or governed by rational design—an opposition putting Western civilisation again on the path of “progress” and “enlightenment”, accompanied by the eradication of natural “prejudices” and inclinations. In his wide-ranging study of the “civilising process”, Norbert Elias places his accent squarely on the development of the arts and sciences, particularly on the advances in “civil” rationality that trigger a spiralling dynamic towards expanding levels of societal complexity and functional differentiation. To be sure—and as Elias would not deny—one also needs to remember the flip-side of this process: the pervasive subjugation and domination of pre-civil “natives” or indigenous peoples under the “advanced” auspices of Western colonialism and imperialism.3
The Divine
Next to the nature–civilisation conundrum there is a second contour or boundary dimension: that of the divine. Here again, Western civilisation shows a tendency towards tension or conflict (notwithstanding episodes of accommodation). Whatever the tendency or preference, the boundary raises difficult issues. Clearly, civilisation in the sense of civil or city life is not necessarily hostile to religion or faith; but neither can the two domains simply be equated or collapsed into each other—as happens when religion is reduced to a “cultural” phenomenon (for example, by cultural anthropologists). Vis-à-vis civil life, religious faith inevitably introduces an element of “excess” or extraordinary appeal, traditionally captured by such terms as “grace” and “promise”. The difficulty of the relation becomes immediately clear when one turns to one of the founders of Christian thought in the West, St Augustine. In his magisterial Civitas Dei (City of God), composed around 420 ce, Augustine identified not one but two cities: the earthly or mundane city (civitas terrena) and the heavenly city (civitas Dei). While the earthly city is governed by worldly needs and especially the human lust for power and self-aggrandisement, the heavenly city is founded and maintained by grace and the divine act of salvation. Ever since the time of Augustine, this distinction of cities has overshadowed the Western–Christian perspective on civilisation and civilisational progress, resurfacing powerfully during the Reformation and more recently in the works of Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr and others.
One should note that for the bishop of Hippo the two cities were not strictly antithetical to each other. However, in subsequent times the relation was often construed as one of mutual negation, with important consequences for civil society. Once the two cities are radically separated from each other, worldly civil and political life is inevitably denuded of intrinsic purpose or ethical–spiritual significance. Differently and more sharply put, the more the heavenly city is elevated and “transcendentalised”, the more that mundane civil life is desacralised, de-divinised, or (in Max Weber’s term) “disenchanted”. In their desacralised or disenchanted condition, world and nature are placed entirely in the grip of human designs and ambitions—which, in its way, provides an enormous boost to the “advances” of modern science and technology. In the eyes of some religious thinkers, this desacralisation of the world is precisely one of the central achievements of Christianity (seen as a transcendental monotheism). However, from an opposite viewpoint, the same process can also be championed by secular agnostics, for example, by radical Enlightenment thinkers bent on eradicating religion by showing it to be illusory and irrelevant. At the very least, these contrary or contradictory views highlight the difficulty of the relation between the two cities and, more broadly, between civilisation and the divine.
II
The Roots of the West
These comments have already led me deep into my second topic: that of Western civilisation and its historical development. Here we find ourselves instantly in a cauldron of questions. Western civilisation is also sometimes described as “Christian” or “Judaeo-Christian” civilisation. Although useful as shorthand formulas, these labels are confusing and intellectually troublesome. As the previous section should have made clear, religion—Christian or otherwise—cannot simply be equated with civilisation or culture. The most one can say is that Western civilisation has been touched in various ways by Christian or Judaeo-Christian teachings. Apart from merging the Augustinian “two cities”, the labels suffer from other defects, notably that of sidestepping the precarious situation of Judaism in most traditional Western societies. Moreover, the labels are obviously too narrow in that they ignore another important historical, and properly civilisational, dimension: the formative influence of Greece and Rome. Seen from this angle, Western civilisation is at least as much Graeco-Roman as it is Judaeo-Christian, the main issue being how to interpret and assess the respective significance of these divergent strands of tradition.
As one of the foremost interpreters of Western traditions of thought, Gadamer inevitably had to reflect repeatedly on this divergence of formative influences. Contrary to some (recently fashionable) tendencies to counterpose “Athens” and “Jerusalem” in mutually exclusive terms, Gadamer has always recognised their tensional, but mutually supplementary role. Commenting on Heidegger (whom he follows on this point), he emphasised that the former’s outlook had been shaped both by (classical and pre-Socratic) Greek thought and by Christian eschatology. “Heidegger had recognized,” he writes in one context, “a strong tension between the conceptual language of the Greeks, who had developed their physical and metaphysical world-experience cosmologically, and our own modern world-experience which is essentially influenced and formed by Christianity.”4 Ever since the advent of Christianity, Western thought has been forced to grapple with these basic problems: first, how to interpret the “fundamental ‘cosmological’ orientation of the Greeks” and second, how to translate Greek cosmological concepts into Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) vocabulary.
Put concretely, the reliable presence of the universe, the guarantee of its continuance, its uncreatedness and indestructibility, which Aristotle thought he had proven through the force of conceptual argumentation, is being overshadowed by man’s question about himself, about his finite existence and his future. It was the Judaeo-Christian discovery of the precedence of the future, the eschatology and its promise which opened up a new dimension to understand the world.5
While the Greeks knew only “peripherally” about history, being primarily concerned with cosmology (metaphysically construed), the Judaeo-Christian emphasis on salvation history brought into view another aspect of human experience: that of “hope”. As a result, the whole course of Western thought, Gadamer writes, is marked by “the tension between human experience which unfolds itself historically and is directed towards the future, and the formation of concepts which had been drawn from the cosmos”.6
Rome and Christianity
What is remarkable and noteworthy about Gadamer’s account is his refusal to endorse either facile synthesis or radical opposition—and above all his willingness to think together salvation history and cosmology, or Judaeo-Christian temporality and Graeco-Roman philosophy. Returning to the character of Western civilisation, and focusing on its constitutive features, one can say that it has largely evolved in the interstices of the two central labels, Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian. The confluence of elements is imprinted already on the birth certificate of Western Christianity as the latter was implanted upon, and emerged from, the ruins of Roman or Graeco-Roman (Hellenistic) civilisation.
During the early years, relations between Rome and Christianity were tense and hostile, punctuated by violent persecution. Even after the conversion of the emperor Constantine and the elevation of Christianity to the religion of the state, conflict persisted on the intellectual level. As we know, some of the Christian church fathers (such as Tertullian and Irenaeus) rejected the Graeco-Roman tradition as impious and “pagan”, while others (such as Ambrose and Jerome) were willing to embrace a selective learning from it. In subsequent centuries, Christianity and Roman civilisation, despite continuing quarrels, entered into a kind of symbiosis or uneasy alliance. The Western church, later called the Roman Catholic Church, was structured, and continues to be structured, on the model of the Roman Empire. After the coronation of Charlemagne (800 ce), determined efforts were made in western Europe to reaffirm explicitly the continuity with Roman civilisation. These efforts gave rise to the institutionalisation of the “Holy Roman Empire”, governed simultaneously by two authorities (emperor and pope) as rulers of the “two cities”. In a curious historical twist, Roman or Graeco-Roman cosmology was placed here in the service of Christian eschatology. In the words of Eric Voegelin:
The understanding of the medieval empire as the continuation of Rome was more than a vague historical hangover; it was part of a conception of history in which the end of Rome meant the end of the world in the eschatological sense … Western Christian society thus was articulated into the spiritual and temporal orders, with pope and emperor as the supreme representatives in both the existential and the transcendental sense.7
This is not the place to recount in detail the history of this uneasy alliance. Suffice it to say that, in the course of several centuries, the “heavenly city” increasingly collapsed into the “earthly city”, meaning that church and papacy were steadily politicised and “secularised” (with divine grace deteriorating into a worldly political commodity). Simultaneously, the earthly city decayed owing to growing internal corruption, feudal economic stagnation and interminable rifts between princes. The rebellion against this state of affairs was two-pronged, taking the form of Renaissance and Reformation. Triggered in part by the influx of Greek scholars from Byzantium, the Renaissance basically sought to rejuvenate the treasures of Graeco-Roman civilisation, especially its literature and philosophy, while also trying to revitalise the political city after the model of the Roman Republic. In turn, the Reformation sought to restore and purify the heavenly city, that is, the dimension of faith and grace, by stripping it of pretensions to worldly power. Although there was tension between the two revivals (note, for example, the conflict between Erasmus and Luther), there was also considerable overlap: many of the great Reformers were also classical humanists steeped in Greek and Latin texts (figures such as Melanchthon and Reuchlin being prominent exemplars). Thus, in their combined effect, Renaissance and Reformation testified again to the complicated, profoundly hyphenated character of Western civilisation (as Gadamer has noted): its character as Graeco-Roman/Judaeo-Christian.
This complex civilisational amalgam was disturbed and radically reoriented during the ensuing centuries. Pursuing the momentum of its own “civilising process”—a momentum fuelled by Baconian science and Cartesian rationalism—Western civilisation steadily expanded the domain of city life (as a civil artefact), while progressively absorbing or subjugating its corollaries or horizonal supplements. Seen from this angle, the Western Enlightenment signalled the upsurge of a sceptical–humanist philosophy (typified by Voltaire and Diderot) and also the triumphant ascent of empirical science and its technical/technological implementation. It is at this point that one needs to ponder whether Western civilisation is not perhaps co-constituted by a third strand or ingredient, namely, the culture of “modernity” and its social and intellectual ramifications.
Modernity
Clearly, Western modernity stands in a difficult relation to the two earlier formative components. While borrowing from and continuing in many ways the critical–philosophical legacy of Greece and Rome, modern science and rationality also break with that tradition in important respects, especially by disowning classical cosmology and teleology. Regarding the Judaeo-Christian legacy, Western post-Enlightenment modernity is marked by a radically secularising and often anti-religious bent, but this does not prevent it from incorporating into its arsenal a good deal of the spiritual inwardness and individualism previously nurtured by (Reformed) Christian faith. In large measure, the centrality of “human rights” in contemporary Western civilisation is explained by the confluence of Graeco-Roman (especially Stoic) teachings, Christian spirituality and the modern infatuation with secular individualism.
The profound tension introduced by modernity into the traditional fabric of Western civilisation has been clearly noted by Gadamer, especially in an essay entitled “Citizens of Two Worlds”—a reference not so much to the Augustinian “two cities” as to the two contrasting (though often overlapping) worlds of tradition and modernity. Gadamer writes there that “the emergence of the modern empirical sciences in the seventeenth century is the event through which the previous form of the totality of knowledge, of philosophy or philosophia in the broadest [cosmological] sense of the word, began to disintegrate”. As a result of this event, the previous—albeit fragile—“unity of our culture” was called into question. “If this is so,” Gadamer adds,
then the formation of European [Western] civilisation by science implies not only a distinction, but brings with it a profound tension into the modern world. On the one hand, the tradition of our culture which formed us determines our self-understanding by virtue of its linguistic-conceptual structure which originated in Greek dialectics and metaphysics. On the other hand, the modern empirical sciences have transformed our world and our whole understanding of the world. The two stand side by side.8
As is well known, the status of Western modernity is a highly contested issue, surrounded by intense philosophical, cultural and political debates. For some, the rift between scientific modernity and Greek teleology, and between “secular/agnostic” modernity and Judaeo-Christian faith, is so profound as to be marked by irremediable rupture (which can be either praised or condemned). For others, contrasts or divergences are mitigated by overt or covert continuities. This is not the place to rehearse this complex debate—except to note that, as a profound student of Aristotle, Hegel and Heidegger, Gadamer himself has always tended to balance rupture or divergence with some kind of continuity.
In terms of modernity’s implications for the “civilising process”, a few additional comments seem in order. Judging by strictly “civic” and humanist standards, one can hardly deny the considerable accomplishments of the modern period: its contributions to the expansion of human knowledge and to the strengthening of civil–political liberty and personal autonomy. With hindsight, of course, it is also evident that some of these gains were bought at a price—a price exacted particularly from the two corollaries or supplements of civilisation.
Here, one should also not forget that, since its inception, modernity has steadily been accompanied or shadowed by a critique of modernity and its “civilising” effects, a critique epitomised by such names or movements as Rousseau, Romanticism, Nietzsche, existentialism and “deconstruction”. Again, I shall not pursue this issue here, except to point to a caveat voiced in Gadamer’s Truth and Method (pp. 278, 281): that we should not elevate the legitimate critique of (aspects of) modernity into an “antithesis to the freedom of reason”. The statement occurs in his discussion of European Romanticism construed as a counter-move to the Enlightenment. Gadamer writes that Romanticism treated tradition (especially medieval tradition) as the “antithesis to the freedom of reason”, regarding it as “something historically given, like nature”. In Gadamer’s view, however, the celebration of nature and tradition “before which all reason must be silent” is just as “prejudiced” as the “anti-tradition” of the radical Enlightenment; even the deliberate preservation of nature and the past reflects “an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one”.
III
These observations lead me to my final theme: the implications of the civilising process for our global age, and especially for the emerging “dialogue of civilisations”. What the preceding discussion should have demonstrated is the immense complexity of civilisation, and hence of civilisational encounter and dialogue. As a result of historical sedimentations “civilisation” is an intricate, multi-layered fabric composed of different, often tensional layers or strands. Every layer in that fabric, moreover, is subject to multiple interpretations or readings, and so is the interrelation of historical strands. In addition to this multi-dimensionality, one also needs to recall the embeddedness of civil life in the web of what I termed its corollaries or horizonal supplements.
All these features can readily be transferred from the Western context to other major civilisations in the emerging global arena. Thus, “Islamic civilisation” is clearly not a uniform or compact semantic structure; as several writers have emphasised, it is possible and necessary in the case of Islamic societies to differentiate, at a minimum, between pre-Islamic legacies, Islamic traditions and modern cultural layers (often shaped by Western influence).9 Considerations of this kind militate against a bland vision of global homogeneity. Reflecting diverse historical trajectories, different civilisations manage their own complexity and multiplicity in highly distinctive ways, prompting them to resort to differentiated cosmologies, ontologies and epistemologies. With regard to civilisational encounter, this means that, to be fruitful, dialogue has to be both intra- and intercivilisational, establishing linkages across both historical and geographical boundaries.
Gadamer and Dialogue
It is precisely against this background of multiplicity that Gadamer’s hermeneutics proves most helpful, namely, by centrestaging a mode of dialogue which is open-ended and hospitable to multiple and expanding horizons. The pivotal role of dialogue (Gespräch) in his work is well known and requires little elaboration. Commenting on the Platonic model, Truth and Method stresses the point that dialogue proceeds “by way of question and answer”, with an accent on the primacy of questioning: “To question means to bring [an issue] into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the unsettled state of the answer.” To be sure, questioning here is not whimsical or pointless. Rather, it is guided by concern for a topic or issue (Sache), a concern shared by all dialogue partners in an open-ended search for truth:
To conduct a dialogue requires first of all that the partners do not talk at cross-purposes … [It] means to allow oneself to be guided by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are also oriented. This demands [in turn] that one does not try to argue the other down but that one genuinely weighs the other’s perspective.10
What is particularly important in Gadamer’s view of dialogue is its radically non-instrumental sense: dialogue here involves not only an act of questioning but also the experience of being questioned or “called into question”, possibly in unsettling and disorienting ways. The openness of dialogue means precisely the readiness of participants to allow themselves to be “addressed” and challenged by the other, particularly the stranger, the different, the exile. In Gadamer’s words, hermeneutical inquiry is based on “the polarity of familiarity and strangeness”, in that a person entering dialogue must be willing to undergo questioning, even of a radical kind. Hence, dialogical understanding as the “true locus of hermeneutics” always hovers in the “in-between”: between self and other, familiarity and strangeness, presence and absence. Elaborating on this point, one might say that dialogue happens in the “middle voice”, between pure activity and passivity, which is also the terrain of what Gadamer calls “hermeneutical experience”, seen as a venturing forward into the untamed and unfamiliar. Once the aspect of the “middle voice” is taken seriously, dialogue ceases to be a wilful exercise of construction or deconstruction. As Gadamer notes, the expression “conducting a conversation” is actually misleading, for the more genuine the conversation is, “the less its conduct lies within the willpower of either partner”. It would hence be more correct to say that we “fall into conversation” or “become embroiled in it”.11
Observations of this kind apply not only to interpersonal relations, but also—and perhaps still more forcefully—to civilisational encounters. What was called “Orientalism” in the past was precisely the effort to dominate and “talk down” the other, in such a manner that the “Occident” was never “called into question” or never allowed itself to be questioned.12 To avoid this outcome, civilisational dialogue must jettison self-aggrandising or assimilationist agendas (in the sense of the old French notion of mission civilisatrice). This means that intra‑civilisational discourse should not degenerate into “culture wars”, just as inter- or cross-cultural dialogue should move beyond Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”; but the goal in neither case is a bland amalgamation or homogenisation of differences. As with interpersonal relations, civilisational dialogue has to take otherness seriously and hence to respect differences and distances which cannot simply be wished or talked away. What is needed here is a patient reticence, a willingness to listen to the other—often in silence. There is a famous text by Heidegger entitled “A Dialogue on Language”, which records a conversation between Heidegger and a Japanese (on such topics as art, translation and other matters). The dialogue is remarkable for its porosity and multi-dimensionality. In conversing with each other, Heidegger and the Japanese try to understand and come closer to each other, but they do so in a halting and reticent way, with neither party seeking to assimilate or appropriate the other’s perspective. Despite several points of congruence, the exchange is perforated with puzzlement, self-questioning and silence (even silence about silence).13
Horizons
Respect for diversity and distances also brings back into view the previously mentioned corollaries or supplements of civilisation. From an existential–human perspective, these dimensions can be viewed as horizons or open frontiers (though not as terrains which can progressively be settled and appropriated). Here again, Gadamer’s work is helpful by accentuating the notion of “horizon” (initially introduced by Edmund Husserl) and depicting it as a “range of vision” extending beyond “what is close at hand”:
Essential to the meaning of situation (or situatedness) is the concept of “horizon”. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point ... The concept of “horizon” suggests itself because it expresses the superior breadth of vision that the person who is trying to understand must have. To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand—not in order to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion.”14
On the level of civilisational discourse, horizonal openness means attentiveness to other civilisations, but also to civilisation’s corollaries (nature and the divine), which speak or intervene in human discourse, but do so in recessed and “non-informatic” ways. The question is whether we allow ourselves to be addressed in this fashion. In the writings of the later Heidegger, openness in this sense is implicit in his comments on the “speaking of language”, where language is seen as a medium opening up a primordial space for the interactive entwinement of nature’s earth and sky and of human finitude and the divine (what he called the “four-fold”). A similar view of language is developed in the concluding part of Truth and Method where Gadamer refers to the “speculative” quality of language, that is, its character as an image or mirror of holistic world relations. Language is speculative, we read there, in that “the finite possibilities of a word are linked with the intended sense in a direction toward the infinite”; for to speak means “to correlate what is said with an infinity of the unsaid in a comprehensive nexus of meaning that alone grants understanding”.15
In the context of Western civilisation and its Judaeo-Christian dimension, Gadamer indicates that this speculative quality of language—its resonance with the infinite—has strong biblical support. In sacred scripture, human speech only mirrors a depth dimension of language harbouring a divine “call” or calling. Thus, Genesis presents God as “calling” the world into being, while the New Testament describes God as the “word” (logos, verbum) made incarnate in Christ. As Gadamer observes,
Creation once took place through the word of God. In this way the early [church] fathers used the miracle of language to explain the un-Greek idea of the creation. More importantly still: the actual redemptive act, the sending of the Son, the mystery of incarnation, is portrayed in John’s prologue in terms of the word.16
Other civilisations and religious traditions have different ways to articulate the speculative dimension of language and the character of a divine (or trans-empirical) calling. In a manner paralleling the divine word, nature also speaks to or addresses human life—but again in recessed ways, requiring sober attention. To give an example: if we destroy the rainforests or puncture the ozone layer, nature speaks through global warming and other climatic changes, trying to teach us about the consequences of our actions. Here again, the ongoing process of globalisation renders ecological responsibility a global imperative.
What Dialogue Demands
By way of conclusion, let me briefly sketch or summarise some of the basic requirements of civilisational dialogue in our time. One such requirement has to be attentiveness to “civilisation” seen as a form of civic or city life. As I have indicated, city life in this sense involves a mode of civility or civic conduct, governed by civil–political laws and standards. Awareness of the drawbacks of modern civilised life does not or should not obviate the need to cultivate civil society and a responsible “public sphere”, now on a global or globalising level. Whatever its other dimensions, the emerging global community will also be a “city”—though not on the model of the nation-state—governed by fair rules of conduct and attentive to the demands of good (responsible/accountable) government. Above all, global civil life will have to nurture the virtues of practical–political citizenship: that is, a commitment to social justice and the rule of law, and a willingness to shoulder the sobering demands of civic “prudence” (phronesis). In addition, however, attention must be accorded to civilisation’s corollaries or supplements, speaking to us in their distinctive registers. In sum, civilisational dialogue will have to be a multi-lingual discourse carried on in multiple tonalities, including the tonalities of politics, religion, philosophy and ecology (and—on a subsidiary level—economics and the Internet).
In this complex amalgam, politics is in many ways architectonic (as Aristotle recognised). Globalisation must foster a commitment to social justice and public responsibility if it is to serve not only as the pacesetter of a mega-market and (possibly hegemonic) mega-state, but also as the gateway to global or intercivilisational equity and peace. Here it is well to remember the complex conditions of peace and especially its character as a gift of justice: to have genuine peace in the city, we must also be at peace with ourselves, with nature and with the divine (no matter how this last is theologically formulated). Any act of exclusion or domination directed against any one of these dimensions is an act of violence undermining peace. In his Civitas Dei, Augustine spoke of the different modalities of peace obtaining in the different “cities”, arguing in favour of some concordance among them. Closer to our time, Mahatma Gandhi emphasised the centrality of ahmisa (non-violence), which he saw not merely as a negative injunction, but as an exhortation to “let being(s) be”, or to allow the different dimensions of humanity to flourish. Drawing out the implication of this view for civilisational concord, the Gandhi scholar Bhikhu Parekh observes (correctly) that “all cultures are partial and benefit from the insights of others”, entailing that genuine global universalism “can be arrived at only by means of an uncoerced and equal intercultural [or intercivilisational] dialogue”.17
Endnotes
1. UN General Assembly, Resolution 53/22, 4 November 1998.
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 312.
3. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); also Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon books, 1982).
4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature”, Man and World 18 (1985), p. 243.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 244.
7. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 110.
8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Citizens of Two Worlds”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 212–13.
9. See, for example, Abdol-Karim Soroush, “The Three Cultures”, in Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, trans. and ed. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 156–70. In addition to the main historical layers it is also desirable, within the Islamic tradition, to differentiate between scriptural theology, Graeco-Hellenistic philosophy, and Sufi mysticism and poetry.
10. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 363, 367.
11. Ibid., pp. 295, 353–4, 383. Compare also John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (London: Macmillan, 1991).
12. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See also my Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996).
13. See Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer”, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982).
14. See Truth and Method, pp. 302, 305. Although the text also speaks of a “fusion of horizons” (p. 306), the phrase probably should not be taken in the sense of a bland consensualism.
15. Ibid., p. 469. See also Heidegger, “Language”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 207–8.
16. Truth and Method, p. 419.
17. Bhikhu Parekh, “A Varied Moral World”, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 74. See also Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (London: Macmillan, 2000).
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