How is Global Dialogue Possible?: Foundational Reseach on Value Conflicts and Perspectives for Global Policy 9783110340785, 9783110335521

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How is Global Dialogue Possible?

Process Thought

Edited by Nicholas Rescher, Johanna Seibt, Michel Weber

Volume 24

How is Global Dialogue Possible? Foundational Research on Values, Conflicts, and Intercultural Thought Edited by Johanna Seibt and Jesper Garsdal

ISBN 978-3-11-033552-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034078-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038558-8 ISSN 2198-2287 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston/Munich Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Acknowledgements | IX  Notes on contributors | XI  General Introduction | XIX 

Part I: Conditions of global dialogue Introduction to Part | 3 Daryush Shayegan 1

Dialogue among civilizations: a brief review | 11

Daryush Shayegan 2

Is planetary civilization possible? | 19

Jesper Garsdal 3

Intercultural thought, Bildung, and the onto-dialogical perspective | 37

Karyn Lai 4

Dialogue and epistemological humility | 69

Johanna Seibt 5

Dialogue and the processing of significance: cognition as orientation | 85

Part II: Value conflicts Introduction to Part II | 119 Raffaele Rodogno 6

Attachments and the moral psychology of value conflicts | 129

Daniel Druckman 7

Doing conflict research through a multi-method lens | 143

Howard Ross 8

How cultural contestation frames escalation and mitigation in cultural conflicts | 179

VI | Contents

Chris Mitchell 9

Causing conflicts to continue | 205

Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry 10

The human quest for peace, rights, and justice: convergence of the Traditional and the Modern | 225

Part III: Intercivilizational dialogue Introduction to Part III | 253 Hans Köchler 11

The philosophy and politics of dialogue | 267

Fred Dallmayr 12

Dialogue community as a promising path to global Justice | 283

Tingyang Zhao 13

Tian xia: a model of international relations | 289

Ramin Jahanbegloo 14

Struggle for democracy and pluralism in the Islamic world | 309

Daryush Shayegan 15

Religion and ideology | 323

Part IV: Interreligious dialogue Introduction to Part IV | 339 Reinhold Bernhardt 16

Does the claim of absoluteness lead into interreligious conflicts? | 349

Dorothee Schlenke 17

Certainty and diversity: a systematic approach to interreligious learning | 367

Elsebet Jegstrup and Yoram Lubling 18

Buber and Levinas: on dialogue and the original encounter | 381

Contents | VII

Zhihe Wang 19

Following two courses at the same time: on Chinese religious pluralism | 401

Augustine Shutte 20

Conflict and religion: secularity as standard for authentic religion | 420

Part V: Global dialogue in action Introduction to Part V | 453

Timothy Reagan 21 The ecology of languages and education in an intercultural perspective | 463 María Inés Arrizabalaga 22

Translation as a lesson in dialogue | 491

Mike Hulme 23

Four meanings of climate change | 505

Silja Graupe 24

Standing on Mount Lu: how economics has come to dominate our view of culture and sustainability, and why it shouldn’t | 523

George McLean 25

The Council of Research in Values and Philosophy: a brief review | 551

Afterthought: the problem of the Many | 557  Index of names | 559 Index of subjects  | 571 

Acknowledgements This book is based on research events organized by the project group ICON (“Interculturality, Conflict, and Value Research,” 2007-2012) at Aarhus University, and its successor, the Global Dialogue Council (established 2013). We most gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Research Focus Area “Knowledge Society” at Aarhus University, the SophiaEuropa Network of the Metanexus Foundation, the City of Aarhus, the Institut für Kommunikation und Konfliktforschung München, Arla Foods, the art studio of Silvana Nannini, and, in particular, the Poul Due Jensens Foundation. More than half of the contributions to this book are substantially elaborated versions of papers presented at two large international research conferences held at Aarhus University, Understanding Conflicts—Cross-Cultural Perspectives (2008) and Global Dialogue Conference 2009: Responsibility Across Borders?— Climate Change as Challenge for Intercultural Inquiry on Values. We wish to thank all those who contributed to the success of these two conference: our 600+ international colleagues from 45 countries who demonstrated with their presence that intercultural dialogue is a central task for researchers in the Humanities; as well as our local colleagues, who assisted us with the institutional, academic, and practical organization of these large events. We feel particularly indebted to Steen Wackerhausen, Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Henrik Bødker, Matthew Haigh, Peter Nørgård, Jakob Bock, and Marco Nørskov. Some contributions have been produced in connection with the bestowal of the Global Dialogue Prize 2009 in Aarhus, and 2013 in Athens (www.globaldialogueprize.org). We very much welcome the opportunity to thank the members of the award committee of the Global Dialogue Prize 2009 and 2013, as well as Mark Sedgwick, Jørgen Nielsen, Hans Köchler, and Fred Dallmayr for lending their expertise to informed public media communication in 2009/2010. We are much obliged to William McBride (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP)) and Konstantine Boudouris (Hellenic Organizing Committee for the 23rd World Congress of Philosophy) for hosting the second award ceremony of the Global Dialogue Prize at the World Congress in Athens. The Global Dialogue Prize, one of the most significant research awards in the Humanities worldwide, is the concrete symbolic expression of the significance of the intercultural dialogue, the theme of this book. Olav Ballisager at the Poul Due Jensens Foundation made it concretely possible to realize the inaugural bestowal of Global Dialogue Prize, and we are obliged to him for this and his continued support.

X | Acknowledgements We would like to thank Dieter Teichert, Amina Wadud, Robin Wang, and Tu Weiming for comments, clarifications, or encouragement. Finally, we feel very fortunate that we could gain Roger Gathman to translate from the French and provide stylistic corrections on parts of the book.

Johanna Seibt and Jesper Garsdal, Aarhus, June 2014

Notes on contributors María Inés Arrizabalaga is Professor at the School of Languages at National University of Cordoba [NUC], and an assistant researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council. Besides, she is currently coordinating the Translation Studies Area at NUC, and the Research Area at the Patagonia Arts Institute (Argentina). She has published numerous articles and book chapters (“Five Models and a Challenge: Past, Present and Future of Translation Training Programs in Argentina”, 2012; “The Knowledge Model and the Give-and-take of Instruction and Research”, 2013). She is the editor of LAFKEN Estudios, the first Latin American book series entirely devoted to the convergence of Translation Studies and other areas of knowledge (Traductología y Neurocognición, García, 2012). Reinhold Bernhardt is Professor for Systematic Theology, University of Basel, Switzerland. He specializes in the pluralistic theology of religions whose work, published in German and translated into Spanish and English. His publications include: Der Absolutheitsanspruch des Christentums. Von der Aufklärung bis zur Pluralistischen Religionstheologie (Gütersloh 1990; Spanish translation 2000), Zwischen Größenwahn, Fanatismus und Bekennermut. Für ein Christentum ohne Absolutheitsanspruch (Stuttgart 1994, English translation 1994), Ende des Dialogs? Die Begegnung der Religionen und ihre theologische Reflexion (Zürich 2006) and Multiple religiöse Identität—Aus verschiedenen Traditionen schöpfen (Zürich 2008). Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His research is focused on intercultural philosophy, comparative political philosophy, and intercultural philosophy of education. During 2004-2005 he was president of the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP). He is a member of the International Co-ordinating Committee of the World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations” (Moscow-Vienna). Among his recent books publications are: Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (Palgrave, 2002); Hegel: Modernity and Politics (Rowman&Littlefield, 2002); Peace Talks—Who Will Listen (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); Small Wonder: Global Power and its Discontents (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); In Search of the Good Life: A Pedagogy for Troubled times (2007). The Promise of Democracy (SUNY, 2010), Integral Pluralism: Beyond Cultural Wars (University of Kentucky Press, 2010).

XII | Notes on contributors Daniel Druckman is Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, USA, and Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland. In 2003 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Association for Conflict Management. He is also a member of the faculty at Sabanci University in Istanbul, and a visiting professor at National Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Taiwan and at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research, teaching and consulting work pertains to research and evaluation methodology, negotiation, ‘conflict and isms’, international negotiation and mediation, nationalism, game theory, and cognitive psychophysiology. He has published extensively in international research journals; among his main book publications are Doing Research: Methods of Inquiry for Conflict Analysis, (Sage, 2005), and Conflict Resolution (co-ed., six volumes, Sage 2006). Douglas P. Fry is Professor for anthropology and Chair of the Department for Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birgmingham, USA; he is also affiliated with the Faculty of Social and Caring Sciences at Abo Akademi University in Finland. He has published widely on the anthropology of aggression, conflict, and conflict resolution and is best known for his fieldwork on huntergatherer bands from around the world, debunking the idea that war is an inevitable universal phenomenon of human social life. After the seminal anthology: Keeping the peace : conflict resolution and peaceful societies around the world (edited by Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry (2004) he published The Human Potential for Peace, (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Beyond War (Oxford Univ. Press 2007). Jesper Garsdal is associate professor at VIA University College and adjunct professor for intercultural philosophy of religion at the University of Aalborg. He specializes in world philosophy, comparative history of ideas, and comparative and intercultural philosophy of religion. He was a visiting scholar at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. He has published numerous articles on the methodological problems of intercultural philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and Japanese philosophy, as well as the monograph A comparative study in aspects of Hegel’s, Tanabe’s and Takeuchi’s Philosophy of Religion (Aalborg 2002). In 2009 he initiated the Global Dialogue Prize; since 2012 he has been the director of the Global Dialogue Council which organizes the award. Silja Graupe is Professor of Philosophy and Economics at Alanus University of Arts and Social Science and the Cusian Academy of European History (Germany). She specializes in the new field of intercultural economics, defined as the

Notes on contributors | XIII

critique and reformulation of the foundations of economics in the light of the world’s philosophical and ethical traditions. She is also active in re-orientating economic education, and Japanese and Chinese philosophy. Her publications include The Basho of Economics. An Intercultural Analysis of the Process of Economics (2007), Do Daoist Principles Justify Laissez Faire Policies? (2007), and The Power of Ideas. The Teachings of Economics and Its Image of Man (2012). Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA ) and was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research from 2000 to 2007. His general research interest is global climate change – especially representations of climate change in history, society and the media, climate scenarios, and the interaction between climate change science and policy. He has published extensively on climate change topics and is editor-in-chief of the newly commissioned Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change and co-editor of the journal Global Environmental Change. Among his most recent book publications are Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge Univ Press 2009) and Making Climate Change Work For Us (ed., Cambridge Univ Press 2010). Ramin Jahanbegloo is Professor of Political Science and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethics at University of Toronto. He taught at the Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, at the Department of Contemporary Studies of the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran, and at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India. In 2006 he was imprisoned in Iran. He is a board member of PEN Canada and in October 2009 he became the winner of the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association in Spain for his extensive academic works in promoting dialogue between cultures and his advocacy for non-violence. Among his many book publications on political philosophy and cultural studies are India Revisited (Oxford University Press 2007), The Spirit of India (Penguin 2008) and The Clash of Intolerances (Har-Anand 2007). Elsebet Jegstrup is Professor emeritus of Philosophy at Elon University. She has published extensively on Hannah Arendt, post-modern philosophy (Levinas), and especially on Kierkegaard. Her recent research takes up questions of justice. Among her book publications are The New Kierkegaard (2004).

XIV | Notes on contributors Hans Köchler is Professor of Political Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (Manila). He is the Founder and President of the International Progress Organization (I.P.O.), an international NGO in consultative status with the United Nations. A longstanding advocate of intercultural thought, Köchler is author or editor of many articles and books in over a dozen languages, including Cultural Self-comprehension of Nations (1978), The New International Economic Order: Philosophical and Socio-cultural Implications (1980), Democracy and the International Rule of Law (1995); Civilizations: Conflict or Dialogue? (1998), Globality versus Democracy? The Changing Nature of International Relations in the Era of Globalization (2000), Global Justice or Global Revenge? (2005 2nd ed); World Order: Vision and Reality (2009). Karyn Lai is Senior Lecturer and Philosophy Discipline Coordinator at the University of South Wales, Australia. She specializes in comparative philosophy, with focus on Chinese comparative philosophy. She has published widely on the application of Chinese philosophy on issues in contemporary ethics, including environmental ethics. Among her recent book publications are Learning from Chinese Philosophies: Ethics of Interdependent and Contextualised Self (2006), New Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Chinese Philosophy, (2007) and Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (2008). Yoram Lubling is Professor of Philosophy at Elon University. He specializes in Classical American Philosophy, Holocaust Studies, and Jewish Philosophy (Martin Buber). He has authored numerous articles in international journals; a recent book publication is Twice-Dead: Moshe Y. Lubling; the Ethics of Memory, and the Treblinka Revolt (2007). George Francis McLean is Professor emeritus at the School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America (CUA), Washington, D.C., and Director of its Centre for the Study of Culture and Values. He is the founder and director of the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, the largest and most active scholarly network for intercultural thought, and main editor of the book series Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change. He has written extensively on issues in intercultural value research; among his many book publications are: Knowledge of God and the Discovery of Man (2003); Persons, People, and Cultures Living Together in a Global Age (2004); Beyond Modernity: The Recovery of Person and Community in Global Times (2008); Unity and Harmony, Compassion and Love in Global Times (2011).

Notes on contributors | XV

Christopher Mitchell is Professor emeritus at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. He is a pioneering figure in the field of both theoretical and applied conflict management, developing in the 1960s the basic principles of conflict resolution, including the concept of the so-called “Track Two” interventions for the resolution of protracted conflicts. More recently, he has headed the “Local Zones of Peace” project, which involves delineating and analysing local communities’ efforts to establish neutral and secure “zones of peace” in countries suffering from protracted conflicts between the state and para-state rebels, such as the Philippines, Colombia and El Salvador. His publications include the Handbook of Conflict Resolution: The Analytical Problem-Solving Approach (Pinter 1996) and Gestures of Conciliation : Factors Contributing to Successful Olive Branches (2000). Timothy Reagan is Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. His research focuses on educational linguistics, foreign language education, critical pedagogy, educational leadership, and comparative and international education. He was Professor of Education at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut, USA, with past visiting appointments in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Estonia, Mauritania, Mexico, Paraguay, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, and Turkey. He has published widely on language policy and language planning in education, and critical linguistics in foreign language education. Among his recent publications are: Non-western educational traditions: Indigenous approaches to educational thought and practice (2005) Leading dynamic schools: how to create and implement ethical policies (co-ed., 2008), and Language Matters: Reflections on Educational Linguistics (2009). Raffaele Rodogno is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, specializing in value theory and research on emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective combining philosophy and neuroscience. He is a member of the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) at Aarhus University and collaborates with the Swiss Center for the Affective Sciences, as well as with members of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He has published widely in international research journals; recently he published the monograph In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion (2011, co-authored with J. Deonna and F. Teroni, Fabrice). Marc Howard Ross is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He has published widely on conflict theories and, in particular, on the role of culture in ethnic conflict and

XVI | Notes on contributors its mitigation. His books include The Culture of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective (1993), Contesting Culture in Ethnic Conflict (2007), Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict Management: Theorizing Success and Failure (1999), and most recently Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies (2009). Dorothee Schlenke is Professor for Protestant Theology/Religious Pedagogy at Freiburg University of Education, Germany. Her research interests are focused on the fundamental relationship between religion, Christian theology and the question of education, including religious learning, gender perspectives, and the possibility of interreligious dialogue. Johanna Seibt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her main research interest is in process philosophy, in systematic and historical regards. She is co-editor of the book series Process Thought and is author of the current entry “Process Philosophy” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her book publications include Properties as Processes (1990); Process Theories—Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Dynamic Categories (ed., 2003); General Processes—A Study in Ontological Category Construction (2005); Theory and Application of Ontological Theories (co-ed. 2010). Daryush Shayegan (emeritus, lives in Paris and Tehran) is one of Iran’s most prominent comparative philosophers, cultural theorists, and literary writers. In 2004 he received the French Prix Littéraire Européen (ADELF). His work is written in French and Persian, with translations into English, Arabic, Spanish, Turkish, German, and Italian. He is a specialist in Eastern metaphysics and Persian poetry, but also writes with unique scholarly breadth on the cultural history of the Muslim countries, India, Europe, China, Japan, and Latin America. Among his publications are: Les illusions de l’identité (1992); Cultural Schizophrenia, Islamic Societies Confronting the West ( 1997 transl. from the French); Au-delà du miroir, Diversité culturelle et unité des valeurs (2004); Terre de mirages (2005); La lumière vient de l’Occident, Le réenchantement du monde et la pensée nomade (2008 3rd ed.). Augustine Shutte is Professor emeritus at the Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town. His work is focused on philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, ethics and contemporary Thomist philosophy. Among his book publications are: The Mystery of Humanity (1993); Philosophy for Africa (1995); Ubuntu: An ethic for a new South Africa (2001); The Quest for Humanity in Science and Religion (2006).

Notes on contributors | XVII

Geneviève Souillac is Senior University Researcher at the Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI) at the University of Tampere, Finland. Previously, she was Senior Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, Lecturer at Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in Sydney, Australia, and earlier, Academic Program Associate at the United Nations University's Peace and Governance Program also in Tokyo. Her interests include contemporary European Philosophy, the philosophy and ethics of peace, religious ethics, and civilizational dialogue. She is the author of Human Rights in Crisis. The Sacred and the Secular in Contemporary French Thought (2005), The Burden of Democracy. The Claims of Cultures, Public Culture, and Democratic Memory (2011), and A Study in Transborder Ethics. Justice, Citizenship, Civility (2012). Zhihe Wang is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for the Study of Science and Faith at Beijing Normal University. His research interests are focused on religious pluralism and process philosophy; he is also the coordinator of a variety of collaborations that advocate and advance intercultural thought in China. Among his recent publications are Whitehead and China (Ontos 2008) and The Dao of Conflict: A Chinese Approach to Religious Pluralism (Ontos 2010). Tingyang Zhao is Great Wall Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has been Visiting Professor at the Harvard-Yenching Institute and is a steering member of Transcultura Europe. His research interest are mainly in political theory and political philosophy. Among his recent book publications are The No-World View of the World (in Chinese; 2003); All-Under-TheHeaven (Tian Xia) System (in Chinese; 2005); Credit Human Rights": A NonWestern Theory of Universal Human Rights (2007); The self and the other: An unanswered question in Confucian theory (2008); Studies of a Bad World— Political Philosophy As First Philosophy (in Chinese, 2009).

General Introduction How is global dialogue possible? In view of the unabated cultural tensions in many European societies five years after the European Union’s “Year of Intercultural Dialogue” in 2008, in view of persistent antagonist and hegemonial strategies in global policy making more than a decade after the United Nations’ “Year of Dialogue of Civilizations” in 2001—some might say it obviously isn’t. Shouldn’t we, at this point in time, shift the question to a more modest one: whether global dialogue is possible at all? Alternatively, the question of how global dialogue is possible might strike us as superfluous, given that the answer lies squarely on everybody’s lap: internet technology. Global online communication, networking within and across cultures, is surely the outstanding characteristic of our times. Both the cynical and the techno-centric reactions have their merits, even as both involve instructive misunderstandings that give us a useful foil for the characterization of our project. Let us begin with the techno-centric answer. The internet, a communication tool of unprecedented range, size, and versatility, is currently used by a third of the world’s population; it has at least 25 billion pages offering textual and visual information as well as platforms for communicative interactions of all kinds. However, the early predictions that the internet would usher in an era of global understanding certainly are not borne out by at least one semantic gauge: the number of citations (in the order of 10-1 to10-4) of the vast number of pages that contain the (English) keywords “global communication,” “global understanding,” or “global dialogue” It is almost equaled by the number of the (English) keyword “intercultural conflict,” currently over 3, 6 million, with three times as many instances of “cultural diversity”. Interestingly, less than 1 percent of the pages on “intercultural conflict” include English phrases that are indicative of definitional concerns—showing that a common understanding of the expression “intercultural conflict” is presupposed. In contrast, 10-20 percent of entries with the keywords “intercultural dialogue” (about 1 million hits) and “cultural diversity” (about 10 million) address definitional issues.1 What, if anything at all, could one conclude from this lexical census? One could conclude that those who use the English pages of the internet are well aware of cultural diversity, but are still trying to get a grip on the notions of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue. One could also conclude that Eng|| 1 The results are Google searches, accessed on May 9, 2013. Percentages are not adjusted for the proportionality of English vs. non-English sites.

XX | Introduction lish-speaking users of the internet do not expressly perceive the net as a tool or medium of global dialogue. Of course, this does not mean that they are not using the internet for purposes that we would put under the label intercultural dialogue. But we would have to concede that there is no clear indication that the internet has increased global understanding as the cyber-utopians thought it would. While common sense might seem to tell us that the mere fact of increased communication increases understanding, other factors may preempt this effect. Asking “Why Has The Internet Changed So Little?” a blog author suggests that “the reason why so many wide-eyed predictions about the internet proved to be wrong was because society influenced the internet more than the other way round.”2 The exponential increase in communications around the world still has not helped us to communicate in the specific ways that could facilitate mutual understanding across different and conflicting cultural norms. This leads us to the first misunderstanding we wish to warn against: confusing dialogue with communication. In a first approximation, dialogue is a special form of communicative interaction that constitutively involves a basic sort of acknowledgement of all participants. Precisely what dialogue partners acknowledge in each other can be articulated in different ways, as we shall see from the characterizations of dialogue provided in this book, but there is common agreement that the relevant acknowledgement has a positive function in bringing about the peaceful and productive interaction among dialogue partners, e.g. its form encourages them to search jointly for creative solutions to coordination or cooperation problems.3 The idea that psychology and realpolitik rule out real global dialogue leads us to the second misunderstanding we wish to highlight: there is not just one level of dialogue, but different levels and forms of dialogical exchanges across cultural differences. Generally speaking, the expressions ‘global dialogue,’ ‘intercultural dialogue,’ the “dialogue of civilizations” are used to denote communicational interactions among interlocutors who try to overcome communication and coordination problems that are generated by conflicting cultural commitments. While the term “dialogue of civilizations” has a more narrow || 2 James Curran, March 12, on http://www.opendemocracy.net/james-curran/why-hasinternet-changed-so-little 3 We are using here the familiar distinction between, on the one hand, coordination problems—to be resolved by conventions—and, on the other hand, cooperation problems—which call for a new norm in the strong sense as a rule for group action with shared intentions—to indicate that commitments of different normative strengths and identificatory potentials may be at stake.

Introduction | XXI

sense, as the chapters below will explain, typically ‘global dialogue’ and, especially, ‘intercultural dialogue’ are used broadly to cover communicational interactions at different levels—among individuals, but also among supra-individual interaction units such as groups, societies, nations, cultures, and civilizations.4 It is important to note, however, and this is what dialogue skepticism often misses, that global or intercultural dialogue not only occurs at different levels but also in different forms. At the level of the direct physical encounter of single individuals, intercultural dialogue occurs in the form of praxis—all concerned are concretely involved in the interaction. At the level of communicative interactions between social or cultural groups within one society or nation, intercultural dialogue occurs in the form of policy—those involved, the groups’ representatives, are forging agreements on rules that bind all group members who are concerned but not directly involved. At the level of communicative interactions among different nations, intercultural dialogue could be policy but until now appears in the form of a political strategy. Finally, at the level of communicative interactions among cultures or ‘civilizations,’ intercultural dialogue takes the form of scholarly inquiry. Like groups, societies, and nations, cultures interact by means of their representatives, those who reflect and articulate the core commitments and contents of their own culture, typically scholars and thinkers.5 Intercultural dialogue at the level of civilizations thus is the direct or virtual scholarly conversation of scholars and thinkers of all cultures. On the basis of these distinctions of the forms and levels of intercultural dialogue—as praxis, policy, strategy, and inquiry—the main aim of this book can be succinctly stated as follows: to investigate the hypothesis that global dialogue as praxis, policy, and strategy can be greatly facilitated by global dialogue as scholarly inquiry. || 4 In political strategy papers the term ‘global dialogue’ is often used to abbreviate ‘dialogue of civilizations,’ a term that in politics denotes a model of international relations (see part III below). This is terminologically unfortunate, however, since in these contexts the term ‘global dialogue’ figures in problematic vicinity to ‘globalization,’ a process that is not at all dialogical but structured by relations of economic competition and technological power. We think it preferable to use the notions of ‘global dialogue’ and ‘intercultural dialogue’ interchangeably, in an effort to de-emphasize connotations of expansionism in the term ‘global dialogue’ while at the same time emphasizing that ‘intercultural dialogue’—which the European media often reduce to a dialogue between Islamic culture and Western culture—always stands in the horizon of a ‘polylogue.’ 5 Of course, artists are representatives of cultural reflection as much as scholars and thinkers, and art is a large space for the interaction of cultures. While the notion of intercultural dialogue could be applied to art, in our view, in this project the focus is on the conceptually articulated reflection of culture.

XXII | Introduction This hypothesis seems plausible enough, we think, to merit closer attention. The more the voices of cultural reflection in each culture interact with each in direct or virtual dialogical exchanges on cultural contents, the easier it will be for individuals, policy makers, and negotiators to understand the mutual interdependencies of cultural products and, importantly, to understand these interdependencies not only abstractly but in concrete historical and systematic detail. In other words, scholarly inquiry is not ‘academic’ in the invidious sense, but undergirds larger efforts to promote intercultural understanding. This is what makes ‘intercultural thought’ so significant: that it facilitates and supports dialogue at all levels. Even when intercultural dialogue is conducted at the individual, personal level, intercultural thought has an important role to play; while interpersonal dialogue certainly can succeed in a situation of mutual cultural ignorance, based on sheer existential acknowledgement of the other as human being, such encounters become richer, deeper, and, in particular, more ‘sustainable’ if dialogue partners gain greater familiarity with their mutual cultural backgrounds and their historical and systematic cross-cultural relations. Intercultural thought can teach us to be less ‘hung-up’ on cultural letters and to search jointly, by mirroring each culture in the other, for the respective spirit (or: existential insight) behind the letter. While the existential insights in question may remain irreconcilable—note that promoting dialogue is not promoting reconciliation or compromise—in dialogue interlocutors become aware of the fact that cultural contents are continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that cultural values are not abstract entities but live in the processes of continuous interpretation by the members of the cultural community. This awareness, if gained in the process of joint search for existential truth, should increase mutual understanding and the chances of finding solutions for practical coordination or cooperation problems. There are many open questions surrounding our hypothesis. The task of this book is to address and explore these questions from the viewpoint of different disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields: philosophy, conflict research, anthropology, political theory, theology, linguistics, climate research, and economic theory. The twenty-five contributions to this volume address the book’s lead question ‘how is global dialogue possible?’ chiefly in two ways: one, by investigating the methodology of intercultural thought; and two, by looking at its relation to global dialogue as praxis, policy, and, in particular, strategy, and its potential practical significance in education, translation, climate research, economic theory, and conflicts that center on cultural and religious values. The book is divided into five thematic parts. Since we provide more detailed introductions for each part, we only supply here a very brief and schematic overview. Part I sets out with a focus on global dialogue as scholarly inquiry,

Introduction | XXIII

the original conception of Daryush Shayegan’s notion of a “dialogue of civilization. ” The chapters of this part present the basic idea of this type of inquiry, its history, and the methodological implications of the notion of ‘dialogue’ as a model of understanding for philosophy, in particular for the notion of subjectivity, truth, mind, and values. Part II takes up the theme of values from the perspective of conflict research and anthropology, and investigates the special features of value-based conflicts. The first two chapters of this part provide some conceptual and methodological foundations—they introduce the reader to a relevant philosophical notion of values as well as to the methods of conflict research. The following two chapters analyze the distinctive elements of value-based and cultural conflicts and explain the possible significance of intercultural dialogue to dissolve the identificatory force of antagonistic scenarios. One strategy—suggested in the concluding chapter of Part II—is to focus on the ‘anthropology of peace’ and to explore the possibility of transferring both ‘peace technologies’ and community structures to a supra-national level to introduce a practically relevant, ethically sufficiently substantive, notion of world citizenship. Continuing with this political theme, Part III introduces the second and by now dominant meaning of the “dialogue of civilizations” as model of global politics. The first three chapters of this part clarify the constitutive assumptions of the ‘dialogue model,’ which requires the development of new political categories beyond those that govern the traditional “realist” adversarial conception of international politics. The fourth and the fifth chapter present two studies on the recent history of Islamic societies pursuing democratic forms of government; in connection with these concrete case studies they discuss and partly illustrate the role that intellectuals and scholars can play to develop suitable relationships between traditional religious languages and the political discourse of (Western) modernity. Part IV puts the focus fully on religion and investigates the conditions for the possibility of interreligious dialogue. The first chapter of this part demonstrates that the main monotheistic religions contain the theological resources for the relativization of exclusivist claims. The second chapter argues that interreligious dialogue is written into the very semantics of religious assertions—or, to use a strong reformulation: that the dialogical engagement of religious contents is constitutive for their status as divine revelations. The fourth chapter presents the cognate claim that religious conflicts are self-made problems of a certain metaphysics and epistemology; by contrast, if one adopts a process metaphysics it is possible to formulate a model (“dialogical unity”) of inclusive pluralism. The third and the fifth chapters argue, along very different paths,

XXIV | Introduction partly following Buber and Levinas, partly as an independent line of reasoning, that dialogical experience itself can be taken to form the core of religion. Part V offers reflections on the practical realization of global dialogue. Two chapters reflect on the possibility of intercultural dialogue despite of the diversity of human languages or, as it will appear, precisely supported by it, given that language education and translation can be taken and taught as a lesson in dialogue. The third and the fourth chapter of part V focus topically on two prevalent issues of global policy—the mitigation of climate change and the development of sustainable economies—and illustrate at which level of analysis the intercultural perspective can become particularly productive as an instrument of creativity and innovation. The final chapter offers an example of a practical realization of scholarly intercultural dialogue, describing the work and format of academic events organized by the Council of Research in Values and Philosophy, currently the largest and most productive research network in intercultural thought. The five parts of the book ask the question ‘how is global dialogue possible?’ in five different ways and perspectives—as an exploration of historically sufficient and the philosophically necessary conditions of intercultural dialogue as scholarly inquiry (Part I); as an investigation of its possible use in conflict mitigation (Part II); as a clarification of prerequisites and directions of “dialogue among civilizations” in the specific sense of the strategy concept of global politics (Part III); as inquiry into the conceptual foundations for the possibility of interreligious dialogue and of a (view of) religion that includes dialogue as one—or even the most—central conceptual or methodological element (Part IV); and, finally, as reflection on the practical realization of global dialogue as scholarly inquiry (Part V). To create thematic trajectories between the different parts, to higlight connections and bring, to some extent at least, the twenty-five chapters into dialogue with each other, we have prefaced each part with a separate introduction where each chapter is presented in more detail and some background information is supplemented. On the whole we have tried to turn an anthology into a polyphonic monograph with twenty-six voices. Twenty of the twenty-five chapters of this book are substantially elaborated versions of some of the plenary lectures and session papers presented at two large international research conferences organized by the editors, Understanding Conflicts—Cross-Cultural Perspectives (2008, Aarhus University) and Global Dialogue Conference 2009: Responsibility Across Borders?—Climate Change a

Introduction | XXV

Challenge for Intercultural Inquiry on Values (2009, Aarhus University).6 Two chapters have a different provenience that deserves mention. The theoretical considerations that motivated this book also found expression in a special form of research communication—a research award. In 2009 the Global Dialogue Prize was instituted to “acknowledge outstanding achievements in the advancement and application of intercultural value research,” and endowed as “one of the most significant awards in the Humanities worldwide.” The prize was awarded in 2009 to Daryush Shayegan, and in 2013 to the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, received by the founding director of the organization George McLean; both acceptance speeches are included as the book’s opening and the concluding chapters, respectively. In sum, the aim of this book is to enhance the theoretical and empirical discussion of the notion of global or intercultural dialogue. The book’s twenty-five chapters, which editorial commentaries aim to integrate into an overarching framework, investigate the philosophical conditions for the possibility for global dialogue in its scholarly form as intercultural thought, and explore, from an interdisciplinary point of view, how intercultural thought relates to global dialogue in its other forms: as praxis, policy, or strategy. In the course of these investigations the book sheds light on how global dialogue is possible, when, and for whom, but in particular also why our future depends on it.

|| 6 Other contributions to these conferences appeared in three special journal issues that are thematically closely related to the topics of this book: Religion and Peaceful Conflicts, Special Issue of the Journal of Religion, Peace and Conflict 4-1, (2010), guest editor J. Garsdal; Group Identity and Conflict. Special issue of Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 28 (2011), guest editor J. Seibt; Climate Change, Sustainability, and Environmental Ethics. Special Issue of Environmental Ethics, 35-2 (2013), guest editor J. Seibt.

Introduction to Part I Intercultural dialogue is the endeavor of sustaining the normative tensions among different ‘civilizations’ or cultures by exploring them in (direct or virtual) joint conversation, in the hope that this engagement will improve the conditions for peaceful interaction.7 Intercultural dialogue occurs at different levels in different forms—at the level of personal encounter it is praxis; at the level of social contact it is policy; at the level of international relations it is a strategy of negotiation; at the level of reflected cultural interaction, it takes the form of scholarly inquiry. Since the book’s overarching aim is to explore the hypothesis that global or intercultural dialogue as praxis, policy, or strategy concept can only succeed if it is supported by intercultural dialogue as inquiry, part I will set out with a closer look at the sort of scholarly enterprise in question. In first approximation, global dialogue in the form of an interaction of cultural reflections is what Western academia has identified as “intercultural thought.” Among Western scholars ‘intercultural thought’ often is canvassed as an expression of the Zeitgeist of Western multi-cultural societies of the late 20th century. In fact, however, ‘intercultural thought’ has a long history and is found across cultures—it is not a concrete method, nor tied to any particular paradigm of research, nor topically restricted. Intercultural thought is a posture of inquiry that aims to transcend the limitations of the cultural research tradition in which it originates. Based on the vision of a virtual conversation of thinkers of all cultures, intercultural thought is a striking expression of our—apparently universal—human hermeneutic capacity of creating horizons of understanding between cultures, as well as our ability to articulate insights and contents crossculturally. Intercultural thought poses deep methodological questions concerning its very possibility and its potential significance. Intercultural thought relies on the hermeneutic capacity of intercultural understanding, but what are the roots of this capacity and what does it reveal about human nature? What does it imply || 7 In the context of these introductory passages, here and below, we use the three terms: culture, civilization, and an agent’s world, to denote a comprehensive normative environment of significances and practices. These three terms are notoriously difficult to define; here we hope it should suffice to leave the differences in meaning implicit. Roughly, we take ‘culture’ to be the generic term for a normative environment of significances and practices, ‘civilization’ denotes a specific type of culture that includes complex social and political norms, while an agent’s ‘world’—which may or may not include the norms of a civilization—refers to an individual instantiation of cultural norms.

4 | Introduction to Part I about norms and values in terms of their scope (their universality, or exclusiveness) and as they are manifested in societies and by individual agents? If intercultural understanding is possible, what does it tell us about the epistemic certainty of existential truths, about meaning, about the conceptual role of otherness and contrasts, about human interrelatedness, and ultimately about us as reflective subjects caught in the flow of history? Part I explores, from different philosophical perspectives, methodological, metaphysical, epistemological and metaphilosophical issues arising with the phenomenon of intercultural understanding and scholarly engagement of the latter in intercultural thought. Unfolding the book’s lead question, part I introduces these issues by asking for the preconditions of intercultural understanding and global dialogue as inquiry or intercultural thought. There are two meanings of “precondition” or ‘condition for the possibility’ at play here: one concerns the essential prerequisites for the realization of the phenomenon. The second meaning relates to the actualization of the phenomenon, i.e., to the occasioning of particular occurrences of the phenomenon. Since the public discussion about “intercultural dialogue” often confuses questions of essential prerequisites with occasioning conditions, it might be worthwhile to illustrate the contrast by means of a simple example.8 In order to acquire the capacity of speaking, an entity must be of the right kind—which humans are, and turtles are not. These prerequisites for the acquisition of the capacity of speaking differ, however, from the conditions that occasion particular episodes of speaking. The circumstances under which we actualize our capacity of speaking are neither causes nor entailments—there is nothing that strictly necessitates us to speak. What inclines us to speak may be mere spontaneity, but in most cases we are ‘moved to speak’ because we have a reason, because there is some—communicative or agentive—goal that we wish to achieve. The chapters of part I explore both kinds of preconditions of global dialogue as intercultural thought. The first two chapters of part I by the eminent Iranian philosopher, cultural historian, and writer Daryush Shayegan fall under the domain of the second, occasioning conditions for global dialogue, as they describe the contingent developments in geo-political and cultural history that motivated the call for a “dialogue among civilizations.” In spite of their contingency, Shayegan argues, these developments now offer us good reasons to engage in efforts of intercultural understanding, both as individuals and societies.

|| 8 The contrast is anchored in Aristotle’s distinction between first-level and second-level potentialities and the associated different senses of ‘can’ in De Anima II.5, from whence we also take our illustration.

Introduction to Part I | 5

In this first chapter Shayegan reviews the complex dialectic that led to the philosophical program of a “dialogue of civilizations” in the historically and geographically specific situation of Teheran in the late seventies.9 As Shayegan’s narrative reveals, the original motivations for the program of a “dialogue of civilizations” reflect the intellectual atmosphere within post-colonial Islamic and Asian countries at that time. Dialogue promised a therapeutic form of engagement with the normative and identificatory tensions that Shayegan describes as the complex subjective experience of “cultural schizophrenia,” impressed upon an intellectual contingent both attracted to and repulsed by both Western economic and scientific superiority, on the one hand, and Eastern existential depth, on the other.10 The concrete project of intercultural research that Shayegan in the 1970s labeled the “dialogue of civilizations” had initially, as such, little to do with the later role of this concept in international politics around the turn of the millennium, and even less with current calls for global dialogue in the context of global climate policy and global justice.11 Rather, the “dialogue amongst civilizations” was initially floated as an appeal for a postcolonial cultural reorientation with the aim “to resume once again cultural links with great Asian civilizations which were interrupted because of the Western domination of the world.” However, as Shayegan argues in chapter 2, from present hindsight we see that ultimately the occasioning conditions of intercultural dialogue must be determined in more general terms, and, similarly, its aims are to be placed in values of global well-being: justice, spiritual richness, and security. As Shayegan carefully shows, the “cultural schizophrenia” of post-colonial societies cannot be simplistically analyzed as a tension between the eternal “West” and the eternal “East”. In fact, a glance at the history of modernization shows that it brought out complex and deeply antagonistic strands within older national cultures we associate with the West or Europe, such as those of Germany and Russia, producing a general existential crisis together with a spectrum of new ‘sciences’ of culture that analyzed cultural variations in space and time partly as

|| 9 The text of chapter constitutes the main part of Shayegan’s acceptance speech upon receiving the inaugural Global Dialogue Prize in 2009. 10 This characterization of the cultural-historical origins of the idea of intercultural dialogue as intercultural thought can, in the last analysis, probably also be understood as a claim about a conflicted “cultural sensibility” that might have been experienced by individuals anywhere when facing a mixed past in which progress was inherently linked to oppression. For a different context of origination of the idea of dialogical relations between cultures see below, introduction to Part III. 11 See below chapters 11 and 23.

6 | Introduction to Part I a therapeutic relief from the symptoms of that crisis. Anthropology and history generate synchronic and diachronic catalogues of cultures, creating “recapitulative memories” of the development of humankind—“a resurgence of forgotten voices and …archaic explosion of all the repressed sensibilities.” On the other hand, the same critical, scientific rationality must also be credited for the important “gains of modernity” such as human rights, the division of powers within societies, free markets, and the autonomy of critical reason. These hallmarks of modernity are, in Shayegan’s view, incontrovertibly valuable from all cultural perspectives. If we want to retain these “gains of modernity” we need to reconfigure our model of subjectivity and acknowledge the “dialogical relations” between cultures. Instead of postulating fixed and exclusive cultural identities, we need to understand the “interconnectedness” of all cultures and accept a dialogical model of cultural subjectivity according to which all “hybridizations” and ‘make-shift’ combinations (bricolage) are valid projects for a person’s cultural self-understanding. Shayegan leaves us with the following prescription for constructing a dialogical conception of cultural subjectivity: In order that a relation can be established between the protagonists of culture, they must be capable of getting out of their respective orbits, to see themselves as in multifaceted mirrors wherein the images of both the one and the other are reflected; that they can change, respectively, their places, and decipher, in the passage of one to the place of the other, the other’s heuristic, being lifted to the level of complementarity in knowing that at the bottom of themselves there are extremely varied aspects of an inexhaustible reality. 12

This passage opens up another line of inquiry that takes us away from considering the conditions that occasion, in some specific instance or more generally, the actualization of our human capacity for intercultural understanding, and leads into an investigation of the prerequisites of this capacity. How is it possible for us as humans to perform the role-taking that Shayegan describes? Is it necessary that we experience the combinatorial space of cultural valuations not merely intellectually but existentially, as lived valuations? If we “need to speak with twenty voices at once,” where shall we place truth? How should we conceive of the human mind if we wish to leave the pathologies of modernity behind and embrace a “multiply divided self” as a prerequisite of dialogue and, in fact, of sociality beyond the Cartesian model of “solitary substances” (Whitehead)? These and other questions about the realization conditions or prerequi|| 12 See chapter 2 below. For elaborations on the phenomenology of a dialogical conception of cultural subjectivity see Shayegan 1989: pp. 189ff and 2001:19-33 (the bibliographical details are in chapter 2).

Introduction to Part I | 7

sites of intercultural dialogue and intercultural thought are taken up in chapters three through five. Chapter 3 presents a project that resonates directly, if implicitly, with Shayegan’s quoted prescription of acknowledging otherness as mirror images, by transposing it into the key of a metaphysical investigation. Reaching out into the subtleties of subjectivity-theoretical dialectics, Jesper Garsdal suggests in this chapter that our hermeneutic capacity for intercultural dialogue can be considered as realizing the true structure of our selves. The first step of Garsdal’s analysis of the requirements of dialogue centers on the correlative notions of deciphering and cipher. “Deciphering,” for Garsdal, entails not simply understanding the worldviews of the other, but in fact understanding them in terms of the motives, vocabularies and practices inherent in building one’s own worldview. While we are used—in particular as philosophers of the Western tradition—to view concepts and their contents as fairly readymade and stable, Garsdal’s approach is processual. Thus, instead of the mainstream view of traditional Western philosophy—especially the rationalist tradition—in which concepts and ideas are entities that contain meanings, which in turn exist in themselves and are to be ‘grasped’ by the thinking subject, Garsdal’s view is that meaning is inseparable from the hermeneutic process of interpretation. That process is a ‘deciphering,’ an attempt to make existential sense of a symbol whose full meaning cannot be exhausted by any particular act of interpretation. By putting the emphasis on the process of interpretation, Garsdal argues, we can effectively overcome the familiar dialectical opposition between universalism and particularism. These insights are contextualized, in a second step, with an analysis of the dialectics engendered by a Hegelian conception of self as selfrealization. For Hegel, the subject becomes a self to the extent to which it interacts in certain ways with another self—both selves are mutually constitutive for each other and depend on being each the ‘other’ of themselves. While this conception of the self as social self-realization has seemed to many to be on the right track, it also gives rise to a number of well-known systematic shortcomings. Of Hegel’s critics, Kierkegaard’s and Tanabe’s objections to the self as Hegel constructs it seem to Garsdal to be most pertinent for understanding the deciphering attitude of the subject. Garsdal argues that the peculiar hermeneutic situation of intercultural dialogue—its staging of a confrontation with an alien Other—offers the sort of interactive encounter that can constitute true selves. In the dialogical interaction of two “existential subjectivities”— two efforts at deciphering the valuations that amount to a meaningful life—the true structure of subjectivity as mutual self-realization is achieved. Garsdal’s point is that the condition for the possibility of intercultural dialogue, or what we might

8 | Introduction to Part I call its metaphysical prerequisite, is nothing more and nothing less than the structure of reflective and self-realizing consciousness itself.13 In Chapter 4 Karyn Lai investigates epistemological implications of intercultural dialogue from the perspective of ancient Chinese philosophy. As she observes, our contemporary discourses on global policy feature radical disagreements about both values and approaches. This is not a peculiarity of our time, however: it is a recurrent historical phenomenon. Thus, it invites a crosstemporal view on reactions to such radical disagreement. Lai suggests that the Zhuangzi, a text in ancient Chinese philosophy from the Warring States period (457-221 BCE), contains a recommendation on how to approach irreconcilable disputes and in this way directly speaks to our current predicaments. The author of the Zhuangzi comments on the source of these radical disagreements, which in his view is the result of the irreducibly partial nature of worldviews or perspectives on what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong.’ It is not the partiality in itself that that renders radical disagreement problematic, but the fact that conflicting parties often do not see their view as partial: rather, they see it as the objective truth. This psychological move is often accompanied by attitudes of defensiveness. We might expect that Zhuangzi’s claim about the partiality of all worldviews should lead him to an epistemological question: ‘if not objective truth, which other epistemic status should we then assign to our worldviews?’ A possible answer this question could, for example, fall in with an epistemological account of truth-candidacy or truth-likeness to fit with some stance of pluralism.14 As Lai shows, however, the Zhuangzi treats the problem of partiality quite differently. Instead of determining the theoretical epistemic status of partial claims, he prescribes an epistemic attitude—that is, instead of labeling the status of these claims that would allow us to judge about them as more or less probable or truth-like, we should try to understand their deficiencies. As Lai elaborates, “the method appropriate to [the task of challenging the complacency of presupposed objectivity] is responsiveness, not the evaluation of views for correctness.” In other words, from Zhuangzi’s point of view it will not do to || 13 In this chapter the structure of self-realizing consciousness is dialectically conceived, as determined by its relationship to an ‘absolute’—which, however, is not understood as transcendent but as ‘going on’ within, and informing, certain hermeneutic processes. – In chapter 18 Lubling and Jegstrup unfold an alternative interpretation of the possibility of conflicttranscending dialogue with explicit commitments to a transcendent absolute. 14 For a contemporary position that would lend itself to this effect see N. Rescher’s “perspectival pluralism,” as expounded in his A System of Pragmatic Idealism, Vol. III. Princeton University Press, 1994.

Introduction to Part I | 9

develop a metatheory about the relative correctness of theories. Rather, what is required is a change to a practical position, of fostering an understanding of the gaps ‘in between’ conflicting claims, undermining the complacency that keeps the claimants stuck in their positions. Such understanding is initiated by adopting the attitude of what Lai calls “epistemological humility.” In essence, then, if we are trying to foster epistemological conditions for the possibility of intercultural dialogue we find ourselves in the domain of ‘normative epistemology’— epistemology understood as a normative theory about epistemic practices and attitudes. As Zhuangzi suggests, decision-making in situations with irreconcilable views requires “illumination,” a form of understanding that contemplates the conflicting claims but does not adjudicate between them. Lai quotes the Daoist scholar Wu Kuang-ming, who characterizes this form of understanding as “orientation.” In chapter 5 it is argued that this characterization is not a metaphor but, in fact, the literal description of the way we cognitively establish significances. Chapter 5 opens up an interdisciplinary perspective, putting intercultural understanding into the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. Johanna Seibt explores in this chapter the implications of intercultural dialogue for our understanding of human cognition, and vice versa, points to ways in which cognitive science research might be used to facilitate dialogue and to assess the practical significance of intercultural thought as inquiry. In a first step she works out core elements of the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue. In a second step she observes that intercultural understanding is a type of knowledge that is neither theoretical knowing-that nor practical knowing-how. Rather, based on a phenomenological comparison, she suggests that intercultural understanding resembles spatial orientation—it seems to consist in a transition from felt disorientation to a state in which one achieves a certain degree of orientatedness, but with the awareness that the process of orientation is ongoing. In a third step she introduces the conceptual framework of the “theory of cognitive orientation” by Hans and Shulamith Kreitler, a forerunner of “embodied cognition paradigm” that operates with a particularly productive theoretical model for embodied cognition, namely, orientation. Current approaches to embodied cognition characterize cognition in vague terms such a ‘process’ or ‘interaction,’ while the more specific notion of ‘orientation’ provides a conceptually more fertile theoretical metaphor. According to this approach cognition is a coupling of the cognitive system with the environment, an interactivity comprising cognizer and environment that continuously (‘online’) generates a field of significances for navigation and action. Commonly this orientating interactivity is instant and a matter of preset de-

10 | Introduction to Part I faults, generating meanings and values as transitional routines with quasiobjectual permanence. Certain forms of heuristic cognition de-routinize everyday cognition and force us to re-experience the dynamic origins of our valuations. Seibt present the hypothesis that intercultural understanding belongs to such de-routinizing forms of heuristic cognition, with the distinctive difference, however, that intercultural dialogue not only reveals that significances are processes but also the workings of so-called ‘social cognition,’ i.e., that cognition in the presence of other human beings ‘automatically switches’ into a ‘social mode.’ The phenomenon of intercultural understanding thus has in her view also the particular merit—apart from its practical importance—of alerting us to data that support a consistently processual view of cognition. On this view of cognition as relational dynamics between ‘subject’ and environment, values and other significances are neither ‘subjective’ nor ‘objective’ but emergent orientational routines with temporary contextual relevance. In conclusion Seibt considers in which ways the suggested hypothesis bears on the practical relevance on intercultural thought as inquiry. If intercultural dialogue as praxis, undertaken in the physical presence of interlocutors, manifests a certain mode of cognition that is de-routinized and social, what about the scholarly enterprise of intercultural thought where interlocutors are merely virtually present? Can intercultural thought as inquiry ever carry any of the practical ‘peace’ potential of interpersonal dialogue that the peculiar ‘frame of mind’ produced by heuristic cognition in its social mode? Cognitive science research on imagined interaction and on the cognitive processing of narratives, Seibt suggests, may hold important clues to clarify this question. Part I thus ends bringing the following issues into view: the role of values in conflict, the function of narratives in conflict dynamics, and the larger practical relevance of intercultural thought for the mitigation of culture-based conflicts. These are the main topics of part II, where they will be developed from different disciplinary perspectives.

Daryush Shayegan

CHAPTER ONE The Dialogue of Civilizations—a brief review15 The Iranian centre for dialogue of civilizations was created in 1977 with the participation of Iranian National Television, the University of Farabi and the Institute of Cultural research. Our project had from the outset two questions to answer. Firstly, why of all the countries of the world should we be the one to undertake such a task? And secondly, what were the aims that we wanted to achieve? The first question is probably connected to the particular cultural situation of our country. Iran holds a special place in the Islamic world. Deep down, Iran remains a world at the crossroads of two great spiritual continents: on the one hand it looks towards the East, its language and its immemorial myths associate it with India and the Indo-European world, enjoying, so to say, the same pantheon of Gods and linguistic heritage. On the other hand, its position of bordering upon the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and its conflicting relationship with ancient Greece render it incontestably a neighbour of the Western world. Placed between the two worlds, Iran has played the role of privileged intermediary, an inevitable bridge between continents. That is why also the French scholar René Grousset calls Iran a veritable “Middle Kingdom” (Empire du Milieu) in the heart of ancient world. We know, for example, that there existed an Iranian form of Buddhism, the iconography of which influenced classical Persian poetry, we also know that in the 2nd century the Parthians and Sogdians, all Iranian ethnical groups, were active agents of the spread of Buddhism in China and that Iranian Messianism and eschatology infiltrated late Judaism after the liberation of the Jews of Babylon and their integration into the Achaemenid empire founded by Cyrus. One can provide many such examples, however the fact remains that Iran is still, in every sense, a country both mediator and median, as much in its capacity to assimilate these multiple influences and to recreate them in original form as in its inexhaustible efforts to elaborate the most impressive and prodigious syntheses. It is not an accident that a philosopher like Sohravardi, as early as the 12th century, dares to combine the prophet || 15 In 2009 Daryush Shayegan received the inaugural Global Dialogue Prize. This is the main part of the acceptance speech he delivered on January 27, 2010, in the Music Hall Aarhus, Denmark.

12 | Daryush Shayegan Zarathustra with the sage, Plato, and to reunite them in the prophetic lineage of the Abrahamic tradition. After the conquest of Iran by Islamic armies and the fall of Sasanid empire, we still witness during the Abbasid period, (the golden age of Islamic civilization) what Bernard Lewis calls the “Iranian Intermezzo,” namely the emergence of a “new Iranian Empire under a veneer of Persianized Islam” (1996: 81 and 75). The impact of Persian literature and the reputation of its poets were so overwhelming that after the fall of the Abbasid caliphate by the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, all the north of Islamic world was dominated by Persian civilization, with its centre in the Iranian Plateau, extending westwards to Anatolia and beyond and eastwards into the Central Asia and the new Islamic Empires of India. All these facts and the historic destiny of this “Middle Empire” compelled us to assume once again that role and to inaugurate a cultural centre capable of accomplishing that particular task. Our goals were manifold. (1) The most prominent in rank was, in my opinion, to resume once again cultural links with great Asian civilizations which were interrupted because of the Western domination of the world. We knew that these cultural ties had been extremely fertile in the past, especially by virtue of schools or translations. For example, the translations of the Canon of Mahâyâna Buddhism from Sanskrit into Tibetan, then into Chinese, and later into Japanese. Or the translations of classical Sanskrit texts into Persian during the Moghul rule in India in 16th and 17th centuries, which gave rise to a host of highly interesting syncretistic schools of thought. Let me just mention, as an iconic figure, the Imperial crown prince Dârâ Shokûh, son of Shâh Jahân, the fabulous builder of Tâj Mahal, who not only translated with an amazing clarity and ease fifthy Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian but also wrote a book called «The Mingling of two Oceans» (Majma’ al Bahrayn) that is to say Hinduism and Islam, which caused his death. He was accused of heresy by his brother the shallow fundamentalist Awrangzib and savagely executed. Thus ended the sad story of a brilliant, lovable and enlightened prince, martyr of his work of tolerance and with his death vanished also irretrievably the hope of reconciliation between the two communities upon which depended more than ever the unity of India. Some say nowadays that if Dârâ had succeeded in his endeavour, there would not have been any partition of Pakistan and India after the independence of the subcontinent. (2) Our second purpose was to organize seminars and symposiums on most sensitive subjects by inviting scholars from all parts of the world. We had time only to manage one big symposium on the following theme: Does the planetary impact of Western thought permit a dialogue amongst civilizations? All the papers in English, French, and German, and the discussions that followed, were later published in their original languages and Persian translations. We also had

The Dialogue of Civilizations | 13

programmed several art exhibitions on pre-Colombian, Indian, and Japanese art. For this purpose I made several long trips to India, Japan, and later to South-America. But the sudden explosion of the Iranian revolution put an end to all our projects deemed by the new power as a futile luxury. (3) Our third purpose was to create a substantial library on all human sciences and art. We managed to accumulate in a very short span of time 40000 volumes. Here I have to thank particularly Reza Qotbi, the President of the Iranian National Television. Had it not been for his unpretentious generosity and his unselfish encouragement, we would not have been able to undertake and accomplish such an immense task. I also must thank my colleague Hossein Ziai, an eminent scholar on Islamic philosophy, member of our board of direction, who is a now the head of Iranian Studies at UCLA, for helping me assiduously in all our fields of activity. (4) Finally our last purpose was to set up new centres affiliated to our own in three countries : Egypt, India and Japan.

Method of work Our method of approach was comparative. What were the problems common to all of us who were caught between colliding worlds? What were our constant concerns and mental preoccupations or, as the Russian Intelligentsia of the 19th century used to call them, our “accursed questions” (questions maudites), by which they meant of course cultural identity versus change and otherness, or if you will, encounter between tradition and modernity, historical gaps between different world-views, atavistic resistances, mental blockages, in brief cultural schizophrenia? Could we surmount all these differences by bridging our incommensurable differences? Whence do they arise? Has an Indian, an Arab, a Japanese the same attitude towards the mutations of modern times? There were of course many unanswered questions, but the essential method was to pose them bluntly without any preconceived ideas and prejudices. What I noticed in my comparative studies was astounding. I found out that almost all great Asian civilizations stopped creating after the 17th and 18th centuries. These two centuries were a turning point in the history of the world. The 17th century was dominated by the Cartesian innovation of systematic doubt and the Method of questioning, and the 18th century by the Enlightenment and criticism, its apogee was of course the Kantian philosophy. The Asian civilizations missed all the dramatic breakthroughs of modern times: the Renaissance, the age of Reformation and the Enlightenment, they remained on the sidelines of the changes shaking the

14 | Daryush Shayegan world, of historic upheavals that transformed the landscape of our planet till the second half of 19thcentury. Let me offer a few examples. The great synthesis of Islamic thought in Iran was completed in the 17th century during the reign of the Safavid dynasty (15711722). The Renaissance of the school of Isfahan, the impressive achievement of Mollâ Sadrâ Shîrâzî (1571-1640) brought together a number of convergent currents and fused them together in the crucible of a prodigious synthesis. Sâdrâ was almost the contemporary of Descartes; while he was putting the finishing touches to an ancient movement of thought and adding the last stone to the imposing edifice of Islamic metaphysics, Descartes was short-circuiting the past and hacking out new avenues which were going to make man into the founding authority of the universe. All subsequent developments in Iranian philosophy have been, in a sense, commentaries on Sadrâ’s oeuvre, whose metaphysical content will never be surpassed. We could say almost the same thing about India and China. S. Radhakrishnan identifies four periods in Indian philosophy: the Vedic period (1500600BC), the Epic period (600BC-AD200), the period of the Sûtras and the Scholastic period, which ended in the 17th century. All the schools of thought accepted by Brahmanism –except Buddhism and Jainism, considered as heterodox religions—were confined in very short texts called sûtras (very condensed formulations easily consigned to memory). It seemed appropriate to write commentaries on the commentaries, then again commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries, and so on. This whole literature of commentaries, which are often very tedious but of great technical rigour, constitutes the Scholastic period. This period saw also an extraordinary development of Indian thought, a sort of flamboyant Gothic skyscraper with an architectonic splendour unsurpassed in the history of civilizations, but which ended by suffocating under its own weight. From the 17th century onwards, Hinduism was out of breath: there could be no more creation, only repetition, mannerism and eventually sclerosis. China too was showing signs of exhaustion by the beginning of the 17th century. The great periods of Chinese history sprawl across nearly 4000 years, from the Xia dynasty (2207-1766BC) to the end of Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The Qing period was a time of great compilations, encyclopaedias and literary collections. An attempt was made to catalogue what had been accumulated, to measure the present against the models of the past, to get back to the original sources of classical period (Tang dynasty 618-907), by stripping away the layers of supposedly fallacious commentary with which the canonical texts had become encrusted. But it did not innovate, or launch an era of new insights or creative visions. Even Joseph Needham who was an unconditional admirer of Chinese science and thought admits that, although the Chinese were inventive

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pioneers in many domains—they invented the compass, the gunpowder, the paper, and movable type printing—they never reached the premises of modern science which, according to Needham, rests on three pillars: the Galilean mathematisation of the world, the geometrisation of space and the generalisation of the mechanical model. The decline of Asian civilizations brought their mutual cross-fertilizations to an end. The era of great translations leading to fruitful encounters between India and China, Iran and India, China and Japan came to a halt. These civilizations turned away from each other and were mainly oriented towards the Western world. They withdrew from history, entered a phase of expectation, refrained from renewing themselves and lived increasingly on their accumulated legacy. One is almost tempted to agree with Hegel that the Weltgeist was deserting the areas where culture had been extremely rich and was now taking asylum in the West. In one of my books, Cultural Schizophrenia, I called this withdrawal in oneself, this loss of touch with the changing realities of the world: “on holiday from History” (en vacance dans l’histoire).

On holiday from history What we really intended to do in our centre was, taking into account the epistemological shifts of knowledge, to renew a dialogue with these old civilizations and try to put an end to the phenomenon of being “on holiday from History”, in other words to resume afresh cross-cultural contacts. What were, for instance the major cultural concerns of an Arab, an Indian, a Persian with regard to their traditions? How did they cope, so to say, with the new scientific and technological mutations that shook their worlds? We knew that by the late 19th century when the non-Western civilizations were brought face to face with the technological power of the West, the modern age had already reached the apotheosis of its expansion and had undergone numerous paradigm shifts. As Michel Foucault states so pertinently in his evocative book The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), Order had replaced Analogy and then been unseated in its turn by History. The non-Western worlds were confronted, all at once, with a whole well-wrapped package of human sciences in which anthropology was sovereign and historicity was seen as the essential human dimension. The only epistemological tools available to help these defenceless civilizations assimilate the new world came from a knowledge of pre-modern type. They still inhabited a preGalilean world in which analogy, sympathy, magical relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, occult correspondences between things and beings were the prevalent principles of understanding. In short they lived in an en-

16 | Daryush Shayegan chanted world of projections, alienated in a world of analogies, where the old similitudes had ceased to be a source of certainty, they often tilted at windmills like Don Quixote. This withdrawal from history can also be discerned to a certain extent in Latin America. Octavio Paz (1985) rightly points out that although the Iranians, Indians and Chinese, belonged to non-Western civilizations, the Latin Americans were actually an extension of the West, connected umbilically to Spain and Portugal. Consequently they represent one of the American poles of the West, the other consisting of United States and Canada. But there is a fundamental difference between North and South America. For while the North Americans were born at the same time as the modern world, along with the Reformation and the Encyclopaedia, the Latin Americans marched onto the world stage under colours hostile to the modern world, those of the counter-Reformation and neo-Scholasticism. Hence the particular nature of Latin America is not really the third world, but is nevertheless very much a poor relative of the West. Paz concludes: “That is where the great split lies: where the modern age begins, there too begins our separation.”16 In other words, this break with modernity and the social reality embodied in it meant that ideas could no longer find counterparts in social reality, could only become masks and ideologies. They thus became screens shutting off the subject and his vision from reality, and this led to a divorce between ideas and attitudes. The ideas may be the very latest thing in political fashion, but the attitudes remain rooted in tenacious, stubborn atavism. Defining the attitude of Latin American intellectuals he adds: “The ideas are today’s, the attitude yesterday’s, their grandfathers swore by Saint Thomas, they swear by Marx, yet both have seen in reason a weapon in the service of a truth with a capital T, which it is the mission of intellectuals to defend. They have a polemical and militant idea of culture and of thought : they are crusaders.”17 In this perceptive remark the Mexican poet uses two different periods— yesterday and today—to depict two different ways of knowing and being, as if we were confronted with two different epistemes (Foucault’s terminology), one affecting psychic, emotional and atavistic attitudes, the other shaping modern ideas which come from outside. Between them lies the abrupt discrepancy, a split which is crippling because it divides being into two unequal and ontologically incompatible segments. Indeed it is precisely where they meet that all kinds of distortions arise, since the two parts like reflecting screens facing one

|| 16 Paz 1984: 74. 17 Cf. Paz 1985:164.

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another, become disfigured by the mutual scrambling of their images. But why? Because our own world has not been yet wholly disenchanted: the heavens have not been completely purged of their symbols, and projections persist there, albeit in seriously mutilated forms. Trapped between historicity and hermeneutics of symbols, we are reduced to every imaginable sort of bricolage.

Conclusion In fact these were our main preoccupations when we created the Iranian centre of dialogue. We wanted to resume a dialogue that had been brutally interrupted because of the successive onslaughts of modern times. We also wanted to understand and analyse our respective mental distortions and, learn from each other the different ways of surmounting our cultural idiosyncrasies, find, if possible, adequate solutions to our common problems. We thought that, given the spread of modern ways of living and the global extension of new technologies, we shared somehow a common historical destiny. We also realized that in order to push further in this direction, we had to set up other centres in Africa and Asia. Three centres were supposed to be installed : one in Egypt under the direction of Osman Yahya a great Syrian scholar on Islamic mysticism especially Ibn ’Arabî, a centre in New Delhi and a centre in Tokyo under the direction of Toshihiko Izutsu, a Japanese scholar versed in Islamic philosophy, Buddhism and Taoism. Unfortunately the Iranian revolution put an end to our multiple projects, and professor Izutsu whom I admired immensely passed away more than ten years ago. The dialogue of civilizations was later relaunched by the former president Mohammad Khatami as a cultural programme. It had a large echo all over the world. I don’t know whether they took into account our philosophical premises, but I know nonetheless that the idea flourished and was a success under his presidency. After the revolution I lived for twelve years in Paris where I continued to pursue my research in intercultural relations. What struck me at that time was the nature of a religious revolution. In a book written in French: “What is a religious revolution?” (Qu’est-ce qu’une révolution religieuse?), I realized that a theocracy disguised as an utopian democracy is a perilous adventure and it leads fatally to the “ideologisation of religion.” For once religion seeks power, it is no longer in quest of eschatological transfiguration, but becomes an apparatus that acts as if what was to happen in future had already occurred, as if, in other words, the religious government had anticipated the messianic event of the last day. Religion was now trapped, as Hegel would say, in “the ruse of rea-

18 | Daryush Shayegan son”; by trying to spiritualize the world it ended up by secularizing itself, and by seeking to deny history it got caught, up to the neck, in its swamps.18 Now let me conclude. What we were looking for in the nineteen seventies as a way out from our cultural dilemmas has now taken new forms of challenge, by virtue of globalization and the huge electronic revolution of virtual reality. Whoever is geared to the accelerating rhythm of change must first, I think, understand that we live in a fragmented world of broken ontologies, a world in which the concept of interconnectiveness has been substituted for the old metaphysical foundations. This interconnectiveness manifests itself at all levels of culture, knowledge and science: multiculturalism, plural identities, World Wide Web, holistic science. We live in a world of hybrid cultures where all levels of consciousness overlap each other.19 If assumed with lucidity and without resentment this new mosaic configuration can enrich us, extending the registers of knowledge, enlarging the range of feelings. But driven back from the critical field of introspection—as in the case of an ideological tyranny and fundamentalism—these changes provoke blockages and disfigure like in a shattered mirror the reality of the world and the mental images. We have to avoid at all cost all sorts of reductionism, we have to resort to new forms of looking at the world; perhaps we should adopt a combinatory and ludic art of managing the multiple layers of the mind. Maybe this approach is a third alternative, a path that allow us to escape from both the monolithic visions of ideologies and the illusion of unrealizable utopias.

References Lewis, B. (1996). The Middle East. A brief History of the Last 2000 Years. New York: Scribner. Paz. O. (1984). La fleur saxifrage. Paris: Gallimard. Paz. O. (1985). One Earth, Four or Five Worlds. Reflections on contemporary history. (Lane, H., Trans.). Manchester: Carcanet. Shayegan, D. (2008). La lumière vient de l’Occident. Le réenchantement du monde et la pensée nomade. Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2nd edition.

|| 18 See below chapter 14 (editors’ comment). 19 For a fuller development of these ideas see Shayegan 2008.

Daryush Shayegan

CHAPTER TWO Is planetary civilization conceivable?20 How might we imagine a planetary civilization in a world changing at such an accelerated rhythm? The problem that preoccupies us here is to know the nature of that civilization which is wrapped about our entire planet, and which opens us up to cultural horizons that are more and more extensive, encouraging us to assimilate them and grasp their internal dynamic. This opening would not have happened if modernity in its last phase had not gone beyond its limits, renouncing its hegemonic instinct. This has been variously called post-ideology or postmodernity, although the real implications of this last phenomenon have never been described in their true colors. In the end, the spirit of the new century is distinguished by a movement that is both introspective and retrospective. Thought falls back on itself in order to contemplate itself in the mirror of its own genesis. We can translate this new phase of modernity under the headings of globalization and virtualization. The new phase opens itself to its own past as to something that has never been exhausted, as if it were now replacing the dialectical method with these sediments that had never been reabsorbed, but had resisted the repeated assaults of the New and were ready to resurface, shaking the yoke of the dominant visions. Thus we confront two movements in opposite directions: on the one side, from the Pacific to Europe, in passing through the United States, the world is being converted to ideas that are more or less liberal and we are all trying to live within the free market economy, which becomes, even somewhat truncated, the sine qua non of all economic success; and on the other side, we are witnessing the emergence of sensibilities that lay claim to the legacy of the past, the memory of identities that have been forgotten under the sands of globalization. These reawakened dreams that determine the diversity of cultures all come to us from other ages, other ways of being and living that can hardly be conflated with the leveling brought about by triumphant liberalisms, but reveal, on the contrary, other values and other modes of being. They oppose, to the universalism of the values of the Enlightenment, the particularities of tribalism, and to the market ‘logic’ of the economy, the priority of beliefs that escape the rules of profit. There is nothing so astonishing about the fact || 20 Translated from the French original by Roger Gathman. The essay’s original title is : “Y a-til une civilization planétaire,” lit. “Is There Such a Thing as Planetary Civilization?”

20 | Daryush Shayegan that these resurgent ideas may touch the mass of young people under the forms of ecology and New Age sensibility.

Recapitulative memory The Occident, or rather this new planetary civilization, has become a sort of recapitulative memory that is always pushing forward its own self reevaluation. This memory directs the recapitulation of the entire becoming of our planet, deciphers the phases of its history, then that of the world; it valorizes the archaeology of thought, the genealogy of ancient customs, the history of living and past civilizations, the genesis of old beliefs, and the pertinence of ancient creation myths. It is always rewinding like a reel in a tape recorder. This raw retrospection of the history of humanity has two major consequences. On the one hand, it announces the end of ideologies and avant gardes, like those that marked the first half of our twentieth century; on the other hand, it shows, thanks to its openness to all directions on the map, an increasing interest in all other cultures and visions of the world, even those that had been neglected, or even despised, during the triumphant march of the ‘religion’ of progress. This recapitulative modernity reviews the world in depth and breadth, that is to say, successively and simultaneously, from whence is derived a kaleidoscopic vision of the world. In a way, humans today see unrolled before them an immense panorama of all the stages of the cultural becoming of humanity, all the traces of its historical trajectory: from the neolithic to the information age, in passing by the intermediate stages. This is the reason our world is so chaotic, so ambivalent, and so difficult to grasp. On one side, there emerge cultural conflicts, the discourses of identity, which can degenerate into ‘identity blackmail,’ and on the other side appears a sort of a rainbow coalition, the formation of an interconnective recitative which forges a new, recomposed identity: the costume of Harlequin. A hardening and the emergence of exclusive religious and nationalist radicalisms, on one side, and on the other, plural and multiple identities which prepare the terrain for all kind of interesting and fruitful mixtures. The rejection of occidental values that one observes in a certain part of the Islamic world didn’t start yesterday – there is a long history of it even in Europe, the best cases being those of Germany and Russia.

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Some historic cases: Germany and Russia It is useful to remember that the reaction against the Enlightenment appeared in Europe itself. There was, in the first case, the German reaction. The German revolt against the hegemony of French culture and language, which dominated Europe in the 18th century, gave birth to the Sturm und Drang movement and was caused by the resentment of a wounded and humiliated national pride. In the beginning the Germans imitated the French, then they revolted against them. It is interesting to underline the fact that the same revolt went on to inspire, hardly a century later, the Slavophiles and the great Russian writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; and that more than a century after them, the rejection of the Occident was taken up with more vehemence in the era of Islamic culture, where the claims of identity derived from historic failures. The defeat of nationalism, of socialism, assumed the most diverse forms, and with the Iranian Islamic Revolution fed into a folding back upon itself. In the 18th century, the Thirty Years War devastated Germany and left behind an irremediable chaos. The country was parceled out into a number of principalities, and became provincial. There was no center, like Paris, which would have permitted a cultural renewal. German culture, Isaiah Berlin tells us, leaned towards an extreme Lutheran scholastic pedantry, which ended in folding back upon itself.21 The country suffered from an immense inferiority complex with regard to the lands of the West, notably France, which dominated all the domains of the arts and sciences. In this atmosphere of malaise, pietism, a branch of Lutheranism, took off. Pietism put the accent on the spiritual life, taking refuge in the most intimate interiority in order to protect itself against the attractions of a superficial civilization, of which it denounced the vanity. This gave birth to an entire literature of high emotional coloring, which hated the intellect as much as the France that incarnated it, that land of silk stockings and corrupted morals. Johann Gottlieb Herder (1744-1803) went to war against the universalism of the Enlightenment philosophers in the name of cultural diversity, insisting on the notion of Kultur, as a specific and irreplaceable identity, against abstract universalism. Herder had been influenced by the strange figure of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), the so called “Magus of the North,” who, rejecting en bloc the diktat of the Enlightenment, put in the first rank the concrete, the different, the unique and the singular. According to Louis Dumont, in order to understand the German contrasts, it is necessary to refer to Ernst Troeltsch, who in 1916 || 21 Cf. Berlin 1999: 35.

22 | Daryush Shayegan explained them very clearly in sociological terms. “Germany lives in a community (Gemeinschaft) with which it identifies. This community is essentially cultural: one is a man in as much as one is firstly a German. But, if the German intellectual turns away from society (Gesellschaft) (…) and into his interior life, he thinks of himself as an individual and consecrates all his care to the development of his personality. This is the famous ideal of Bildung or the education of oneself, so important in German literature, from Goethe to Thomas Mann” (Dumont 1991:35). This tension between the singular and universal, between civilization and culture, is especially articulated in one of the great German literary families: that of the Manns – Thomas, Heinrich and Klaus. Thomas Mann wrote a heated pamphlet during the First World War, The observations of an apolitical man, a book that occasioned much flowing of ink. In relation to it, his son Klaus writes: “it is an extremely peculiar document, even unique, this long dolorous monologue of a poet broken by the war. From the literary point of view, it is a masterpiece, a brilliant tour de force; from the point of view of politics, it is a catastrophe… The student of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche considers that his first duty was to defend the tragic grandeur of German culture against the attitude of the militant humanism of Western civilization” (Mann 1984: 82f). In a lecture he gave after the war, in 1923,22 Thomas Mann’s views had significantly evolved, and he now caste a new look on it and tried to justify as he could this controversial book. According to him, the property that most distinguishes the German man is found before everything else in his interiority, which is that reason that he has given to the world the genre of the novel of formation – the Bildungsroman. This interiority is also an introspection that aims at the perfection of his own self, as well as his cultural and religious self. It is, thus, a subjectivity inherited from pietism, in which the exterior world, the political world is interpreted as profane and without importance. In fact, homo germanicus has never admitted the political into his conception of self-education. He feels that transition to the outside that the peoples of Europe have named liberty as a summons (Aufforderung) apt to denaturalize his being and as something that is directly de-nationalizing.23 Thus, for Thomas Mann, it was his older brother, the great writer Heinrich Mann,24 who figured as his opponent, becoming what Thomas Mann called the || 22 As cited in Dumont 1991: 76-81. 23 Ibid. p.76 24 Heinrich Mann is the author of the famous novel, Der Untertan, published in 1918 and translated as Man of Straw in English by Penguin Press, with the translation unattributed but probably by Ernest Boyd, 1984.

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“man of letters of civilization”—for didn’t he defend what his younger brother called the “destructive elements” vis-a-vis Kultur, to wit, democracy and universal values? Heinrich dissented from the conservative milieu of the intellectuals of this epoch, and wrote during the first year of the war a biographical study of Emile Zola, erecting a literary monument to the glory of a French writer who defended, with so much ardor, the innocence of Captain Dreyfus in his famous article: J’accuse. Besides, Klaus defended his uncle and added in reference to his father, “in his generous blindness, how much he resembled Don Quixote! Where he saw the most dangerous enemies, there were really only windmills… the enemy windmill against which he laid down the heavy barrage in the Observations … is a mysterious character—‘the Champion of civilization’”(Mann: 1984:83). Even if Thomas does not cite his name, we know very well that it is a reference to Heinrich Mann, who was exceptionally courageous for the time, since “when the German intelligentsia in 1914 joined almost without exception in chorus with the enthusiastic partisans of the war, he was one of the rare few to remain clear eyed and circumspect” (ibd. 84). In the drama of this emblematic German family, one rediscovers all the contradictions of this country, between community and society, between “holism and individualism,” and between civilization and culture. Similar oppositions we see later in Russia between the Slavophiles and Westernizers, and still later in the Islamic world between the Salafistes and the champions of modernisation. But in as much as these civilizations are extra-Occidental, these contradictions derive from epistemological ruptures, since these cultures, unlike Germany, knew neither the Reformation, the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment, while the latter participated in the common patrimony of Western Europe. It is enough to think of the immense genius of Leibniz in the early 18th century, or of the dominating figure of Kant, who in his own way incarnated the entire critical spirit of the Enlightenment. From 1770 to 1830 there took place in Germany an enormous cultural mutation, an unprecedented blossoming in the domains of art, poetry, and of philosophy, but “even this development marks the begin of a process of distancing between Germany and its Western neighbors” (Dumont 1991:34). A distancing that will reveal itself as fatal to the West and will end in the great catastrophes of the 20th century – the two fratricidal world wars. Albert Béguin in his thunderous list of accusations against the weakness of Germany shows to what degree the great adventures of German genius are adventures of ecstasy, flights from one-self; to what degree the passage to poetry, music and philosophy is made “in a sort of lyric intoxication”; and how much these vertiginous metamorphoses impeded the crystallization of the German

24 | Daryush Shayegan nation. Thus, for the Germans, every finished form is already a sign of petrification, and there is life only in the incessant metamorphosis of forms.25 It is curious to see that the lack of crystallization is also characteristic of the Russian genius, which often oscillates between two extremes: nihilism and apocalypse, because it too doesn’t recognize a middle term which is precisely the space of the crystallization of cultural values. This is what Constantin Leontiev (1831-1891) meant when he said that the Russian could be a saint, but never a decent man.26 Europeanized Russia after Peter the Great’s reforms enjoyed a double identity. On one level it behaved according to the norms and conventions of the West; but on another level, its interior life was impregnated with ancient customs and a typically Russian sensibility. It is this specific trait which allowed Natasha, the heroine of War and Peace, to reveal her deep emotions to the sound of the balalaika in a typical Russian dance.27 The Russian aristocracy lived in the country, surrounded by serfs from their infancy, like an island of European culture in the vast ocean of the Russian peasantry.28 Nowhere did the abyss between the heterogeneous levels of society yawn as much as it did in imperial Russia, and nowhere, as well, might one see the coexistence, in the same epoch, of ways of life rooted in such different centuries.29 Other tensions divided the Russian soul: his pagan and Dionysian nature and his orthodox and monarchic religion. An irreconcilable tension between the flesh and the spirit, between the formidable power of the choral chant, the abandon of dance and debauchery and the ascetic spirit of the Iourodstvo (fools of Christ), the humility, and the renunciation that approached asceticism.30 This duality was reflected in all domains: in the tension that opposed the capital of Old Russia, Moscow, to the new Petrovian capital, Saint Petersburg, a Westernized city with refined French manners; in the incessant conflicts opposing the Slavophiles to the Westernizers; in the language which opposed the language of the aristocracy, French, to the clear and unequivocal language of the peasants. On the other side the Western world had an intoxicating charm, like that felt by Levin in Anna Karenina when he was a constant visitor to the Stcherbatsky family, where “he saw all the members of the family through a mysterious and poetic veil: not only could he find no fault in them, but he even

|| 25 Cf. Béguin 1945: 81-91. 26 Cf. Berdiaeff 1974: 18. 27 Cf. Figes 2002: 44f. 28 Ibid. 29 Cf. Berdiaev 1951: 22f. 30 Cf. Berdiaev 1969, pp. 10-14.

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supposed the most elevated sentiments and the most ideal perfections” (Tolstoy 1952: 27). In revolting against European, and principally French domination, writers like Kniaznine (1740-1783) and Kheraskov (1733-1807) began to celebrate Russian values as opposed to those of the Enlightenment, the spirited effervescence of the Russian soul,31 and this antithesis was the creative leaven that fed all the Russian literature of the 19th century. At the base of this idea reposed the old romantic ideal of the Russian earth, an earth that was not corrupted by Western civilization. If Saint Petersburg symbolized the vanity of the ephemeral attractions of this world, the narcissistic attitude of the dandy looking at his reflection in the Neva, the true Russia was in Moscow, and in the provinces, where the humble untouched virtues of the Russian people were jealously guarded. 32 Out of this was born the idea of the corrupt and depraved West, which it was necessary to combat and deny, whatever it cost. This rejection went on to nourish all Russian literature from Pushkin up through the Slavophiles, and invoked the same messianic vision of Russia, which was supposed to be, according to Dostoevsky, the bearer of God. But the frenzied affirmation of Russian identity rose even higher when the rejected West was opposed not just to the Russian soul, but even more, to the primitive and savage identity of the Scythian temperament, that is to say, the symbol of Asiatic Russia, which gloried in its barbarism. We find this idea in Pushkin when he declares that he drinks proudly like a Scythian savage, or in Herzen and, as well, the so called Scythian poets, fascinated by the prehistoric past of a Russia once peopled by the Scythes, a nomadic tribe of Iranian origin which lived around the Black Sea and the Caspian around 800 B.C. For Alexandre Blok (1880-1921) in his poem, “The Scythians,” it is by reintegrating the vital force of the savage hordes that Europe could renew itself, bringing back together the Orient and the Occident; if it doesn’t do so, it will perish under the assault of savage multitudes and Russia will no longer be there to serve as a shield.33 Just as Pangermanism wanted to dominate the world by imposing the tragic destiny of its great culture, so to Russian messianism believed it grasped the truth in the face of Western universalism, but inside of these “cursed questions” (the great Russian contractions) in which the Russian intelligentsia participated, there were faults, inherent weaknesses in the Russian character, notably the lack of a critical spirit. “Russians,” Berdyaev said, “are not skeptics; they are

|| 31 Cf. Figes 2002: 58. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., pp. 415-420

26 | Daryush Shayegan dogmatists. Among them, everything takes on a religious character; they have little understanding of what is relative. Darwinism, which in the West was a biological hypothesis, among the Russian intelligentsia took on a dogmatic character, and so the question at issue was salvation for eternal life. In Russia everything was appraised and assessed according to the categories of orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy”(Berdiaev 1969: 27). There is doubtless a filiation here with the Bolshevik revolution; all the non-resolved contradictions of the Russian soul, considering the Russian’s penchant for dogmatism, had finally to flow into the Bolshevik aberration, of which Lenin was the exemplary prototype, sharing certain features with Chernyshevsky, with Netchayev, with Tchakev, and with Yeliabov, and sharing other features with the Princes of Moscow, Peter the Great, and the other creators of the despotic state.34 Finally, that “metaphysical hysteria” is brilliantly incarnated in Dostoevsky’s visionary novel, The Demons, where the great outlines of the historic destiny of Russian as well as its nihilism and messianism are foreseen. “Auto-destruction and auto-consumption are Russia’s national traits,” Berdiaev added courageously.35 Here I would like to insert a personal anecdote. At the time when, in the eighties, I used to meet up with Emile Cioran in Paris fairly often, one of those meeting in particular has remained with me. Cioran had an unbounded admiration for Dostoevsky, and when someone spoke of The Demons (or The Possessed), which I had recently reread, Cioran turned towards me and said with an admirable emphasis that in reading that novel, he had understood everything about the future of Russia, everything is written down there in black and white in a prophetic manner. Wilhelmine Germany and Nazi Germany no longer exist. Germany, after the defeat of the Second World War, became a true and solid democracy, one of the fundamental pillars of the European Union, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Empire, Russia rejoined for good or evil the Concert of Europe. However, even as Russia is staging a painful apprenticeship in democracy, it could not totally free itself from the temptation of the autocratic state that is so anchored in its collective psyche. The opposition to universal values now comes, besides, from the periphery, and from the Islamic world in particular, mostly from the radical branch, the Salafids who want to rule the world with a new Caliphate. However, the wind of liberty that has recently blown over the Arab world presages, there too, a hope; a hope that, whatever our cultural and religious particularity, there are always values that transcend national and ethnic particularities and ethics, and which concern all humanity.

|| 34 Berdiaev 1951: 225. 35 Berdiaev 1974: 20.

Is planetary civilization conceivable? | 27

Universal values In the world of cultural relativism where we live, each culture has its own claims: its way of seeing the world, its way of appreciating the rights of man, its way of defining the sovereignty of peoples and the rights of citizens. Some proclaim Asiatic values, others self-reliance, an autarkic vision of human relations, others still consider that all political power emanates from a divine source. In all of its discourses, there is a challenge to the West and the modernity that supports it: you are not the sole judge in this matter, nobody authorizes you to unilaterally impose your values. And as if this was not enough, the militant multiculturalists also unite to lend their voices to these protests. They speak of the ‘white terror,’ of the pernicious misdemeanors of Eurocentrism that, according to them, operate by binary oppositions: white/black, good/evil, normal/deviant. In this opposition, it is the first term that is privileged. Multiculturalism tends to become a sort of identity politics, where the concept of culture is unfailingly conflated with ethnic identity. The risk of this is that it essentializes the idea of culture in overdetermining its distinctions. For example, the Afrocentrists exaggeratedly accentuate difference, transforming into sacrosanct fetishes the virtues of the minority that at last proves itself to be not only intellectually sterile but politically suicidal. It is true that cultures are different, that mentalities vary according to history, language, and religious experience. At the crossroads of philosophy and psychology, the new linguistics reveals itself to be of great significance, according to George Steiner. In fact, there are multiple relations between thought, language and reality, and Benjamin Lee Whorf adds: “the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. …And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices of neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.”36 There are also other determining factors, the mother concepts of a culture, the untranslatable words from one language which constitutes its spirit or as Jacques Maritain puts it so well, “the titles of metaphysical nobility” of a certain vision of the world. We know that those peoples who have only tardily acceded to political unification and consolidation have tried, because of that tardiness, to put up front their difference or their cultural specificity. Let us take into consideration, here, the German, Russian and Islamic cases. || 36 As cited in Steiner 1971: 80.

28 | Daryush Shayegan Cultural differences are there and one can’t emancipate oneself from them cheaply – even more so considering that the historical lags between civilizations put a brake on the movement of mutual comprehension, and that globalization, far from hastening assimilation, creates zones of resistance in traditional cultures. We also know that all cultures on the planet have been ethnocentric. The Middle Empire of China thought of those who lived on the peripheries as barbarians, if not as sub-humans. Islam in the Golden Age in spite of its immense tolerance relative to that time nevertheless distinguished the Land of Islam (Dar al-islam) from the Land of War (Dar al-harb). At the base all civilizations, even those that, like Islam, had established a protocol of tolerance, have been ethno-centric, and still are today. It was only much later that there emerged in the West, due to the birth of modernity, a new unfiltered look at the world. One began to entertain serious doubts in the exclusive equation which, without blinking, identified virtue with the great qualities of one’s own ethnicity or religion, and one began eliminating particularisms and traditional atavisms, preferring what is accessible to all humans independently of their race, language, or ethnic peculiarities – that is, Reason. If we take Enlightenment reason as the source of ‘neutral’ values which could benefit all beings on the planet, outside of any religious or ideological position, then men can in the end come to form a community of universal ideas, susceptible of being applied to ethnic, political, economic and social levels. What better guarantee do we have to defend ourselves against the abuse of executive power than the theory of the separation of powers, advocated by Montesquieu in the Enlightenment that largely inspired the American constitution, which still remains a monument to individual liberties and a subtle system of checks and balances; what better system of individual protection do we have than the principle of habeas corpus, which shelters us from the arbitrariness of totalitarian and tyrannical temptations; what more opulent order do we have for managing the economy than that of a tolerant liberalism, tempered by security and the justice of social laws; and finally what more efficacious arms do we possess to counter the dogmatic intolerances of every corn of the world if it isn’t the critical, reflective thought which has the capacity to split itself in two, to escape from itself and to see the other. One can enumerate still other of the advantages of modernity, but whatever we say, even if these guaranties were born in the West, they no longer remain confined to one civilization, but have become the patrimony of all of humanity precisely because of globalization. In my book I wrote : “just as the Neolithic revolution encompassed the entire planet and created great centers of civilization, becoming a sort of acquired nature for Homo sapiens sapiens, so too modernity, issuing from the scientific mutations of the West, spreads over the en-

Is planetary civilization conceivable? | 29

tire planet, infiltrating (to some extent unconsciously) into the cultural genetic code, so to speak, of contemporary man” (Shayegan 2008:40). It is true that certain cultures in the name of ethnic and religious values repress in block these social gains, looking for detours, or substitutes, but they don’t find values that can substitute for the qualitative change that they are also experiencing, for this is the equivalent of putting into question what has become an integral part of their own person-hood. It is always in this light that we evaluate our own positions. It is the imperious presence and necessity of the new state of things which pushes the tyrants of the third world to act out the parody of the rights of man. These universal, ideologically neutral values, free from all confessional color, constitute in themselves a new identity: neither ethnic nor religious, nor truly national, but which belong to that reason by which all men, or at least those who are conscious of living at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are supposed to participate without reserve, independently of the culture to which they belong. If we mean by universal those values that transcend the frontiers, the ethnic divisions, the national atavisms, the historical ruptures, then these values are very much universal ones. One can refuse them, one can take refuge in identity fantasies, one can try to find in the latter God knows what ersatz comfort, or sublime illusion, but one cannot suspend the universal values and continue one’s little train of existence as if nothing had happened, because this will lead very simply to closure, or worse still, to a petrification of identity. All those countries which believe they have discovered a third way, resistant to the kind of values that modern man takes for granted, have famously suffered for it. To say that the gains of the Enlightenment serve as a screen for imperialism, for the perverse domination of the West, doesn’t change the problem at all. All the cultures of the planet must submit themselves to the gains of modernity at the risk of isolating themselves otherwise in a self-centered world; they must conform or they will be left at the margins of the road. What is more is there are no substitute values. We can promote religious rights – Christian, Hindu, Islamic, whatever – but we will remain desperately in the illusory domain of unrealizable wishes. If the religions must take power, they will change in nature and experience a process of ideologization.37 However mixed and attractive cultural diversity may be, it cannot even be recognized and seen except by a split, mediated, reflective consciousness. Here is where our modern identity becomes pertinent, because this and this alone is what is gifted with the critical faculty, which, due to its recapitulative memory, can, paradoxically, value the archaic || 37 See below chapter 15.

30 | Daryush Shayegan and historically separate levels of other cultures, offering them a space of existence, favoring their multiple articulations, to reconnect, other words, worlds which live at different ages. Without the support of our the critical and selfreflective consciousness of our modern identity, other cultures – by which I mean those which incarnate a traditional vision of the world – will remain blocked at a certain stage of development, outside of historic evolution. They will remain behind the cleavages that have blown apart their closed, preGalilean world. For, despite their indisputable riches, they have other perceptions of time and space, of death and the last end of man; perceptions that are certainly enormously charged with affective tonalities, capable of making the most intimate chords of the soul vibrate, but which can’t exteriorize themselves, can’t recoil from themselves, that is to say, critique themselves. If they have to occupy the public space, as we see, for example, in Iran, where religion has taken power, they get so unhooked from the reality of the world that they become neurotic, psychologically unbearable for modern man. Without the underlying supports of modernity, traditional cultures end up experiencing a contortion of identity. This also means that diversity ought not to end up promoting exclusive identities. Every exclusive identity, whatever other masks it puts on, is a vain search for an original purity. It is all smoke and mirrors, which deceives and fascinates at the same time. In wanting to live in retreat from the world, in looking for fictional genealogies, in retrenching oneself behind the myths of some golden age, one falls from Charybdis to Scylla, from immobilism to obscurantism. This is the risk that haunts all the fundamentalists, the ethnocentrists, the purists of every camp (be it Arab, African, Afghan, Persian or Hindu). This is when the criteria of authenticity is measured by the light of conformism to a certain sclerotic ideal, or worse, in the light of a closure, that is to say, just the reverse of the effect that cultural diversity wishes to attain. Impermeability becomes in this way a merit in itself, and it ends up creating a sclerosis of the personality. For he who lives in his own tradition, identity is so intensely present and so imminent in his everyday life experience that it doesn’t permit the taking of any distance, still less that splitting of the consciousness that helps us to project an objective vision of the world. In the 1970s this idea had the wind in its sails; it was in this period that Senghor launched the idea of négritude, when Unesco organized colloquia on this subject, where Iranian intellectuals, carried away by American counter-culture, debated the evil effects of Westernization without let up, urging a return to the living sources of their original identity. But nobody asked whether a discourse of identity, which would feed on resentment and the negation of the Other, could end in any other way than in a regression pure and simple, and this is what inevitably took place in the Islamic world.

Is planetary civilization conceivable? | 31

Dialogical relations Cultural diversity must avoid a major trap: that of exclusivity and resentment; it cannot articulate itself except within an open civilization where democratic rules are respected, where the relations between beings and the cultures that they represent are not monologic, as they were for the most part in ancient and traditional civilizations, but instead dialogic. But the dialogic relation is not self-evident, by any means. It requires a long historical process to arrive there. It was necessary, for instance, that in the eighteenth century the idea of dignity, in relation to distinctions and privileges, was substituted for that of honor, which thus made the reigning order no longer one of distinction, but of something that all men shared, among all social categories alike. This change implied ideas of recognition and of an identity that was no longer anonymous but individualistic, having, as Herder said, it own measure (jeder Mensch hat ein eigenes Mass). Thus identity and recognition imply ipso facto a dialogic relationship, or, to put it another way, different languages of communication take into account the fact that—as George Herbert Mead said—the others become by the force of things significant others. The genesis of human thought is essentially dialogic and as Bakhtin affirms, envelop all levels of being. Life is an event of coexistence, an immense network of interconnectivity to which we are all connected and invited in as much as we participate. This is manifested in the constant and incessant flux of creations and exchanges: between the words in a language, between the people in a society, between the organisms in an eco-system, and between physical processes in the natural world. For Charles Taylor, this relation is language writ large: it includes the language of art, of gesture, and of love. He describes also what Gadamer calls the “fusion of horizons.” Taylor says: “To approach, say, a raga with the presumptions of value implicit in the well-tempered clavier would be forever to miss the point.” The fusion of horizons functions thus across a new vocabulary of comparison, where we move in a larger horizon where what is taken for granted as a basis of all appreciation is situated as a possibility on the side of other little known modes.38 Can one dialogue in our days from a perspective of cultural diversity? Without a doubt, yes !… in taking precautions. Firstly, in avoiding the excess of resentment, the “anti” discourses, which, instead of convincing arguments, utilizes anathema and is always searching for scapegoats in order to justify their successive failures. To accept cultural diversity doesn’t at all mean that we are dealing with “autonomous” cultures, outside of the interconnectivity that ties || 38 Cf. Taylor 1994: 91.

32 | Daryush Shayegan us all into one globalized civilization. To accept cultural diversity means that cultures are continents of their own peculiar sensibility, climates of being which, in order to live and thrive are nourished by the dialogue of man with himself, with his soul and his immemorial past; that this dialogue extracts its material and its arguments from the fecund humus of the zone of hybridization where all identities cross-pollinate to create new patterns: multiple identities that are luminal or result from unprecedented mixtures; and finally, that this state of things announces a new phenomenon: bricolage, the combinatory art of multiple relations at all levels and the play of mirrors.

The play of mirrors What characterizes our epoch, with its uncertainties, its confusions of all sorts, is the chaos that it spreads out before our stupefied glace, where no one knows what saint to swear by. One might say that Pandora’s box has been opened and all the spirits have flown from the magic flask, from the most ancient to the most recent and shrillest. But why this resurgence of forgotten voices and this archaic explosion of all the repressed sensibilities? Recapitulative memory has long prepared this opening and it was already inscribed, as I already said, in the nature of our planetary civilization. We are condemned to ceaselessly enrich our palette of knowledges, to enlarge the fan of our sensibilities, to take from other cultural memories, to furnish ourselves with new keys. Whether we like it or not, we find ourselves in an inter-epistemic situation, to borrow Michel Foucault’s terminology, to wit, there is a gap for traditional civilizations which still operate on the level of symbols and analogies and feeds on the arsenal of collective memory, all the while consuming new ideas, coming out of the successive mutations of modern times, abundantly and without discernment. The inter-epistemic situation shows that ‘blocks’ of knowledge can coexist, affront each other and evoke a sort of cultural schizophrenia.39 Precisely in this case, the magico-mythic world can pass through the conceptual grill of the modern perspective – and what is more, both can act within the same person, paralyzing his critical faculties, provoking mental blocks and convulsive seizures of identity. Here the positions of the epistemes (the paradigm or conceptual grid) are differentiated. They situate themselves in the spaces of different perceptions: the psyché and the whole panoply of magic images that accompanies it, and the mental reduced to the poor ascetic estate of the concept. Charac|| 39 Cf. Shayegan 1989.

Is planetary civilization conceivable? | 33

terizing the schizophrenia of Latin American intellectuals, Octavio Paz wrote: “The ideas are today’s; the attitudes yesterday’s. Their grandfathers swore by Saint Thomas and they swear by Marx, yet both have seen in reason a weapon in the service of a Truth with a capital T” (1985:193). Here and now mark two divergent ways of being present in the world, two historic epistemes of which one conditions the emotional behavior and the atavistic attitudes, while the other models exogenous modern ideas. Between the two, the break inserts itself: tearing the person in two and projecting in an immense field of distortion. This doesn’t exclude contact between the two, since at their meeting place emerges all sorts of mixtures which, for the rest, can be extremely creative on the level of the novel and poetry (think of the amazing creations of the Latin American or Anglo-Indian novel) but which, on the level of critical thinking, can invoke enormous conceptual misunderstandings. Let us say, finally, that the magical worlds of most historical cultures of our planet have not been disenchanted, and their public space, in spite of some ravages, still shelters the pale images of collective memory. The spiritual shelterlessness has still not led to the privatisation of beliefs. Squeezed between the hermeneutic of old archetypes like the world and historicity, there they are, at present, pressed into all the bricolages imaginable. This only means that between diverse cultures which are in a certain way on as many corresponding different levels of consciousness, it is necessary that there be, as we have already mentioned, dialogic relations. In order that a relation can be established between the protagonists of culture, they must be capable of getting out of their respective orbits, to see themselves as in multifaceted mirrors wherein the images of both the one and the other are reflected; that they can change, respectively, their places, and decipher, in the passage of one to the place of the other, the other’s heuristic, being lifted to the level of complementarity in knowing that at the bottom of themselves there are extremely varied aspects of an inexhaustible reality. It isn’t easy to understand the Other. How can we understand the Hindu, Hermann Keyserling asked, for whom the psychic, that is the soul, is more real than the physical, who is more expressive than any other people in representing the irrational, and who, in associating the imagination to the flesh, renders visible what is invisible in itself?40 How, in other words, to understand a people for whom the divinities of the pantheon have more concrete reality than historical facts have for other people. And what is one to say of the highly symbolic language, of the paradoxes inspired by the Persians, of the flights of their imagination, of the vertiginous leaps of a people, || 40 Cf. Keyserling 1996: pp. 100 and 108.

34 | Daryush Shayegan obsessed to the point of ecstasy by mystic poetry - without going into the wonderful spiritual realizations of Chinese and Japanese civilization. If all the extraoccidental cultures, which have marked the apotheosis of the human spirit, are put together, we will enlarge still more the array of our sensations, multiply the levels of our perception, meaning that we will proportionally elevate our enlarged presence in the world. Ernst Robert Curtius, the German critic, says that we can find in Goethe the most varied philosophical ideas: Ionian hylozoism, Plato’s soul of the world, Aristotle’s entelechy, the natura naturans and the natura naturata of Spinoza, Leibniz’s monads, and finally Schelling’s philosophy of nature. All of these very heterogeneous elements are tied together by the idea of metamorphosis. This is Goethe’s key idea, for it made him a participant in the continuity of the Philosophia perennis.41 Not everyone, certainly, has the immense synthetic genius of Goethe, whose curiosity and intellectual vigor is exceptional – one has only to read the Conversations of Goethe and Eckermann to see this. But I believe that if cultural diversity bears fruit and inspires the inhabitants of this planet, who are condemned to understand each other or perish, we can only follow this path. Besides, one has the impression that the human consciousness, in the age of shattered ontologies and interconnectivity, becomes a rainbow of all the strata of the consciousness, from shamanism to the last avatars of virtualization. In telescoping them, we pass through the whole epic of human consciousness and perhaps we learn as well to speak, as Diderot says, “by twenty mouths at once.”

References Béguin, A. (1945). Faiblesse de l’Allemagne. Paris : José Corti. Berdiaev, N. (1945). L’esprit de Dostoievski ( Nerville, A., Trans.). Paris : Stock. Berdiaev, N. (1951). Les sources et le sens du communisme russe (Cain, L., Trans.). Paris : Gallimard. Berdiaev, N. (1969). L’idée russe (Arjakovsky, H.,Trans.). Paris : Maison Mame. Berlin, I. (1999). The Roots of Romantiticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Curtius, E. (1932). Goethe ou le classique allemand. In La nouvelle revue française. Hommage à Goethe. Paris : Seuil. Dumont, L. (1991). L’idéologie allemande, France-Allemagne et retour. Paris: Gallimard. Figes, O. (2002). Natasha’s Dance—A Cultural History of Russia. New York : Picador. Keyserling, H. (1996). Journal de voyage d’un philosophe. Paris: Bartillat. Mann, K. (1984). Le tournant, Histoire d’une vie ( Roche, N., Trans). Paris: Solin. Paz, O. (1985) Une planète et quatre ou cinq mondes. Paris : Gallimard.

|| 41 Cf. Curtius 1932: 19.

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Shayegan D. (1989.) Le regard motile. Paris: Albin Michel. English translation 1997 by J. Howe: Cultural Schizophrenia, Islamic Societies Confronting the West. London: Saqi books. Also published by Syracuse University Press, 1997. Paperback edition under the title Schizophrénie culturelle Paris: Albin Michel 2008. Shayegan D. (2008). La lumière vient de l´Occident, le réenchantement du monde et la pensée nomade (2nd ed.) Paris: édition de l´Aube. (Original work published 2001). Steiner, G. (1971). Extraterritorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. New York: Atheneum. Taylor, C. (1994). Multiculturalisme, différence et démocratie (Canal, D.A. Trans.). Paris: Aubier. Tolstoy, L. (1952). Anna Karénine (Mongault, H., Trans.). Paris: Gallimard.

Jesper Garsdal

CHAPTER THREE Intercultural thought, Bildung, and the onto-dialogical perspective The aim of this article is to investigate the meta-philosophical ‘conditions of the possibility’ of a dialogue across cultures, that is, dialogue among proponents of different religious and philosophical worldviews or, more technically speaking, ontologies. I suggest that in order to conceptualize such a notion of intercultural or cross-cultural dialogue, we need new terminological tools. In particular, we need to understand the ontologies that frame the contributions of the dialogue partners from a new metaphilosophical perspective that I call the “ontodialogical perspective.” I set out by explaining the onto-dialogical perspective and its relationship to the traditional mono-logical ontological perspective, making use of the mediaeval notion of speculative grammar as developed by the so-called modistae. Different worldviews, whether distinctively religious or nonreligious, are like different speculative grammars that are “deciphered” by means of existential interpretations. I further explicate the notion of existential interpretation and discuss the assumption—essential for philosophical understanding of ‘thought’ in general—that such existential deciphering processes can occur ‘freely’ without external obstruction or pressure. This raises the question of how we are to understand the relationship between existential deciphering and the formation of subjectivity through dialogue. The second section addresses this question, starting with a brief presentation of central tenets in the development of the notion of “Bildung,” which I claim is an important background for Hegel’s philosophy. I briefly set out the notion of Bildung as Eckhart and Goethe originally perceived it, namely, as introducing the systematically important idea of an anticipatory or “nightly knowledge” (Eckhart) or “dreaming premonition” (Goethe). I then engage this notion to characterize the recollection of “self” in relation to “otherness,” and further to elucidate the notion of dialogue. I then address—on the foil of an interaction with Hegel—two central systematic questions arising for the conception of an onto-dialogical perspective. First, how can we claim that agents can engage in the project of understanding several ontologies without ending up in exclusivism or inclusivism? Second, how can we conceive of the subjectivity of such an existential deciphering process?

38 | Jesper Garsdal In the third section of the paper I explore the role of the notion of ‘otherness’ in the existential interpretation processes in dialogue. Again I take my lead from Hegel’s notion of spirit as an ontology of identity according to which everything constitutively relates itself to otherness and the other of itself. But I do not follow Hegel in the assumption that it is part of everything existing that the other is also subsumed it is own identity. Rather, taking up some insights from Kierkegård’s and Tanabe’s criticism of Hegel, I will suggest that we should conceive of the dialogical relation between different ontologies—philosophical and religious speculative grammars of existential meaning—as a continuously ongoing interaction with specific dialectical character that goes beyond the logic of Hegel’s dialectics. I characterize this as “sleeping into each other and waking up in one self.” As I will explain, it is in dialogue where this process takes place. I then unfold this notion of dialogue in a conversation with aspects of Hegel’s, Kierkegaard’s and Tanabe’s philosophy. Let me start out, then, by introducing the idea of philosophical and religious ‘grammars’ in terms of which the onto-dialogical perspective can best be brought into view.

The notion of philosophical and religious grammar and the onto-dialogical perspective Let us start by taking a look at the mediaeval notion of speculative grammar as proposed by the so-called modistae; then we will see how this idea can be used to introduce the meta-philosophical concept I call the ‘onto-dialogical’ perspective; which thereafter is illustrated and expanded with an allegory. At the end of this section I introduce the idea of ontological-grammatical ciphers and existential-grammatical deciphering.

Speculative grammar: the isomorphism of being, language, and understanding The modistae were a group of medieval thinkers, mainly writing in the 13th and 14th century, who presented the new idea of a ‘speculative grammar.’ Speculative grammar is “speculative” in the sense that the grammar is taken “mirrors” reality, and thus amounts to a realist ontological category theory, albeit of a peculiar kind. The grammatical categories of word classes, gender, case, number, time, etc. are modes of signifying, modi significandi, these correlate with modes of understanding, modi intelligendi, which in turn correlate with modes

Onto-dialogical perspective | 39

of being, modi essendi. Substantives, verbs and adjectives can be seen as ways of signifying certain modes of being for understanding. Grammatically wellformed sentences of ordinary language thus indicate which modes of being can be combined with other modes of being. Ontologically speaking “modism” and the modistae thus focused on “the ways” in which beings interact, rather than on the analysis of what beings are as isolated substantial “beings in themselves." In short, speculative grammar claims that the structure of being discloses itself to understanding in the structure of language—we can reconstruct it by determining the significations for different modes of being and by analyzing how these significations combine. This method, they argued, presented a major advance over the traditional approach to ontology by means of genera and species. The basic modist idea that the combinatorial aspects of language reflect the grammar of being has inspired philosophers throughout the centuries—for example, it motivated various attempts to generate a universal philosophical grammar in the 17th century.42 But also later we find traits of the envisaged cognate structure of language and being, for example, in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger.43

|| 42 For example, we find this idea in Leibniz’s philosophy, where it plays an important role in his attempt to develop a perennial philosophy and religion, not least in his interpretations of Chinese philosophy. Other early modern attempts to find a universal grammar were often similarly inspired by the idea of pre-Babylonian 'original language' that presented Adam's 'alphabet of being' and could be recovered from Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were taken to be closer to this “original language”. The idea might be rooted in the double meaning of logos as both “thought” and “speech” in Greek and Judaic thinking; it underlies the conception of certain languages—e.g., Sanskrit, Japanese, or Arabic--as ‘divine languages’ getting to the essence of being . 43 Both Peirce and Heidegger studied what was—unbeknownst to them—the most famous well-known modist treatise, the Tractatus de modis significandi seu grammatica speculativa, written by the 14th century thinker Thomas of Erfurt, which was until 1922 mistakenly attributed to Duns Scotus. For a brief discussion of the notion of grammar and religion in Wittgenstein, as well as similarities and differences in relation to the notion of grammar developed here, especially in relation to the phenomenon of religious conversation, see Garsdal 2012: 265-266.

40 | Jesper Garsdal

From universal grammar to the dynamics of onto-dialogical difference and the deciphering of grammar The notion of a speculative grammar obviously comes under pressure as soon as one realizes that there are profound differences among linguistic grammars— many more than the modistae, all speakers of Indo-European languages, could have been aware of. In view of this profound diversity of linguistic grammars, new questions arise. Which of these linguistics grammars holds the key to the grammar of being? Or are there as many grammars of being as there are linguistic grammars? Also, if a linguistic grammar determines the structure of understanding, from which perspective are we to understand the difference between linguistic grammars? Clearly, the program of speculative grammar is no longer an approach for philosophical research in ontology—at most, the analysis of some particular linguistic grammar could be used as a heuristics for developing an ontology. In fact, the plurality of linguistic grammars directly leads to a plurality of ontologies precisely on the assumption of the isomorph relation between language and ontology—the idea of a speculative grammar is at once a thesis of radical linguistic relativity. If we extend the notion of a language from natural languages to include also the languages of theories and philosophical and religious worldviews, the structural isomorphism of speculative grammar directly leads into pluralism and radical relativism: each theory or worldview has its own ontology. Dialogue across languages and associated ontologies would seem to be impossible. One way to deal with this issue is to introduce what we might call a “twolayer model” in which a grammatical depth structure maintains the universal isomorphic relation between being and grammar, and where the actual surface grammars can be seen as instances of this depth structure or at least interpreted in relation to this structure (or phrased in the language of fundamental ontology, that the different worldviews are considered as ontic instances of a fundamental ontology). This is a theme which has been unfolded in various ways not only in philosophy but also linguistics and semiotics, since the above mentioned 17th century interest in the idea of a universal grammar that could bridge between different cultures and languages. In the following I shall set the idea of fundamental ontology or depth grammar largely aside. However, even though the isomorphism thesis of speculative grammar would lead to radical relativism, there is another element of speculative grammar we can use for the purposes of grounding the possibility of dialogue across languages (theories, worldviews) and ontologies. We can, or so I want to suggest, retain the core intuition of the modistae about some “correlativity” be-

Onto-dialogical perspective | 41

tween being and communication but construe it as a dynamic interaction between the different grammars. The relevant modification or further development of this theoretical intuition I will call the onto-dialogical perspective. It is a modification designed in particular to address the requirements of dialogue between speakers with different worldviews; thus it also needs to take into account that not every philosophical or religious worldview has a clear grammar or presents itself in the form of a theory. I will explain the details of the ontodialogical perspective in a moment; first it might be useful to introduce the concept with an allegory.

The islands of ontology and the interaction between them Imagine a group of islands in the open sea, under the skies of heaven. One of these islands we could envision as a poetic Heideggerian world of a fourfold of earth, heaven, mortals and divine beings. Other islands might have a more Buddhist flavor and would be worlds inhabited by beings-which neither-aredead-nor-alive to paraphrase a well-known Zen expression. Again, one island might be the world that the French scholar and expert in esoteric Islam Henry Corbin has called the Imaginatrix or the realm of Mundus Imaginalis, (or in the words of Ibn al’Arabi, the realm of alam al-mithal). This realm is essential for Corbin’s view of existence, which we could characterize as a dynamic relation between being-at-this-side-of-death (earth-man) and being-at-the-other-side-ofdeath (the personal angel) connected through God’s creative imagination44. On some islands there might be beings, which have several bodies and, which live in world(s) with several heavens and earths. Without exaggerating these differences this means that, for example, the phenomenology of “death," “body," “world” and “the other” etc. might differ from island to island. I want to suggest that instead of trying to devise a comprehensive speculative grammar as a common ‘depth structure’ or ‘fundamental ontology’ underlying the different ‘ontic worlds’ of the islands a priori, one could focus on how the interplay between ‘local speculative grammars’ opens up for different ways of interacting with ‘others,’ both others living at the same island, and at others living at other islands. We might call this a shift from an ontological perspective to an onto-dia-logical perspective. This is the onto-dialogical dimension of a given grammar.

|| 44 See for example Garsdal 2011-2: 86-91 and Corbin 1998: 153-154

42 | Jesper Garsdal The suggested ‘local’ perspective on ontology, signification, and hermeneutics enables us to open up new ontological dimensions in ways that go beyond what can be achieved by subsumptions under a joint general ontology—the local grammar is combined with an account of the potential for potential dynamic interactions with the other ‘islands.’45 The dimension of interactions across ‘the sea’ might alter the environment surrounding any single interaction to such a degree that a completely new environment of connectedness is generated of what previously seemed to be local grammars. This dynamics can of course also take the opposite direction—the destruction of such connections and interactions might lead to a forgetfulness of the connectedness of a ‘larger’ connectedness that once obtained, and generate the impression that the local grammars is essentially isolated. These two moments together constitute the dynamics of the interaction between different philosophical and religious speculative grammar(s). To be sure, religions and philosophical grammars besides this interactive communicative transformational dynamics also have some sort of dynamic identity—even though the worlds of the islands from a phenomenological and ontological perspective change through interactions with people from other islands, they are still imagined and considered as islands throughout.

Ontological-grammatical ciphers, identity formation and existentialgrammatical deciphering The formation of existential identities can be assumed as constituted through interplay between the ontological dimension of a grammar and the concrete ‘agency’ or dynamic potential of the grammar, which again can be taken to consist of different interpretations of the grammar and the interaction between these interpretations. More precisely, I take existential identities to be constituted by the interplay between virtual ontological-grammatical ciphers and the dynamics of existential-grammatical deciphering of these ciphers in form of interpretation and signification, both vertical as the interpretation of the grammatical ciphers as such, and horizontal as the particular interpretation in relation to other existential interpretations of these ciphers.

|| 45 In other words, there might be many way of conceiving the onto-dialogical perspective dependently on how specific grammar(s) is/are interpreted.

Onto-dialogical perspective | 43

This notion of an ontological-grammatical cipher is indebted to Karl Jasper’s notion of “ciphers of transcendence”.46 However Jasper’s notion of cipher is closely connected with his attempt to transform Kant’s transcendental ideas (world, immortality of the soul and God’s existence) into “ideas of transcendence” (orientation in the world, existence and transcendence). The function of the cipher’s are in Jasper’s Kantian inspired approach, that they at one hand at a symbolic level point to the ideas of transcendence, but that they at the other hand also point to the absolute limits of human insight. The notion of the ontological grammatical cipher is not in the same way pointing to the limits of existential or lived knowledge for existence in relation to transcendence. The difference is that the ciphers even though they are fundamental existential ciphers in contradistinction to Jaspers notion of ciphers are related to grammars or “islands” which instead of being oriented towards transcendence “directly”. This means that limits of knowledge in relation to “transcendence” depends on the specific grammar and cannot be claimed universally, not only according to which limits there might be to knowledge of the transcendent, but also regarding if there are limits. Or put differently focus shifts from transcendence “in itself” to the transcendence which might be involved in communication across “grammatical” borders. The ciphers therefore are both ontological and grammatical oriented and might function as a “vehicle” for interpretational interaction between what from some perspectives could be considered to be “ideas of transcendence”, which we as earlier indicated later will relate to the idea of dialogue as the dynamic process of sleeping into each other. The inherent openness of the onto-dialogical perspective further has the somewhat radical implication that what from the ontological perspective from one grammar might be considered as a cipher of transcendence might alter meaning through interaction between grammars. Grammatical ciphers vary from religion to religion—in Christianity the idea of Jesus Christ as the incarnated Son and Word of God and the idea of the Trinity, in Islam the idea of Tawhid and Quran as the Word of God, and in Buddhism, the idea of An-atman and Pratītyasamutpāda, might be considered as such religious grammatical ciphers. If you identify with one of these religions, then you will—if asked—engage in the verbal or non-verbal deciphering of the ciphers that are most commonly associated with this religion. This does not mean that you necessarily have to claim “the truth” of these ciphers. Three are, for example, many Unitarians Christians, who like for example Muslims or Buddhist do not believe in the idea of the trinity, but it is much more likely that you as a || 46 For a good summary of Jasper’s notion of cipher of transcendence see Thornhill 2011.

44 | Jesper Garsdal Unitarian Christian be asked to “explain yourself” more to Trinitarian Christians (and perhaps vice versa), than, for example, a Muslim or a Buddhist would be. In other words: if you identify yourself with the “name” of a religion, then you will at least have to relate to - if not necessarily acknowledge – (some of) the common ciphers of that religion in the course of your deciphering and interpretation of the religion you claim to belong, while this is not the case if you belong to another religion with other central ciphers. Identities are always identification processes, which means that not only religious identities but also not-so-religious secular identities can be analyzed through interplay between central (religious-) grammatical ciphers and existential-grammatical deciphering of these ciphers in form of interpretation and signification. From this perspective the Enlightenment can be seen as centered around specific grammatical-ciphers, namely freedom (and maybe less often equality and fraternity), and historicity—ciphers, which first fully become meaningful through the existential and philosophical decipherment of them, in different interpretations of them in different contexts. For another illustration, consider the notions of reason and Geist (spirit) in the context of the 18-century Enlightenment versus the context of the 19-century counter-Enlightenment. Reason (i.e., reason as ratio, as epistemological category) can count a third cipher in the grammar of 18th century Enlightenment, next to freedom and history; in 19th-century German Idealism, however, the cipher of reason was replaced by the notion of Geist, Spirit. Precisely how to rank the central ciphers of a (philosophical or religious) worldview is a matter of debate in the history of philosophy and the history of ideas. My point here is that allegiances to a view are typically cashed out in engaging to at least one of the central ciphers of the view. Thinkers who claim to be inspired by the Enlightenment typically express this commitment by relating to the existential cipher ‘freedom.’

The onto-dialogical perspective: beyond relativistic pluralism The onto-dialogical perspective is an attempt to define a new stance in the family of philosophical positions that aim to accommodate, in some fashion, the diversity of valuative commitments in different cultures. In order to appreciate the way in which the onto-dialogical perspective suggests we should, not only as philosophers, come to grips with this diversity, we will first explore how we can conceive processes of identification and formation as edification processes of subjectivity through a brief reflection on the German idea of Bildung. This idea is both an important background for Hegel’s dialectics, and something we later in section three also ourselves will refer to in relation to our notion of dia-

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logue. We have already announced that we conceive dialogue as a form of mutual sleeping and waking into each other and the notion of Bildung give us a first hint how this is to be conceived as Bildung is closely connected with ideas of “nightly knowledge” and the dreaming and recollection of spirit in an edifying formation process through “images”, “Bildung.”

The formation of the person - “Bildung” as theme for Eckhart and Goethe The German word ‘Bildung’ is sometimes translated as ‘formation’; in relation to education it is often equated with ‘edification’ to emphasize a character building aspect, the formation of a ‘person.’ However neither ‘formation’ nor ‘edification’ catches all the connotations of Bildung as a formation process that expresses itself through images, Bilder. But it is important to note that the notion of Bildung stems from a complex notion of what images are. The idea of Bildung goes back at least to the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart, where it played an important role for the task of integrating the Christian conception of the human being as created in the image of God into an existential dynamic between nothingness and Being. In the 18th century Goethe developed an idea of Bildung that combined formation with continued intensification and development, Steigerung, which is also found in living nature, but which in the human being more explicitly develops be means of a reflection on, and integration of, otherness within the self.47 Whether and how such an integration is possible—and desirable—is the pivotal question for an account of self and subjectivity that fits with the onto-dialogical account of pluralism I have begun to sketch in the previous section. If we take Bildung to be a social process in which the participants discover ontological layers in otherness, ‘the image of God in the other,’ we need to explain how this can be done without ‘consuming’ the other’s deciphering processes in ways that subsume the other ‘under’ the integrating self. According to Wolfgang Wackernagel, Eckhart’s use of the German Bild is not only a German translation of the Latin Imago but it also takes advantage of some the connotations in the West Germanic word bilidi.

|| 47 An interesting project in comparative philosophy could be to compare the notions of ‘Steigerung’ and ‘Bildung’ in relation to human development in the tradition inititiated by Goethe with the idea of “intensification of being” as found in the philosophy of Mulla Sadra.

46 | Jesper Garsdal However, turning now to Eckhart’s own understanding of the image, it is clear that his approach is the first to be inspired not only by the philosophical and theological implications surrounding the Latin definition of imago but also the first to draw from the supernatural, magical and religious context of the West Germanic word bilidi. Until the eleventh century this word apparently meant a ‘magical force’, ‘magical spiritual entity’, a ‘miraculous sign’ (Wunderzeichen), or an archetype (Urbild); it then began to designate a ‘being’, a ‘form’ or a ‘formed thing’ and finally an ‘image’ in the secular sense, such as a representation or copy (Abbild) that a painting embodies, and to this semantic sense was added the metaphorical one of an image painted in words. Meister Eckhart’s works, which stand at a crossroads between Latin and German languages, has therefore contributed to the development of the German philosophical language, particular as it relates to the vocabulary of the image.48

For theological reasons, however, Meister Eckhart cannot operate with a simple representational notion of the human “similarity” or “likeness” as an Abbild as an immediate representation of the divine Urbild. In light of the tension between, on the one hand, the biblical claims that humans are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26) and “that we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2) and on the other hand the biblical prohibition of making images of God in the Decalogue (Exodus 20:4), Eckhart introduces a notion of disimagination or dis-representation, in German: Entbildung, as a central component in the notion of the image. Wackernagel presents an interesting and detailed account of how Eckhart operates with three complex semantic layers of the notion of the image and how these three layers must be conceived in a complex dialectic between Bildung and Entbildung by Meister Eckhart (as well as in later Rhineland mysticism, and Angelus Silesius). [T]he first level concerns the Trinity, the second level defines the human being, while the third level concerns the world of perception. The first and the third level thus constitutes the two poles of the dialectical being of the image. If the first pole constitutes the image, then the third level constitutes the non-image, while the second level constitutes the region of similarity/dissimilarity between the first and the third (Wackernagel 1993: 78)

From this division it might first appear that one should aim for “Bildung” as a paidea or a formative perfection in the likeness of the divine image, and avoid || 48 Wackernagel 1993:78; for what follows see Wackernagel 1993: 77-98. Wackernagel also offers some reflections on the possible philological relation between the indo European word bhilo from where the word bilden derives and the Greek word of philo. Such a connection, which, as Wackernagel admits. has been contested, would make it possible to combine the word Bild, with ideas of amity and love. This would have pleased Eckhart, since philosophy as the love of wisdom then could be seen as the “image of wisdom” (ibid: 78). Philologically less questionable however is the claim that the word stems from West Germanic, bilidi.

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“Ent-bildung,” which ensues if one follows the phantasms of perception of the interior and exterior world. However, as Wackernagel shows, Eckhart thinks more along the lines of Dionysius’ (the Areopagite) and Plotinus’ ideas of negative theology and abstraction as removal (aphairei): the artist who is sculpturing a statue does not in-form marble with an image but rather removes marble to let the inherent possible image shine forth in actual existence. In other words, the similarity/dissimilarity between the un-representable divine word-image and the images of perception is dynamically mediated by negation and not by representation. In the history of mysticism such dis-imagination has been considered as awareness of, or attention to, what has been called the “dark night of the soul”; Wackernagel also quotes Eckhart’s interpretation of the Song of Solomon: To know a creature in itself is to have ’vesperal’ knowledge; here one sees creatures through images that have multiple distinctions. To know a creature in God is to have ’matinal’ knowledge; here one contemplates creatures without any distinction, devoid of any image (aller bilder entbildet), released from all resemblance, in the One, which is God himself (Eckhart’s commentary to Solomon’s song in Wackernagel’s translation; (Wackernagel 1993: 87).

This “negative way” or “nightly knowledge” between “vesper” and “matins” should not be seen as iconoclasm49: [It not only relates] to the domain of language and its beyond; that is, as a simple negative metaphor. The gulf between the nothingness of the creature and the plenitude of the divine being cannot be overcome by simply transcending the limits of language. Rather it might be more apt here to speak of an active disimagination, alluding to the method of active imagination that Jung described. Or perhaps we should refer to the different Western and Eastern techniques of yoga and meditation. In fact, only by an ethical and even practical approach to Entbildung can abstraction become a lived experience. The aphairetic ascension of the being-this-or-that toward the divine is inseparable from its mystical certainty concerning the subsistence of the essence of the model or of the archetype at the very heart of the being of images—and this must be accomplished without transgressing the meta-physical limits of these images (Wackernagel 1993: 94-94)

In sum, Eckhart’s notion of active dis-imagination points to living experience, “knowing of creature in God”, a “nightly knowledge,” in which existence is detached from its own inner and outer images, without transgressing the “metaphysical limits” of these images. || 49 Wackernagel also discusses similarities and differences between Eckhart’s notion of disimagination and Kandinsky’s notion of spiritual abstraction, Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit and theological iconoclasm and non-theological deconstruction.

48 | Jesper Garsdal Also in Weimar Classicism we find a dynamic understanding of the relation between “Urbild” and “Bild” but with an increased focus on organic metaphors in relation to the notion of “Bildung” (and perhaps therefore with a less pronounced focus on the role of disimagination), namely, in Goethe writings on nature and in his literary work especially in the novels on Wilhelm Meister and in Faust. For present purposes Thomas Pfau‘s (2005) description of Goethe’s notion of Bildung and Bild is particularly instructive: The fuel that keeps this dialectical machine running and on track is found, appropriately enough, at the very root of Goethe’s botanical research, namely, in his theory of Bild and Urbild[my italics]. Inspired by Blumenbach’s Über den Bildungstrieb (1781), his own botanical hypotheses during his Italian Journey (1784), and by Kant’s discrimination between mechanical and organic models of judgment (Critique of Judgment, § 65), Goethe develops his concept of Bildung in his 1790 essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants and in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Both texts strongly anticipate Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty in the Phenomenology by arguing that the epigenetic quality of Bildung – its capacity to “emerge” rather than be expressly conceived or proposed – has to do with the dual meaning of Bild. For a given organic formation, however minimal and innocuous, is never static but, however unbeknownst to itself, serves as the objective point of reference for a discursive intelligence that is analogously self-transforming.[my italics]. To study the morphology of a perfoliate rose or the skeleton of a bull is not simply to arrive at an image of an object; rather, it is to fashion an image, a complex representation, which in turn will mirror back to the observer the particular kind of intelligence gradually realized by such activity. (Pfau 2005: 142)

It is important to note that the formation of the rose is conceived by a perceiving intelligence “outside” of the rose which “fashions an image” of the rose, in a way that reflects back on the perceiving intelligence, transforming the latter by this activity. Pfau continues by showing that for both Goethe and Hegel the concept of Bildung in a person is closely connected with an increasing awareness of the person’s interpretational activities in relation to the fashioning of “images”. Of particular interest for us here is Pfau’s analysis of Goethe’s presentation of Wilhelm Meister’s development, where the teleology at a certain stage of this development is characterized as the unfolding of a past dream of the future: “Do not images of our future destiny appear before our unclouded eyes in the dreams of our youth as premonitions?” he kept saying to himself, “Is it not possible that Fate sows

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the seeds of what later is to befall us, a foretaste of the fruits we later are to enjoy”50 (my italics).

Pfau continues his analysis by noticing that Wilhelm Meister at this particular stage of his development is deficient: [It suffers from a] narcissistic absence of an active principle (Hegel’s Arbeit or Goethe’s Praxis) that shows “fate” to be less the opposite of “self-determination” than an as yet inadequate conception of Bestimmung (“determination”) as a necessarily immanent, selfregulating process. However jejune and narcissistic Wilhelm’s reading of it might seem, the Amazon’s Bild not only presages his developmental advances in the coming books but also triggers a concurrent progression in the reader’s interpretive competence. (Pfau 2005: 144)

Altogether, then, the notion of Bildung in Goethe as reconstructed by Pfau is an attempt to articulate a dynamics that constitutes its telos by its own movement of directed unfolding and does that more and more through the act of selfdetermination; we shall later see how this act of self-determination is further developed in Hegel’s philosophy. In light of both the temporal aspects involved in Goethe’s metaphoric use of the dream, as well as Eckhart’s notion of the “nightly knowledge” of the creature “in God”, two questions arise. First, how are we to understand this act of self-determination? Second, how ‘far does it reach in the context of meeting the other not only the other as a “creature in God” but as a ‘dialogical other’? In keeping with Eckhart’s and Goethe’s metaphors let us approach these two questions by way of a reflection on the idea of sleep and awakening in relation to the other.

Self and otherness in relation to Bildung Recall the question that launched us into a closer investigation of the dynamics of Bildung. How can we avoid subsuming the other while integrating it into the self? The notion of an ‘awakening to the other’ would seem, at first glance, to provide a solution—we integrate the other as something that we recognize as having been implicit in our selves. However, such a conception of “awakening” would imply that “real differences” in worldviews only seem to exist as dreams for finite selves and it would exclude the possibility of something being “unre|| 50 Goethe in book 4 in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship here in Pfau’s reference to Erik Blackall’s translation, Pfau 2005: 143-144.

50 | Jesper Garsdal solved” in relation to the other. To preserve the possibility of radical alterity we need to move away from the first-person point of view of the dynamics of Bildung as integration of the subject and move to a first-and-second-person point of view, and conceive of it as the relational dynamics of and interaction. The self awakes to the other as an implicit aspect of itself while ‘sleeping into the other,’ i.e., while becoming an implicit aspect of the other. In other words, the dream might not primarily point to the possibility of awakening, but rather primarily points to the continued possibility of awakening to self and deep sleep into the other, who never becomes fully integrated in the self.51

How can one engage in the existential deciphering of several grammars? How can we conceive of the possibility that an agent is existentially engaged in several ontologies and regards the content of the different ontologies from the perspective of her or his ontology, yet without either excluding or including all other ontologies? In order to answer this question we need to set out with a view of an ontology as something that can only be characterized in terms of how it is disclosed in the existential deciphering of a subject. Thus the description of an ontology must take into account, from the very beginning, how this ontology interacts with other ontologies through existential deciphering processes. The content of another ontology must be brought forth by the subject for the subject as other than the subject. This does not mean, however, that the “content of the || 51 For the perspective taken here it is quite important to attend to different interpretations of what it means to be awake, to dream, and to be in deep sleep. One further would need to consider how the three terms ‘awakening’, ‘dreaming’ and ‘sleeping,’ in their given interpretation, are related to Bildung, and to the notion of self and other in dialogue. For the sake of illustration, let me for a moment relinquish the author’s voice: Is this article written and read from an ‘awaken’ state of mind or is it a discussion which itself is a part of a Bildung process? In other words, even though ‘I’ am writing and ‘You’ probably are reading this from what in common sense understanding would seem to an awake state of mind, one could also ask if the involvement in this text at present maybe is nothing else but a shared dream. -- For more reflection of how to conceive the abovementioned terms one could gather inspiration from both Indian (see for example Sharma 2004) and Chinese philosophical traditions (see for example Allinson 1989, especially 96-110 on the comparison between the butterfly dream and the dream of the great awakening in Chuang Tzu). But it is not only important to consider how we conceive of what is said about sleep, dream, and being awake in relation to Bildung; in the context of the onto-dialogical perspective it is equally important to consider the fact that we are talking about a dialogue between the self and other from different ontological perspectives. For a discussion of how different ‘home ontologies’ generate two implicit existential deciphering processes see Garsdal 2007.

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other” is a mere construction produced by the investigating subject. There will be aspects of the other’s otherness that have thinking as a prerequisite—in order to let the other appear as other for the subject, a certain type of hermeneutic approach is required. Not only the contents of the ciphers have this fundamentally phenomenal character of appearing only in relationship to the investigating subject but this is also so for the ‘logic’ of an ontology. Thus, in interpreting a structure of ciphers, an ontology, various ‘phenomena-logics’ are disclosed— the phenomena-logic of the ontology for us as well as the phenomena-logic for the other. The different forms of ‘organizing’ principles are non-reducible to existential subjectivity even though they are dependent on subjectivity in form of existence to come forth as both phenomena and principles. In order to get this—let us call it: phenomenal—conception of ontology better into view, we will use two Hegelian distinctions as an expository foil. The first distinction is the one Hegel draws between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. The beauty of nature presents itself in an image that we perceive as beautiful but without knowing or perceiving the formative-imaginative process leading to this perception. In contrast, the beauty of art not only lies in the image which we perceive as beautiful but also in the fact that we perceive these images as generated for the beholder, so we perceive in art the free process of Bildung of “absolute spirit” as the organizing principle of the beautiful phenomena.52 In art this organizing principle of “absolute spirit” is immediately perceived, while in the Science of Logic—and this is the second distinction relevant for our purposes here—the absolute spirit or absolute idea is the dialectical unfolding of conceptual determinations of thought.53 In Hegel’s view the structure of thought is “Logos” that creates knowledge—the absolute idea (or Thought) knows itself only by continuously transcending itself into otherness unconscious of itself. All determinations of

|| 52 Cf. Houlgate 2010: “The purpose of art, for Hegel, is thus the creation of beautiful objects in which the true character of freedom is given sensuous expression. The principal aim of art is not, therefore, to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom—images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art's purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art's sake, but for beauty's sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.” 53 The absolute Idea, as unfolded at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit (§805), is often taken to form the entry point into the Science of Logic.

52 | Jesper Garsdal thought or “Begriffe” (concepts) are transformed into each other in a sort of “universal thought life.” Importantly, this process of thought unfolding itself to come to itself comprises not only concepts for all contents but also for all structural relationships of contents, all ‘logics’ including its own. In light of the characterization of Bildung suggested above it is tempting to view Hegel’s project as an attempt to describe the ‘Bildung of Being,’ a process where Being realizes itself as the absolute idea which/who knows itself only by continuously transcending itself into an otherness unconscious of itself, Nature as sleeping Spirit, which in turn begins to dream of itself in the manifestation of phenomena, and wakes up first recollecting itself as the subjective spirit, which consciously tries to find itself in its own objectifications, but finds that the marriage with subjective spirit is first realized in the absolute spirit of art, religion and philosophy. In the final analysis, however, Hegel’s philosophy is a position of philosophical inclusivism, so despite the useful leads he provides, a dialogical conception of pluralism cannot follow him all the way. While the onto-dialogical perspective agrees with Hegel’s intuition that content comes into existence only by way of being thought (deciphered) by a concrete historical subject, the ontodialogical perspective does not embrace the much farther going Hegelian claim that we can organize this content in a more and more comprehensive dialectical process, through the unfolding of concepts, so that in the end the subject would be able to conceive of all the essential features of the other. In sum, then, the question of how a subject can be engaged in the deciphering of the ciphers of different ontologies can be answered as follows. Since the content of any cipher is related to the content of others, the deciphering of one implicitly will engage contrasting ciphers from other ontologies and these relationships can be explicitly worked out in processes of deciphering or interpretation especially developed for this purpose. So any attempt to engage the ciphers of one’s own ontology implicitly resonates with the content and structure of other ontologies, and these implicit relationships can be explicated in many ways none of which will be exhaustive.

In which sense is existential deciphering ‘subjective’? A reflection on Hegel’ notion of person Before moving on, let us briefly retrace our steps so far. We asked whether there is any conception of a dynamics by which a subject can integrate what is ‘other’ to it in a non-subsumptive, appropriating way, and found the conception of such a dynamics in the notion of Bildung. Bildung is an attempt to think a de-

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velopment as guided by a goal or telos that is not previously given but emerges in the course of that very development. In an attempt to apply this insight to the situation of deciphering other ontologies, we then noticed that Hegel’s philosophy, which has the ambition of engaging all possible ontologies, can be understood as the attempt to describe the ‘Bildung of Being,’ a process he calls ‘absolute spirit.’ On the contrastive foil of Hegel’s proposal we could then determine the contours of an onto-dialogical conception of how an agent may be existentially engaged in several ontologies and may regard the content of the different ontologies from the perspective of her or his ontology, yet without either excluding or including all other ontologies. Let us now move on and consider the following question, again in conversation with Hegel. Given that what we called ‘existential-grammatical’ deciphering is from a perspective in the sense in which only a subject of thought and action can supply it, how can we conceive of subjectivity in the deciphering process? The central grammatical cipher for Hegel is the notion of the absolute idea (here understood as set out in the Science of Logic). The absolute is idea characterized by its ability to set something as real otherness for itself and then discover itself in the otherness, thereby returning to itself (for example, example Logic, Nature, Spirit or in Spirit, subjective, objective and absolute spirit, or in absolute spirit art, religion, philosophy, etc.). In this sense the absolute idea includes, interprets and signifies according to Hegel everything there is or exists throughout the world – in other words, in our terms, it can be characterized as speculative grammar albeit of a peculiar type, namely, as a total grammar –an inclusivism that “contains” or includes “all others”. For Hegel such a grammar is possible because the absolute idea is the synthesis of “universal life” manifesting itself in the phenomena of the world and the re-cognition of this universal life both theoretically as the idea of truth and practically as the idea of the good, as the will in the idea of the absolute good is setting everything there is to know of itself. The universal life is just as much Thought as it is Will, however. The Will is, in Hegel’s view, a drive or power directed towards the realization of the absolute good, which betokens, following the logic of Hegel’s dialectics, that the will is the power to ‘set itself’ as that which initially is opposite of its goal, the idea of the absolute good, and initially is “abstract” as a “means” to realize its goal. Gradually, however, the will realizes itself and its goal, concretizing itself and its goal in these gradual realizations, and ultimately coinciding with its goal structurally, so that in the end the will is the absolute good realizing itself in what has turned out to be the autobiography of absolute spirit

54 | Jesper Garsdal Hegel connects the ontological starting point of the Science of Logic with a Christian theological understanding of metaphysical and ontological reflection as an expression of the movements of the inner divine word in the opening chapter of Gospel of John.54 Everything in the world is therefore a masked expression of a fundamental ‘grammar of personhood’ (the term ‘masked expression’ is inspired by the Latin ‘persona’). As far as these ‘masks’ have become aware of themselves as expressions of this grammatical personhood, they themselves are persons. Hegel sees the continued knowing realization of this dialectical interplay between persons and ‘grammar of personhood’ as the central goal for the “divine word” in itself, which, as explained above, in the Logic realizes itself through its otherness, Nature, and return to itself, by knowing itself in-and-for itself in Spirit. In other words, everywhere we look we should in Hegel’s view look for the ‘face of the divine logos’ in varying degrees of consciousness of itself. Thus Hegel’s philosophy provides us with a model for how to conceive of logical dependencies as nevertheless ‘subjective’—the expression of a normativity that is characterized by personhood. We have nowadays a tendency to contrast the ‘objective’ laws of logic with ‘subjective’ modes of reasoning. Hegel’s philosophy reminds us of the possibility of conceiving inference principles themselves as the expression of a systematic normativity that is personal or subjective in character. The normativity that governs the structure of the absolute idea is the normativity of a person’s realization of itself through the knowledge of itself. As this person is the divine “Logos” then there is nothing outside itself, and it therefore continues to manifest itself in new forms of otherness in which, through the dialectics of speculative identity, it slowly wakes from deep sleep in nature as otherness, begins to dream of spirit, and then realizes that it dreams of itself, before it sets out to a new a larger circle where it again realizes itself. As before, let us again use Hegel’s account of subjectivity as briefly reconstructed to develop an alternative account from the onto-dialogical perspective by selecting and deselecting elements of Hegelian thought. The onto-dialogical || 54 Cf. Hegel 1969: 824: “The Notion is not merely soul, but the free subjective Notion that is for itself and therefore, possesses personality – the practical, objective Notion determined in and for itself which, as person is impenetrable atomic subjectivity – but which, none the less is not exclusive individuality, but explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other has its own objectivity for its object. All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavour, caprice and transitoriness; the absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth and is all truth.”

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perspective adopts the basic intuition that the normativity that guides our deciphering of ciphers and their relationships within and across grammars can be understood as the expression of a subjective will. The subjectivity in question— which could be adumbrated as the Logos of divinity—also expresses itself partially in the subjectivities of individual human interpreters, male and female. But the onto-dialogical perspective rejects again Hegel’s claim that the particular type of normative dependencies he calls ‘dialectics’ can or even must unfold themselves in the form of a complete, i.e., all-inclusive, system. As might be suspected, the onto-dialogical perspective proposes that the normative dependencies that guide any individual human deciphering process, and at once express a type of normativity we can consider as personal or subjective, take the form of a dialogue. The following section will further elaborate this proposal.

Dialogue as social Bildung—selves mutually dreaming of and awakening each other Even though Hegel introduced a dynamic dialectic of recognition clarifying the interplay between self and other, he has been criticized for not taking seriously the existential self nor the existential other—both are simply subsumed under the dialectic of the divine word's identity with itself through other. In the following I will continue my strategy of using Hegel’s thought as the stage onto which to set, with its own modifications, the onto-dialogical perspective; now I will extend this expository foil also to critical reactions to Hegel’s thought. Let me thus bring into view aspects of the existential and ethical protest against Hegel and other ‘thinkers of identity’ who subsume everything and every face under a single “Logic of speculative identity." Hegel’s notion that Spirit in some fashion “sleeps into the other” through will-full action seems insightful in certain respects, but it is important to recognize that this claim can be separated from the further-going claim that Spirit can and must recognize itself totally in the other, in a new manifestation of absolute identity of self and other in thought. To understand in which ways these two claims can be dissociated from each other—and in which way dialogue is an alternative to Hegelian inclusivism—let us briefly consider a few central ideas in Kierkegaard’s and Tanabe Hajime’s interpretations of Hegel. On this dialectical platform it will be easiest to introduce the notion of dialogue that is at the core of the ‘ontodialogical perspective.’

56 | Jesper Garsdal From the otherness of divine logos to the openness of Existence – Hegel and Kierkegaard It is well known that Kierkegaard protested against Hegel’s “System" on behalf of the single individual unique existence. As just sketched, in Hegel’s view the “person” who attains self-knowledge through the will-full searching for selfknowledge is the thinking universal person, God as Logos. All other phenomena, therefore, remain merely a part of this repeating movement of Logos setting itself in the other and returning to itself. According to Kierkegaard’s reading, Hegel’s philosophy makes it strictly speaking impossible for an individual human being to realize himself or herself as this existent particular person. The reason for this is that the search for self-knowledge of any existence (any human person) is ‘already’ established by and contained within the universal teleological search for the thinking universal person. In other words, Kierkegaard worries about the problem that insofar as we wish to realize ourselves as part of our overarching project to realize divine subjectivity, we must recognize that the self we realize is already conceived of in relation to this further goal and thus not identical with the realizing self. The self that realizes is particular, while the self that is to be realized is universal. In this way, Kierkegaard argues, the existence of the individual cannot be warranted in the form of self-realization. Could one try to conceive of the repetition of ‘selves’ that is required for the process of self-realization in analogy to teleological structure of the “Logos"? That is, could one postulate that a human self or unique existence could have itself as the goal by setting itself unconsciously as a middle term in a syllogism, by sleeping and dreaming (itself as) self-understanding? This is exactly the question Kierkegaard asks in two books from 1843 Repetition and Fear and Trembling, which has the subtitle of “Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical,” without arriving at an answer. In two books from 1844, The Concept of Anxiety and Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard continues to reflect on the problem of how human existence can relate to trans-individual truth. Let us here recall what we said about the notion of Bildung as it was perceived by Goethe, namely, that Bildung for the human being is possible as a repetition in form of a recollection of what earlier in life has been the dreaming spirit’s premonition of what was to become in the future. In the mentioned two books Kierkegaard examines how the existential temporal modi of past, present and future can be related to eternity and further sees the ambiguity of anxiety as the soul’s qualification of the dreaming spirit. The term ‘dreaming,’ we noted above, denotes that something is present to a self without that self being consciously and reflectively aware of it—in this way a mental content can exist for a self without immediately setting off the

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dialectics that turns otherness into correlativity; a dreamed content is perceived as otherness but not as the other of the dreaming self. For Kierkegaard the dreaming of the dreaming spirit has as “soul” to be qualified as anxiety, which is the ambiguous “mood” that indicates the possibility of spirit, without already presuming that this possibility will be realized as an inherent telos. Since Spirit is not a ‘given’—at least not in The Concept of Anxiety—but only is present as a possibility for existence, anxiety is not necessarily a premonition of an “emanating divine image” of the self. For the religious thinker Kierkegaard anxiety is to be countered by a leap of faith to open up for the future possibility of an existent human individual meeting with the divine Logos. Kierkegaard has difficulty, thus, to describe the process of Bildung, or the ‘edifying formation’ of the person, as Goethe and Hegel did it, namely, through an emanation of “images” dialectically following each other. For the Protestant Christian thinker Kierkegaard, human existence (and humanity in general) has a long record of failing to understand its own potential of being truly a self, a potential which manifest itself in the dreaming spirit of anxiety. Instead, humans continuously misconstrue themselves as epistemic subjects of divine subjectivity. The meeting of Logos as a “real other” cannot take place in the form of humans trying to understand how Logos conceives itself. Instead Logos must redeem humans from their continuous misconstruction of themselves (as those who encounter divine subjectivity in their thinking) by entering as the other at the “existential-practical” level.55 We will not pursue here Kierkegaard’s alternative ideas about how existential communication is possible. What is important to note for present purposes is that due to his focus on human existence and its temporal modi, and in consequence of assigning to the dreaming spirit the status of an ambiguous, not teleological determined, possibility, Kierkegaard creates a systematic space for the interaction of self with an other that

|| 55 Taking the religious perspective, Kierkegaard advocates existential time not only as a precondition for historical time, but also as an condition for an existence’s free future realization of a relation to (divine) Being. The notion of existential time and its relation to a conception of Being played a central role in existential philosophy and hermeneutics, as well as in intercultural philosophy. For example, the notion of existential time has even been used to challenge the importance assigned to historically oriented hermeneutics in Western philosophy. Henry Corbin suggested, for instance, that the different strata of the imaginative worlds in esoteric Islamic thought can be reinterpreted as existential time, and Raimon Panikkar postulates three different forms of time consciousness (non-historical, historical and trans-historical time consciousness) in what he calls the cosmotheandric experience.

58 | Jesper Garsdal existentially continues to remain other than self in the course of this interaction and is not dialectically ‘appropriated’ by the self. The self’s becoming sleeping spirit as an existential possibility for the awakening of an other – the Boddhisatva logic presented by Hajime Tanabe The Japanese philosopher Hajime Tanabe, one of the most central figures in the philosophy of the so-called Kyoto school and a specialist in Hegel’s philosophy, provides us with the conceptual tools for developing yet another dynamic template of the relationship between self and other. The philosophers of the Kyoto school in general attempted to reinterpret central ideas in Mahayana Buddhism in ways that could make these ideas a living part of a world philosophy. For our purposes here it is enough briefly to review Tanabe’s philosophical reinterprettion of sunyata (“emptiness,” “emptying,” or as the philosophers of the Kyoto school put it, “absolute nothingness”) and samsara (the illusionary realm of desires). We shall focus on Tanabe’s criticism of Hegel’s philosophy from a philosophical perspective inspired by Mahayana Buddhist and on the notion of intersubjectivity he introduced in his later philosophy, inspired by the Shin Buddhist notion of the Bodhisattva. Let us start by looking at how Tanabe’s notion of actuality and particularity differs from Hegel’s. Actuality is a central idea in Hegel’s philosophy as it denotes the relation between the universal, the particular and the individual56 with the particular being the synthesis. Tanabe followed Hegel in considering actuality as a central category, but for Tanabe actuality is not the synthesis of the individual and the universal through the particular, which Tanabe considered as much more problematic. This is so both in Tanabe’s early philosophy, the so called “Logic of the Species”, which among other things also was an attempt to articulate a philosophical critique of “closed nationalism” in Japan in the 1930’es, and in his later “Philosophy as Metanoetics” (written in 1944 after he realized of his own failures in relation to, and participation in, this very same nationalism). For Tanabe, one could interpret the particular as a society—as a so-called “social species”—in so far as the latter “mediates” between the universal and the individual. But for Tanabe it is far from certain that this happens. For Hegel, a

|| 56 Findlay’s English translation has Der Allgemeine Begriff, Der Besondere Begriff, Das Einzelne in Hegel’s original German translated to the “Universal Notion”, “The Particular Notion” and “The Individual”. I have decided to keep the English translation here, and hope that the sematic differences in Hegel’s and Tanabe’s interpretation will be clear from what follows.

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given society contains its own internal contradictions, which might be painful and even deadly for the individuals to go through, but, as Hegel informs us in the Philosophy of History, the “cunning of reason” always secures the realization of the universal Idea in immediate actuality while the participating individuals may well remain unawares of this process and their part in it. By contrast, Tanabe claims that social species could be seen as much more resistant to “the cunning of reason” than Hegel thinks. On this view the individuals remain strangers without identity or self in relation to the universal, which in consequence only can be seen as “nothingness.” While Hegel relies on a “positive” dialectical conception of reason of ‘both-and’ with suitable mediation, the Buddhist inspired alternative is a negative dialectic of neither-nor and the “emptying” of both the misconstrued self and the society, closing off any relation between existence and absolute nothingness. This notion of the self as a failed construction is just as prevalent in Tanabe’s Shin Buddhist inspired notion of No-Self as it is in Kierkegaard’s Christian inspired notion of sin. Like Kierkegaard, Tanabe attends to the existential time of the individual self and, like Heidegger, considers chronological time as a forgetfulness of existential time. This is a key to understanding Tanabe’s view of the relation between the universal, the individual and the particular in Philosophy as Metanoetics. Tanabe’s follows the lead from Kierkegaard regarding the distinction between the order of reason and the order of time, and emphasizes that time is not to be understood as chronological time but existential time. He constructs an account of the modi of existential time that mirrors Hegel’s notion of actuality. When we try to create personal identity from the past, we discover our lack of “self-power”—that we are tied to an established particular social context, a social species that does not mediate between the universal and the individual. Thus, in Tanabe’s Shin Buddhist inspired philosophy, we cannot enlighten ourselves but have to be saved by a savior, the Amida Buddha, in the present, which thereby becomes the universal present. This means that both the past and the future are ‘taken out of our hands’ and we become “empty beings.” This realization is part of the process of enlightenment—or better in Tanabe’s later Shin Buddhist inspired philosophy—the process of salvation. For Tanabe the notion of “empty being,” despite the emptiness of existence, contains the danger of being too focused on the singular self. The relation between the temporal future and the singular or individual self is therefore itself a continued negation of the self. What brings the empty being of the present into the future is the Amida Buddha (which of course is not a ‘being in itself’), who uses the empty self as sign or “skillful means,” upaya, which can help others to realize the process of salvation. There is a ‘forerunner’ who experienced salvation due to the intervention of the Amida Buddha; the forerunner inspires fol-

60 | Jesper Garsdal lowers who break through their karmic past, thus becoming forerunners themselves due to a new intervention by the Amida Buddha. Tanabe maintains that the forerunner-follower relationship is more fundamental than the dialectical condition of the temporal modi of past, present, and future of the empty being and conceives existential time as the collapse of this “inter-subjective sequential dependency” into one single existence. He also stresses that existential time is an important mediating aspect of the Boddhisatva dialectics he develops.

The dialogical other There are several aspects of Tanabe’s project that provide important leads for our project of developing a notion of dialogue. It points the way for a conception of subjective existential deciphering from within one grammar to the next that is not just ‘orchestrated’ by the dialectical ‘mechanism’ of the home grammar’s attempt to realize itself in form of a conceptualization of otherness, following the model of self-realization of the “Absolute Idea." For Tanabe, the existential deciphering is not only the existent self's opening towards the anxious dreaming ambiguity of an unknown future, but it also is an opening up for another existence's possibility for enlightenment without necessarily realizing the enlightenment of the other as one’s own path. It should be obvious that in this sense we have an opening up towards a realization of the other without unavoidably subsuming the other under the dialectics of identity.57 || 57 Furthermore, Tanabe’s re-formation of Hegel’s ideas also contains important challenges to the relationship between externalization, objectified product, and property. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel claims that when the subject realizes itself and in the course of this process objectifies itself in externalized products, it creates at once a connection to that product as the property that it deserves. This idea is taken up both in liberal and Marxist economics, but does not square with the giveaway structure of the Boddhisatva logic Tanabe presents us for. Hegel’s notion of what is right is related to the demands that arise from the soul’s self-conscious discovery of itself as a universal principle (spirit). This universal principle has to realize and justify itself by freely discovering itself in its other. This is done by producing “a thing” and seeing “this thing” as the result of its own work and it therefore rightfully owns. This is where Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights starts and thereafter in ever expanding circles through contracts and “liberal society” culminates in the State. There is some disagreement regarding whether Hegel considers private property as an “eternal conserved” part of objective spirit, or whether he only saw it as a starting point for other developments of organization—as Marx will later argue should be the case. But there is—according to the perspective on the structure of subjectivity suggested in this article— a fundamental structural problem in any conception of the realization of spirit that takes objectified results of the spirit’s attempt to realize itself as the spirit’s own “property.”

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However, there are some aspects of Tanabe’s philosophy that do not quite fit the notion of dialogue we are after here. First, as long as one assumes that there is an individual subject, an existence that expresses itself in thought, one cannot adopt doctrine of the personal no-self in Tanabe. Second, according to the onto-dialogical perspective I am trying to work out here, the internal thought process of the individual self does not exhaust all the activities it is involved in—it is also involved in dialogue in interaction with otherness, which cannot be reduced to the self’s own thoughts. Dialogue is a mutual affair and, unlike Tanabe, we need to attend to the nature of mutual interactions. 58 Third, in dialogue both parties have something to contribute with. In that sense, we are not one but at least two ‘selves-of-value’ in dialogue as such. This means, on the other hand, that our focus on a misconstruction of subjectivity in dialogue not so much would be on the partners as such, but rather on the political and economic context of the dialogue and the metaphors of justification for property and desert such contexts introduce. We should therefore distinguish between dialogue as such and the political and economic contexts surrounding dialogue. I will here only indicate one way of conceiving the notion of dialogue, but it should be obvious that if dialogue contains something of central value for both the individual human and for human interaction, then this also might have huge implications for how we not only conceive but also evaluate the political and economic surroundings of dialogue.

The archetypical phenomenon of dialogue: individual thought and the sleeping into the other as entrance into the social world of Bildung When we meet otherness in dialogue, one way of conceiving the meeting with the other in dialogue is that we are in dialogue with the other because we do not know the other. But how are we to understand this lack of knowledge or, better, this unknowing? According to Hegel this unknowing is neither the failing to know given sensory phenomena nor the state of ignorance before the Platonic recollection of ideas; it is the will-full not knowing of subjectivity. Such conceptions of “will-full” not-knowing are familiar from interpretations of the Christian notion of sin or the Buddhist notion of avidya—in both cases the willfulness of the state is connected with failed subjectivity, which latter is therefore in need || 58 I am focusing here on some fundamental characteristics of dialogue, leaving aside special cases of dialogue as textual hermeneutics.

62 | Jesper Garsdal of salvation or enlightenment. And we have indicated that both Kierkegaard and Tanabe can be seen as exemplifying such interpretations. Hegel, however, differs from such interpretations of the will. In his view the will-full not-knowing spirit is not failed subjectivity; it is a way for Spirit to get insight in relation to otherness by finding itself in otherness. The ontodialogical perspective I want to present here agrees with Hegel that when we meet a deciphering process that is other than the deciphering processes we ‘know,’ then we have to start with what could be called the normativity of willfull ignorance in form of ‘active listening’ to the ‘inner word’ of the otherness of that grammar. This can be a painful process. But the pain involved in our relation to the other is not, as in Hegel, the pain that the “Notion” relives as it tries to regain itself through otherness. Rather the pain of “sleeping into” the grammar of the other is painful since the self loses the consciousness of its own self in the other—the self returns to itself as it otherwise will be in danger of losing itself in the other! In other words, there is a process of retraction and expansion in relation to the other that is not due to an overreaching structure of identity between self and other, but is due to analogical expansion on the basis of interest and the fear for oneself. The same thing goes for the other involved in the interaction, and the central archetypical phenomenon of dialogue can therefore be seen as the continued mutual dynamics of expansion into the other and retraction into self. Unlike Tanabe the onto-dialogical perspective holds that there is a self and that this self is actually self-centered in Hegelian fashion since it learns from interacting with the other. However, even though Hegel might be describing central features of thought, the onto-dialogical perspective insists that he is not describing all the central features of dialogue—he overlooks that the other continues to be the other despite our retraction of back in ourselves. Our position raises the question why one should be interested in “sleeping into the other” if one cannot not engage in the other in order to get to know the other as one's own self. Posing this question would seem to imply that we primarily act will-fully if it furthers our self-interest. The first part of the answer is simple: man is not only self-centered but also oriented towards and interested in the other.59 We saw how Tanabe actually claimed that the existential entrance

|| 59 An example is that we often will much for our loved ones even though we might not gain anything for ourselves. The only point I want to make here is that we are well familiar with ‘acts of love,’ i.e., situations that we would prima facie characterize as ‘doing something for the other’ without gaining anything merely out of love for the other.

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into the future not is concerned with establishing a dialectical self-knowledge, as the self becomes empty self. The entrance into the future rather aims at opening up for ‘the enlightenment of the other’ by making oneself ‘useful’ for the other’s process of enlightenment. Even though we disagree with Tanabe regarding the first point then we do agree with him on the second point, albeit in a different sense of serving for the other’s enlightenment. The self’s will-full sleeping into the other offers to the deciphering other subject an opportunity of expressing or externalizing his or her own subjectivity into the self's “sleeping subjectivity” in the dynamics of listening and retracting in the archetypical phenomenon of dialogue. Thus dialogue is fundamentally a social process, since more subjects are involved in a way that cannot be reduced to a distributive plural of parallel activities. Dialogue thus should be distinguished from the process of objectification in a speculative logic of identity. In the latter the subject will have a tendency to attempt to retrieve all objectified results of the externalizations process as its own ‘products.’ Rather, within a dialogue there is mutual in-forming of one subjectivity on the other, an informing of thought images into the other’s ‘underlying sleeping’ subjectivity, where the latter is not informed as ‘passive matter’ but as ‘active matter’ fertilizing and revitalizing them during the subject’s awakening. The question is, of course, what happens to the content which is informed in the sleeping subject by the other, and what will happen to that content when the awakening subject takes it up into its own cognition? The difficulties in understanding the depth structure of dialogical encounters as mutual or social Bildung are closely related to problems with recognizing what existence ‘gains’ in relating to both, itself and the other, through a movement of retraction and expansion, which is met with a similar movement by the other. If existence as self is self, how then could it gain ‘more than itself’ through willfull dialogical exchange?

Dialogue across ontologies with different content Recall that from a Hegelian perspective Spirit not only finds itself in otherness, it can even include “the grammar” of otherness in itself even though it is the grammar posited by the other. This inclusivism of Hegel’s is possible since Spirit realizes itself as divine Logos—Spirit can ‘contain’ the other because the other is posited by Spirit itself. This apparent contradiction–that Spirit can contain content which it has not posited itself, and discovers a new form of itself containing ‘the former self’ and ‘the former other who posited the content’ – is for Hegel not a problematic contradiction but an example of speculative dialectics. We

64 | Jesper Garsdal will suggest another approach, where we distinguish between the existential and ontological levels for each of the two participants in the dialogue. We have already indicated above that there might be many ways of conceiving the onto-dialogical perspective according to how specific grammar(s) is/are deciphered by the different ways existences can relate to themselves either confessional or in a syncretistic deciphering across different ontological ciphers. We now have sketched a notion of an existence involved in dialogue, and more specifically of the “awakening process” in which existence retracts to itself from the sleeping into the other, meaning that it is retracting into its own ontological assumptions and interpretations (in terms of which the identity or lack of identity of the self can be established). Existence defends here, so to speak, the play with the other, against the ontological presumptions it operates within its own thinking. How can we describe what happens in ‘awakening’ more precisely? For Hegel, the Christian theologian, the divine Logos actually creates new knowledge, but it unfortunately annihilates the other as other in the process; in the Hegelian theology God’s knowledge of God self is repeated in new and ever expanding circles. In contrast we will instead suggest that the Wisdom of any given grammar should be seen as the ‘marriage’ between the onto-Logos of the grammar as it is manifested in existence and onto-Sophia.60 Through the awakening process where existence realizes the content of the other it both recognizes the “thought images” of the other as coming from the other, while it at the same time lets itself become in-spired by these images by molding them according to the subjectivity of the self and content of the self’s own thought images. As the other in the interchange also switches between sleeping into the other and awakening to self, we can talk about a process of dialogical and “social Bildung."61 || 60 By speaking of ‘marriage’ here I would like to set a pointer to an interpretation of the relationship between onto-Logos and onto-Sophia that has its source domain in interpersonal encounters that also engender a meeting of ontological and existential planes, namely, love. In The Meaning of Love the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloyyov suggests that love is the discovery of Sophia shining through the other person. It would be worthwhile—yet beyond the space limitations of this paper—to investigate how the metaphorical space that enters cultural and religious constructions of gender can or should be mapped into a person’s understanding of the onto-dialogical perspective (Solovyov 1985). Relevant starting points for such an investigation might be, for example, the link between Sophia and the ‘eternal feminine’ in the mystical tradition from Boehme to Goethe, or feminine conceptions of the creating deity, as in Shaktism. 61 Wackernagel ends his article on Eckhart by writing the following “Just as - to return to our initial theme of friendship - a certain degree of non-possessiveness and spiritual detachment (we are here not speaking of negligence) in friendship and love can contribute to the improve-

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The process of dialogical and social Bildung is of course by its very nature not limited to only one religion or only to religion. For example, one might engage in such a process it to explore the tension between “the absolute” and “the infinite” in Islam as we find it elaborated in the thought of Ibn Arabi, or between the “higher truth” and “conventional truth” developed by Nagarjuna in Mahayana Buddhism. There might be other and equally promising conceptual candidates to investigate on each of the Islands denoted by the ciphers of, for example, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and obviously the same goes for conceptual candidates from other “islands” with other ciphers, such as ‘freedom,’ ‘ratio,’ or ‘Geist.’ The central point is for both nonreligious or a-religious world-views how they are existentially and grammatically relate to the possibility of the self’s transcending itself in the meeting with an other’s existential deciphering of ciphers other than those involved in the self’s own interpretations. At the existential level these possibilities are difficult to determine on principled grounds but will need to be explored in concrete action.

Dialogue as depth structure in different social spheres At the end of this exposition of the onto-dialogical perspective, let me now try to draw out a larger trajectory and ask how the “archetypical phenomenon of dialogue” and “social Bildung” can be understood in relation to concrete social contexts and everyday social phenomena.62 Many forms of social interaction operate under communicational constraints imposed by media and institutions—how can our present-day pressures of efficient communication be reconciled with a hermeneutic stance that requires the unhurried exchange and molding of images and logics? The answer to this question is surely that no such quick reconciliation is possible. Rather, in social contexts that include intercultural contact our social

|| ment of these - and most other relationships, so too can disimagination which underpin the diversity of images, help ensure the necessary degree of spiritual serenity and inner freedom that will guarantee the establishment of what can be called, from a transcultural point of view symbiossophy.” (Wackernagel 1993: 60) 62 Yet another question one might raise at this point is how one might tie the hermeneutic procedures that the onto-dialogical perspective relies on, to scientific research on mind and meaning. For example, could we, with the conceptual tools of the philosophical reflection of current cognitive science, make any sense of the faint presence of significances that the metaphor of ’sleeping into’ points to? On this question see chapter 5 below.

66 | Jesper Garsdal forms of interaction and communication should be adapted to the requirements of dialogue. For these contexts at least, if not more ubiquitously, we need to create forms of social exchange that will allow for a communicative space where individuals can express themselves as ‘spiritual existences,’ i.e., at the deep level of their existential understanding, and can let such expressions in others occur. Such new form of social exchange may require that we rethink the sociopolitical sphere, i.e., the relationship between individual and society, and the relation among individuals within society. As much as one might endorse dialectics as a productive way to approach the theory of subjectivity, we do not need to adopt—as I hinted at above—Hegel’s conception of society, were isolated subjects are taken to realize themselves through the ownership of that which is the result of their own objectification. We can escape the ownership model as the defining characteristic of the subject’s social existence if we distinguish the process of externalization and resultant “objectification” and do not conceive externalization as immediately occupied with the realization of self through objectification. Metaphorically speaking, one could perhaps say that the externalization and internalization should be seen in life-giving processes for the self. In that case one might perhaps instead talk of the exhaling and inhaling of the breath of the self: the self does not become itself by realizing the ‘air’ it exhales as its own, but rather by letting the exhaled air function as a gift which can be in-formed by other(s). Each of the selves involved in the mutual process of dialogue is, so to speak, in each moment will-full active in the sleeping into the other in the exhaling/externalization of itself as a gift and cognitive active in the waking up to itself in the inhalation/internalization of the air informed by otherness. A political economy built on the conception of subjectivity that is presupposed by intercultural dialogue will need to replace the model of ownership at many levels, and especially for global commons, such as nature, the climate, and markets. The political philosophy that could provide orientation for the development of such a political economy surely cannot be the work of an individual but must arise by dialogue and its archetypical phenomenon in the process of social Bildung.

References Corbin, H. (1998). Alone with the Alone : Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Garsdal, J. (2007). Chuang Tzu as an inspiration for reflections on the relation between existential cultivation and inter-subjectivity. International Journal for Field-Being, 6, 1-16.

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Garsdal, J (2011-1). Neither Mouse nor Rat or Both Mouse and Rat? Some Problems Regarding Translation and Interpretation of Religious and Philosophical Texts across Ontological and Cultural Contexts. ReCIT, Revista Del Area De Traduetologia (ex Centro De Investigacion En Traduccion), 2, 35-49. Garsdal, J. (2011-2). Perspectives on Intercultural Philosophical Phenomenology. In Paulsen, M., Koefoed, O., Ydesen, C. & Kroman, J. (Eds.), Learning from the Other - Intercultural Metalogues (pp. 78–92). Malmö: NSU Press. Garsdal, J. (2012). Some reflections on existence and imagination in relation to interreligious dialogue and intercultural philosophy of religion. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23, 257-266. Hegel, G.W.F. (1969). Science of Logic (Miller, A., Trans.). Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller, A. & Findlay, J., Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Houlgate, S. (2010). Hegel's Aesthetics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/hegel-aesthetics/. Accessed 17 June 2013. Kierkegaard, S. (1983). Fear and trembling; Repetition (Hong, H.V. & Hong, E.H., Trans.). Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The Concept of Anxiety : A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Thomte R. & Anderson, A.,Trans.). Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Kierkegaard, S (1985). Philosophical Fragments (Hong, H.V. & Hong, E.H., Trans.). Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Panikkar, R. & Eastham, S. (1993). The Cosmotheandric Experience : Emerging Religious Consciousness. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Pfau, T (2005). From Mediation to Medium: Aesthetic and Anthropological Dimensions of the Image (Bild) and the Crisis of Bildung in German Modernism. Modernist Cultures, 1, 141180. Sharma, A. (2004). Sleep as a State of Consciousness in Advaita Vedānta. New York: The State University of New York Press. Solovyov, V. (1985). The Meaning of Love (Marshall,I., Trans.). London: Centenary Press. Tanabe, H (1986). Philosophy as Metanoetics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thornhill, C. (2011). Karl Jaspers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/jaspers/. Accessed 17 June 2013. Wackernagel, W. (1993). Establishing the Being of Images: Master Eckhart and the Concept of Disimagination. Diogenes, 41, 77-98.

Karyn Lai

CHAPTER FOUR Dialogue and epistemological humility In an increasingly globalized world, policy making involves stakeholders with different interests and value-commitments. There are not only striking differences in values and goals of corporations, industry bodies, government and individuals, but such differences, conflicts, and incommensurabilities are compounded by a diversity in cultural backgrounds. In this light, the search for agreement in global policy making seems defeated from the start. However, it appears that throughout history thinkers both East and West investigated models of decision-making that could be employed in a situation or radical disagreement, i.e., where stakeholders do not share any commitments as to the values, goals, or even procedural standards, on which the decision could be based. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to an early Chinese exploration of the role of dialogue in decision-making under radical disagreement. The Zhuangzi, a text63 from the Warring States period (457-221 BCE) in China, makes insightful comments about the driving force of vested interests in the debates of his day. Each of the early thinkers was keen to push his own view. While the thinkers then were not concerned with issues in our current global policy discussions, Zhuangzi’s suggestions remain relevant. In describing the state of play in the debate between the Confucians and the Mohists (two groups of thinkers who proposed different solutions to the unrest then), Zhuangzi could have been describing the nature of disagreement in our contemporary world: … we have the ‘That’s it, that’s not’ of Confucians and Mohists, by which what is it for one of them for the other is not, what is not for one of them for the other is (Zhuangzi, ch. 2; transl. Graham 2001: 52).

The disagreement between the Confucians and the Mohists was deep-seated: what one affirmed the other denied and vice versa. The aim of dialogue for these early Chinese thinkers was misdirected: dialogue for them was reduced to debate, in which the aim was to win. If this is the case, how might we engender || 63 The discussion draws from the text, Zhuangzi, named after is alleged author, Zhuangzi (399? – 295? BCE). However, of its thirty three chapters, only the first seven—the “Inner Chapters” (Neipian)—can be more or less properly associated with the ideas of Zhuangzi. The other chapters were written from between the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE, most probably by other thinkers. Refer to two notable discussions of the text, by Graham 2003 and Liu 1995. The discussion here focuses primarily on the arguments in the Inner Chapters.

70 | Karyn Lai dialogue? Zhuangzi promotes epistemological awareness by drawing attention to the irreducibly specific and subjective nature of individual perspectives. This awareness involves the acknowledgment that all views have limitations. In this way, the lesson we take from Zhuangzi is not in the typical form of a solution to decision problems through dialogue. I suggest that Zhuangzi’s ideas promote epistemological humility. That is, they prompt a change in the attitude of people so that those entering into an exchange of views understand the nature of their own biases.64 This is not a guarantee of success (indeed, we wonder if any plausible proposal would make such a claim). It is a proposal for entering into exchanges with a mind that is not already closed.

Zhuangzi on intolerance During the Warring States period in China, when sections of the Zhuangzi and many other texts were written, there were so many competing doctrines that the baijia zhi xue) was coined to charphrase ‘hundred doctrinal groups’ ( acterize the situation: The empire is in utter confusion, sagehood and excellence are not clarified, we do not have the one Way and Power … There is an analogy in the ears, eyes, nose and mouth; all have something they illuminate but they cannot exchange their functions, just as the various specialties of the Hundred Schools [baijia] all have their strong points and at times turn out useful. However, they are not inclusive, not comprehensive; these are men each of whom has his own little corner. (Zhuangzi ch. 2; transl. Graham 2001: 275) 65

.

Here, we sense the author’s dismay at the confusion in the debates. The proposed solutions were grounded in incompatible ideals of government, society and human good. Yet, in spite of differences in their ideals, many believed that the solution laid in the establishment of a common standard—that is, the one they each proposed. Indeed, the quest for one Way (dao)—a single solution to

|| 64 I use the terms ‘bias’ and ‘partial,’ in relation to perspectives, with caution as I do not wish to suggest that Zhuangzi’s response to these views is to propose their opposites: unbiased, or impartial perspectives. 65 This passage is found in the Zhuangzi text, although the chapter is not one that we can attribute without doubt to Zhuangzi. Graham, who analyses the composition of the Zhuangzi, believes that chapter 33 was written by a group of thinkers called the “Syncretists”. The early Syncretists were keen to promote the Way of Heaven—that is, its cosmic patterns—as a model for administrative hierarchy. In Zhuangzi 33, Zhuangzi’s philosophy is criticized for its lack of attention to practical affairs. (Graham 2003: 94-101).

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the unrest embraced by all—is expressly stated in the passage. In their debates, standards were applied to a wide range of human activities including craftsmanship, decorum, social practices and the meanings of terms in language. Above all, for many of the thinkers, the implementation of standards was crucial to stability; it also served as the rationale for their particular conceptions of government.66 The assertion of each doctrine was accompanied by intolerance of difference and plurality as indicated in the tone of the passage itself. Zhuangzi devised a number of images and metaphors to cast doubt on the thinkers’ assumptions that their individual views were objectively true, that is, independent of (dis)agreement or personal opinion. Instead of engaging with these thinkers about whose doctrine was superior—and hence adding another doctrine to the list—he questioned their underlying assumptions by challenging their epistemological naiveté. What is meant by intolerance as it is used here? While the Zhuangzi does not have a term or phrase that may be translated as ‘intolerance,’ Zhuangzi’s discussion of the attitudes of those asserting the correctness of the views is what I wish to capture by the term: In interactions, there is plotting and scheming, and daily there is the striving of heartmind [xin] with heart-mind. There are hesitancies, concealments, and reservations. Small apprehensions cause restless distress; great apprehensions produce endless fears. Where their utterances are like arrows from a bow, we have those who feel it their charge to pronounce what is right [shi] and what is wrong [fei]. Where they are given out like the conditions of a covenant, we have those who maintain their views, determined to overcome.67

According to Zhuangzi, the pronouncements of “shi” ( Aye! True!) and “fei” ( Nay!) were accompanied by determination, or obsession, to prove that one’s view was the correct one (Wong 2005). These attitudes were inextricably bound up with each person’s belief in what was right and what wrong. They incorporated attitudes of approval and disapproval of particular situations and states of affairs (Hansen 2003b). Each doctrine affirmed a particular set of beliefs as correct—shi—and denied—fei—what was not compatible with those that were correct. The Confucians shi(-ed) their own view and fei(-ed) that of the Mohists and vice versa. || 66 Two concepts at the centre of these discussions were fa (standard) and ming (names). Refer to Makeham 1994, Graham 1989 and Schwartz 1985. 67 “... ...” (Zhuangzi “Qiwulun,” ( ) Guo Qingfan, 1961: vol. 1: 51. Author’s translation; adapted from the translation by Legge 1891: 178-9).

72 | Karyn Lai Zhuangzi was sceptical of the assumptions about language and its capacity to reflect reality as upheld by some thinkers (Lai 2008: 63-9). There was in particular a group of thinkers dubbed the “later Mohists” who sought to quell disagreement by setting fixed correspondences between (specific terms in) language and (aspects of) the world (Lai 2008: 111-41). Zhuangzi was concerned that matters concerning the rectification of society were reduced to projects to standardize name-referent correspondence. He believed that attitudes about the superiority of one’s own beliefs, not mismatches of language with the world, were the primary cause of division. The method the thinkers were using to resolve their disagreements, by each asserting the correctness of his own view (the “this-not this” approach) is not only arbitrary, it simplistically dichotomizes issues: It is by a ‘That’s it’ [shi] which deems that a boundary is marked. Let me say something about the marking of boundaries. You can locate as there and enclose by a line, sort out and assess, divide up and discriminate between alternatives, compete over and fight over ... To ‘divide’ [fen], then, is to leave something undivided: to ‘discriminate between alternatives’ [bian] is to leave something which is neither alternative ... Hence I say: ‘To “discriminate between alternatives” is to fail to see something.’ (Zhuangzi, ch. 2; transl. Graham 2001: 57)

Zhuangzi’s criticisms stem in part from his concern about their objective to reduce diversity to homogeny.68 Once a winning view had been decided upon, it was put forward as if it were a pronouncement and considered binding on everyone. There was no room for difference.

Situating the doctrines and responding to them How does the Zhuangzi understand the doctrines, each with their specific set of affirmations and denials, of approvals and disapprovals? To answer this ques), which is tion, we turn to Chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi text, the Qiwulun ( the chapter most concerned with epistemological issues. In the first instance, || 68 In this passage, Zhuangzi discusses the attempts to make clear distinctions using methods such as fen and bian. While fen more closely resembles classification, bian involves refining distinctions. The later Mohists also made other sets of distinctions according to what could be affirmed or not (ke-buke), what was similar or different (tong-yi), so or not-so (ran-buran) (Lai 2008: 111-141). The Mohist conception of knowledge centres on how a person applies these distinctions in practice. For the Mohists, knowledge is not about the accumulation of information but its practical applications. To know something is to be able to distinguish it—(bian) to pick it out—from others. Hansen discusses the skill of pattern recognition and making distinctions in Mohist philosophy (1992: 104ff).

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the title of the chapter itself—Discourse on the equalisation of all things—is revealing. What is equalized, and how is it equalized? A passage in the Qiwulun seems to indicate equal regard for—that is, no preference for any one of—the shi-fei views: Therefore while a shi picks out a stalk from a pillar, a hag from beautiful Xi Shi, things peculiar or incongruous, (from the perspective of) dao (a person) sees through them and deems them one ... Only the accomplished person knows how to see through them and deem them one; that which deems according to shi he does not use but lodges them in the ordinary [the day-to-day]. To understand the ordinary [nature of the views] is to understand their use. To understand their use is to see through them. To see through them is to grasp them. (Zhuangzi, ch. 2).69

From the perspective of dao the shi-fei views are deemed one (yi ). What does it mean to deem all things one? There are two fundamental ways to understand this statement. The first is a metaphysical thesis, that the ‘one-ness’ is the unity between the oppositional views. One such account is offered by Thomas Radice, for example, who argues that Zhuangzi offers a way of life built upon a realisation of the fundamental unity of opposites (Radice 2001: 33).70 This view is problematic as Zhuangzi in this same chapter also expresses scepticism about the possibility of an impartial perspective or one that is a view from nowhere (Zhuangzi, ch. 2; Graham 2001: 60; Lai 2006). The second thesis treats ‘one-ness’ as an epistemological assertion whereby the doctrines are seen as epistemologically equal: no one particular assertion of shi-fei is better than the others. Here, I draw on the title of the chapter, “Discourse on the equalisation of all things,” to suggest that the term ‘yi’ means ‘equal’ or ‘same’. On this account, Zhuangzi’s evaluation of the doctrines of the Confucians and the Mohists is that they are each limited by what they individu-

|| 69 “

... .” (Zhuangzi “Qiwulun,” ( ) Guo Qingfan, 1961: vol. 1: 69-71. Author’s translation, adapted from Graham 2001: 53-4). I have interpreted (tong) in ‘ ’ as ‘[to] see through’ to capture the sense of access and attainment embodied in the term. The Shuo Wen Jie Zi, a classical dictionary compiled by Xu Shen (100-121), expresses in terms of “ ”, to arrive at [a particular understanding] ( , , 1133). This explication of incorporates the phrase in this passage, namely, that the accomplished person ( ) sees through things and deems them one. The allusion to see-ing foreshadows the notion of illumination discussed later in the paper. 70 I describe this as a metaphysical account because it incorporates metaphysical commitments; Radice articulates the notion dao in terms of a ‘natural order’. In his analysis, the shifei distinctions “threaten the survival of the individual and the natural order of dao.” (Radice 2001: 39).

74 | Karyn Lai ally can grasp. At one point in the chapter, Zhuangzi cleverly represents the limiting nature of individual perspectives using the terms ‘this’ ( zi) and ‘that’ ( bi): ‘this’ refers to my own perspective while ‘that’ to another’s perspective. From another person’s point of view, however, ‘this’ and ‘that’ are reversed: what I call ‘this’ is what he would call ‘that’ and vice-versa: There is nothing that is not the “that” and there is nothing that is not the “this”. Things do not know that they are the “that” of other things; they only know what they themselves know (Zhuangzi, ch. 2, trans. Chan 1963: 182).

Zhuangzi used indexical terms—terms whose meanings change relative to a context or vantage point—to illuminate the insularity of individual points of view. Zhuangzi’s scepticism, unlike that of Descartes’, is not concerned about the potentially illusory nature of sense perceptions. For Zhuangzi, it is not that individual perspectives might be erroneous (Soles and Soles 1998) but that they are partial while at the same time purporting to stand in for the correct view.71 If we follow this line of argument, the perspectives of all—humans, other animals, Peng, the cicada and the dove—are each limited. To say they are equal is not to say they are all limited in the same way but that there is no single point of view that is unobscured by a person’s particular way of seeing things. Each view has specific limitations. Hence no proponent can claim that his doctrine is epistemologically superior. From a person’s point of view (whether ‘this’ or ‘that), what one knows (which is limited) is taken to constitute knowledge.72 In the passage on how the accomplished person deals with the shi-fei views, the person who deems the views equal does not use (yong ) them. He situates (yu ) them in the commonplace (yong ). In other words, he understands that the shi-fei views operate at the level of ordinary discourse, where the common practice is simply for each person to assert and defend his or her own view.73 || 71 For discussions on scepticism in the literature, see Raphals 1996, Chinn 1997, Trowbridge 2006 and the collection of essays in the anthology edited by Kjellberg and Ivanhoe (1996). 72 This prompts us to ask whether Zhuangzi thinks there is a way of justifying these doctrines. In a passage discussing the adjudication of disputes, Zhuangzi asks: “Whom shall I call in to judge [the shifei disputes]? If I get someone of your party to decide it, being already of your party how can he decide it? If I get someone of my party to decide it, being already of my party how can he decide it? If I get someone of a party different from either of us to decide it, being already of a party different from either of us how can he decide it? If I get someone of the same party as both of us to decide it, being already of the same party as both of us how can he decide it? (Zhuangzi 2, trans. Graham 2001: 60; annotated by author). 73 In Zhuangzi 27, the idea of lodging oneself in a particular perspective is referred to as an argument strategy. (Graham believes this is a chapter whose ideas are reasonably close to ), lodging-place speech, is one of those in Zhuangzi’s Qiwulun chapter (2001: 25)). Yuyan (

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However, the accomplished person sees through them. Here, it is important to mention A.C. Graham’s interpretation of the term tong ( ) as ‘interchange’ in his translation of the passage (2001: 53-4): the accomplished person sees the views as interchangeable. This is not to say that any one of them may replace another. Interchangeability relates to the way in which the accomplished person is able to lodge in any one of these perspectives. From each of the perspectives, he appreciates how things seem one particular way (weishi ). This is another way of saying that the shi-fei views are indexical. Zhuangzi tells a story of a monkey-keeper who is able to shift between shi-fei perspectives: A monkey keeper handing out nuts said, ‘Three every morning and four every evening.’ The monkeys were all in a rage. ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘four every morning and three every evening.’ The monkeys were all delighted. Without anything being missed out either in name or in substance, their pleasure and anger were put to use; his too was the ‘That’s it’ [shi] which goes by circumstance. This is why the sage smooths things out with his ‘That’s it, that’s not’ [shi, fei], and stays at the point of rest of the potter’s wheel of Heaven. It is this that is called ‘Letting both alternatives proceed’ (Zhuangzi ch. 2; trans. Graham 2001: 54; annotated by author).

The monkeys are unable to shift between the two options; the Daoist scholar Harold Roth notes that “[e]ach developed his own unique viewpoint on the world and came to prefer It and only It and thereby left no room to adopt any Other.” (Roth 2003: 22). When the sage ‘smooths things out with his shi or fei,’ he does not use them in the way the monkeys do (cf. yong ). He does not rely on the specific perspectival frame as his only point of reference but understands their situatedness—‘the shi which goes by circumstance’—from his point of rest.74 The allusion to perspectives—to have only one, as in the case of the monkeys, and to be able to see from different perspectives, as in the case of the || three methods of argumentation. Of the three, lodging-place speech is most prominent, used ninety percent of the time (indeed, the chapter is named after this strategy). Yuyan speech is useful, for example, where “persons [are] brought in from outside for the purpose of exposition. A father does not act as go-between for his own son because the praises of the father would not be as effective as the praises of an outsider.” (Zhuangzi “Yuyan” trans. Watson 1968: 303). Lee Yearley proposes that the enlightened person lodges (yu) temporarily at the shi-fei views in order to understand them and, in this way, sees yu as an argumentative device rather than a physical location (Yearley 2005). 74 There are important differences between weishi ( ) and yinshi ( ). The first involves deeming (wei) things in a way that is guided by a shi-fei view. Hence, in the passage on the accomplished person who sees through the shi-fei views, we are told that the sage does not use weishi ( ). However, yinshi is important to the sage’s treatment of the shifei views, where he understands them on a circumstantial basis. Roth covers the distinction between weishi and yinshi meticulously (2003: esp. 22-28).

76 | Karyn Lai monkey-keeper or the sage—is important as perception is an important aspect of Zhuangzi’s epistemology. As noted previously, perception in Zhuangzi does not concern the veridicality of the senses in gaining access to truth or reality. It is to understand the insularity of perspectives and therefore to understanding one’s epistemological shortcomings from any one of these perspectives. The first chapter of the Zhuangzi, “Free and easy wandering,” opens with a story about a giant bird whose ‘girth measures who knows how many thousand miles’): A cicada and a turtle-dove laughed at it, saying, ‘We keep flying till we’re bursting, stop when we get to an elm or sandalwood, and sometimes are dragged back to the ground before we’re there. What’s all this about being ninety thousand miles up when he travels south? (trans. Graham: 2001: 43-4).

The little creatures have some grasp of their own physical limitations but they are unaware of how these are limiting. From any one of the lodged, shi-fei perspectives, it is difficult to see how any other shi-fei perspective might be plausible. Zhuangzi is concerned not with what a proponent of a shi-fei doctrine sees but how one sees the shi-fei doctrines. How does the accomplished person regard the shi-fei doctrines? Does she judge them? Would, or could, Zhuangzi say that one shi-fei doctrine is more plausible or appropriate than another? In another passage in the Qiwulun, the place of an accomplished person is characterised in terms of an axis or a pivot (shu ): Where neither It nor Other finds its opposite is called the axis of the Way. When once the axis is found at the centre of the circle there is no limit to responding [ying ] with either, on the one hand no limit to what is it [shi], on the other no limit to what is not [fei]. Therefore I say: ‘The best means is Illumination [ming].’ (Zhuangzi, Chapter 2, trans. Graham 2001: 53; author’s annotations).

From the point of view of the pivot, each of the lodged views has its own terms of reference and therefore the point is not to set them in opposition to each other, as the sparring disputers are keen to do. The Daoist scholar Wu Kuang-ming draws parallels between Zhuangzi’s pivot and the idea of an axis mundi.75 On || 75 Wu (1990): 142, 161. Following this line of thought, Alan Fox suggests that “the axis establishes a reference point which provides orientation” (Fox 1996: 65). Fox’s analysis of the axis differs from the account here. He focuses on avoidance of dichotomy: “Zhuangzi seems to suggest that it is unnecessary and in fact somewhat dysfunctional to systematically, categorically, and unreflectively prefer one pole of a dichotomy to another” (ibid). By contrast, the discussion here does not give precedence to the dichotomous aspect of shi-fei, although it does not preclude it. According to the argument in this paper, the Zhuangzi’s project involves not

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this account, the position on the pivot is an orientation. From this position, the illuminated person may switch between the many different doctrines, indeed, to an unlimited number of positions. The modus operandi of the person at the axis is to respond (ying ) to the shi-fei views rather than to assess the shi-fei assertions made from each perspective. One important feature of the pivot position is the agility of the person in responding to the different shi-fei views, suggested by the circle (huan ). From the axis, all points are equidistant. Interestingly, the notion of circularity also features in the passage on the monkey-keeper, who rests on the wheel of Heaven ). The enlightened view is not about the evaluation of the rightness of ( each of these views but a method of understanding all of them—it is an epistemological thesis.76 There is an important metaphor in this passage, that of illumination (ming ). The response of the person on the axis is characterized by an illuminated perspective (yiming ). The term ming ( ) is comprised by two characters, for sun (ri: ) and moon (yue ), hence signifying light. Drawing on the metaphor of light,77 I suggest that illumination does not generate objects in and of

|| only abstinence from having either-or preferences, but also understanding their epistemological inadequacies. Fox also argues that the position of the pivot is associated with “seeing the ‘big picture’, in which all contradictions are located and resolved” (ibid). To reiterate, I argue here that to ‘deem the views as one’ is not to unify them but to grasp the epistemological limitations of all shi-fei views. 76 In the Zhuangzi, there is also the metaphor of a mirror, used in relation to the Sage’s insight: “The utmost man uses the heart like a mirror; he does not escort things as they go or welcome them as they come, he responds and does not store.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 7, trans. Graham 2001: 98. Graham argues that the mirror metaphor captures the sense in Daoist thought about the activity of mirroring, which is not ‘surrender to passions’ but rather ‘impersonal calm which mirrors the situation with utmost clarity.’ (2001: 14; 16). The detachment of Zhuangzi’s sage is consistent with the mood of the entire text and may also explain why Zhuangzi’s discussions can sometimes appear to have a playful character. The most thorough articulation of the playful character of Zhuangzi’s philosophy is by Kuang-ming Wu (1982). 77 Some scholars interpret ming in metaphysical terms to suggest attainment of truth or an unobstructed grasp of reality. This understanding of ming corresponds to the view discussed above, of yi as the one enlightened doctrine (eg. Radice 2001). There are, however, significant concerns about whether the early Chinese philosophers, and Zhuang in particular, were concerned about a notion of truth or reality as articulated in metaphysics in Western philosophy (Hansen 1985; Hansen 1992: 285-92; Soles and Soles 1998). Important discussions about ming include the accounts by Lo 1999, Møllgaard 2003, Wenzel 2003 and Yearley 2005. Lo (1999) presents an unconventional interpretation of yiming, suggesting that the advice of the Zhuangzi text is to stop using ming: on his account, ming is the method used by the disputing thinkers and hence Zhuangzi’s point is to stop them.

78 | Karyn Lai itself but only brings clarity to what one sees. The person at the pivot responds to the shi-fei doctrines but does not produce more of these to compete with the existing ones. According to this account, Zhuangzi’s epistemological project is not to determine truth. Hence, he does not advocate relativism because his theory is not concerned with truth or truth-making conditions.78 Zhuangzi does make a judgment: it is not possible to determine a set of truth conditions for the proposals to quell the unrest because each view is a situated view. His aim is to challenge epistemological complacency. The method appropriate to this task is responsiveness, not the evaluation of views for correctness. Roth suggests that a person at the pivot position is epistemologically aware in a way that a person who only engages at the shi-fei level does not. In Roth’s account, to “find lodging-places in daily living” is not to negate shi-fei positions. Rather it involves the “relativizing or perspectivizing” of each of them (2003: 29). Roth’s description of the pivot position captures a sense of agility in how the illuminated person responds to the shi-fei views: Dualistic cognition [shi-fei knowledge] and propositional knowledge may be useful in certain specific circumstances, but when the circumstances change, as they inevitably do, one must abandon them and allow oneself to respond to the new situation without their determining influence. This yields an awareness that is able to focus completely on what is taking place in the present moment. (2003: 29).

On Roth’s interpretation, great understanding is an enviable capacity to possess. The illuminated person not only has greater epistemological insight, she also has the mental agility to respond to new situations more spontaneously. The issue of spontaneity is a major aspect of Zhuangzi’s philosophy, and of Daoist philosophy more generally. While it is not within the scope of this discussion to explore it in greater detail, it is important to note that the concept encapsulates the Daoist view of life that is less encumbered with conventional norms and expectations.79

|| 78 Interesting discussions of relativism in Zhuangzi’s philosophy include articles in the two anthologies edited by Kjellberg and Ivanhoe (1996) and Cook (2003). 79 For extended discussions of spontaneity in Daoist philosophy, refer to Fox 1996, Slingerland 2003 and Jullien 2004.

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Zhuangzi’s insights for dialogues on global policy In this final section, I suggest two related ways in which these epistemological reflections may inform contemporary global policy discussions. The first is in its treatment of plurality and the second in addressing the attitudes of those engaging in dialogue. The Zhuangzi text acknowledges the plurality of views and embraces it. At an initial glance, Zhuangzi’s endorsement of plurality, in treating the shi-fei views equally, may seem unsustainable. If Zhuangzi’s points are understood as a proposal for relativism, its contribution to policy discussions would be minimal. What I have suggested in this chapter runs contrary to a relativist thesis. I propose that the Zhuangzi prompts readers to appreciate the different frames of reference of the views brought into dialogue. On this approach, instead of abandoning the justification process, the emphasis is on understanding each view in terms of how it is situated. In practical terms, this means that different points of view are seen in light of their assumptions and presuppositions. In fact, contrary to the epistemological tenets underlying relativism, this approach demands rigour. It highlights awareness of the presuppositions that shape any one view. One important implication of this epistemological insight is that it does not accept that any one view is objectively correct or true. Here, we need to keep in mind that Zhuangzi’s epistemology relates to proposed solutions to the unrest in ancient China rather than matters of fact such as, say, measurements of length or distance. Are contemporary global policy dialogues in any way like the debates of Zhuangzi’s day? One might be inclined to think that, as contemporary dialogues often include consideration of the data provided by research in the various sciences, that they at least incorporate more objective dimensions. The way current debates on major global policy issues play out, however, run contrary to this expectation. To link up with contributions in part V below, let illustrate this with a quick review of the relevant literature on climate policy. Here it appears that climate change scepticism has been a prominent feature in such discussions in many countries (Dessler and Parson 2010; Pearse 2007; Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole, and Whitmarsh 2007; Jacques, Dunlap and Freeman 2008; Boykoff and Boykoff 2007; Antilla 2005). Furthermore, while some of the current debates on climate change are underpinned by political motivations, there are also important academic and intellectual concerns about the how the environmental future is conceived and the parameters for assessing it. The point here is not to give credence to those who deny the results of legitimate research

80 | Karyn Lai but to note that the atmosphere of discussions—where personal motivations hold sway—is not unlike those in Zhuangzi’s day. Zhuangzi’s advice to ‘deem the views as one’ warns against the simplistic approach taken by the debating thinkers to pit the views one against another. To deem the views as equal is to be mindful that each is cramped by particular presuppositions. The point of dialogue is to understand the limitations of each so that advocates of particular views re-assess their claims. Perhaps, if we could converse with the cicada and the turtle-dove, we might point out how their circumstances limit their grasp of the giant bird’s capacities and needs. This approach may already be commonplace in dialogues. However, the important question for Zhuangzi is that of onus: typically, in debates, it is the opponent who points out weaknesses in one’s views. In Zhuangzi’s proposal, however, the onus falls on each person himself or herself to understand their own frames of reference. This is especially important in environmental debates, for example, as it also places the onus on all concerned to question anthropocentricism and other conventional biases that shape and limit points of view. Epistemological self-awareness is at the crux of Zhuangzi’s positioning on the pivot. This approach to discussion allows for a variety of views to be aired and does not necessarily see plurality as a threat. The attitudes of those entering into discussion are, for Zhuangzi, a key feature of the pointless debates; this second insight is also relevant to contemporary environmental discussions. Zhuangzi addresses both the epistemological naiveté of the thinkers and their intolerant attitudes. The scenario of the Confucians and Mohists engaged in pointless debates, the simile of the giant bird and small creatures (and many others in the text that suggest the significance of perspective to understanding), the use of lodging-place strategy in argumentation and the metaphors of the pivot and illumination, are central to the argument here. These stories and scenarios prompt readers of the text further to consider the perspective of the other. While some of them place the reader in a third-party observer’s position (as for instance in observing the cicada and turtle-dove and the monkeys), the passage on this (‘self,’ zi) and that (‘other,’ bi) involves the reader directly. It reminds the self (this) that it is the other’s ‘that’ and vice versa. This challenge to respond (ying) to the other by standing in another person’s shoes is an important ethical implication of epistemological awareness. While it does not necessarily follow that all readers of Zhuangzi’s philosophy will be humbled through the exercise of assessing their own beliefs as one among others, the challenge is an interesting one as it approaches the issue of intolerance from an epistemological point of view. Interestingly, in this way, Zhuangzi’s discussions turn the tables on those who are intolerant of others’

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beliefs. He places the onus on the intolerant person to examine her epistemological assumptions. This also means that the challenge from Zhuangzi does not confront a person’s beliefs in the way the shi-fei debates do, by thrusting competing sets of beliefs against what a person believes. In line with that, the aim of this essay is not to suggest a solution to contemporary global policy discussions for it would be naïve to expect that a text from the 4th century BCE might have answers to the complex issues of our modern world. Hence, the insights of the text lie in its emphasis on epistemological awareness and the process of dialogue rather than its promotion of particular goals. The approach offered here encourages individuals to take on different perspectives. By doing so, it addresses the attitudes with which people enter into dialogue. It is one that anticipates plurality rather than conformity and that is open to a viewpoint that is different from one’s own. Such an attitude is especially important in environmental dialogues, although it is by no means restricted to discussions in this field alone.

References Antilla, L. (2005). Climate of scepticism: US newspaper coverage of the science of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 15, 338-352. Boykoff, M. T. & Boykoff, J. M. (2007). Climate change and journalistic norms: A case-study of US mass-media coverage, Geoforum, 38, 1190-1204. Chan, Wing-tsit (1963). A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ewing Y. Chinn (1997). Zhuangzi and Relativistic Scepticism. Asian Philosophy, 7, 207-220. Chong, Kim-Chong (2006). Zhuangzi and the Nature of Metaphor. Philosophy East & West, 56, 370-391. Cook, S., ed. (2003). Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dessler, A. & Parson, E. (2010). The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fox, A. (1996). Reflex and Reflexivity: Wuwei in the Zhuangzi. Asian Philosophy, 6, 59-72. Graham, A. (2003). How much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang Tzu Write? In Roth, H. (Ed.), A Companion to Angus C. Grahams Chuang Tzu, Monograph no. 20, Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (pp. 58-103). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Graham, A. (Trans.) (2001). Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Graham, A. (1989). Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle: Open Court. Guo, Qingfan [ (1844-1896)] (1961) Zhuangzi ji shi , ed. Wang Xiaoyu ( ), Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju: Xin hua shu dian ( : : ).

82 | Karyn Lai Hansen, C. (1985). Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and Truth. The Journal of Asian Studies, 44, 491-519. Hansen, C. (1992). A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Hansen, C. (2003). Shifei: This and not, right and wrong. In Cua, A. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (pp. 703-706). London: Routledge. Jacques, P., Dunlap, R. & Freeman, M. (2008). The organisation of denial: conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism. Environmental Politics, 17, 349-385. Jullien, F. (2004). A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking ( J. Lloyd, Trans.). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kjellberg, P. & Ivanhoe, P. (1996) (Eds.) Essays on Skepticism, Relativism and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lai, K. (2006). Philosophy and Philosophical Reasoning in the Zhuangzi: Dealing with Plurality. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 33, 365-374. Lai, K. (2008). An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Legge, J. (Trans.) (1891). The Texts of Taoism, Part l (of 2): The Tâo Teh King (Tâo Te Ching) of Lâo Dze (Lao Tsu) and The Writings of Kwang-dze (Chuang-tse) (Books I-XVII). The Sacred Books of the East series (Müller, F., Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Xiaogan (1995). Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Lo, Yuet-Keung (1999). To Use or Not to Use: The Idea of Ming in the Zhuangzi. Monumenta Serica, 47, 149-168. Lorenzoni, I., Nicholson-Cole, S. & Whitmarsh, L. (2007). Barriers perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications. Global Environmental Change, 17, 445-459. Makeham, J. (1994). Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pearse, G. (2007). High & dry: John Howard, climate change and the selling of Australias future. Vic: Penguin Group. Radice, T. (2001). Clarity and Survival in the Zhuangzi. Asian Philosophy, 11, 33-40. Raphals, L. (1996). Skeptical Strategies in Zhuangzi and Theaetetus in Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on Skepticism, Relativism and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture, NY: State University of New York Press: 26-49. Roth, H. (2003). Bimodal Mystical Experience in the Qiwu lun Chapter of Zhuangzi. In S. Cook (Ed.) Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi (pp. 15-32). Albany: State University of New York Press. (Reprinted from: Journal of Chinese Religions, (2000), 28, 31-50). Schwartz, B. (1985). Legalism: The Behavioral Science. The World of Thought in Ancient China (pp. 321-349). Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Slingerland, E. (2003). Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slingerland, E. (2004). Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi: Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Comparative Thought. Philosophy East & West, 54, 322-342. Soles, D. and Soles, D. (1998). Fish Traps and Rabbit Snares: Zhuangzi on Judgment, Truth and Knowledge. Asian Philosophy, 8, 149-126. Trowbridge, J. (2006). Skepticism as a Way of Living: Sextus Empiricus and Zhuangzi. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 33, 249–265.

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Wong, D. (2005). Zhuangzi and the Obsession with Being Right. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 22, 91-107. Wu, Kuang-ming (1982). Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. Wu, Kuang-ming (1990). The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu. Albany: State University of New York Press. Yearley, Lee H. (2005). Daoist Presentation and Persuasion: Wandering among Zhuangzis Kinds of Language. Journal of Religious Ethics, 33, 503–535.

Johanna Seibt

CHAPTER FIVE Intercultural dialogue and the processing of significance: cognition as orientation This chapter explores connections between the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue and theories of cognition. Theories of cognition investigate how living organisms of suitable complexity generate cognitive significances, which for the human case include meanings, valuations, beliefs, and motivations. A theory of cognition has many different types of data, ranging from neurophysiological measurements to third-person observation to the phenomenology of cognition, i.e., to experienced and introspectively re-identifiable differences in cognitive processing and type of cognitive contents. The thesis I will try to make plausible in this chapter is that the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue can provide important leads for theory choice in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, at least if one admits the form of argument called ‘inference to the best explanation.’ I will thus ask here the book’s topical question ‘how is intercultural dialogue possible?’ in the sense of ‘which theory of cognition can best explain the phenomenal aspects of understanding as we experience them in intercultural dialogue?’ Theories based on the so-called “computational paradigm” of cognition where understanding is conceived of as algorithmic processing of predefined symbols seem ill-suited to explain the phenomenology of dialogue. In contrast, approaches to cognition along the lines of the competing new paradigm of “embodied cognition” can accommodate all relevant phenomenal aspects. The chapter’s primary aim, then, is to argue for the significance of intercultural dialogue as a datum for a theory of cognition. However, in the process of doing so it will also become apparent that, vice versa, cognitive science research can also contribute to a better understanding of intercultural dialogue in theory and praxis. Insights about the cognitive processing involved in dialogue might allow us to identify non-attitudinal factors—e.g., sensory relevant aspects of the spatial environment as well as temporal aspects—that are positively linked to facilitating the relevant communicative attitudes of dialogue participants. I proceed from the simple observation that intercultural dialogue would not be undertaken if it did not engender at least some degree of subjective understanding, that is, understanding in the weak sense as one speaker’s impression of being ‘able to follow’ the utterances of another speaker. Moreover, it seems that participants of intercultural dialogues, i.e., speakers who belong to radical-

86 | Johanna Seibt ly different cultural and linguistic communities, not only subjectively feel that they can make some sense of the utterances of their interlocutors, they also have the impression of reaching some sort of mutual understanding. The impression of such mutual understanding could amount to the literal sharing of some cognitive content across linguistic and cultural barriers—in cognitive science research the current consensus on linguistic and cultural relativity appears to be that while language plays an important role in shaping human thought, there is no evidence for ‘hermetic relativism,’ i.e., the thesis that the linguistic and cultural norms of a community strictly delimit what members of that community can think.80 However, we do not even have to assume that the mutuality of understanding in intercultural dialogue is grounded in literally shared cognitive content. As I argue below, even if the mutuality of understanding engendered by intercultural dialogue were a subjective illusion on all sides and warranted only at the practical level, by nothing else but the occurrence of certain interaction patterns, this would suffice to claim that intercultural understanding is a distinctive cognitive activity that a theory of cognitive significance should account for. Based on this empirical premise that we experience mutual understanding in intercultural dialogue, the chapter’s overall argument proceeds in three steps. In a first step I delineate the type of situation that is targeted by the notions ‘dialogue’ and ‘intercultural dialogue’ in their reflected use, and reconstruct the main elements of the phenomenology of (intercultural) dialogue. In a second step I consider the epistemic status of the kind of understanding generated by intercultural dialogue. As it turns out, ‘intercultural’ understanding involves a type of knowledge that is neither theoretical ‘knowing-that’ nor practical ‘knowing-how.’ Guided by the phenomenological elements of (intercultural) dialogue, I suggest that the understanding generated in this type of communicative situation is best classified as orientation. Orientation—e.g., in its most familiar form as spatial orientation—is neither propositional knowledge nor inference nor the formation of an intention for action but a mental operation sui generis. In the third step of the argument I set out with a brief reconstruction of an early proposal for ‘embodied cognition, the so-called “theory of cognitive orientation” developed by psychologists H. and S. Kreitler (1976); hereafter abbreviated as ‘TCO’. Even though TCO is prima facie outdated, it is still relevant for the conceptualization of cognition and I will use it here as a generic representative of the embodied cognition approach with useful ‘umbrella’ terminology. TCO || 80 Cf. e.g. Gumperz & Levinson 1996, Casasanto 2004, 2010.

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uses the familiar process of orientation, i.e., the ‘online’ interaction of an organism with its environment, as model for the process of cognition in general, a postulated theoretical entity called “cognitive orientation.” According to TCO, cognitive orientation is a fast and defaulted interactivity between organism and environment; the routines that emerge from this interactivity have quasiobjectual permanence and can be classified as meaning and values. But cognitive orientation also occurs in two slow modes, especially in heuristic cognition. I argue that the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue is best explained in terms of a slow mode of heuristic social cognition. Altogether, then, I suggest, that dialogue, but especially intercultural dialogue, is an opportunity to experience the process of cognition in ‘slowmotion’—cognition is always social meaning-making, the contextual working up of meanings, rather than the processing of ready-made symbolic representations. In everyday conversations, where meanings are communicational tools to achieve certain goals, the generation of contextualized meanings happens too fast to enter our awareness. In intercultural dialogue, however, our routinized valuations are challenged; we are forced to re-experience the dynamic origins of valuations in the searching activity of orientation and to recalibrate our field of significances. In conclusion I briefly consider two implications of this suggestion. I argue that the link between, on the one hand, the natural interactivity of cognition and the experienced process of creating significances during dialogue opens up the route towards a processual conception of values. Second, I suggest that cognitive science research on the cognitive processing of narratives, e.g. on neuronal simulations of movements during the cognitive processing of action words, may hold important clues for an assessment of the role of the scholarly narratives produced by intercultural value research in academic contexts.

Elements of a phenomenology of (intercultural) dialogue The expressions ‘intercultural dialogue’ and ‘intercultural understanding’ are used for a rather wide range of activities and phenomena, especially in political contexts. Many of these communicative activities and phenomena are rather remote from those situations that correspond to what one might call the ‘reflected sense’ of dialogue. In this latter sense ‘dialogue’ denotes a distinctive type of interpersonal communicative engagement that attracted the attention of thinkers such as Mikhael Bakhtin, Martin Buber, David Bohm, or Carl Rogers. I shall largely avoid, however, any theoretical idiom and try to characterize the relevant communicational engagement in common sense terms. I begin with a con-

88 | Johanna Seibt ceptual analysis of the term ‘dialogue’ in its reflected sense, in order to be able to hone in on a sufficiently specific kind of communicative situation; in a second step I will characterize some of the main phenomenological aspects of situations of this type. In common usage the term ‘dialogue’ refers to direct personal conversation between two or more people, and further, more narrowly, to a distinct type of communication that contrasts with discussion, argument, interrogation, brain storming, planning, co-ordination or instruction. Communication studies have their own criteria to distinguish dialogue from other sorts of communication and differentiate between various types of dialogues.81 Staying with a commonsensical description of phenomenal features, however, dialogue stands out as a form of conversational engagement without extraneous purpose or product— there is no opponent to be defeated, no action plan to be worked out, no information to be extracted, etc. To be sure, a certain episode of arguing might de facto fail to vindicate a claim, or an episode of joint planning might de facto fail to result in a plan; but arguing or joint planning are communicative actions that are undertaken for the sake of certain products. In contrast, an episode of dialogue has its communicative goal in communication itself. Dialogue, it is often said, is undertaken in order to listen. But even here, the listening is not aimed at receiving instructions, at the assessment of competences, or at the detection of lies. A dialogue does not aim to accomplish certain results or to produce something—it is undertaken merely for the sake of creating a joined horizon of understanding, in order to enable continued meaningful communication. This observation is reminiscent of Aristotle’s distinction (in Metaphysics Theta. 6) between, on the one hand, ‘accomplishments’ or productions (kineseis)—i.e., telic actions that are performed in order to achieve a purpose or goal beyond the occurrence of the action—and, on the other hand, ‘activities’ (energeiai)—i.e., actions that are undertaken for the sake of their own occurrence. But again, staying with the phenomenology of dialogue, I think it is important to point at the difference between, on the one hand, self-directed actions that are undertaken strictly for the sake their own occurrence, and, on the other hand, self-facilitating activities.82 An episode of dialogue is a self-facilitating activity,

|| 81 Cf. Anderson et al. 2004. 82 When I intentionally raise my arm just in order to intentionally raise my arm, I perform a strictly self-directed action, an action that is undertaken for the sake of their own occurrence, but one might question whether such actions ever have a natural pragmatic context. Even though Aristotle discusses in Metaphysics Theta.6 human actions, one should note that the target of his distinction are more generally forms of dynamics or types of processes.

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not a self-directed activity—no dialogue is undertaken just for the sake of dialogue, but for the sake of improving the conditions for future communication.83 If we say that the purpose of an action is the aim of the action that lies in an ‘extraneous’ product, i.e., an independent product that differs from of the type of action performed, then it would appear that dialogue is a mode of communication that has an aim but no purpose. For this reason, because dialogue does not try to achieve anything beyond the facilitation of communication, it is often a form of communication used in order to transform a conflict. In fact, by ‘dialogue’ we often refer to a specific communicative situation where the speakers involved have prima facie incompatible agentive commitments but no longer aim to defeat each other by argument or rhetoric. It would be misleading, however, to characterize dialogue simply as the tool or process of communicative conflict transformation.84 Different types of conflict call for different types of conflict resolution or mitigation—commonly sorted into problem-solving, negotiation, arbitration, mediation, and facilitation—and in some of these forms of conflict intervention dialogue plays no essential role or even no role at all. 85 For example, in conflicts of interests that are resolved by arbitration, i.e., by a third party with authority recognized by both conflicting parties, dialogue among conflicting parties is not called for. Similarly, conflicts of interest that are addressed by problem solving or negotiation may not relevantly involve dialogue among the conflicting parties—here discussion and rational argument may suffice. On the other hand, the primary goal of third party mediators or facilitators is to assist the conflicting parties to implement a process of conflict transformation, and for this purpose it may be useful to create the communicative stance of dialogue on different occasions throughout the process, at the beginning or at the neuralgic point of the process where “shifts of consciousness” are in sight.86 However, there is one type of conflict that is inseparably tied to dialogue in the sense that dialogue appears to be the only instrument we have in order to transform such conflicts—namely, conflicts generated by incompatible com-

|| 83 This holds in particular for the dialogues that David Bohm realized in ”dialogue groups” who nominally meet ’for the sake of engaging in dialogue’ without topic and agenda, but, as becomes clear from Bohm’s exposition of the concept, do have a purpose, namely, to observe the workings of consciousness and the interactive constitution of meaning; cf. Bohm 1996: 6ff. 84 In Skandinavian countries the term ‘dialogue’ is frequently used in a semi-technical sense to refer to the settlement of labor conflicts. Similarly, Bohm (ibid.) observes that in international politics the term has rhetorical use and predominantly denotes negotiation. 85 Cf. Cheldelin et al. 2003 and below chapter 7. 86 Cf. Allan Nan 2011.

90 | Johanna Seibt mitments resulting from diverse cultural values. Conflicts resulting from differences in cultural values—which are here taken in the broadest sense and including ethnic and religious values—cannot be negotiated. As Rodogno (chapter 6 below) explains, value diversity with genuine potential for conflicts requires that both parties hold the relevant values in the special form of “attachments,” which are constitutive for an agent’s self-understanding (‘identity’). Furthermore, conflicts that result from valuative commitments cannot be resolved by arbitration; in cultural differences, in particular for religious differences, there is no likely cultural authority acknowledged by all parties. If such conflicts cannot be settled by power (as opposed to resolved, see Druckmann 2002 and chapter 7 below), the remaining option is to ‘facilitate’ a resolution by dialogue. If dialogue is used as a form of conflict intervention in cultural conflicts, the conflicting parties will need to engage in intercultural dialogue, a form of communication that has the aims of dialogue in general—the aim of enabling and improving ongoing communication by creating a joint horizon of understanding across cultural boundaries. However, intercultural dialogue is a form of communication that can be, and frequently is, undertaken outside of the context of an ongoing conflict, and not even with a view of reducing the likelihood of a future conflict. The attempt of transcending one’s own cultural horizon of understanding is a special hermeneutic undertaking that can be pursued in its own right.87 To summarize our considerations so far, dialogue is a communicative activity that has no extraneous purpose but is self-facilitating, i.e., undertaken only with the aim of generating present and future understanding; unlike mediation or arbitration dialogue is not a phase of conflict mitigation, even though this is frequently a context where this type of communicative activity is recommended. Let us continue then and investigate more closely the way in which participants of a dialogue experience this sort of communicative activity. There are, I submit, three interconnected aspects that stand out in the phenomenology of (intra- and inter-cultural) dialogue.

|| 87 Global intellectual history shows that this hermeneutic enterprise often has been pursued independently of conflict contexts; cf. for instance the cases cited in Shayegan (Chapter 1 above) or the European fascination with China in the 17th and 18th century, carried by Western scientists and scholars (cf. e.g. Jacobsen 2013 and the reference in note 1 of the introduction to the Part II).

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First, the fact that dialogue is a communicative activity that is not instrumentalized is commonly experienced as a form of acknowledgement.88 Since a dialogue is not geared towards a product, whether intrinsic to the conversation (e.g., disputation of topic) or extrinsic (e.g., plan), the participants of a dialogue do not perceive themselves as tools but as ends in themselves. Each participant is engaged for the sake of realizing his or her understanding or ‘meaning making’—that very capacity that we experience as our own form of being.89 In intercultural dialogue this first phenomenal aspect, acknowledgement, is particularly strong, since the participants are acutely aware of the fact that the communicative activity they are engaged in cannot serve any intrinsic or extrinsic instrumental purpose, given the linguistic-semantic and conceptual obstacles they perceive. On might even say, for the situation of intercultural dialogue, the less dialogue partners can linguistically interact, the more they are present to each other as non-instrumentalized human beings, and the special effort at continued communication affirms such presence. In other words, assuming that ‘meaning making’—our capacity of ‘taking something as something’—is the distinctive form of human being, precisely because communication is hampered in intercultural dialogue, the sustained effort of participants at understanding and at affording understanding constitutes an affirmation of what it is to be human, in oneself and in the other. The second ingredient in the phenomenal experience of dialogue participants is the awareness of a cognitive search. While in instrumentalized communicative interactions speaker and hearer process cognitive contents subconsciously and attend to the external goal of the interaction, in dialogue participants become aware of the cognitive processes as such—cognitive contents are no longer used or even experienced as ‘ready-made’ packages of information, they are felt as the yet unavailable products of mutual linguistic understanding. In Martin Buber’s phenomenology of dialogue this aspect of cognitive search is the outstanding characteristic of the cognitive posture of the so-called “I-Thou” relationship, which Buber contrasts with the posture of the “I-It.” While in the “I-It” mode of cognition we effortlessly apply and express established classificatory concepts, cognition in the mode of the “I-Thou” relationship is the experience of grasping as effort, of the taking in of potential con|| 88 This point is stressed by many authors, cf.e.g. Hyde 2004, however without exploring the connection between acknowledgement and the lack of instrumentalization. 89 I take this here as a basic phenomenological datum, setting aside philosophical elaborations of this insight in Bergson, Buber, and Heidegger. The ‘understanding’ at issue here is the effort of making sense, as hermeneutic activity, not the exchange of semantic content between two speakers.

92 | Johanna Seibt tent. In dialogue, Buber observes, the ‘I’ is “arrested” in the experience of ongoing cognitive exploration of the ‘Thou.’90 In other words, the dynamics of meaning-making is ‘arresting’ since it is felt as search or ongoing effort, as the experience of partial failure and the necessity of renewed engagement. Closely connected with the felt effort of meaning making is the third element of the phenomenological experience of dialogue, namely, the awareness of the social nature of meaning making. Participants of dialogue are both positively and negatively aware of this feature, as a dimension that is both present and absent. Interlocutors are aware of sociality as present in the sense that they are awareness of the other as physical present—they take in another human being that is exposed in its inexhaustible particularity.91 But sociality is also experienced as absence in the sense of an absence of social contents—the fact that in the “I-Thou” mode established conceptualizations for the content of the experience are lacking is experienced as a lack of social confirmation. The combined experience of the social dimension as present and absent generates the feel of ‘adventure,’ of precariousness and exposure, but also of open potentiality. The physical presence of the interlocutor is felt as immediate totality—as not mediated and filtered by the classificatory concepts of a linguistic community; vice versa, interlocutors are aware of the fact that they are not protected from the ‘onslaught’ of the totality of the other’s otherness by the common layer of conceptual filters, i.e., that they cannot hide behind conventional meanings and roles. This double immediacy, the immediacy and exposure of self, and the immediacy of the totality of an ‘other’ is felt more strongly to the degree to which social meanings are experienced as absent—that is, it is felt more strongly again in intercultural than in inner-cultural dialogue. Altogether then, we have arrived at the following characterization of dialogue, inner-cultural and inter-cultural. Dialogue is a non-instrumentalized or merely self-facilitating communicative activity that is undertaken only for the aim of realizing present and future understanding. The interlocutors of a dialogue experience this communicative activity as an acknowledgement of what it is to be human—as the capacity of understanding or meaning making. The realization of this capacity is felt as ongoing search, as the process of meaningmaking, which is undertaken in the absence of social confirmations yet in the

|| 90 Cf. Buber 1923:18. My references to Buber are merely pointers to epistemological aspects of his phenomenology of dialogue; for a more comprehensive exposition of Buber’s notion of dialogue see below chapter 18. 91 Cf. “each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being” (Buber 1965:19).

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presence of the formative power of the social. Thus the process of meaningmaking is experienced both as risky exposure and as creative engagement. The status of this characterization of dialogue is that of a thesis or claim about conceptual content and phenomenal experience—as such it is left to the reader’s validation, as this is typical for definitional and phenomenological claims in philosophy. The phenomenological characterization can derive some support from the fact that the various extant description of dialogue (in the ’reflected’ sense of the term) largely concur on these points, mutatis mutandis. For example, with reference to over 100 sources in the literature on dialogue across disciplines, Cissna and Anderson (1998) claim that approaches to dialogue are “generally consistent” with the following description: Thus, a dialogic perspective on communication emphasizes that meaning, often unexpected meaning, emerges from the encounter between self and other; prefers a conception of self as continually emerging in and through the relationship with other rather than one anchored in individualism; and notes that there can be no isolated utterance— that all talk presupposes an ongoing conversation in which one participates for a time (Cissna & Anderson 1998: 65).

There is one aspect of dialogue, however, that Cissna & Anderson highlight as neglected in the discussion, namely, the temporal dimension of dialogue. While most characterizations of dialogue, including the one I offer here, take dialogue to consist in an ongoing activity, Cissna & Anderson submit that “the qualities necessary for genuine dialogue occur only occasionally and for brief moments” (ibid. 68). This interesting suggestion is based upon the observation that in dialogical engagements we experience only for very short periods of time a connectedness that Cissna & Anderson characterize with Kaplan (1969) as “mutuality,” a connectedness that goes “beyond reciprocity” where we “become more fully human” (ibid. 97). While it strikes me as very important to highlight such possible moments of special connectedness, I think it is best to consider them not as a definitional trait but as a potential of dialogue; below I will show how this phenomenon of ‘mutuality beyond reciprocity’ can be explained on the account of cognition that, as I shall argue, best accommodates all phenomenal features of dialogue combined.

The phenomenology of orientating oneself The overall thesis of this paper is that intercultural understanding presents an important datum for any theory of cognition. Intercultural understanding is the ‘frame of mind’ we are in when we engage in intercultural dialogue; it is that

94 | Johanna Seibt which intercultural dialogue aims for (but not, as I stressed in the previous section, as a detachable product of the activity of dialogue that would render dialogue an instrument used for a purpose). Intercultural understanding is the content of what we experience in dialogue and as such carries the latter’s hallmarks as worked out above—it is the awareness of meaning-in-the-making intertwined with the awareness of acknowledgement, adventure, and creative potential. Assuming that understanding is a form of cognition, and assuming that a theory of cognition is to account for all forms of human cognizing, the kind of understanding that we experience during dialogue is something a theory of cognition must come to grips with. If intercultural understanding were a clear instance of either declarative ‘knowledge-that’ or practical ‘knowledge-how,’ it could be straightforwardly accommodated by theories of cognition that operate with the classical model of cognition as computation. In the first case it could be analyzed as any other item of propositional knowledge, as the result of rulebased composition of symbols with pre-defined meanings; in the second case it could simply be rejected from the domain of relevant data. However, the type of understanding that is generated in intercultural dialogue does not seem to fit the traditional dualism of knowing-that versus knowing-how, of propositional knowledge versus practical skill. Intercultural understanding is intrinsically tied to the activity of dialogue and is in this sense an ‘on-line’ capacity akin to practical skills; yet it also has the felt character of being ‘about’ something, akin to the distinctive feel of intentionality that we associate with propositional goings-on such as perceivings, believings, inferrings, intendings etc. (at least on those occasions when we consciously reflect on the difference between acting and thinking). But the sort of understanding we are building up in the course of dialogue is not yet articulated into the form of propositional judgments—it is imbued with the searching character of the dialogical experience, the felt tentativity of the effort of making sense that does not yet allow for settling down into judgment. In short, dialogical understanding seems to present us with a ‘half-way house’ of non-propositional contents that nevertheless amount to ‘knowledge’ of sorts. In order to conceptualize this peculiar frame of mind, we need to remind ourselves that we are, in fact, perfectly familiar with a kind of conscious cognitive processing that is neither a clear-cut instance of propositional knowledge nor a practical skill (knowing-how). Such cognitive processing occurs when we orientate ourselves in space. When we perceptually and physically explore a new environment, we ‘get our bearings onto’ the environment by placing ‘landmarks,’ i.e., points of significance for later orientations. Imagine stepping out of the train in a foreign city— there is a distinctive subjective feel-

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ing of disorientation to which we respond by ‘placing’ the scenery relative to familiar categories of significance, but such ‘placings’ of significances typically are not processed at the level of propositional judgements. We can make ourselves explicitly aware of these ‘placings’ of significances, which takes the form of classificatory statements (‘the exit is over there’). But commonly we do not raise orientational insights to this level of awareness since the information is temporary, perspectival, and context-bound—used for ongoing action. Immanuel Kant may have been the first Western philosopher to observe that cognitive processing during orientation yields, or better: performs, nonpropositional knowledge. He draws attention to the fact that orientation is by no means limited to spatial orientation but appears to be an ubiquitous phenomenon we also experience at the level of abstract thought, e.g., when we search for the solution of complex problems or try to systematize a complex domain (Kant 1786: A 308-310, 316). The insights that orientation provides are not classificatory judgments (“Erkenntnis”) based on criteria but a “felt need of reason” (ibid. 308), a knowledge of ‘how to go on,’ in which direction to proceed, both concretely and abstractly. In the recent epistemological discussion orientational knowledge has been described as “agentive knowledge, not a general knowledge that can be taught, but a knowledge that shows itself in individual praxis, in the course of doing something right in a given situation” (Stegmaier 1992: 11, my transl.).92 Importantly, however, ‘doing something right’ here does not mean performing a skill well, but placing something into the right relationships to oneself. Orientational insight is not only situational in that it is perspectival and temporary, it is also “abbrevatory—it lives in a network of indications [Anhaltspunkte], which we do not (and do not need to) survey in their entirety,” and whose significance only emerges in the course of our continued action (ibid. 12). In short, when we orientate ourselves we subjectively experience a content that does not (yet) have the form of an articulated proposition but presents itself as temporary and tentative awareness of an incomplete network of placed significances for action (‘landmarks’) that is continuously updated in the course of action. It is important to observe that the ‘landmarks’ used in orientation are significances introduced by this very process. Using J. J. Gibson’s notion of ‘affordances’ we can bring out this point more strongly by saying that orientation is the ongoing interaction with the environment that establishes affordances for

|| 92 On the larger significance of orientational knowledge within philosophy cf. Stegmaier 2005 and 2008.

96 | Johanna Seibt further interaction (orientation and other interactions).93 Altogether, then, orientation is a kind of cognitive processing that we experience as the activity of establishing significances that are pre-propositional and action guiding. On the basis of the characterizations suggested here, it is plausible, I trust, to claim that our phenomenal experience of the activity of searching-forunderstanding in intercultural dialogue in relevant ways resembles the phenomenal experience of the cognitive processing involved in spatial and figurative orientation. As such, it may not seem particularly striking or theoretically fertile to draw attention to a phenomenal similarity between the two kinds of cognitive processing, intercultural understanding and orientation. The comparison becomes theoretically productive, however, if we take a further step and ask for the relation between, on the one hand, the kind of cognitive processing involved in orientation, and, on the other hand, cognition in general. For this purpose let us briefly review an account of cognition that operates with ‘orientation’ as its basic theoretical metaphor.

The theory of cognitive orientation From the vantage point of today’s research on cognition, Kant’s observations about the “felt need[s] of reason” or pre-propositional contents guiding us to the point where classificatory judgments can be made, appear uncannily perceptive. They seem to anticipate, at the level of phenomenology, the recently developed view that the cognitive processing begins below the level of classificatory symbolic representations that computationalism and other traditional representationalist dualisms take to be the point of departure for all forms of cognition. This view of cognition, increasingly denoted as the new paradigm of “embodied cognition,” is actually a cluster of approaches labeled “interactivism,” “the Dynamic Hypothesis,” “enactivism,” “extended mind,” “situated agency,” or “distributed cognition.”94 What these positions have in common, despite all differences in detail, is a general outlook on cognition as a complex process in which an organism’s interaction with its physical and social environment generates cognitive contents continuously or ‘online.’ Importantly, on this view of cognition cognitive contents are themselves ‘in-the-making,’ they are processes || 93 Gibson’s (1979) affordances are features of the environment that the organism processes as indications for possible actions where such processing is not to be conceived on the model of either recognition or projection but as a process that is both. 94 Cf. e.g., Bickhard 2004, 2009, Calvo 2008, Clark 1997, 2013; Hendricks-Jansen 1996, Hutchins 2001, 2006; Pfeiffer & Bongaard 2006, VanGelder & Port 1995.

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that begin in attunements and might, but need not, end in the formation of that which we consciously experience as propositional contents (beliefs, intentions etc). Proponents of accounts of embodied cognition struggle with a conceptual problem, however, especially those who champion anti-representationalist theories. In general, scientific theoretical terms—e.g., ‘electrical current,’ ‘harmonic oscillator,’ or ‘self-maintaining system’—are introduced together with a model, a familiar thing or occurrence that exhibits suitable analogies—e.g., a water current or (ideal) spring or a candle, respectively. Accordingly, in order to denote the relational dynamics of cognition as proponents of embodied cognition envisage it, a new theoretical term must be introduced, together with a model, for purposes of explanation and hypothesis formation. Emphasizing their naturalist commitments, many proponents of embodied cognition resort to dynamic systems theory, biology, or acoustics to harness productive metaphors that might lend themselves as explanatory models, speaking of “coupling,” “adaptation,” “attunement,” “resonance,” etc. The difficulty with this strategy is that these ‘source domains’ for the analogical transfer are ontologically too restrictive. While the relationships between scientific theoretical terms (or: theoretical entities) and models are extremely variegated, the focal properties of the new theoretical entities should be illustrated literally by properties of the model.95 Among the focal properties of the process of ‘embodied cognition’ is precisely its ontological status as a ‘mongrel entity’ that combines several ontological domains. According to its very idea, embodied cognition is an interactivity that covers three ontological domains—embodied cognition is a dynamics that connects physical processes and physiological processes and engenders emergent dynamics as ‘product’ the functioning of which fulfil the role of semantic items.96 To highlight this unusually encompassing character of embodied cognition I shall speak of a ‘p+p+s interactivity’ (physical-cumphysiological-cum-semantic). Thus, the dynamics of embodied cognition cannot be modeled by anything that is either just physical, or just physiological, or

|| 95 Cf. Frigg & Hartmann 2006. 96 I am using the term ’semantic’ here in a wide sense of ’having content,’ to denote dynamics with that operate under ‘normative’ (in contrast to ’linear-causal’) constraints. Paul Mehle and Wilfrid Sellars, to whom we owe the original suggestion that content is a way of functioning, already in 1956 noticed categorial difficulties for a naturalist ontology of mind--they introduced the term ’physical1’ to classify interactions that involve both processes of inorganic nature (called ‘physical2’ processes) and the physiological processes of sensory organisms—i.e., to characterize physical processes as they occur under the special constraints that obtain within the context of a sensory organism.

98 | Johanna Seibt just semantic— an explanatory model for embodied cognition should be a wellknown process that in some fashion engages physical, physiological, and semantic elements, i.e., is a p+p+s entity. Interestingly, there is an early precursor of an ‘embodied cognition approach’ that operates with an explanatory model exhibiting the prerequisite ‘p+p+s’ ontology. The “Theory of Cognitive Orientation” (to restate, abbreviated as ‘TCO’) by Hans and Shulamith Kreitler (1976) is nominally a ‘theory of motivation’—it describes cognition as a process that links classificatory assessments with agentively relevant valuations. To denote this process the authors introduce a new theoretical term: ‘cognitive orientation’; the entity denoted by the term ‘cognitive orientation’ today still has the status of a theoretitheoretical postulate, comparable perhaps to the status of the denotation of ‘electron’ in 1990. The explanatory model of cognitive orientation is everyday spatial orientation, a familiar process which is ontologically speaking a p+p+s interactivity involving physical, physiological, and semantic factors. To forestall a narrow reading as human orientation, Kreitler and Kreitler point to Pavlov’s studies on the so-called ‘orientating reflex’ in higher animals. This reflex is a reaction to stimuli that are „novel, surprising, incongruent“ (ibid. 45) and consists in a combination of (i) a “matrix of specific somatic, automatic, electroencephalographic and sensory reactions” (ibid. 60) and (ii) two behavioral aspects: the organism’s directing itself towards the stimulus for increased sensory reception and active exploration of the stimulus in the physiological state of attentiveness (higher muscle tonus, lower perceptual thresholds), in order to determine which further course of action is appropriate: fight, flight, or feed. On the other hand, to counteract connotations of passivity in Pavlov’s talk about a ‘reflex,’ Kreitler and Kreitler also speak of orientation as “meaning action” (ibid. 60) and emphasize that the organism’s role during orientation is active exploration and that orientation is interactivity, not mere reaction, nor interaction understood as a series of separable phases of ‘give and take’.97 With these qualifications of the explanatory model in place, the authors turn to elaborating the postulated dynamics of cognition called ‘cognitive orientation’ (abbreviated here as ‘co’ in order to stress the theoretical status of this term in contrast with everyday phenomenal (spatial and figurative) orientation). As in any analogy, there are similarlities and dissimilarities between co and

|| 97 Cf. ibid. 62: ”The occurrence of an orienting response as the very first reaction in response to each relatively new stimulus demonstrates that there exists no purely mechanical or physical linkage between stimulus and response on that level of behavior on which defensive, adaptive, and conditioned reflexes take place.”

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phenomenal (spatial and figurative) orientation. For example, co is an ongoing interaction between organism and environment in the course of which a network of (preconceptual) significances is established and continuously revised. Most importantly, while phenomenal orientation often draws on ‘ready-made’ cognitive content (sign posts, pictograms), co does not involve any symbolic representations. According to TCO no such items exist. It is in the course of perception that significances arise, and not, as classical representationalism would have it, at a last stage where certain arrays of sensory data are selected and miraculously matched to given representations. “The placement of meaning action at the core of perception implies that there is no one particular stage or fixed point […] at which the selection of what to attend to is established” (bid: 61). In other words, TCO promotes the anti-representationalist claim that the interactivity between organism and environment is all there is to cognition; there is no distinctive phase marking ‘success’, no point when representations sufficiently ‘match’ external conditions. In cognitive orientation significances (or, in human processing: meanings) are formed as emergent quasi-objects of this dynamics, like hurricanes, i.e., entirely situation-bound and temporary.98 TCO’s main thesis, then, can also be summarized as the claim that perception, understood as the interactivity dynamics of co, does not precede meaning but performs meaning. Such a processual account of significance (meaning) needs to explain (i) how significances formed—or rather: performed—and (ii) in which way the transitory nature of processual significances generated in the course of interactivities can be combined with the relatively stability or contextindependence of conceptual content. In order to address these two tasks in the spirit of TCO we need for a moment to set aside the literal descriptions offered by Kreitler and Kreitler and look for a more recent theoretical idiom; as it turns out, the closest affinity is with “situated simulation theory” (Barsalou 1999, 2003). Reading TCO’s postulates about “dimensions of meaning” with situated simulation theory, the relevant ‘assessments’ can be understood as weights in the output vector of a neural net that determines further activation patterns in more encompassing networks. The strengthening of these activation patterns due to repetition creates default network activations that consist of sensory information (in all sensory modalities: touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste), motor action, proprioception of motion, and internal states (in particular, feelings of pleasure and pain, emotions). What humans consciously experience as ’content’, whether proto-conceptual & pre-

|| 98 Thus Kreitler and Kreitler’s “theory of cognitive orientation” can count as the first proposal of a so-called “pure theory of embodied cognition” (Calvo 2008: 17).

100 | Johanna Seibt positional or conceptual & propositional, are re-enactments of these complex activations.99 Conceptual content thus is inextricably “modal” (i.e., includes sensory information as sound, sight, smell etc.), “non-modular” (i.e., inextricably bound up with sensory information and motor action), ”valuative” (i.e., including activation patterns of the limbic system), and ”situational” (i.e., restricted to activation patterns for motor actions that are afforded in the situation; cf. Barsalou 2003). As we now return to the further elaboration of TCO, it is important to keep in mind that the—as such: infelicitous—intentionalist metaphors of TCO can be given more general and neurophysiologically grounded theoretical underpinnings in terms of more recent research. 100 According to TCO the process of co establishes significances in the intersection of many “dimensions of meanings” that belong to three fundamental “perspectives of assessment”: descriptive, valuative, and normative. The significance of an environmental stimulus with respect to these three perspectives the authors call the “orientativeness” of the stimulus in the given situation (ibid. 79). To use the authors’ elucidation, the ‘orientativeness’ of a stimulus in a given situation is its significance relative to the questions “What is it? What does it mean for me? What shall I do?” (ibid.). In short, classical representationalism postulates three modules and two stages of translation: perception translated into conceptual representations translated into proximate volitions; TCO, on the other hand, takes cognition to be the interactivity between organism and environment that generates and—dependent on agentive feedback—re-enacts neural activation patterns, thereby establishing the patterns’ orientativeness or perceptually grounded significance for action. The complex activations that amount to the orientativeness of a stimulus— again, roughly: of what the stimulus is for the organism and what it can do with the stimulus—are not inert, however, with respect to dynamic aggregation. Focusing on human cognition, Kreitler and Kreitler speculate that co-activations of orientativenesses in the course of the dynamics of co increasingly create linkages. In this way, due to simple repetition (Hebbian learning), orientativenesses

|| 99 Cf. Barsalou 2003 for discussions of the empirical validation of the re-enactment or simulation hypothesis, which was conceived at the same time but independently of the discovery of ”mirror neurons” by G. Rizzolatti and colleagues in the mid-1990s. 100 In the context of human cognition the formation of cognitive orientation clusters indeed may involve significances that are propositional contents (“beliefs,” “intentions”) but on the whole the intentionalist idiom (“evaluate”, “assess,” “mean” etc.) does not quite square with the authors’ ambitions for a general account of cognition beyond the human case. Once these metaphors are cashed out in neurophysiological or functionalist terms, the intended generality is achieved.

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are combined; they form propositions and these in turn associate to form “cognitive orientation clusters” (ibid. 113). ’Cognitive orientation clusters’ thus consist of “beliefs” about (a) the world, (b) oneself, (c) norms, and (d) about one’s wishes and desires.101 Ultimately, then, the orientativeness or action-guiding significance of a stimulus that is generated in the course of the dynamics of co is both situated—attuned to the physical situation—and contextualized, i.e., embedded into the context of a contingent clustering of significances that have come about within a concrete human biography. To summarize, as I have reconstructed it here, the theory of cognitive orientation views cognition as the process of the ‘on-line’ formation of significances. Significances are emergent modes of the underlying interactivity between organism and environment; that is, they are intrinsically relational—a significance is an affordance: what an environmental feature is for the organism—and processual.102 The significance of an environmental feature for an organism is the “orientativeness” of the given experiential interaction. In the special case of human cognition, such orientativeness is experienced as ‘content’ or ‘meaning.’ In human cognition an orientativeness amounts to a complex characterization of a stimulus with respect to descriptive, valuative, and normative aspects; here each orientativeness is embedded into a network of orientativenesses, a “cognitive orientation cluster.” In human cognition the orientating information of this cluster is often worked up into the form of an association of “beliefs.” These beliefs articulate the descriptive, valuative, and normative dimensions of the orientativeness of an experiental interaction. Importantly, there is a ‘motive force’ in any belief that is inherited from the pre-propositional orientativenesses that constitute a belief, where these orientativenesses are, to re-emphasize, dynamics and not causally inert ‘abstract objects.’ Kreitler and Kreitler speak here of the “meaning value” of a belief: Cognitive orientativeness […] may be defined as the potential power of the meaning values of beliefs, functioning singly or in interaction, to promote the formation of a specific be-

|| 101 To illustrate the embedding cognitive orientation cluster for a perception: after a departmental meeting I discover a fancy pen on the floor. The action-guiding orientativeness of the perceptual process I am engaged in is influenced by the following complex of beliefs: that this is a pen with certain attractive features, that I am an honest person, that one should return lost items, and that I want to keep the pen.—Note that I shall here set aside a critical discussion of TCO’s account of belief formation. 102 TCO predates complexity theory; from the present point of view it is suggestive to understand emerging significances as complex phenomena, modes of occurrences of an underlying interaction complex akin to hurricanes and convection cells.

102 | Johanna Seibt havioral intent and thus to predispose the individual toward a certain overt […] behavior (ibid. 95).

Once we appreciate the ‘motive force’ in “meaning values,” it becomes clear how TCO explains the translation from cognitive contents (intentions) into actions. Cognitions, on this account, are themselves the processes in the course of which ‘efficient’ motivations arise. This concludes our brief overview over basic ideas of TCO, which Kreitler and Kreitler tested in the context of therapeutic applications. 103 In places one might prefer to replace the intentionalist metaphors of TCO by the more detailed process descriptions of current research in cognitive science; however, in my view, the theory’s main idea to conceive of cognition on the explanatory model of phenomenal orientation still stands as a particularly accessible and fertile conceptualization of embodied cognition. In one respect, however, TCO would need to be extended to fit with current cognitive science research. In its original formulation TCO still retains the assumption of traditional Western philosophy of mind that cognition is the dynamics of a solitary thinker. Other cognizing subjects enter in TCO only indirectly, as elements in one of the four components that make up a ‘cognitive orientation cluster,’ namely, in the component that contains ‘beliefs about the world.’ On the other hand, recent research on social cognition suggests that the presence of other human beings influences the process of co itself. The important point I wish to draw attention to, for the purposes of this paper, is not the familiar one that the presence of others changes our motivation in the sense that it changes the components of the cognitive orientation cluster—for example, the phenomenon that the presence of others changes what we experience, i.e., that the content of our experience involuntarily reflects what we take to be the beliefs and goals of others.104 What matters for our present purposes is rather the observation that the presence of other humans changes how we experience, i.e., the mode in which experience occurs. Philosophers have speculatively postulated two modes of intentionality, “we-mode” and an “I-mode” (Tuomela 2006). In cognitive science the ‘we-mode’ is taken to amount to a || 103 The theory has been empirically investigated in over 60 studies in social and educational psychology; therapeutic applications pertain to motivational ‘reprogramming’ in cases of substance abuse. See e.g., Kreitler & Kreitler 1986a, b, 1990a, b, 2004; Kreitler 2001, 2002. 104 For example, the adjustments of one’s own preferences (in TCO: ”wishes and desires”) in the presence of others, or the involuntary representation of collective tasks as social tasks (see Hommel et al. 2009): when humans perform certain tasks in parallel with conflicting assignments, performance decreases since subconsciously each person takes the other person’s goals into account.

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different sort of cognition, a process with different dynamic architecture. For example, the presence of other observers changes which environmental features become salient for processing as affordances—i.e., in the terminology of TCO, which orientativenesses are at all generated in a situation; this can be taken to indicate that we process the environment from the point of view of a group subject (Frith 2012). That co occurs in an individual and a social mode, i.e. that there is a change in the dynamics of cognition itself, is perhaps most strongly suggested by experiments showing that in the social mode cognition is slowed down—we process visual information more slowly if the scene contains the figure of another observer with a different perspective and conflicting information (Samson et al. 2010). Assuming, then, that co has two modes, an individual and a social mode, let us now consider how TCO might be used in order to explain the phenomenal features of (intercultural) dialogue.

A hypothesis The considerations presented in the previous sections have been leading up to the formulation of a hypothesis about the significance of intercultural understanding for theory choice in the theory of cognition. In order to motivate the specifics of this hypothesis, I need to establish two further premises. Both of these premises are likely to appear trivial and redundant, but I think it is worthwhile to put these two ‘reminders’ in place. The first premise concerns the relationship between (i) phenomenal aspects of cognition to be explained (explananda) and (ii) aspects of the process of cognition that a theory of cognition postulates as explaining factors (explanantia). Obviously there are no similarity requirements—this is important to emphasize especially for a theory like TCO that operates with a model taken from the domain of the phenomenology of cognition. To explain phenomenal features of orientation in terms of similar features of co—e.g., to explain the phenomenal feel of a distance S between landmarks L1 and L2 in spatial orientation in terms of a relationship R between the dynamics D1 and D2 that generate contents L1 and L2—would be a return to the pre-modern style of scientific explanations along the lines of the ‘like generates like’ principle. However, we can formulate a generic requirement for the relationship of explananda and explanantia if both are taken more abstractly as changes. Various notions of scientific explanation ride on the systematic correlation (in the form of a controlled experiment) between changes in one factor or system and changes in another factor or system. So we can say, and this is my first premise, that a theo-

104 | Johanna Seibt ry of cognition needs to explain the temporal aspects of phenomenal contents, and by these shall be meant externally timed subjective changes and permanences. For example, the difference between quick and slow memory recall must be explained in terms of two different sorts of cognitive processing. My second premise is that a theory of cognition should cover all cases of cognition, from cognition as it occurs in normal information processing of adult subjects during everyday tasks, to cognizing in two exceptional situations, learning and heuristic cognition (phenomenal orientation, problem-solving, etc.). In particular, then, given that the dynamics of co is taken to be the general form of the process of cognition, learning and heuristic cognition are just as much occurrences of the co-dynamics as routine everyday cognitive processing. Let me quickly elaborate on this second premise, taking the case of learning first. While computational accounts of cognition notoriously have trouble coming to terms with learning—this is part of the so-called “grounding problem”—the embodied cognition approach in general and TCO in particular can straightforwardly accommodate learning. In fact, the dynamics of repetition and reinforcement by which cognitive orientation clusters are generated is a phase of the full dynamics of co as introduced by TCO. This phase of the codynamics may occur slowly and distributed (embedded in other interactional dynamics) over the years of our primary socialization in childhood.105 From the point of view of TCO, cognition under ‘normal’ circumstances in everyday praxis and everyday communication situations merely abbreviates the first phase of the full dynamics of co and immediately reactivates cognitive orientation clusters that are already established as default routines. But not all forms of cognition after learning fit with this fast abbreviated routine processing. Take the second sort of exceptional cognition, heuristic cognition, which we experience as going on, as a dynamic response to a state of disorientation—e.g., as spatial and figurative orientation, as fundamental research in a new field, as problem-solving, and whenever we try to make sense of “baffling” or “mind-boggling” phenomena. On these occasions the first phase of

|| 105 Note that both physical features and human practices constitute the environment in which cognitive orientation as learning occurs. Once we admit that the environment in which affordances are established contains practices, our ’normative capacities’—i.e., our understanding of the concept of normativity in general and our knowledge about particular norms— can also be taken to be acquired by nothing more than repetition and reinforcement, i.e., by conditioning, in the course of acquiring linguistic competence, which includes the capacity of participating in normative discourse; cf. Sellars 1954.—The embedding dynamics in which the generation of cognitive orientation clusters occurs may have the character of caretaker-child interactions as early and basic as described by Reddy & Morris 2004.

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the full dynamics of co is operative again and new cognitive orientation clusters are generated. There are, however, also distinctive differences in the temporal aspects of learning and heuristic cognition. Thus, according to the first premise above, the temporal differences between learning and heuristic cognition call for two different explanantia—the dynamics of co must occur in two varieties, one to account for learning, another one to account for heuristic cognition. With these two premises in place, let us now turn to the question of what, if anything, intercultural dialogue can reveal about cognition. Above I suggested, on the basis of phenomenological similarities, that intercultural understanding creates the same kind of knowledge as phenomenal (spatial and figurative) orientation. Since phenomenal orientation is one of the varieties of heuristic cognition, we can also say more broadly that in intercultural dialogue we are engaged in heuristic cognition. At the phenomenological level this appears initially plausible—in dialogue we experience the effort of making sense, an ongoing search for ‘leads’ in an engagement that feels adventurous, risky and creative, and phenomenally this has much in common with the way in which we experience the heuristic phase of fundamental research. One might object, however, that there is a decisive phenomenological difference between dialogue and heuristic cognition. In heuristic cognition (as phenomenal orientation, fundamental research, problem-solving, etc.) the focus is on the object or subject matter; this seems to be case even during heuristic inquiries undertaken in conversation with someone else.106 By contrast, dia|| 106 This footnote is an excursion. In Plato’s ‘dialogues’ precisely this element of existential encounter in dialogue is missing. But the interpretation of dialogue as manifestation of cognitive orientation also throws new light on the engagement that we have come to call “Socratic dialogue.” From our current interpretational perspective we should say that Plato recognized the close connection between dialogue and ‘first inquiry’ or the heuristic phase of fundamental (conceptual) research. Socrates’ conversations typically have two parts, separated by an aporia, a point of complete disorientation. The first part is instrumental and thus not a dialogue in any sense—it has the purpose to generate the aporia, to bring Socrates’ interlocutors to the realization that all routes of conceptual routine navigation are unviable. The actual dialogical phase begins only after this state of disorientation has been reached, as joint search for new leads, a joint placing of affordances for how to go on. The placing of affordances for how to go on take the form of definitions—to define a term, Socrates explains in the Meno, is like tying it down, grounding something that floats, setting a position from where one may proceed further to stake out more of the conceptual landscape. Importantly, the ‘ideas,’ and the definitional links between them, that are generated in this process, are not solidified abstract quasi-things but persist as ‘attractors’ of a future dynamics, i.e., as leads for future inquiry. Switching to the descriptive level of cognitive science, Plato’s ‘ideas’ are cognitive orientation clusters or attractors for the dynamics of cognitive orientation—they are ‘abstract’ in the sense of that they ‘live’ only in occurrences of cognitive orientation as it occurs in ‘first inquiry.’ For an interpretation

106 | Johanna Seibt logue is experienced as an encounter of another self, intertwined with an awareness of sociality as both present and absent, yielding a paradoxical mixture of heightened acknowledgement of one another as human beings, and heightened personal exposure due to a lack of social conventions. We noted that this paradoxical social aspect of dialogue is especially pronounced in intercultural dialogue and increases with the decrease of shared linguistic meaning. Thus we should say that participants of a dialogue and in particular of intercultural dialogue are involved in heuristic cognition but in ways that reflect the social dimension of cognition. Is there a theory of cognition that can account for the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue, at least for its temporal aspects (cf. premise one above)? As I just suggested, TCO holds out the prospect of being able to explain what occurs during heuristic cognition and, as pointed out in the previous section, TCO can be extended to accommodate the effects of “social cognition,” i.e., the effects of the physical presence of other people on the process of cognition. Even though we cannot yet detail the neurophysiological differences between the ‘individual mode’ and the ‘social mode’ of the dynamics of co, the theoretical model that TCO uses to describe the process of cognition at least provides the conceptual resources to accommodate the social dimension of cognition.107 If cognition is the interactivity of an organism and its immediate physical environment, social cognition can be conceived as the modifications of that interactivity that ensue once the environment is altered by the presence of humans. Altogether, then, we can formulate the following hypothesis: (H) In dialogue, and especially in intercultural dialogue, we experience the effects of social cognition on heuristic cognition. The temporal aspects of the phenomenology of (intercultural) dialogue can be explained if we conceive of cognition along the lines of an anti-representationalist account of

|| of Plato that supports such a processual reading of Plato’s ideas see Wieland (1982). Wieland argues that it is not by chance that Plato never presented a ‘theory of ideas’. Plato’s emphasis on ‘dialogue’ as method of philosophical inquiry is a commitment to the claim that philosophical knowledge is not theoretical knowledge; rather, philosophical knowledge is the “reflected ability” to create communicative situations (dialogues) that engage contents and interlocutors in such a way that the action-guiding or motivational force of these contents is realized in the interlocutors even though the content are never made fully explicit in propositional assertions (cf. Wieland 1982: 38-70). 107 Compare this with the conceptual difficulties that arise for any attempt of making sense of the data on social cognition on the basis of a traditional Cartesian representationalist theory of cognition as a procedure occurring strictly inside an individual thinker’s head.

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‘embodied cognition paradigm’—for instance, along the lines of accounts that fit the generic mold of TCO—as a physical-cum-physiological-cumsemantic interactivity involving an organism and its immediate (sensorily accessible) and social environment. On the assumption of (H) we can make sense of the above-mentioned observation by Cissna & Anderson about the “mutuality” of dialogue, which, as the authors claim, is a phenomenal aspect of dialogue that is not captured by reciprocal acknowledgement. Indeed, the mode of social cognition, the unreflected ‘we-mode’ of cognition, goes beyond reciprocal acknowledgements of individual agents. Cognitive scientist have argued that what is experienced as “mutuality” or “engagement” is a “relational dynamics” of its own kind, akin to the “coupling” of two dynamics systems, that is independent of the ability to entertain a ‘theory of mind,’ i.e., of propositional knowledge about the intentional states of others.108 Whichever theoretical metaphor one might use before the details of the ‘social mode’ of the dynamics of cognitive orientation are worked out in empirical research, it should prove important for such research, I submit, to keep the ‘data’ of dialogue in mind—the mutuality we experience in dialogue is the phenomenal manifestation of the social mode of cognition. To summarize, then, in this section I drew attention to three forms of cognition as learning, everyday classificatory and inferential processing, and heuristic–creative processing. I presented the hypothesis that dialogical engagements are best explained by accounts of cognition that can accommodate the form of heuristic cognition occurring in the mode of social cognition. Even though computational theories of cognition have offered explanations of everyday classificatory and inferential processing, they are notoriously incapable of accounting for learning and, more generally, for any situation where new significances are (non-definitionally) introduced. On the other hand, accounts of cognition as ‘embodied,’ which describe cognition as an ongoing interactivity between organism and environment, have the conceptual resources to explain everyday classificatory and inferential processing in terms of processing routines, as well as the special form of heuristic cognition and the special mode of social cognition. This is particularly palpable if the model for the theoretically postulated interactivity of cognition is taken—as this is done by the ‘Theory of Cognitive Orientation’—from the phenomenology of heuristic cognition, namely, ‘orientation.’ If cognition is modelled on phenomenal orientation as “cogni-

|| 108 Cf. Varela 2001, Reddy et al. 2004, De Jaegher et al 2007, Tylén et al 2007, Auvray et al 2009, De Jaegher et al. 2010.

108 | Johanna Seibt tive orientation,” it might seem, at first blush, circular and uninforming to point out that phenomenal orientation and other instances of heuristic cognition manifest cognitive orientation. But, and this I have tried to emphasize in this and the previous section, as long as the difference between model and theoretically postulated dynamics is clearly kept in sight, and as long as explanation here is understood as correlation of temporal aspects of phenomenological features with structural and temporal features of the postulated dynamics of cognition, there is no danger of a circular explanation. It is in this qualified and more tenuous sense of manifestation as correlation that intercultural dialogue can be said to be a communicative engagement that phenomenally manifests the thoroughly processual nature of cognition, as well as the irreducible social mode of cognition in the presence of others.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to pose the question of ‘how is dialogue possible?’ in the form of a query about cognitive foundations: ‘what do we need to assume about cognition in order to explain the peculiar phenomenology of the knowledge or understanding generated by intercultural dialogue?’ In conclusion let me now turn the tables and ask what a processual, antirepresentational, and embodied conception of cognition could betoken for theory and praxis of intercultural dialogue. There are two implications I briefly wish to point to.109

|| 109 A larger question I need to omit altogether here is how to relate the process account of significance sketched in this chapter to methodological reflections on intercultural dialogue from a metaphilosophical perspective as offered, for instance, by Panikkar 2007 and Garsdal (chapter 3 above). The account is developed with the conceptual tools of Western analytical philosophy, and one might question whether an analysis of the cognitive conditions for the possibility of intercultural dialogue is at all meaningful if it is not undertaken from an intercultural standpoint itself. On the other hand, process thought has been a longstanding interface between different philosophical traditions, within and across Western and Eastern thought—as documented in the titles of the book series Process Thought. To mention a specific point of potential contact, as Jesper Garsdal has pointed out to me, the fact that the embodied cognition paradigm must expand the traditional toolbox of Western ontological category theory to include cross-level concepts creates an interesting link to Buddhist metaphysics, especially the postulate of ontological cross-level elements (nama-rupa); note, though, that the ‘nama-rupa’ are commonly characterized as ‘psychophysical,’ while the category of a ‘p+p+s’ dynamics, i.e., of a physical-contentual or physical-normative entity is tied to a naturalist metaphysics, cf. Seibt 2014.

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First, if we conceive of cognition along the lines of TCO, we can begin to understand more clearly what values are and how they function in the context of dialogical engagements. The debate about values, traditionally characterized by the opposition between subjectivist and objectivist approaches, recently has favored what appears to be the intermediate third alternative, namely, accounts that take values to be dispositional or response-dependent properties. According to standard formulations of the dispositional approach, an item is of value if and only if we would be disposed, under ideal conditions, to value it, where ‘valuing’ in turn is understood as ‘desiring to desire it.’110 Such ‘desiring to desire’ is intended to create a link between value and reflected motivation, which is relative to a thinker’s paradigm of rationality. This latter point some authors prefer to bring more explicitly into view by taking values to be “tertiary properties”: An object’s secondary properties pivot on its dispositions to evoke characteristic affective responses in the suitably responsive senses. Analogously, a state of affairs’ tertiary properties pivot on dispositions to evoke characteristic reflective responses in the suitably prepared mind. (Rescher 2005: 117).

Dispositional and response-dependent accounts of values are quite ‘static,’ however. Here values are taken to be relational properties (of an object, feature, event etc.) that exist—timelessly—on the condition of a certain response by the subject. If at all, dispositional and response-dependency accounts offer a cursory characterization of the process by means of which members of a community are conditioned (or “prepared”) to react with certain valuations, but they do not describe how established valuations may be changed later on. In particular, to the extent to which dispositional and response-dependency accounts link valuations to emotional reactions and motivations, they cannot be used to explain why the mere dialogical encounter of people with conflicting values should have any impact on established valuations. By contrast, if we conceive of cognition along the lines of TCO, valuations are continuously in the making—they are part of the cognition orientation cluster, i.e., continuously reactivated in the course of the interactivity of cognition. According to TCO values are, like meanings, processing routines, emergent dynamics akin to standing waves and convection cells, and thus are continuously disruptable if environmental changes (interferences of cultural practices) create a state of disorientation. If values are emergent processing routines this

|| 110 Cf. for instance Lewis 1989.

110 | Johanna Seibt does not render them more subjective, however, since qua emergent they intrinsically dependent on the interactivity that connects organism and environment. As a first asset, then, of the view of cognition suggested by TCO, we can note that such a processual account can make sense of the dynamics of valuations and values. Second, an account of values based on the TCO view of cognition also holds out the prospect for coming to grips with the difficult relationship between values and emotions. On the one hand, values and disvalues are closely connected with emotions or, to use Rodogno’s somewhat broader term, with ‘attachments.’ According to TCO we build up our valuative routines in the course of the long learning process during primary socialization; since this is at once the process during which we grow up and reach our reflective selfunderstanding as particular persons, we can explain with TCO why attacks on values feel, as Rodogno points out, ‘personal.’111 On the other hand, in dialogue we apparently can bracket some of the emotional and motivational force of our attachments—precisely this special emotional posture enabled by dialogue renders dialogue of use for conflict mitigation. With TCO we can attribute this ‘detachment effect’ in dialogue to the fact that in this special non-purposedriven form of communicative engagement social cognition is foregrounded, i.e., the dynamics of cognitive orientation occurs in its social mode. Since the social mode of cognition apparently aims for an alignment of the epistemic and valuative assessments of the processed scene, it forces a disruption of valuative routines and a transition to the form of heuristic cognition. The phenomenal impression that in dialogue conflicting valuative commitments can be jointly ‘explored’ might have their roots in the combination these two alterations of the dynamics of cognitive orientation.112 Second, an approach to cognition viewed as embodied and antirepresentational along the lines of TCO can also shed light on the praxis of intercultural dialogue. Above I tried to make plausible that the peculiar irenic and creative potential of (intercultural) dialogue can be attributed to the workings of

|| 111 Cf. Rodogno’s discussion of values below in section 2.1. TCO also affords us with an explanation of the persistence of valuations of items that we no longer ‘desire to desire’ as in, for example, sentimental reactions—that we as adults now experience pain if a long forgotten childhood toy is discarded is due to the fact that the perception of the toy triggers the momentary reactivation of an old cognitive orientation cluster. 112 Based on the situated simulation account Prinz (2005) has argued that moral values are grounded in emotions; the relativist position he promotes can be avoided if one moves away from the classical focus on the moral judgment of the individual subject and attends—as Prinz does not—to dialogue and to phenomena of valuative commitments with emotional detachments due to foregrounded social cognition.

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social cognition in direct embodied personal communication. Moreover, embodied cognition approaches should enable us better to understand the role of contact for intercultural dialogue. For example, it should enable us to explain the fate of “intergroup contact theory,” an approach first presented in1954 by Gordon Allport, who proceeded from the hypothesis that contact between opposing groups can, under the right conditions, reduce social tension. Intergroup contact theory still seems to inform recent public calls for intercultural ‘dialogue’ in the sense of the mere pragmatic facilitation of direct physical encounters. However, it is questionable whether such orchestrated short-term “encounters for dialogue” provide the right sort of contact in order to engender attitudes required for patient joint exploration of communalities and differences—these seem to be more the results of repeated and long-term contact.113 Finally, embodied cognition research also should be able to elucidate the possibility of dialogical engagements in cases where embodied contact is not an option. Certain elements of direct dialogical engagements can be re-created even “when groups are highly segregated, physically or socially, or when there is little motivation to engage in contact.”114 As has been shown, even the imagination of individual positive contact with an ‘outgroup member’ reduces anxiety and stereotyping; when individuals listen to a simple story about a positive encounter with a member of an outgroup, the mental simulations engendered by the semantic processing of the story produce a measurable attitudinal change.115 Interestingly, the scripted story can be as minimal as the instruction to imagine a positive interaction. An anti-representational theory of cognition that conceives of meanings as ‘reactivations’ of processing routines or, in Barsalou’s terminology, as “simulations” of perceptual processing, would seem to contain the basic resources to explain these psychological effects of imagined contact, as well as to suggest under which conditions the effects of imagined contact can be enhanced or reduced. Since scripted stories for imagined positive interaction do not have to be short, all kinds of narratives, whether fictional or scholarly, also can serve this function (cf. chapter 8 below). For the mitigation of cultural conflicts it will be of primary importance to clarify whether there are additional features of such narratives that will increase the desired irenic effect.116 Precisely || 113 Cf. Pettigrew 1997 as well as the critical reflections on the efforts of the European Community’s to establish 2008 as Year of Intercultural Dialogue in Berg 2011. 114 Cf. Crisp, R. and Turner, R. 2009: 232. 115 Cf. Crisp and Turner ibid. as well as Turner, R. and Crisp, R. 2010. 116 E.g. narratives that reconstruct conflict frames in agreement with the principles of “appreciative inquiry” developed by D. Cooperrider and S. Srivastva or “positioning analysis” (cf., Mogghadam et al 2008).

112 | Johanna Seibt here future research in cognitive science will need to play a pivotal role. This holds in particular also for the pursuit of intercultural dialogue at the level of scholarly discourse, e.g. as intercultural value research, as promoted in this book. A better understanding of the conditions under which a script re-creates the mode of social cognition without disturbing the form of heuristic cognition will enable us to determine whether and how the academic field of intercultural value research can be more than a purely ‘academic’ enterprise and more effectively support the praxis of intercultural dialogue. To be sure, despite the important role that cognitive science research can play for the realization of dialogue, the ultimate criterion of success for any theoretical and practical attempt at facilitating dialogue must always remain the phenomenal experience of shared humanity that Buber once formulated with powerful simplicity: “I think no human being can give more than this: making life possible for the other, if only for a moment. Permission.”117

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Rescher, N. (2005). On the Import and Rationale of Value Attribution. Mind and Society 4: 115– 127. Rizzolatti, G. & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. Prinz, J. (2005). Passionate Thoughts. In Zwaan, R. & D. Pecher (Eds.), The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking (pp. 93-114). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Samson, D., Apperly, I., Braithwaite, J., Andrews, B., & Scott, S. (2010). Seeing it their way: evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 1255. Sellars, W. (1954). Some Reflections on Language Game. Reprinted in Science, Perception, and Reality, Reseda: Ridgeview (1963), 321-359. Stegmaier, W. (1992) „Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?“-- Zur Möglichkeit philosophischer Weltorientierung nach Kant. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 17, 1-16. Stegmaier, W. (ed.) (2005). Orientierung—Philosophische Perspektiven. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Stegmaier, W. (2008). Philosophie der Orientierung. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Turner, R., & Crisp, R. (2010). Imagining intergroup contact reduces implicit prejudice. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 129-142. Tylén, K., Allen, M. (2009). Interactive sense-making in the brain. In Carassa, A., Morganti, F. & Riva, G. (Eds.), Enacting Intersubjectivity, International Workshop (pp. 224–241). Amsterdam: IOS Press. Tuomela R. (2006) Joint intention, we-mode and I-mode. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XXX: Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility, 30, 35-58. Van Gelder, T. J. & Port, R. (1995). Its About Time: An Overview of the Dynamical Approach to Cognition. In R. Port, Van Gelder, T. (Eds.), Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition (pp. 1-43). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Varela, F.J. et al. (2001). The brainweb: Phase synchronization and large-scale integration. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 229–239. Wieland, W. (1982). Platon und die Formen des Wissens, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Roeprecht. Wood, J. (2004). Entering into Dialogue. In Anderson, R., Baxter, L.A. & Cissna, K.N. (Eds.), Dialogue-Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies (pp. xv-xxiii). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Zwaan, R., & Pecher, D. (Eds.) (2005). The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Introduction Intercultural dialogue is a hermeneutic stance, enabled—or at least: greatly facilitated—by scholarly inquiry into the history, variety and dynamic of cultural and existential commitments across cultures. Even though intercultural dialogue in this sense has a long history, the public demand for intercultural dialogue is a more recent phenomenon.118 It is not always clear whether the notion of intercultural dialogue as used in recent public discourse is informed by the methodological requirements for cross-cultural hermeneutics—often the term ‘intercultural dialogue’ here simply denotes an openness towards cultural diversity as a pragmatic attitude.119 Importantly, it is in reaction to the observable increase in so-called ‘cultural conflicts’ during the last two decades that the public call for intercultural dialogue has grown louder. Such a dialogue, it is assumed, could contribute to the resolution, prevention, or at least the mitigation of conflicts. This raises two questions. First, how does intercultural dialogue as a scholarly enterprise relate to intercultural dialogue as an attitude of openness and a pragmatic effort to promote social cohesion? Second, is there any reason for thinking that intercultural dialogue, in either of the two senses, is a form of conflict intervention that could issue in concrete results? The contributions to Part II of this volume provide relevant input on both of these questions. Surprisingly, intercultural dialogue as a scholarly inquiry appears to hold greater promise for promoting social peace than intercultural dialogue as an activism based on “inclusivism” or the “celebration of diversity” as such. The reason for this, as suggested by the following chapters, is that concrete inclusive narratives that are founded in scholarly research about historical and conceptual interrelations and dependencies between the contesting cultural value systems

|| 118 Here we need to bracket the question precisely how the history of intercultural thought relates to the history of cross-cultural intellectual exchange, a popular topic of recent scholarship in intellectual history, cf. e.g., Euben 2008; Dumoulin 1988; Swanson 1989; Clarke 2002; Schwab/ Patterson-Black/ Reinking 1984. 119 For example, the European Council Project on “Intercultural Dialogue” agreed upon the following definition: “Intercultural dialogue is a process that comprises an open and respectful exchange or interaction between individuals, groups and organisations with different cultural backgrounds or world views. Among its aims are: to develop a deeper understanding of diverse perspectives and practices; to increase participation and the freedom and ability to make choices; to foster equality; and to enhance creative processes” (http://www. Interculturaldialogue.eu/web/icd-project.php; accessed May 2013).

120 | Introduction to Part II seems to positively affect the way the public forms its attitudes. In addition, the scholarly analysis of value systems can help agents identify the relative significance of contested cultural values and to detect underlying political and economic motives. The different aspects of the role of intercultural dialogue in modifying value conflicts unfolds in several steps, beginning with a reflection on the term ‘value conflict’ in chapter 6. As philosopher Raffaele Rodogno argues in this chapter, it is not values as such that are in conflict. When people fail to share commitments to the same values, a mutual feeling of alienation may arise, but the conflict itself lies in norms that are associated with these different commitments. On the other hand, that two logically contradictory or practically incompatible norms have the potential to generate social conflict in some fashion turns on the values associated with these norms. For example, it has been argued that the conflict potential of practically incompatible norms depends on whether the associated values are perceived as moral values. Rodogno reviews Thomas Scanlon’s account of value conflicts as assaults on one’s “standing as a person”—if a moral value is violated, it means that a norm is violated, something that ought to require justification before other moral agents. When that appeal does not happen, this can be interpreted as an attack on the moral status – the full personhood - of those who are committed to the relevant norms and associated values. Rodogno argues that Scanlon’s account of this peculiar phenomenological aspect of value conflicts does help explain why they are “personal” in ways that are not the case with regard to conflicts of interests. However, as Rodogno points out, Scanlon’s explanation does not quite go to the heart of the matter. Value conflicts feel “personal” not because they involve moves that seem to express disregard for us as persons, but because they seem to express disregard for us as the persons we identify ourselves as —i.e., they are an attack on our individual identity or group ‘identity.’ The phenomenology of value conflicts can be captured better, Rodogno suggests, if we analyze the conflict potential of values not in terms of the kind of values involved (e.g., moral values) but in terms of a specific “form of valuing”—the way in which a certain value is mentally present within us. To characterize this mental presence, Rodogno introduces a new ontological type of mental entity he calls “attachment.” Attachments are certain “configurations of cognitions, volitions, and emotions”, closely related to the dispositional complex or attitudinal state of ‘caring’ as analyzed by various philosophers. What we care about, or are attached to, contributes directly to our identity. Rodogno shows that by focusing on whether or not our valuations occur in the form of attachments, on, in other words, the “psychological life of values,” we can shed light on why some incompatible norms are more likely to generate conflicts than others. We are thus

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equipped to understand why we experience some, but not all conflicts as pertaining to our personal core. Rodogno’s ‘attachment’ is an analytical concept that has direct links to empirical conflict research, especially since attachment is a form of valuation that can be directed to items that are not good or beautiful, or that can even incorporate aversive emotions, as “negative attachment” or hatred. Even though this is not one of his explicit aims, Rodogno alerts us to an important ambiguity in the notion of conflict as used by researchers of different disciplines. Scholars in intercultural value research mostly operate with an abstract notion of conflict that is tied mostly to its semantic content—values can be said to conflict in this sense if they govern incompatible norms. On the other hand, conflict researchers understand conflict as a concrete and complex historical process that is compounded of a multitude of physical acts (performances of actions as well as non-intended events) as well as psychological states and occurrences. Conflict research is a relatively young interdisciplinary area that was initiated in the cold war era of the 1950s. At first, it was undertaken by a group made up mainly of historians, political scientists, and psychologists. During the Cold War, for the most part researchers were trying to create descriptive models for interest-based conflicts at different levels of complexity (from interpersonal to interstate conflicts). After the Cold War ended, there was a surge of ‘identitybased’ conflicts in the early 1990 which refocused its interdisciplinary scope: it fanned out to include sociology and anthropology as well. It was at this point that it became evident that conflict analysis did not yet have the right tools to investigate conflicts that could not be defined narrowly in terms of interests, but instead were driven by values or ‘identities.’ Analysts of ethnic conflicts observed, however, that this new focus on ‘identities,’ commonly understood in the fairly static sense of “self-categorization” proposed by Tajfel and Turner, also had a problematic side.120 On the one hand, it seemed unproductive at the level of research: “Indeed, so potent is the identity factor that, once invoked it often simply shuts down further analysis, or even curiosity” (Black 2003: 122). On the other hand, the use of ‘identity’ as an analytical concept in conflict research lent itself to possible abuses in ‘identity politics.’ Precisely because social (including cultural and religious) ‘identity’ exhibits such a problematic functionality in the generation and protraction of conflicts, the argument went, conflict researchers should beware of the promulgation of “identity-fetishism”, i.e.,

|| 120 Tajfel/ Turner 1979; Turner et al. 1987.

122 | Introduction to Part II the reification of interaction patterns into quasi-objectual entities (v. Beek 2000: 525). Chapter 7 introduces the reader to the current research landscape in conflict research. It provides an impression of how the field has overcome past difficulties in the analysis of conflicts that are not based on interests but on “attachments” in Rodogno’s sense. In this chapter conflict researcher Daniel Druckman argues for a “multimethod” approach to the empirical study of conflicts. Given the complexity of the phenomenon, a targeted combination of experiments, correlative analyses (“modeling”), surveys, case studies, and document analysis can diminish theoretical biases in data and analytical parameters. As Druckman reviews the strengths and limitations of each method, the reader encounters a plethora of proposals for distinguishing the different constituent processes, dynamics, and structures of conflicts, as well as their environments and psychology. Druckman’s chapter is core reading for any researcher in the Humanities who wishes to gain an informed overview over the field of conflict research. From the point of view of the philosopher (or theologian) who chooses to promote intercultural dialogue to mitigate conflict, this overview should be both sobering and uplifting. It is sobering since the study of conflict presents itself as yet another advanced, theoretically articulated, methodologically sophisticated, and highly diversified field of empirical research, with the effect that general pronouncements by philosophers or theologians about ‘conflict mitigation by dialogue’ are likely to appear naïve. On the other hand, it is uplifting to see the number of concrete interfaces for interdisciplinary research. To indicate a few rich topics: philosophers might investigate the role of intercultural inquiry for the “development of trust”; for “content analysis” and specifically for the analysis of public “framing” of conflicts; for the “turning points” of conflicts, insofar as these are engendered by reframings; and, finally, in connection with “storytelling” as method of conflict intervention. Of these potential interfaces between conflict research and intercultural dialogue, the topic of “trust building” would seem to link best with intercultural dialogue as a public platform for personal encounter, while issues of “framing” and “storytelling” link to intercultural dialogue as scholarly inquiry. In chapter 8 it becomes clear why the latter interface, if the stories are sufficiently inclusive and self-reflective, might be able to provide useful support for the prevention and transformation of a certain class of social conflicts. In chapter 8, conflict researcher Marc Ross analyses the generating factors and dynamics of “cultural contestations.” Far from being a monolithic and temporally unchanging thing, a culture, Ross argues, is a cohesive assembly of “specific frames and scripts” that provides “both cognitive and affective beliefs

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about social reality.” These frames and scripts—which offer explanations of events and structure the space of culturally permissible and expectable actions—are engendered by narratives which in combination constitute the culture’s “worldview.” While Ross agrees with Rodogno that differences in cultural values and beliefs as such do not generate conflicts, the potential for social conflict arises, Ross argues, when one cultural group feels that its cultural expressions are not included within, or explicitly excluded from, the “symbolic landscape of a society” and thus from status and opportunities. The lack of recognition and the ensuing anxiety and social disorientation lead excluded cultural groups to seize on “psychocultural narratives” that are cognitively simple and emotionally salient, thus fulfilling the need for an explanation of the situation. “In such contexts, group narratives and the familiar shared images link in-group members providing reassurance, relieving anxiety and reinforcing within group worldviews while differentiating it from out-groups.” The investigation of “psychocultural narratives” has important implications for conflict intervention since they “frame conflict in three different ways: as reflectors, exacerbaters or inhibiters, and causes of conflict.” The conflict potential that is commonly associated with a group’s ‘identity’ can be further located in specific psychocultural narratives that have a strongly identificatory function for the group and at the same time polarize the space of options. As Ross illustrates with the cases headscarf conflict in France and post-apartheid South Africa, whether antagonistic psychocultural narratives lead to “psychocultural dramas” that symbolize and generate hostility depends on whether the state manages to produce inclusive ‘counter-narratives’ and enact it within the society’s symbolic landscape. Chapter 8 puts into vivid relief how intercultural scholarship may help prevent conflict or participate in peace-building since it by definition produces inclusive narratives of cultural self-reflection. These anchor foreign cultural values within the academic institutional part of the ‘symbolic landscape of a society.’ But intercultural inquiry can contribute to the technologies of peace not only by producing inclusive cultural self-reflection, but also, as Chapter 9 highlights, by constructing turning points in protracted conflicts. In chapter 9 historian and conflict researcher Chris Mitchell explores various explanations for the fact that conflicts often continue even when ‘the cause is lost’; when, that is, it is clear that the original goals of the conflict are unattainable and that the economic costs for the continuation of the conflict far outweigh the gains. Instead of analyzing this phenomenon in terms of the features presented by these protracted conflicts, Mitchell follows an alternative process-geared approach that looks at the type of dynamics involved. Looking at the stages of these kinds of conflicts, Mitchell identifies one phase he calls

124 | Introduction to Part II “entrapment.” The hallmark of entrapment is that there is a threshold after which leaders of the conflicting parties associate themselves and their political futures no longer with the original goal of the conflict but with the continuation of the conflict itself. As in the well known sunk cost fallacy, they are motivated in terms of past investment instead of the concretely attainable gains in the future. Moreover, entrapment is intensified by cultural images of the virtues of endurance and the legend of the persistent hero who prevails in the end. The leaders are thus led to think that they can only either continue the conflict or completely lose face and political and moral status. Mitchell suggests that protracted conflicts can be approached at the cultural level by identifying those cultural images and frames that lock leaders in and impede decisions for a change of strategy by exalting perseverance or eschatological models of last minute victory. However, Mitchell concludes, any utility-based arguments pointing to the fallacy of this reasoning will fail when the conflict in question becomes not a means to an end but an end in itself. In “what might be called ‘revenge’ or ‘retribution’ cultures, where honor demands ‘getting even’”, conflicts present a “conundrum” since any lack of adherence to the conflict directly contradicts cultural core commitments. This conundrum seems to have a straightforward normative answer: such conflicts must be ended with cultural change—by giving up on positive valuations of notions of honor that require violent retributions. But on what grounds could one justify the normative force of this recommendation? Is it not bound to be the expression of another cultural bias? Or is it possible to press for cultural change on empirical grounds? In chapter 10 Geneviéve Souillac and Douglas Fry explore the latter strategy in the context of discussing the conceptual foundations of global politics. Intertwining the perspectives of political philosophy, peace research, and anthropology, the two authors mount an argument for cosmopolitan citizenship based on the idea of normative belonging, using insights from the anthropology of peace to build their case. Souillac and Fry’s overarching thesis is that we can find, in “traditional forms of knowledge about governance” (that is, the social rules and practices of pre-modern societies), important inspiration for building a contemporary political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. They develop this theme through a complex argument that connects a sequence of substantive claims with partly empirical and partly conceptual support. At the heart of their argument are four major claims. First, the authors argue that “peace systems”(as they call them) inhering in traditional societies, are not just present in some geographically privileged traditional communities but rather are found globally among them all, suggest-

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ing that “living without war…may actually be the human social and behavioral default.” Second, traditional peace systems, the authors point out, operate with a notion of “positive peace,” where nonviolence and consensus are explicit values and integrated into conceptions of individual virtues and social well-being that associate aggression and coercion with a loss of moral dignity. This claim, which is again based on anthropological data, runs directly counter to the way in which peace has been conceived in modernity, where a Hobbesian anthropology has defined it ex negativo as simply the absence of war. Third, the authors’ prescriptive suggestion is that we need to replace the communicative form of rational discussion with dialogical interaction, shifting emphasis from discursive rationality to intersubjectivity, while introducing a “positive peace value constellation,” i.e., a network of values and normative commitments comprising peace, non-violence, equality, consensus-decisions, justice, and human rights. It is a practical ideal of liberal democracies to ground normative authority in joint deliberation—supported, for example, by Habermas’ conception of discourse-theoretic truth or Rawl’s conception of justice. However, as the authors point out, such participatory forms of legitimization in democracy are well-suited to decision-making at the level of the nation state, to the extent that members of national societies implicitly share sufficiently many valuative commitments as to enable rational deliberation with a prospect of democratic consensus. Once the discourse-theoretic model is applied to decision-making at “higher levels” across national and cultural borders, implicitly shared value frameworks and equal access to the communicative tools of rational deliberation can no longer be relied upon. A dialectical deadlock arises—the model presupposes a universal conception of reason and thus cannot accommodate the particularist challenges arising in intercultural contexts. To escape the deadlock the authors perform an anthropologically informed dialogic turn. On the basis of this modification of the discourse-theoretic model a notion of “normative solidarity” emerges that can found “higher levels of citizenship as shared normative belonging.” Fourth, Souillac and Fry observe that we can derive inspiration from the ethics of indigenous “nomadic bands” since there exists a “space of practices [that] is decentralized, borderless, and yet recognizable in its emphasis on nonviolence, conflict resolution, and peace-making,” an “expanding society of such practitioners, beyond the classical formalization of territorial or cultural belonging.” The appeal to the nomadic ideal of community gives us a visionary framework with which we can transpose “traditional knowledge of governance” in indigenous peace systems to contemporary tasks of peace-building at the global level.

126 | Introduction to Part II The authors’ third claim repays, we believe, a moment’s reflection. The suggested modification of the discourse-theoretic model makes use of a concept of dialogue that, at first blush, seems to differ from the notion of dialogue as it is used in other chapters in this volume. Elsewhere in this book, authors refer to dialogue as a form of communication in a context of radically diverse or even mutually exclusive valuative commitments. Souillac and Fry, on the other hand, suggest dialogical interactions among people that share the commitments of a “positive peace value constellation” and already conceive of themselves as relational subjects. Should we thus say that there are two sorts of dialogue at issue here, one that allows for communicative interaction in scenarios of ‘radical’ value conflicts with no shared commitments, and another one that facilitates non-oppressive forms of decision-making in ‘moderate’ value conflicts – those in which some fundamental commitments are not challenged? In order to resolve this tension one might introduce a processual perspective and ask whether the pure dialogical encounter with radical disagreement about values is not bound to reveal some shared commitments. In a loose analogy to K.O Apel’s “transcendental-pragmatist foundation” of positive values one could argue that the speech act of pure dialogue presupposes and performatively establishes certain commitments, such as the recognition of the interlocutor as engaged in the search for existential truth.121 In a second step one could argue that the performative commitments of dialogue—which differ from the pragmatic presuppositions of discourse—suffice to derive the positive values of “normative solidarity.” Without being able to draw out this observation in the space of this introduction, we wish to draw the reader’s attention to the promise of pure dialogue for the project of ‘bootstrapping (moral) content from process’—while the pragmatic presuppositions of discourse might not lend themselves to a communication-theoretic performative foundation of moral values, the act of pure dialogue is more clearly undertaken in a moral dimension. Chapter 10 thus goes from presenting empirical data to support the general thesis that humans have a natural potential for peace, to proposing how to harness these data to create a transformed vision of the potential of cosmopolitan citizenship. Whether the ‘higher levels’ of citizenship so envisaged can be realized within the nation state order would seem to depend on the extent of national communicative restrictions. On the other hand, the development of “normative solidarity” and cosmopolitan consciousness can be fostered if na-

|| 121 Cf. Apel 1988. Relevant pragmatic presuppositions of the speech act of pure dialogue can be gleaned from chapters 3, 5, and 18.

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tion states accept a model of international relations known as “dialogue of civilizations,” which will be discussed in the opening chapter of part III.

References Apel, K.-O. (1988). Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Beek, M.v. (2000). Beyond Identity Fetishism: 'Communal' Conflict in Ladakh and the Limits of Autonomy. Cultural Anthropology, 15, 525-569. Black, P. (2003). Identities. In Cheldelin, S., Druckman, D., & Fast, L. (Eds.) Conflict—From Analysis to Intervention (pp. 120-140). Continuum: London. Clarke, J. J. (2002). Oriental enlightenment: The encounter between Asian and Western thought. New York: Routledge. Dumoulin, H. (1988). Zen Buddhism: A History, vols. 1 and 2 (Heisig, J. W. & Knitter, P., Trans.). New York: Macmillan. Euben, R. L. (2008). Journeys to the other shore: Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge. Princeton University Press.; Schwab, R., Patterson-Black, G., & Reinking, V. (1984). The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Columbia University Press. Swanson, P. L. (1989). Foundations of Tʻien-Tʻai Philosophy: The Flowering of the Two Truths Theory in Chinese Buddhism. Jain Publishing Company. Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In Austin, W. & Worchel, S.(Eds.) The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA:Brooks/Cole. Turner, J., Hogg, M., Oaks, P., Reicher, S. & Wetherell, S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Raffaele Rodogno

CHAPTER SIX Attachments and the moral psychology of value conflicts It is often alleged that intercultural conflicts are conflicts of values as opposed to, or in addition to, conflicts of material interest (Ross, this volume; Huntington 1993; Eder et al. 2002, Kim et al 2008; Le Baron et al. 2006). It may be quickly objected that conflicts of material interest do involve values insofar as prudential value or goodness is another way of naming a person’s (material and less material) interest or well-being. Hence, if you and I were fighting over exclusive control over the only water-well in the area, we would precisely be fighting over which one of us shall control at least part of the other’s level of well-being. To say this much, however, is to admit that, strictly speaking, the water-well conflict is not a conflict of value. What the belligerents are fighting over is control over resources that are understood to contribute to the goodness of their lives. The conflict is over control of these resources, not about the value to which they contribute. In intercultural conflicts, however, values themselves are said to conflict. What does a conflict of values consist in? If taken literally, this is an odd thing to say. On any plausible conception of value, values cannot as such causally interact with anything else, let alone conflict with each other. The idea of a conflict of value, then, is at least to some extent metaphorical. Yet conflicts that involve conflicting values are all but metaphorical. In what way, then can we bridge the gap between the metaphorical and the literal sense of such conflicts?

Values in conflict: a first pass In order to answer this question, we must begin with the following stipulation: in order for values to come into conflict they must be accompanied by norms. In particular the thesis here is that conflicting values entail conflicting norms. This is not the claim that all values entail norms (though I would tend to sympathize with that view) but rather that values without norms cannot come into conflict and, in fact, that conflict will in practice manifest itself at the level of norms.

130 | Raffaele Rodogno To illustrate this suppose that A judged that the environment is valuable in itself while B judged that it isn’t. Suppose now that no norms whatsoever accompanied these value judgments. What kind of a conflict, if any, would A and B be involved in? If no norms were attached to these values, nothing whatsoever would follow from these value judgments in terms of what agents should, or ought to do, feel or believe; or again, nothing would follow in terms of what is permissible or forbidden for agents to do, feel, and believe. And finally, to use a different normative jargon, nothing would follow in terms of what agents would have reason to do, feel, or believe. Surely, from such solitary (i.e. unaccompanied by norms) values no conflict could manifest itself in the actions or feelings of two individuals (and, in fact, even of a single individual). A and B may or may not be in conflict over, for example, whether there is reason not to burn trees for fun. In fact, if no norms were attached to values, even if A and B agreed about the environment being valuable, they may or may not be in conflict over whether to burn trees. The idea here is simply that it is hard to understand what would follow from the claim that something (e.g. the environment) is valuable, in the absence of some implicit or explicit attitude (actions, feelings, beliefs) guiding norms. When norms do accompany values, however, it is easy to see how conflicts arise. A values the environment and takes that to imply that we ought not to burn trees for fun. B, however, does not value the environment and does not take that norm to apply to him. What is more, when norms do accompany values, it is also easy to see that two distinct kinds of conflicts may arise. The first kind of conflict originates in the fact that individuals disagree with respect to the very idea that something is valuable. This was the original case of A and B above. In this case, A and B’s respective axiological views of the world are relevantly different, at least with regard to matters concerning the environment. While A may well take himself not to have reason to burn a tree for fun, B may well take himself to have such a reason. Conflicts, however, may also arise even when individuals do in fact agree on the value of something, while disagreeing on what norms would follow from the correct understanding of that value, or again, on how to rank this value and the norms that follow from it, when these are in conflict with norms following from other values. The point here is twofold: (a) sheer axiological agreement does not eliminate the possibility of conflict (or again differences in normative

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outlook may be consistent with axiological agreement); and (b) conflict plays itself out at the level of norms.122 This, however, is not to say that values aren’t fundamental or relevantly important in understanding the nature of conflicts. Consider the following examples. In the first case, A and B disagree about the value of the environment. While A deeply appreciates the grandeur of nature and thinks, for example, that the Grand Canyon is a marvelous thing, B thinks that “the Grand Canyon is just a big ditch that might as well be filled in if that proves to be economically advantageous” (Scanlon 1998:159). Compare now this case, with that of two individuals who agree that the environment in general and the Grand Canyon in particular are valuable but are not quite in agreement as to what norms follow from this. While both A and B believe, for example, that the ecosystems in the Grand Canyon ought to be preserved, A believes that we ought to actively intervene to maintain the status quo, while B thinks we should simply refrain from interfering and let nature do its work even if that proves to alter the status quo. Clearly, A and B are separated by a much wider gulf in the first example than they are in the second. It also seems clear that much of the gap is to be explained precisely in terms of the individuals’ shared valuing of the environment or their failure to do so. This comes to fore if one imagines how the conversation would go if A and B where to try and reconcile their positions in both cases. In the second example, if B were to persuade A that non-interference is the right norm, he would probably have to show that this is better for the environment or more in line with the correct understanding of how ecosystems function or our capacities to manipulate them. In the first example, however, in order to bridge the gulf none of this information would be relevant. Each individual would rather have to show the other that his entire axiological outlook with regard to the environment is simply lacking or mistaken; that he fails entirely to see matters aright. The task at hand is different, and much more challenging. Let us now focus on cases in which people fail to share a value. Within this very class of cases, another important distinction must be drawn, for, as we shall see, not all failures to share values should be considered and are experi|| 122 Against what suggested so far, point (a) seems to imply that values and norms cannot mutually entail each other, since normally this would signal a one-to-one relationship: V1 if and only if N1. The entailment I have in mind, however, is weaker than that and involves, among others, the idea that a necessary condition for any value to exist is that some socially instantiated norm exists. There may be more than one norm at one time, different norms at different times and places, and disagreement about what norms the value entails, and hence the possibility of (a).

132 | Raffaele Rodogno enced as conflictual. For Thomas Scanlon, for example, only those failures that involve moral values can become conflictual. Moral values (in what Scanlon calls the “narrow sense”) are those that derive from our standing as persons. Responding correctly to such values involves ensuring that our actions are justifiable to others, which in turn amounts to acting only in those ways others could not reasonably reject. Scanlon then considers the way in which failures of sharing values are experienced as involving or not involving moral values. As for the latter type of case, Scanlon thinks that in most cases the effects on mutual relations would be quite local. If someone does not see the point of music, or of chess, or does not appreciate the grandeur of nature, then one cannot discuss these things with him or enjoy them together. “Blind spots” such as these may stand in the way of certain relations with a person, but they leave much of life untouched. A person who cannot share our enthusiasm for one or another valuable pursuit can still be a good neighbor, co-worker, or even friend (Scanlon 1998:159)

One may well feel alienated from those who, for example, fail to see the value of science, of historical understanding, or of the grandeur of nature and see them as “missing something” in at least two senses: “there is a category of reasons, a form of value, that they are failing to appreciate; and their lives are poorer because of this lack” (Scanlon 1998: 158f.) When moral values are involved, however, when, that is, the situation is experienced as involving a failure to accord value to others, the effects on mutual relations are not confined in this way: This failure makes a more fundamental difference because what is in question is not a shared appreciation of some external value but rather the person’s attitude towards us— specifically, a failure to see why the justifiability of his or her actions to us should be of any importance. (Scanlon 1998: 159)

To recap, then, even when we focus our attention merely on cases in which individuals fail to share some value, much of the effect that this failure will have on mutual relations, including its potential for conflict, will depend on the nature of the value at hand. In particular, according to Scanlon, we must distinguish values that are somewhat external to us from the moral value that we all have as persons. Clearly, if A does not care whether his actions are justifiable to B, if, that is, A does not respond to the reasons B may have not to endure these actions and their consequences, A will not be much of a neighbor, a co-worker, or a friend.

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There is one aspect of Scanlon’s distinction that renders the latter particularly relevant to the analysis of intercultural conflicts of values. Conflicts of values will not arise if the parties involved merely feel at some distance as a result of a failure to share some value. Conflicts of values involve more than just the feeling that the other is “missing something” and that her life is thereby made poorer. And they certainly affect the range of relations in ways that go beyond the “blind spots” mentioned by Scanlon, for a “blind spot” is by definition not a conflict. Though on the right track, Scanlon’s distinction raises some questions, which the following illustration nicely brings to the fore: People with a consuming interest in one activity often feel that a large gulf separates them from those who cannot see the point or value of that pursuit. The gulf that some religious people feel separates them from unbelievers may be an extreme case of this. But even this feeling of distance has the personal character I have just mentioned only if the believer feels that denying his religion involves denying his standing as a person and that of others as well. Conceivably, some believers may see things this way (ibid.).

In other words, a believer may at times experience the denial of her religion as a simple gulf standing in between her and the unbelievers, and at times as a denial of her standing as a person. Two sets of questions arise at this point: (1) Why is the same failure to share some value at times experienced as a “gulf”, or even a “large gulf”, and at times experienced as a much more serious and personal attack? And (2) is the latter, more severe case really and correctly experienced as an attack on a persons’ moral standing as Scanlon would have it? Or is its special “personal character” more appropriately characterized in other terms? Does the believer in the example above need to feel that the non-believer is failing to treat her as a person? A traditional way of approaching these questions would be to focus on the nature of the values and the norms that they entail. Hence a number of scholars, (cf. e.g. Bernhardt, this volume), study the nature of value conflicts such as religious ones by identifying the conflict generating features of certain religious norms such as exclusivity, universality, and final validity. This is a perfectly legitimate way to go about exploring the nature of value conflicts. Yet, I would argue, even better answers would be produced if this kind of analyses were to be complemented by an enhanced understanding of the psychological life of values or valuing. In the next section, I will present the nature of a form of valuing that I call attachments. In the section after that, I show how attachments provide us with a different and promising angle from which to tackle questions (1) and (2) thereby enhancing our understanding of conflicts of values.

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Attachments “Attachment” is a semi-technical name for what could otherwise be called a form of valuing. As I shall use the term, attachments are specific configurations of volitions, cognitions, and emotions. Notions that are in the vicinity, if not interchangeable with “attachment” or “being attached to X” as used here, are “caring about X”, “X being important to one”, and “X being something that matters to one”. Hence, if Sally is attached to a specific religion, her religion or faith is something she cares about, something that matters or is important to her. Beside religions, we may have attachments towards items of all categories: particular objects (e.g. one’s house), pets, persons, projects, careers, practices, ideals, etc. My caring about something will manifest itself in many ways depending in large part on the nature of the object being cared about. I may for example admire it, desire it, pursue it, judge it good, preserve it, respect it, keep it secret, let it free, and so on. Importantly, however, displaying one or the other of these attitudes is not sufficient to warrant the claim that one cares about or is attached to something. Agents may desire something for its own sake and pursue it as a final end without caring about the thing or considering it of any importance. For instance, there are numerous more or less inconsequential pleasures, such as the desire for and the eating of an ice-cream that we seek entirely for their own sakes but that we do not truly care about at all (Frankfurt 1999: 158159). Frankfurt describes the attitude of caring about something as involving, among others, the following: A person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it. He identifies himself with what he cares about in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced. Thus he concerns himself with what concerns it, giving particular attention to such things and directing his behavior accordingly. Insofar as the person’s life is in whole or in part devoted to anything, rather than being merely a sequence of events whose themes and structures he makes no effort to fashion, it is devoted to this (1988: 83).

We are also told that caring cannot be like a whim. The type of action guidance that it provides “implies a certain consistency or steadiness of behavior and this presupposes some degree of persistence” (Frankfurt 1988: 84). Hence, deciding to care about something is not tantamount to caring about it nor is it a guarantee that one will care about it. Rather than to an act of will such as a decision, caring should be likened to the character of a person’s will. Frankfurt concludes that “the fact that someone cares about a certain thing is constituted by a com-

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plex set of cognitive, affective, and volitional dispositions and states” some of which are not generally under his immediate voluntary control (ibid.). I take these to be valid starting points for an analysis of attachment. In what follows, I qualify and elaborate some of these points, and, in particular start by putting some flesh on the idea that attachments are specific configurations of volitions, cognitions, and affections—or emotions, as I would rather call them—and then move to explore the link between attachments and identity. If Sally is attached to her religion, she devotes at least part of her life to it. In terms of volitions, this means, for example, that she would avoid certain choices and actions in order to make room for and abide by the activities constitutive of her religious practice, which she will then directly pursue. Some of the choices she foregoes represent things she would otherwise have chosen. And part of the things that she needs to pursue directly may involve choices that she would otherwise have foregone. To this extent caring about something may involve an element of sacrifice. In fact, one criterion enabling us to understand how much a person cares about something is precisely the sort of sacrifice she does in order to pursue what she cares about. This is one way to understand what Harry Frankfurt means when he writes that a person who cares about something is invested in it and, as I would add, has invested in it.123 Frankfurt, then, seems right when he claims that one should benefit or be vulnerable to, respectively, an enhancement or a diminishing of what one cares about. Hence, anything that Sally can consider as favourable to her religion, or her practice of it, is likely to affect her positively, just as any hindrance is likely to affect her negatively. The way we should understand the idea of being affected here merits further attention. Sally can be positively affected by eating a chocolate ice cream insofar as she finds it pleasant. But the positive impact at issue here is bound to be different both qualitatively and quantitatively. Rather than sheer sensory pleasure, the feelings at issue will be more along the range of reward, joy, accomplishment, fulfilment, and pride. Similarly, personal setbacks, say, in Sally’s capacity to follow religious precepts will be a source of sadness, preoccupation, guilt and shame, while more impersonal setbacks, such as the instating of a law forbidding the display of religious insignia in public space, may be experienced as a source of anger and indignation.

|| 123 This criterion, however, is not always a reliable indicator. A person may in fact care so much about something that she fails to even notice her foregoing things that she would otherwise have chosen and her accepting other things that she would otherwise have foregone.

136 | Raffaele Rodogno Note how these emotional occurrences also explain part of the structure of our volitions. Hence, when we feel (occurrences of) shame, guilt, pride, anger, etc. we will be disposed to do whatever these emotions typically dispose us to do, i.e., hide, make amends, show off, or aggress. So far I have emphasised the way in which caring about something can have an influence on a person’s volitional and emotional life. Attachments, however, will also have an impact on the structure of an individual’s cognition. The fact that we care about a certain project will tend to enhance or heighten our cognitive focus on the facts that are likely to influence the project one way or the other. These facts will simply be more salient for us, then they would have otherwise been had we not cared. Further, attachments can go as far as influencing a person’s normative view of the world. Sally will have a relevantly different normative view of the world than someone who is attached to another religion or to no religion at all. By this it is meant that different individuals with different attachments will likely cognize the same facts as being different reasons for actions. Hence, while Sally will cognize the anti-religion stance of a politician as a reason not to vote him (and will likely be angered and offended by his remarks), an atheist may well cognize (and, more generally, experience) this fact in different terms. To recap, attachments explain and in fact make intelligible much of the structure of a person’s affective, cognitive, and conative life. If this is correct, the step from a person’s attachments to her identity, at least in some sense of this complicated notion, is quite short.124 Hence, for example, if you would like to know or understand who Sally really is, what defines her as a person, you may get quite a good idea if you learnt that, say, all she really cares about are her children, her faith, and her country. Beside Frankfurt, a few philosophers have for some time discussed under different headings what I have discussed here under the heading of attachments and noted their connection with notions of identity and integrity. Bernard Williams, for example, used the term self-defining or ground projects, which he characterized as: ...those projects with which [the agent] is more deeply and extensively identified [and which he may] take seriously at the deepest level, as being what his life is about (1973: 116).

|| 124 See Rodogno (2012) for an exploration of the senses of ‘identity’ and a fuller treatment of the idea of attachment identity discussed above.

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Williams further argued that any external demand imposed on agents the pursuit of which conflicted with the agent’s own attachments would amount to a loss of integrity for the agent. Similarly, according to Gabriele Taylor, the link between integrity and identity lies in the idea that what an agent “thinks very worthwhile doing, and what he thinks very important no to do, contributes essentially to his being one sort of person rather than another” (1985: 108-109). Somewhat similarly, Elizabeth Ashford (2000: 422) takes Williams’ notion of integrity to denote a person’s unified sense of self, his self-conception. An agent loses his integrity when he is required to act and acts in a way that is contrary to what he deems important, contrary to those projects he identifies with, those projects that define what his life is about.

Conflicts of values—second pass We embarked on an analysis of attachments in order to answer two important questions regarding the nature of conflicts of values: (1) Why is the same failure to share some value at times experienced as a gulf, or even a large gulf, and at times experienced as a much more serious, personal attack? And (2), is the latter, more severe case really and correctly experienced as an attack on a persons’ moral standing as Scanlon would have it? Or is its special “personal character” more appropriately characterized in other terms? When a conflict arises with a non-believer, must Sally need to feel that the non-believer is failing to treat her as a person? The way in which the notion of attachment can help answer the first question should be quite evident by now. Conflicts, rather than mere experienced gulfs, are likely to arise when one’s attachments are being threatened in some way. If A deeply cares about the environment, he will not experience B’s prolonged attacks on imperiled species merely as a gulf between them but rather as deeply misguided, if not plain wrong, as actions that ought not to have been done. A will not just think that B is missing something: his relation with B will most likely be conflictual. In most circumstances, we would be very surprised to learn that A and B were friends, good co-workers or good neighbors. A will feel hostile and indignant towards B and will be disposed to express these feelings in the appropriate ways, by condemning B’s actions and having B punished, and by attempting to stop him in any way he saw fit given his circumstances (which include A’s other goals as dictated by his remaining attachments.). If the conflict is allowed to continue long enough hatred is likely to take root. Hatred is quite relevant to the study of conflicts, and hence worth a short mention here. It may be considered as a negative form of attachment. If hatred

138 | Raffaele Rodogno is allowed to come about, between A and B, there will occur not only a conflictual failure to share fundamental values but also a negative attachment on behalf of one of them to the other. This negative attachment has a particular structure. If A hates B, he will, for example, see the fact that something is in B’s interest as a reason not to pursue it or even actively to undermine it. This is quite different from, both, cases in which A is positively attached to (e.g. loves) B and cases in which A was indifferent to B. Similarly, A will feel joy at B’s misfortunes and pride at the idea of having personally contributed to them. To the extent to which this is possible with his other attachments, A will reorient his aims so as to be as destructive as possible towards B. The relevant destructive facts will be particularly salient to him. Another feature of attachments discussed before brings fully to the fore the nefariousness of hatred for conflict resolution. The idea here is that hatred is a form of attachment. As such it will be persistent. Just as deciding to care about something is not tantamount to caring about it nor is it a guarantee that one will care about, deciding to stop hating someone is not tantamount to stopping hating him nor is it a guarantee that one will stop hating him. That is enough about hatred. Let us go back to A and B and postulate this time that the environment is not something A is invested in. It is highly unlikely in this case that he will be hostile, indignant, let alone hateful with regard to B and B’s environmentally unfriendly actions. Note at this point, the difference between attachment as a form of valuing, and other forms of valuing. Even if A did not care much about the environment, he may still in some sense value it. He may for example judge that the natural environment is a good thing, or more likely, that it may be beautiful and, hence, the appropriate object of admiration. He will in these circumstances probably feel some distance between someone like him and someone like B, feeling that the latter is “missing something”, while at the same time not having much if any of the cognitive, emotional, and volitional reactions described as pertaining to A in the previous version of the example. Let us now move to question (2). It is clear from the analysis of attachments, that the latter are deeply personal things at least in some intuitive sense. They enjoy strong connections to questions of personal identity: the loss of someone we care about as a result of death or divorce will often involve renegotiating one’s identity. Similarly, losing touch with another person’s attachments will often lead us to ask how well we know this person, even if the latter were someone very familiar to us. Hence, at some point in their relationship (typically around the time children leave home), spouses are often quoted as wondering whether their partner is the same person they once married. Finally, being required to act somehow against those things one deems important (one’s at-

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tachments), may violate one’s integrity, i.e., another notion intimately connected to one’s identity. It comes as no surprise, then, that threats to one’s attachments be experienced as having a special personal character. While attachments do seem in line with Scanlon’s analysis in accounting for this personal aspect, they do not seem to suggest that the conflict be experienced in the terms suggested by Scanlon. To return to Scanlon’s own example, it does not seem that the believer, e.g. someone like Sally, will necessarily or even typically experience the nonbeliever’s denial as a failure to accord her value as a person. The challenge posed by the nonbeliever to Sally’s faith is likely experienced in a way that is as personal as an attack on her children. Similarly, having to accept situations in which her faith and its precepts are violated, may involve a loss of integrity similar to that of those parents who have to accept situations that involve diminished well-being for their children’s. What makes the conflict personal is that the attachment it threatens is something the person is deeply identified with. Scanlon’s account seems to shift the focus away from the real source of contention, i.e., the believer’s faith being under attack, to something that seems phenomenologically inaccurate and overintellectualized, i.e., her moral standing. To say that on the account on offer here conflicts of values are not typically experienced as denials of one’s moral standing is not to say that they are not experienced as inherently moral conflicts. At some level, they clearly are. This is not only the case for attachments such as one’s faith that are inherently and explicitly interwoven with moral precepts. The case of A and B and the environment discussed a few paragraphs above is a good illustration, as, unlike religions, in Western cultural contexts it is not something typically bound to moral discourse. Remember that on the account on offer here, values are accompanied by norms. A’s attachment to the environment is a form of valuing, which comes with norms such as “trees ought not to be burnt for fun”, “waterways ought not to be polluted”, etc. A will likely consider B’s actions as actively against the environment, transgressing its norms and, as such, bad, if not evil and plain wrong (while, at the same time B is not likely to perceive the situation in these terms). From A’s point of view, such actions are the appropriate object of indignation. They ought to be condemned and their perpetrators punished. This, I would say, is as moral an experience as one may ask for. Finally, we should say a few words about the connection between an account of conflicts of values such as this one that focuses on the psychological life of values, on the one hand, and accounts that focus on the more cultural aspects of conflicts. The two types of account should not be taken to be in competition. The idea that values have a psychological life, for example, is not at

140 | Raffaele Rodogno odds with the idea that a necessary condition for any value to exist is that relevant social practices exist (Raz 2003). While not necessarily leading to conservatism, conventionalism, or relativism (Raz 2003), this view makes room for the idea (1) that cultural contingencies have a role in determining the nature of the attachments (religious, non-religious, and if religious, of what kind) likely to be found within in a certain context; (2) that attachments are in some sense socially constituted; and (3) that specific groups will share and unite around specific attachments with which they will identify as a group. These features open interesting connections between the attachment account of value conflicts and accounts that rely on psychocultural narratives and identities (Ross, this volume).

Conclusion Values cannot as such conflict. In order to make sense of value conflicts we need to understand, first, the close relation between values and norms and, second, the psychological life of values, that is, they we value things. In particular, I argued that there is a specific form of persistent valuing that explains why failing to share values becomes conflictual and why such failures are experienced not merely as gulfs between the conflicting parties but as much more personal attacks. I have also illustrated the way in which these conflicts involve certain moral experiences and not others. Finally, I have pointed out the ways in which this account complements, rather than competes with, those accounts that focus on the objects of one’s valuing and, in particular, the conflictgenerating features of its norms, and those accounts that emphasize psychocultural narratives and identities.

References Ashford, E. (2000). Utilitarianism, Integrity and Partiality. The Journal of Philosophy, 97,421439. Eder, K, Giesen, B., Schmidtke, O. & Tambini, D., (2002). Collective Identity in Action. A Sociological Approach to Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Frankfurt, H. (1988). The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Frankfurt, H. (1999). Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Huntington, S (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 22-49. Kim, Young Yun & Dharm, P. (2008). Globalization and Diversity. Special Issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations 32.4.

Attachments and moral psychology | 141 Le Baron, M., Pillay, V. (eds.) (2006) Conflict Across Cultures. Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Raz, J. (2003). The Practice of Value. Oxford University Press, Oxford Rodogno, R. (2012). Personal Identity Online. Philosophy and Technology 25, 309-328 Scanlon, T. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Taylor, G. (1985). Pride, Shame, and Guilt. Emotions of self-assessment. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Williams, B. (1973). Utilitarianism, For and Against. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Daniel Druckman

CHAPTER SEVEN Doing conflict research through a multimethod lens125 There is a noticeable trend in the social sciences toward doing multi-method research. This trend is particularly evident in the more inter-disciplinary fields such as conflict management and resolution (Maoz et al., 2004; Druckman, 2005). The widespread desire among conflict scholars to embrace this approach is due in large part to the complexity of the problems confronting them as well as to the overlap with several other fields, each emphasizing a particular mode of inquiry. A full understanding of protracted conflicts depends on the insights gained from both comparative and case-specific research. Comparative methods have been developed and fine-tuned by political scientists working with aggregate data sets and by psychologists conducting replicated laboratory experiments. Case research has evolved from largely descriptive to analytical studies as political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists have recognized the need for more theory-based research on particular cases or regions. Both these research traditions are highlighted in this chapter. An attempt is made to survey the scope of methods used by conflict scholars along with examples of projects that illustrate the application. A goal of the chapter is to convey the value of using multiple, complementary methods for exploration. Recognizing the value of both the general and the specific, conflict analysts have addressed several issues concerning the foundations for doing research. One issue is the philosophical divide between positivism and constructivism. The former aligns more closely with traditional scientific approaches to knowledge accumulation; the latter is rooted in more subjective phenomenological approaches to understanding.126 Another issue is a preference for either quantitative or qualitative methods of exploration. Although part of this tension || 125 Reprinted with the permission from Berkovich 2008, 119-142. 126 Because of space limitations, this chapter does not review the valuable contributions made by constructivist researchers to methods for studying conflict. Studies on discourse analysis and grounded theory are particularly relevant. The interested reader should consult Cheldelin et al. (2008, Chapter 2) for a review of studies in this tradition. On discourse analysis, Winslade and Monk (2000) discuss their approach to the theory and practice of narrative mediation. On the rationale and application of grounded theory, see Strauss and Corbin (1990).

144 | Daniel Druckman resides in comfort with numbers or words, the more fundamental difference is between whether an investigator seeks the generality that comes from using a common yardstick for measurement or the depth of understanding that can emerge from a more nuanced study of a group or culture. A third distinction is between etic and emic approaches. For “etics,” a particular case of conflict is seen as an instance of a large class of conflict processes. For “emics,” a conflict is a unique event to be understood within its own context. Heated debates have turned on these sticking points. However, by considering each of these preferences as a particular aspect of doing research, the dualities break down and the seeds for a multi-method approach are sown. Many of the examples of research projects discussed show how both features of the divide inform the research process. Many conflict investigators collect data from the vantage points of object and subject. Observed behaviors or events are complemented by interviews that reveal perceptions, interpretations, and perspectives. Data collected in an aggregate form for statistical analysis are complemented by interpretations of the way a process plays out in sampled cases. A good deal of my own research travels between case and comparative analysis. For example, the concept of turning points in negotiation was discovered in single-case studies – using quantitative (Druckman, 1986) and qualitative (Druckman et al., 1991) methods of analysis. The concept was verified in a comparative, qualitative analysis of 34 cases (Druckman, 2001). These projects illustrate the mix of small-n (one or few cases) and large-N (many cases) approaches to research as well as combining quantitative with qualitative analyses. They also call attention to strengths and limitations of each of the methods, a theme that will be developed in the sections to follow. A variety of methodologies used in studies of conflict are discussed in this chapter. Many of these studies rely primarily on a particular methodological approach, which is usually an experiment, survey, or case study. A few more recent studies have combined two or more methods in the investigation. Both the single- and multiple-method approaches are discussed in the sections to follow. I begin with published examples of simulation experiments followed by modeling, surveys, case studies (single, time series, comparative), content analysis, and evaluation research. Each section includes a brief review of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Then, I proceed to give examples of the way that multiple methods are used together in several research projects. In these studies, the particular strengths of the different methods complement one another. This theme is carried forward in a concluding section. The discussion shows how the multimethod strategy has evolved to deal with the challenge of “compensating for weaknesses” in single- method studies of conflict.

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Doing Experiments A considerable amount of our knowledge about negotiation, mediation, and other small-group conflict processes come from laboratory experiments. Spurred on by the path-breaking experiments conducted on levels of aspiration by Siegel and Fouraker (1960) and on the development of social norms and trust by Deutsch and Krauss (1962), negotiation researchers have found this approach useful for isolating important variables (see Rubin and Brown, 1975, for a review of the early experimental studies on bargaining.) Examples are self– other orientations, distributive or problem-solving approaches, pre-negotiation experience, time pressure, constraints on representations, the role played by values and interests, alternative power configurations, alternatives to negotiated agreements, and task framing. With regard to mediation, we have learned about effects of different mediator approaches, the timing and functions of mediation, and the use of electronic aids in performing diagnoses and analyses of conflicts (see Carnevale and De Dreu, 2006, for a recent review of laboratory findings). In addition to constructing and refining theories, the experimental findings have been used in training contexts for developing negotiating skills (e.g. Druckman, 2006). Few researchers would deny that these studies have made important contributions. At the same time, few would claim that the laboratory findings encompass the complexities of many real-world conflicts. For methodologists, this is the trade-off between internal and external validity. I now turn to a discussion of this issue. Experiments have the distinct advantage of allowing researchers to infer causation with some degree of confidence. Referred to as internal validity, this is due essentially to three features of experimental design: random assignment of experimental subjects to conditions (groups, treatments), control by the experimenter over independent (or causal) variables, and replication of the experiments many times. Random assignment assures comparability of the groups (experimental and control conditions) being compared. Control groups decrease the chances that alternative (uncontrolled) variables explain the findings. Replication allows a researcher to assess variability or to judge whether the same finding re-occurs in repeated administrations of the experiment. These features also enable a researcher to use statistical tests in order to discover relationships between independent and dependent variables and to ascertain whether the relationships are due largely to chance. On the flip side of these advantages are problems that result from the very features essential to inferring causation. Highly controlled and compressedtime situations, needed to increase confidence in causal inference, create artifi-

146 | Daniel Druckman cial settings. The more controls instituted to reduce the plausibility of alternative explanations – or to increase internal validity – the less the experimental setting resembles other situations. The relatively homogeneous populations used in most experiments combined with contrived tasks and limited time periods pose threats to generalizability or external validity. The interesting challenge for researchers is to conduct studies in realistic settings (field or simulation) while retaining the analytical advantages of experimentation. This challenge calls for balancing the two validities in the design of studies. Examples of several balancing strategies are offered in the paragraphs to follow. Three strategies are comparing laboratory with field data, designing realistic laboratory simulations, and conducting randomized experiments in field settings. The comparison strategy is illustrated by the work of Hopmann and Walcott (1977) and Beriker and Druckman (1996). The former investigators explored the relationship between external stress and negotiating behavior in two settings, a simulation of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and in the actual negotiations. Convergences were found between the experimental and field results, indicating that stresses were dysfunctional for the negotiations: high stress produced greater hostility, harder bargaining strategies, and fewer agreements than low stress. The experimental findings showed that a highstress condition produced significantly fewer solutions than both a low-stress and neutral condition. This kind of controlled comparison is a strength of experiments; unlike the actual talks, the simulation provided for variation in outcomes. The comparison showed that low stress does not improve outcomes, but high stress hinders attempts to reach agreements. A similar type of comparison was made in the Beriker and Druckman study of the Lausanne peace conference in 1922–1923. An additional condition created for the simulation provided insights not likely to be obtained from an analysis of the actual talks. Negotiators in a weak power-symmetry condition were more satisfied with the outcome, achieved faster resolutions, disagreed less often, and made fewer competitive statements during the discussions than those in the other conditions. These studies illustrate an advantage of experiments: they allow for exploration of new conditions not present in the setting being simulated. Further, similarities found between the simulation and field bolster support for the external validity of the laboratory simulation. The realistic simulation strategy is illustrated by my study of situational levers. An attempt was made in that study to create “packages” of variables for each of four phases of a multilateral conference over environmental issues: prenegotiation planning, setting-the-stage, the give-and-take, and the endgame. The variables were drawn from a well-known framework of factors that influence negotiating processes (see Sawyer and Guetzkow, 1965). Hypotheses about

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flexible (or inflexible) negotiating behavior were evaluated by gearing the variables in the direction of more or less flexibility. Many of the hypotheses were confirmed. More importantly, however, the study shows how complexity can be incorporated in simulations. Comparisons were also made between different kinds of role-players in the simulation, scientists, and diplomats. Correspondences between the findings from these samples contribute further to the external validity of the experiment (see Druckman, 1993). An example of the randomized field experiment strategy is the study by McGillicuddy et al. (1987). This is a rare example of a field study that randomly assigned 36 disputant pairs and mediators to one of three experimental conditions: mediation without arbitration, mediators become arbitrators if the dispute is not settled (med/arb same), and a new party is appointed to be an arbitrator if the dispute is not settled (med/arb different). Strong differences were found between the conditions on process but not outcomes. The med/arb same condition disputants were less hostile, made more new proposals and more concessions, agreed more often with the other disputant, and were more satisfied with the outcome than disputants in the other two third-party configurations. The cooperative motivation shown by disputants in this condition may have been an attempt to discourage the mediator from arbitrating the competing claims. However, subject morality posed a threat to the internal validity of the experiment: 68% of the participants dropped out of the study before it was concluded. By showing that the distribution of dropouts was random across the three conditions, the threat to validity was not serious. This study is a good example of increasing the relevance of findings for real- world settings while retaining the analytical advantages of classical experimental designs. (See Pruitt, 2005b, for a review of field experiments on social conflict.)127

|| 127 Perhaps the earliest attempt to perform a field experiment on conflict resolution is the popular robbers cave study performed by Sherif and his colleagues (1961). Their demonstration of the positive impact of a superordinate goal has captured the popular imagination. The problem with the study is that it was a non-replicated demonstration experiment. The value of the study is that it stimulated a debate during the cold war about alternative strategies for reducing tensions as well as considerable research on the topic. (See Johnson and Lewicki (1969) for an example of earlier research; see Brown and Wade (2006) for a recent study on the concept. The research shows both positive and negative impacts of superordinate goals on resolving conflicts.)

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Modelling conflict processes For some conflict processes, it is possible to specify relationships between variables with precision. These specifications may take the form of models that are often evaluated with experiments. They may also depict outcomes that would have resulted if the conditions had been different. This is referred to as counterfactual analysis (see Sprinz and Wolinsky-Nahmias, 2004, pp. 369–371). Examples are solution concepts for two-person games, coalition formation, concessions in negotiation, and transition rates in conflict processes. Each of these examples is described in this section. The most popular solution concept for two-person games is the Nash equilibrium. The simplicity and elegance of this concept derives from the property that it minimizes the losses incurred by game players. It is a social norm in the sense that all players prefer this outcome to any alternative. It is calculated as the outcome that maximizes the product of the preferences of the two parties. Along with other solution concepts (see Avenhaus and Zartman, 2007; Guner and Druckman, 2000), this idea covers a wide range of choice situations where a person must decide between making an offer or remaining silent, voting for one candidate or another, or intervening versus standing aside. It has the feature of providing a parsimonious explanation for social behavior such as bystander apathy. (See Osborne, 2004, for this and other examples.) These concepts come to life in the sequence of players’ choices in different types of game structures. An old problem for students of politics is the decision to form a party coalition. And, perhaps the oldest idea about how to do this is the minimum winning coalition (Riker, 1962): this is a coalition consisting of only those parties needed to win. Further work extended this idea by adding policy positions to the model. Referred to as a minimum connected winning coalition, this model has been shown to be a better predictor of coalitions in some parliamentary systems (Axelrod, 1970). A more detailed version of the connected coalition was developed by dividing policies into their weighted parts, such as the relative importance of ideological and material values. This enlarged model was shown to predict coalition choices in laboratory simulations (Krause et al., 1975). Other modifications to the general formulation were introduced in order to account for decisions made by parties that challenge political regimes. The modifications consisted of dividing interests into two parts, asset complementarity and legitimacy as well as substituting a measure of “social comfort” for ideology. This model provided useful estimates of the likelihood that various alternative coalitions would form and challenge the incumbent regime.

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Another type of model was developed for capturing the exchanges that occur during a negotiation leading toward an agreement or impasse. The model consists of three parameters, the tendency to reciprocate, the tendency to make unilateral concessions or to initiate reciprocation, and the level of friendly feelings. It is evaluated by varying the values of these parameters and observing the timing and type of agreement reached. Using computer simulation, Bartos (1995) evaluated the relative merits of a concession exchange (distributive) and an informative search (integrative) approach to bargaining. This was done by having the computer generate a series or path of demands that each type of party (a distributive or integrative bargainer) would make. He concluded that the concession exchange process is faster, but the information search process may be more productive because it can increase the chances of getting an agreement. Many conflicts and negotiations pass through phases of antagonistic and cooperative behavior. A key challenge is to identify the transitions that occur between these phases. This challenge has been addressed by a form of modeling that captures the dynamics of conflict, referred to as stochastic processes. The models attempt to define the parameters that influence rates of transition from one state to another. Two parameters were highlighted by Coleman (1973): the transition rate at the time of an initiating event and the rate of decline. These parameters capture two processes. One refers to decay in rates of change as a function of time in a particular state: The longer a negotiation process remains in a state of cooperation, the lower the probability that it will move to a state of competition between the parties. The longer parties remain in a state, the less they attend to cues that may signal change in either process or relationship. The other process refers to the effects of a terminating event such as a deadline. When faced with an end-state, transitions increase over time in a systematic fashion. Data showing that rates of transition slow down with time from an initiating event – such as a cooperative move after a period of hostility – and speed up with time to a terminating event have implications for interventions aimed at moving parties out of antagonistic spirals. A number of other formal models of conflict processes have been shown to be useful. These include negotiation support systems, game and decisiontheoretic formulations, and system dynamics. For summaries and examples of application, the reader is referred to the book edited by Avenhaus and Zartman (2007). Vallacher and Nowak (2007) offer an interesting new approach to modeling social–psychological processes and mechanisms with implications for resolving intractable conflicts. Referred to as a dynamical systems model, this approach is useful for capturing both gradual and sudden changes that are likely to occur in the course of an unfolding conflict (Coleman et al., 2005). A

150 | Daniel Druckman related form of modeling is developed by Gabbay (2007). His non-linear approach to modeling captures the internal dynamics of small-group decision making with implications for the occurrence of turning points in complex international negotiations. Another recent modeling approach has been found to provide insights into factors that drive conflict-resolving processes. Referred to as machine learning, this approach uses decision-tree algorithms to sort through a variety of coded variables hypothesized to influence outcomes. It was shown to provide added value to statistical approaches, particularly with regard to contingent relationships among variables. The path-like features of the decision trees and the “ifthen” feature of the association rules can reveal hidden structures in the data. For example, Druckman et al. (2006) found that enlarged joint benefits occur when friendly parties discuss only a few issues or when they discuss many issues in an asymmetrical power structure. The authors considered this finding to be a refinement over those obtained with multidimensional scaling techniques. For discussions of a variety of other computer-aided methods for conflict analysis, see the chapters in Trappl (2006).

Collecting and analyzing survey data Survey research has played a less prominent role in the study of conflict processes. Two possible reasons are that survey data are often difficult to collect and sample surveys can be expensive to conduct. For many conflict zones, population registries are not available, respondents are difficult to contact, and attributions about the researcher’s intent lead to suspicions about how the data will be used. But, even when lists are available and respondents are eager to be of assistance, the costs can be prohibitive. Most probability samples require large numbers of respondents, many of whom must speak through interpreters. Without substantial support, surveys – unlike many of the other approaches discussed in this chapter – are difficult to implement. With proper support, surveys can provide valuable insights into the way people think about their group identities and the implications of those attachments for the course of a conflict and its settlement. A good example of this kind of survey is the recent study by Burn (2006). Burn implemented a survey of citizens in two countries, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Her team conducted face-to-face interviews with 753 citizens drawn from the most recent (1999) census in each country. Although these were not probability samples – in the sense that each citizen had the same chance of being chosen – a careful attempt was made to represent the demographic

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breakdown of groups. This was done by matching sample percentages with those in the population. For example, the census and sample breakdowns for ethnic groups in Kazakhstan was Kazakh (58% vs. 53%); Russian (23% vs. 22%); Uzbek (6 % vs. 13%); and other (13% vs. 11%). Representative samples have the advantage of ensuring that the key categories are included in the survey in proportion to the population; they have the disadvantage of over- or underrepresenting respondents from certain categories. The proportional representation approach to sampling used by Burn was a strength of the study. Not only did this sampling approach enable her to examine impacts of the varied group identities in each society, it also shed light on important theoretical questions about factors that facilitate or impede transitions to democracy. The survey methodology used by Burn enabled her to compare groups and to assess relationships between the theoretically relevant concepts. One set of hypotheses compared the strength of clan identities among various demographic categories. For example, she hypothesized that clan identity will be stronger in rural than in urban areas. People living in urban areas have more opportunities to identify with other groups. Another set of hypotheses examined relationships among variables. For example, strong clan identity is correlated with greater tolerance for authoritarian leaders; it is also correlated with less support for democratic institutions. Each of the variables was defined by indicators that could easily be represented by survey questions. For example, salience of clan identity was measured by answers to three questions – willingness to financially support clan members, voting preferences for clan members, and preferential treatment of clan members (compared to non-clan members). The survey questions on clan identity captured several aspects of identity including commitment, spread, durability, and salience. These were the intervening variables in a framework that connected clan expectations, roles, and behavior to political institutions. The survey data provided evidence about the constraining and facilitating roles played by group identities in the transition of political systems. Surveys are useful for gathering information about defined populations. For some issues, all members of the population can be interviewed. An example is Birkhoff’s (2001) study of mediators’ perspectives on power. She mailed surveys to each of the members of the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (SPIDR), which were considered to be a population of professional mediators. Although her return rate was only 37%, she was able to show that this “sample” represented the membership on key demographic variables. In this study, the “sample” was defined by the returns rather than by random selection from population lists. The responses to her questions suggested an interesting taxonomy of the varied meanings of power in practice. Other research questions that would benefit from surveys include the extent of polarization on values within

152 | Daniel Druckman societies, the spread and durability of group or national identity, and changes in perceptions of relationships with other societies following such interventions as problem-solving workshops. Panel (repeated) surveys would be particularly useful for gauging changes in attitudes through time. Conducting surveys in conjunction with other methodologies may be useful for linking micro- (smallgroup interactions) with macro- level (societal trends) processes.

Performing case studies Case studies come in several forms, ranging from the single case to a large number of cases used for making comparisons. In my earlier work, I distinguished among four approaches: the enhanced case study, time-series analysis, focused case comparisons, and aggregate or large-N case comparisons. (See Druckman (2002; 2005) for a comparison of features of these approaches.). Each approach has both strengths and weaknesses. The issues are depth (enhanced case study) versus breadth (time series and aggregate methods), control for internal validity (focused comparison) versus robust sampling for external validity (aggregate), and cross-sectional (aggregate) versus longitudinal analyses (time series). Used together, the weaknesses of one approach – for example, limited sampling of the focused comparison method – can be offset by the strengths of another, for example, representative sampling for comparative case studies. I will return to this issue in the final section on multi-methods. Studies that illustrate each type of case-based approach are discussed in this section. Enhanced case studies. This research approach consists of viewing a case through the lens of a theoretical framework. Key concepts are used to interpret the way a conflict process unfolds or how it is resolved. Many published analyses of negotiation and mediation use this approach: examples are Haskel’s (1974) use of the concept of power symmetry/asymmetry to understand Scandinavian market negotiations, Winham’s (1977) emphasis on issue complexity as the primary challenge in multilateral trade talks, and the studies by Cameron and Tomlin (2000) and Druckman et al., (1991) on turning points in NAFTA and the INF talks respectively. The books edited by Rubin (1981), Zartman, (1994), and Cohen and Westbrook (2000) provide examples of how particular cases – Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, European Community talks, Bronze-Age diplomacy with Egyptian pharaohs – can be viewed from a variety of theoretical perspectives, such as game, decision, coalition, or leadership theories. The evaluations of various theory-derived hypotheses about choices made in the Crimean (Gochal and Levy, 2004) and Vietnam (Walker, 2004) wars are good examples of enhanced case studies on successful and failed strategies to manage conflict.

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My 1995 study with Green (Druckman and Green, 1995) on negotiations between the Philippines Aquino regime and the National Democratic Front shows the relevance of the concept of “ripeness” for decisions to negotiate and “formula” for opportunities discovered or squandered during the process of negotiating. Further insights into that negotiating process came from superimposing concepts from the literature on the sociology of conflict, particularly with regard to the interplay between values and interests, onto the unfolding discussions (see also the other case studies of internal conflict in Zartman, 1995). These enhanced case studies call attention to the relevance of theory for capturing the essential processes of complex cases. They do not, however, provide sound explanations for relationships among variables in the conflict setting, process, or outcome. Explanatory goals are addressed by the comparative methods to be discussed in the sections to follow. Time-series analysis. This approach to analysis captures the dynamics of conflict processes. It consists of a family of techniques that analyzes a sequence of events that occur over a relatively long period of time in the context of one or more cases. The techniques include experimental before–after comparisons, correlation/regression analyses of trends, probability forecasting, and qualitative process tracing. An example of each of these applications is provided in this section. Before and after comparisons of trends are illustrated by our study of mediation during the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh (Mooradian and Druckman, 1999). Nearly 4000 events from 1990–1995 were coded on a six-step scale ranging from significant action toward peace (+3) to significant violence directed at an adversary (−3). A time-series of monthly violence scores was compared six months before and six months after each of the six mediations; none of the comparisons were statistically significant. A significant change did occur, however, between the months preceding and following the period of intensive combat between April 1993 and February 1994. These results lend support to the hypothesis that a mutually hurting stalemate is a condition for getting warring parties to the table to negotiate a cease fire. Since then, the violence has subsided although the issues that gave rise to the conflict have not been resolved. (See also Druckman, 2002, for the distinction between settlements and resolutions of conflicts.) Another attempt to explore the effects of mediation on violence is the study by Schrodt and Gerner (2004). Using various indices of cooperation and competition, they examined ten cases of mediated dyadic conflicts. For each conflict, they cross-correlated mediator behavior with the level of violence over time. This technique is useful for examining long-term, time-delayed effects of interventions. Of particular interest is their finding about the sticks-or-carrots issue:

154 | Daniel Druckman Is mediation more or less effective when mediators use rewards (including side payments) or coercive measures such as sanctions? Their technically sophisticated machine-coding approach to analysis produced a complex, contingent finding: violence was reduced when mediation was accompanied by both coercive measures and by cooperative incentives directed at the weaker party in the dyad. Probability forecasting with Bayesian techniques is illustrated by asking whether a peace agreement will hold through time. Probabilities can be estimated from historical data showing that agreements hold for at least five years in one third of the cases examined. The question is whether this is sufficient information for projecting the longevity of future agreements. The Bayesian answer is that other factors, referred to as conditional probabilities, must also be taken into account. Examples of these factors are spoilers, schisms between parties, regime continuity, international pressure, and availability of arms. Probabilities for each factor can be provided by expert panels. For example, the experts agree that international pressure to sustain an agreement results in a .7 probability that the agreement will hold and a .2 chance that it will fall apart. When these estimated probabilities are inserted into the Bayesian formula (see Frei and Ruloff, 1989), the result is a revised estimate of longevity. This estimate is regarded as an update from the historical record. In this example, longevity is increased from .33 (based only on the record) to .63 (when pressures are taken into account). However, when all of the factors are included together, the revised probability of .30 is virtually the same as the historical probability of .33. This is because the factors have offsetting effects, some favoring, and others hindering the durability of agreements. Qualitative time-series often takes the form of process tracing. This consists of searching an historical record of events for evidence about whether an hypothesized process did or did not occur. An example is the paths developed from cases of negotiation in my study of turning points (Druckman, 2001). Focusing on departures in trends, I traced the relationship between causes, referred to as precipitants, and consequences following the occurrence of a departure, known as a turning point. Paths were traced for each of three types of negotiations, those over security issues, environmental concerns, and trade matters. The case-specific paths were combined by discovering the most frequent precipitant (inside or outside the negotiation), departure (abrupt or nonabrupt), and consequence (escalatory or de-escalatory). A particularly interesting finding is that outside factors were needed for departures in the security while inside factors (either new ideas or procedures) were usually the cause of change for the environmental and trade cases. An explanation for this differ-

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ence is that security negotiators are more averse to risk than their counterparts in the other areas. An interesting application of this three-part framework is Dougherty’s (2006) study of social movements in Northern Ireland. Her detailed historical traces of the school integration movement provided insights into the factors that precipitate the transformation of social conflicts. The link between collective action and transformation was shown to turn on the development of a critical mass of key members of the movement. Other examples of the tracing of conflict dynamics are Carstarphen’s (2003) analysis of dialogues about prejudice among small groups of men from different backgrounds and Pruitt’s (2005a) chain analysis of two cases, the Northern Ireland peace process and the talks between Israel and the PLO in Oslo. Focused case comparisons. Another enhancement to the traditional case study is the structured, focused case comparison. Similar to the enhanced case study discussed earlier, the focused comparison uses theory to guide case selection and analysis. Unlike the single-case study, a focused comparison consists of a matching of similar cases. It is an attempt to impose the logic of experimentation on a small number of cases. (See Faure’s 1994 discussion of the Most Similar Systems Design [MSSD].) One of the early examples of application is Putnam’s (1993) comparison of a northern and southern Italian province in terms of a number of performance indicators. The provinces were similar in most aspects of their political systems. They differed only in terms of economic development, with the north outpacing the south, and the development of a civic culture. These were the independent variables in the focused comparison. If, as Putnam argued, the provinces differed only on economic and civic development, then either or both of these variables can be used as an explanation for differences in performance. Using partial correlation, he showed that civic culture was the better explanation: When levels of civic culture were controlled, economic development made little difference in performance. These results produced an interesting debate about alternative explanations (see Tarrow, 1996). Indeed, it is the suggestive implications of focused comparisons that contribute to the refinement of theory. Further examples of the approach come from studies on conflict management. One of these studies is Allen Nan’s (1999) analysis of coordination among conflict-resolving organizations. The research focused on processes of complementarity and coordination among NGOs in three former Soviet republics: Abkhasia, South Ossetia, and Transdniestria. These cases were matched on types of disputing parties, interests, time, and power. A key difference however was whether they initiated a process of long-term unofficial facilitated joint analysis among negotiators (LUFJAAN) of the contending groups: only Abkhasia did not

156 | Daniel Druckman entertain this process. The cases differed also on the key dependent variable, progress toward a cease fire. Progress occurred in South Ossetia and Transdniestra, but not in Abkhasia. Because the cases were carefully matched on other variables, she inferred that there was a relationship between the LUFJAAN process (the independent variable) and the reduction of violence toward a ceasefire agreement (the dependent variable). Additional coding of the South Ossetia negotiations by Irmer and Druckman (2009) revealed that the process consisted of more problem solving than competitive bargaining statements, leading to comprehensive (rather than partial) outcomes. Further analyses showed that trust between the negotiators increased through the course of the talks. These effects may have resulted from the long-term facilitation process used in this case as documented by Allen Nan. Considered together, the two studies illustrate the value of combining methods, MSSD and statement coding. Another small-n case-study approach emphasizes differences rather than similarities between cases. Referred to by Faure (1994) as the Most Different Systems Design (MDSD), this approach is useful for developing typologies. An example is Weiss’ (2002) study of mediator sequencing strategies. Three cases of peace processes were used as exemplars of alternative sequencing approaches: gradualism (Mozambique), boulder in the road (El Salvador), and committee (Angola). Content analyses of the negotiation process in each case confirmed the approach used and identified a number of factors that distinguished among them, for example, type of most contentious issue, type of reasoning, trust building, and ripeness in the process. These factors were used to construct a profile for each of the three types of mediator sequencing strategies. Another MDSD study, conducted by Druckman and Lyons (2005), compared Mozambique with Nagorno Karabakh. The different profiles for these cases resembled the distinction – made by Galtung (1969) – between negative (Nagorno Karabakh) and positive (Mozambique) peace. Additional coding showed that the cases differed also on various indicators of distributive (competitive) and integrative (problem- solving) bargaining. Further insights about these cases emerge when we consider findings obtained in other, related studies. Concerning Mozambique, the gradualist mediation strategy discovered by Weiss may have encouraged problem-solving and forward-looking rhetoric coded by Druckman and Lyons (2005) and by Irmer and Druckman (2009). Concerning Nagorno Karabakh, the 1994 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan (see Mooradian and Druckman, 1999) may have led to the distributive bargaining process and partial, cease fire outcome also coded by Irmer and Druckman (2009). The larger picture for these cases emerges from studies that employed several meth-

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odologies – MDSD, content analysis, and interrupted time series. I will return to the topic of complementary methods in the sections to follow. Aggregate case comparisons. Comparative case studies are also performed across a large number of different cases. Referred to as the method of concomitant variation (Faure, 1994), large-N case studies are another form of MDSD. Unlike the controlled comparisons discussed in the previous section, these studies consist of sampling of cases from a larger universe. When carefully done, the sampling increases confidence in the generality (or external validity) of the findings. Random sampling of cases from a defined universe reduces the possibility of selection biases (or self-selection) which pose the dilemma of alternative explanations for findings (see Sprinz and Wolinsky- Nahmias, 2004, pp. 368–369). The large number of cases also increases the scope of the comparisons and permits the use of statistical techniques for evaluating relation- ships among variables. This tradition of case- based research in international relations can be traced to McClelland’s (1976) analyses of the World Events Interaction Survey. In anthropology, this tradition has been strongly influenced by Murdock’s (1957) World Ethnographic Sample and by Whiting and Child’s (1953) cross-culture analyses of child training. It has been refined by Naroll (1962) and by the authors in Naroll and Cohen’s (1973) handbook. Building on these foundations, the method has gained popularity in research on conflict management. Parallel aggregate case research streams have been developed by Bercovitch and collaborators on international mediation and by Druckman and associates on negotiation. The former have compiled a useful data set of 333 international conflicts since 1945. A variety of coded features include information about the parties, the conflict, and the conflict management agents. Guided by a conceptual framework that connects these categories, the authors have identified conditions influencing mediation success. Their statistical analyses make evident contingent relationships between independent (concerning the dispute, the parties, the mediation process, and the mediator) and dependent (mediation success) variables. For example, short conflicts with few fatalities are more amenable to mediation than other kinds of disputes; conflicts involving parties with the same amount of power are more likely to be successfully mediated than conflicts between parties that differ in power or available resources (Bercovitch and Trappl, 2006). Further aggregate analyses of mediation showed that third parties were more likely to be used in complex (many issues) negotiations (Druckman, 1997). The large-n analyses of international negotiations have also produced a number of interesting findings. A key dimension that ran through 23 negotiation cases was whether the talks were bilateral or multilateral. More treaties result from talks with a smaller number of parties (Druckman, 1997). In an analysis of

158 | Daniel Druckman 30 cases of negotiation sampled from a listing of 176 cases in the Pew Case Studies in International Affairs, Druckman et al., (1999) found that the cases were distinguished in terms of a well-known typology of negotiation proposed by Iklé (1964): profiles of features differed depending on whether the talks were primarily distributive, integrative, normalizing, extension, or side effects. Another analysis examined turning points that occurred in 34 cases, distinguished in terms of issue area – security, trade, or environmental. The most frequently occurring trigger for the security cases was an external event, such as thirdparty assistance; triggers of turning points were from within the talks (as substantive or procedural decisions) in the trade and environmental cases. These differences highlight the risk-averse approaches taken by negotiators in the area of security (Druckman, 2001). Risk aversion is also highlighted in the Ember and Ember (1992) study of resource security and warfare in 186 societies (using the Human Relations Area Files). They showed that fear of others and of nature were the strongest predictors of war. Specifically, fear of the future rather than current problems of scarcity appeared to be the primary motive for war. Warfare was used for plundering resources in order to protect against an uncertain future. Interesting findings about conflict have been obtained also from a number of other aggregate case studies. Diehl et al., (1998) multidimensional scaling of expert judgments showed that different types of peacekeeping missions clustered around two dimensions, roles and processes. Peacekeepers in some missions played primary roles (e.g. collective enforcement, state/nation building). In other missions (e.g. election supervision, arms control verification), they are third parties. Missions characterized primarily by distributive processes include collective enforcement, sanctions enforcement, and pacification. Those where integrative or problem-solving processes are emphasized include election supervision, nation building, and observation. These findings contribute to the development of taxonomies with implications for training. Compelling findings about the factors that lead to the initiation (but not the duration) of ethnic conflict within societies were reported by Gurr and his colleagues (2005). Their sophisticated statistical analyses produced a probability (odds ratio) ordering of various drivers of internal conflict: state-led discrimination, ethnic diversity, regime type, spillover or neighborhood effects, recency of ethnic wars, and youth bulge. Similar factors were shown to drive conflict in predominantly Muslim societies. This study is notable for the careful analyses performed as well as the policy implications derived. Factionalism, more than regime type, led to a larger risk of ethnic conflict. This suggests the strategy of institutionalizing political participation in a manner that cuts across communal lines with policies aimed at easing discrimination against minorities. Another

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implication from the findings concerns transitions to democracy. The authors suggest that attempts to democratize autocratic regimes in Muslim countries increase the short-term risks of political instability. This would seem to be a result of the persisting influence of under-development and being in “bad neighborhoods.” Another recent aggregate case analysis with policy implications was performed by Downs and Stedman (2002). They were interested in the factors that influenced the successful implementation of peace agreements negotiated during the early 1990s. Specifically, they examined the relative impact on the implementation outcome of the difficulty of the conflict environment and the willingness of other states to intervene in the conflict. A difficulty index was constructed as an aggregate score of eight measured factors: for example, the number of warring parties, hostile neighboring states, number of soldiers, wars of secession. A willingness index was composed of three factors – major or regional power interest, resource commitment, and acceptance of risk to soldiers. These indices were regressed on an implementation outcome judged as a success, partial success, or failure. The difficulty index was a stronger predictor of outcomes than the willingness index: a partial correlation of −.66 between difficulty and outcome actually increases to−.76 when willingness is controlled; the correlation between willingness and outcomes is .33. The key factors in the conflict environment were the existence of a spoiler, the presence of disposable resources, and a neighboring state hostile to the agreement. Taking the Downs-Stedman analyses a step further, Druckman and Albin (2008) included the extent to which each of these cases included principles of distributive justice in the text of the agreement: each document was coded for the number of principles included – equality, proportionality, compensation, need. They found that justice moderated the relationship between difficulty and the implementation outcome: the more justice principles included in the agreement, the less severe the effects of difficult environments. Justice principles can offset the negative effects of the conflict environment; they can also reinforce the positive effects of an environment that is more conducive to peace. These findings were bolstered by the results of complementary qualitative (focused comparisons) analyses and will be revisited in the section below on multimethod research. The four case-study approaches entail somewhat different data requirements. For enhanced case studies, detailed descriptive information is needed. Event chronologies must be developed for both qualitative and quantitative time series. Comparable units must be constructed for matched-cases in focused comparisons and generic codes (e.g. cooperation–competition scales) are essential for aggregate analyses. These data and measurement requirements turn on

160 | Daniel Druckman the availability (and quality) of information. Often, the information comes from archival sources such as the Pew Case Studies in International Affairs (1999). Missing from most archival documentation, including the Pew cases, is a common framework that organizes the diverse case material for analysis. This shortcoming was noted by the authors in the special issue on data sets edited by Telhami (2002). They recognized the value of conceptual frameworks that capture processes, dynamics, structures, relationships, and issue areas for analyses of negotiation in particular but also for studies of conflict management more generally. Such frameworks should guide (primary analysis) rather than follow (secondary analysis) data collection. With the advent of web-based technologies, case researchers can access information directly from conflict actors, even before settlements or resolutions have occurred, reducing their reliance on secondary analyses of information gathered at an earlier time for other purposes (Druckman, 2002). The discussion of documentation continues in the next section.

Analyzing documents Documents are important sources of material about conflict and conflictresolving approaches. Often they are the primary source of information about a conflict that occurred in the past. They come in many forms including speeches given by leaders or group representatives, conversations held between negotiators, and events or activities observed by scholar-researchers. The quality of the documentation varies with the extent to which it captures what was actually said or presented: transcripts of speeches or conversations are more valuable for analysis than documents based on observers’ judgment of what occurred. Both types of documentation, first and second-person, have been used for qualitative and quantitative content analyses of relationships between conflict processes and outcomes, as well as for assessing the impacts from interventions on the course of a conflict. The content analysis studies discussed in this section provide examples of applications on several topics. An important contribution of content analysis is to the comparative analysis of conflict processes. Comparison is facilitated when the same categories are used to code conversations among disputing parties or their representatives in different negotiations. Recorded conversations between negotiators were the material used for coding labor – management disputes (Landsberger, 1955), religious conflict (McGrath and Julian, 1963), industrial wage negotiations (Stephenson et al., 1977), arms control talks (Bonham, 1971; Jensen, 1984), base rights negotiations (Druckman, 1986), and a variety of laboratory simulations

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(Zechmeister and Druckman, 1973; Pruitt and Lewis, 1977; Beriker and Druckman, 1996). Many of the coding systems used in these studies evolved from Bales’ (1950) interaction process analysis. The changes reflect differences between problem-solving and negotiation groups, particularly with regard to the mixed-motive (cooperative and conflictual) features of negotiation. These features are captured in the popular coding system known as bargaining process analysis (BPA). A sampling of findings from these studies follows. The BPA system has been used to evaluate a number of hypotheses in a variety of cases. Hopmann’s (1978) analysis of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe showed that threat potential (how much a country stands to lose by no agreement) influenced the outcome (portion of the text authored by each member state). Exercising their right to use a veto over the agenda, the more powerful parties effectively prevented unfavorable decisions from being made. They acted together to preserve their joint interest in domination over their blocs and the nonaligned states. On the other hand, countries with low threat potential (Yugoslavia, Romania, France) became somewhat influential by acting together on the basis of their common interest to change the prevailing structures. Further evidence for super-power dominance – or structural asymmetry – comes from King’s (1979) study of the UN Special Session on Disarmament and from a study of the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks discussed by Druckman and Hopmann (2002). Both these studies provided content- analysis evidence for a “bilateral condominium” between US and Soviet negotiators: they were more responsive to each other than to any of their allies. Many of these BPA studies were included in a multi-case analysis of responsiveness by Druckman and Harris (1990). These researchers found that a particular model, referred to as comparative reciprocity, best captured the way that bargainers responded to each other. Bargainers responded to each other’s moves in similar ways across a variety of types of security talks: different parties, issues, time periods, and length. This study demonstrates the value of content analysis for creating data points in a time series used for comparative analyses. The BPA system has also been used to compare processes in historical negotiations with those that take place in a laboratory simulation of those talks. The study by Beriker and Druckman (1996) compared the way bargainers reached agreements in the peace talks at Lausanne following WWI with student-role players of those diplomats. Content analysis of the Turkish-language transcripts of the official talks and the taped conversations of the laboratory bargainers produced several interesting findings. For example, the enhanced competitiveness of the Turkish delegates on issues in which they were part of a coalition (compared to issues when they were a single party facing a coalition) was re-

162 | Daniel Druckman produced in the simulation. An additional finding from the laboratory was that more agreements occurred when equally weak parties (Turkey and Greece) negotiated. In another BPA comparison of a real-world and simulated case, Ozcelik (2004) found similar differences between asymmetrical and symmetrical power configurations in the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change and a simulation of those talks. Using a different coding system – messages coded for hostility and attacks on the motives of the other side – Bonham (1971) demonstrated that the experimentally induced differences between parties about the relative importance of two disarmament issues resulted in greater negative affect and hostility, fewer concessions, less reciprocation, and fewer agree- ments in a simulation of the 1955 trilateral (USA, Soviet Union, United Kingdom) UN Disarmament Subcommittee. These studies illustrate a contribution of content analysis to simulation validity. As is apparent from the studies reviewed above, content analysis has made many contributions to our understanding of negotiation processes. This may be due, in large part, to the quality of public documentation available for many cases. It is also due to the efforts that have been made to develop reliable and valid coding systems tailored to this kind of interaction. Add to this the care that has been taken to insure a systematic procedure, and the ingredients for a successful study are in place. (See Druckman, 2005, Chapter 9 for a checklist of steps in performing content analysis.) However, valuable contributions can be made with less precise documentation. An example is the study by Irmer and Druckman (2009) on comparative peace processes. Instead of coding words or sentences, she developed scales to capture such dimensions as distributive or integrative bargaining processes. The scales were better suited to the more interpretive material available on these cases. Strong relationships between processes and outcomes across 30 cases were demonstrated. Another contribution comes from researchers who have developed more complex approaches to coding. These include Roberts’ (1997) semantic text analysis, Donohue and Roberto’s (1993) negotiated order approach, and the various forms taken by narrative or discourse analysis (Riessman, 1993). Each of these approaches is intended to capture more nuanced communication from the text with an eye on deeper meaning. They are also suited to the concepts that emanate from more complex theories of communication.

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Evaluating interventions Conflict management is both a theoretical and an applied field. Many of the methods reviewed to this point in the chapter are suited to addressing theoretical issues or debates. They also consist of tools that can be used to evaluate interventions designed to settle or resolve conflicts. Several tools—both quantitative and qualitative applications—are often combined in the course of an evaluation project. The interventions include a variety of conflict domains and conflict resolution approaches: for example, formal and informal mediation, facilitation and interactive conflict resolution, peace-keeping missions, peacebuilding programs, transformative and structural interventions, and humanitarian programs implemented by non-governmental organizations. In this section, I discuss the challenges of evaluating interventions and provide examples of how evaluation projects are done. A first challenge is to answer the question: What is being evaluated? An intervention can be a single, well-defined treatment such as an electronic mediation delivered at the time of a negotiation impasse. It can also consist of a family of procedures such as a peacekeeping mission. The former type of intervention is easier to evaluate; comparisons with a no-treatment control group facilitate causal inference. The latter presents the larger challenge of ascertaining the contributions of different parts of the package. Another distinction is between case-specific and generic evaluations. Programs designed for implementation in specific schools, communities, or regions are evaluated in the context of those institutions or organizations. Administrators and policy makers are concerned about local impacts: Does it work? Much of the peer-mediation literature consists of program- specific evaluations. A more theoretical approach to evaluation is taken by those investigators (and practitioners) interested in types of interventions. The concern here is with generality: Does the approach of interactive conflict resolution work? This question is addressed with accumulated cases in a comparative research design. The single, well-defined intervention facilitates attempts to infer causation between the administration of the intervention and its impact on processes or outcomes. A second challenge asks about effectiveness. This includes addressing the summative (impact) question: Did it work? It also includes the formative question: How did it work? Summative evaluations turn on the distinction between short- and long-term impacts. A reduction in violence or stabilization may last only as long as the peacekeeping forces remain in the country. School violence may erupt again sometime after the peer mediation programs have ended. This reversal calls attention to the need to monitor situations for some time after the

164 | Daniel Druckman intervention. They raise questions about whether to return or to alter the approach taken by the initial mission or program. Formative evaluations ask about the reasons for success or failure of interventions. Alternative explanations for outcomes often emerge. For example, an increased number of court cases investigating corrupt practices suggest that the rule of law has been restored. They may also suggest that the level of corruption remains high despite the efforts of the peace-building team. School peer-mediation programs may reduce violence because of the climate created by their implementation rather than the specific techniques used. Explaining the reason for observed impacts is important. It helps evaluators understand why impacts occur and to re-consider the way their interventions are delivered. A third challenge refers to the dynamics of interventions. The popularity of a contingency approach to conflict analysis is based on the observation that situations and perceptions change. Intervention may have different effects at different stages of a resolution process. Negotiation research has shown that situational influences change from one stage of the talks to another (Druckman, 1993). At different stages, particular aspects of the situation seem to cause the way a negotiation (or conflict) process moves – often abruptly – from a sequence of escalatory moves to de-escalation (Zartman, 2000). These observations call attention to the idea that interventions may be moving targets analyzed with interrupted time-series research designs (see the section above on time-series analysis). The dynamics challenge is met when the evaluation produces time and situation-specific effects for the interventions. An added bonus would be a comparison to no-intervention “controls.” These challenges raise issues about the value of evaluations. They are practical concerns for the client or sponsoring organization. They are also research concerns for the evaluator who is keen on making a more lasting contribution to the field. The practical concerns include a clear definition of the intervention or program being evaluated, identification of the stakeholders and their interests, developing both summative and formative indicators, assembling a team with an appropriate division of labor, providing briefings and draft reports that are sensitive to the political environment in which the evaluation is conducted, and insuring that the recommendations are implemented. Clarity in defining the intervention is also a concern for researchers. But, in addition, sampling, control groups (including a matched “treatment”– no treatment comparison), and monitoring effects over time for assessing change are important considerations. A layer of complexity is added to evaluations when interventions conducted at a micro-level (interactions among disputants) are evaluated for impact at a macro-level (societal changes). This problem is illustrated by evaluations of problem-solving workshops, where assessments of attitude change at a micro-

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level are linked to assessments of public opinion at a macro-level (Rouhana, 2000). A question of interest is whether changes in workshops surface in larger changes in their respective populations. A technical challenge is to insure proper time lags to infer causality: long enough to allow for transfer from the workshops to the societies but not so long as to put other influences on societal opinions into play. A number of the research methods discussed in the sections above can be used together in a complementary fashion: for example, pre/posttest comparisons for attitude changes at the micro-level, sample surveys for public opinion assessment, time series for monitoring changes in public attitudes, and Bayesian techniques for updating probability estimates based on changes in situations or the introduction of new interventions. Evaluations can be performed in a variety of ways. Useful recommendations can be made from the application of less- rigorous approaches to research design. One of these approaches is referred to as action research. Like other forms of evaluation research, this approach seeks to provide recommendations (action plans) for organization or community change. Unlike evaluation research, it promotes close collaboration between investigators and organization/community members in all phases of the research process. The participants in the research do not simply provide information to the researchers; they influence the direction taken by the project by designing the change, observing what happens following the change, reflecting on these processes and consequences, and planning further action (Kemmis and Wilkinson, 1998). The emphasis of these activities on process places action research in the realm of formative evaluation. The central role played by the consumers of the project and its products renders this approach different than other formative evaluations. Although there is considerable flexibility in the way an action project is implemented, most are guided by a sequence of tasks discussed by Bassey (1998), Robson (2002), and Druckman (2005). Senehi’s (2002) idea of constructive storytelling resonates with the connection between social change and conflict intervention. Stories are regarded as being accessible, fluid, vivid, and powerful forms of expression that can bring disputants together; but they can also be divisive. By incorporating storytelling activities into action research projects, participants may acquire insights that compel them to take action. Another application of the action-research approach to resolving conflicts has been made by Rothman (1997) in an Israeli training context (see also Ross and Rothman, 1999, for a perspective on both action and evaluation research). Although not made explicit by its practitioners, the goals and procedures used for implementing problem-solving workshops may be considered as action research. An emphasis on social change is reflected in the shared goal of contributing to the resolution of resolving bitter conflicts

166 | Daniel Druckman between participants’ countries. The idea of involving workshop members in – or at least being transparent about – all phases of the activities is intended to enhance their desire for change, reduce divisions among them, and encourage them to promote change in their societies. Lacking, however, in these and many of the other action research projects is evidence on effectiveness from the standpoint of both formative and summative criteria. Other forms of applied research on conflict come under the rubric of research consulting. This refers to projects driven by problems defined by clients. The analytical consultants on many of these projects are asked to perform a variety of roles. For example, four roles were implemented on a recent consulting project. The problem consisted of development of a framework for organizing the various parts of complex inter-governmental negotiations. The role of advisor turned into that of bridge-builder (between the consulting/policy and academic communities) as the lead investigator sought input from academic specialists familiar with frameworks and with specific cases. The tasks involved theoretical knowledge and technical skills. The former was needed to identify key features of negotiation and to organize them into a framework that connected them in space and through time. The latter role involved reliability testing, refinement, developing weighting procedures, and performing analyses. The product was transmitted to the client in the form of a report that emphasized applications of the framework to familiar cases of negotiation. Training in a variety of methodological approaches goes a long way toward producing a useful product. It is also useful for making contributions to theory in the field of conflict analysis. I turn next to a discussion of the value of multi-method research.

Research conducted through a multi-method lens It is clear from the discussion that a variety of methodological approaches have been used to analyze conflict. Only a few of these studies have employed several methods. Researchers in this field have not, for the most part, taken advantage of the complementarities that exist among the various approaches to doing research. This is evident as well in the chapters written for the Maoz et al. (2004) book on different methodological approaches to the study of mediation and conflict management. Each author illuminates the value of a particular approach used to address research questions in the field. The approaches include game theory, simulation, large-N statistical analyses, and historical case stud-

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ies.128 In his concluding essay, Stoll (2004) describes the strengths and weaknesses of each approach but laments the state-of-the-art by noting that: “Research that relies on any one approach is usually inferior to research that makes use of several methods” (2004, 360). He adds “that it is a rare situation where one method is so superior that the others can safely be ignored” (2004, 360). Several multi-method studies are discussed in this section. A multi-method design trades the weaknesses of one approach for the strengths of another as these are described in this chapter and by Stoll (2004): for example, the breadth of a random-sample survey for the depth of a detailed case study. When the different approaches are used together in sequence, a more complete picture of the conflict or resolution process is achieved. This can be illustrated by two studies of peace agreements: our study of relationships between principles of justice and the durability of agreements negotiated during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Druckman and Albin, 2008) and Irmer and Druckman’s (2009) study of the relationship between the processes and outcomes of a variety of peace agreements. The justice and durability study combined an aggregate analysis of 16 peace agreements with a focused comparison of selected cases. The former analysis produced a statistical model of the role played by justice in implementing the agreements: justice principles moderated the relationship between the conflict environment and implementation success. The latter analysis showed that many principles of justice increased the chances of success in difficult conflict environments. Few justice principles in an agreement decreased the chances of complete success in less difficult environments. The qualitative results bolster the quantitative findings: both show that justice principles play a moderating role, first in the form of a statistical path model and then as a 2 × 2 matrix of difficulty (high or low) by justice principles (many or few). Both analyses illuminate the value of control: partial correlations were used in the aggregate analysis, while case selection (the combinations of high-low, few-many of the two variables) created independent variables in the focused comparison. The complementarity is between the more robust analysis of a variety of cases and a more controlled analysis of cases selected on the theoretical variables of interest.

|| 128 Despite the differences in methodological approach, various studies in Bercovitch 2008 converge on the general conclusion that there are no assurances that international mediation will lead to better outcomes or a successful conclusion of negotiations. The effects of mediation are contingent on a variety of factors in the situation as well as the broader context of the conflict.

168 | Daniel Druckman Irmer and Druckman’s study is novel in the way it uses methods to build a logical argument that bolsters explanation. The analyses proceed in sequence from initial quantitative work to later qualitative inquiries. After constructing process and outcome indicators and assembling a data set of 26 cases, the investigator calculated a correlation among the process and outcome indices. An average correlation of .82 indicates a very strong relationship. Not considered in the analysis, however, were the effects of context: the strong association between process and outcome may be accounted for by correlated context variables. Thus, a second step consisted of controlling for context by calculating partial correlations. These correlations remained strong, indicating that process rather than context accounted for the outcomes. The next question asked was whether this relationship was causal. By tracing the process in each of four cases (not part of the aggregate data set), they showed that outcomes – as comprehensive, partial, or deadlock – were indeed caused by the coded processes. A final step in the sequence entailed an attempt to discover a mechanism that could explain the causal relationship. Referred to as a plausibility probe, the analysis showed that the development of trust through phases of the talks appeared to provide a plausible explanation. The mode of inquiry used in this study – designated as A (association), C (causation), E (explanation) – may be considered a model for research on negotiation and peace processes. This study provides an example of moving beyond the use of single methods. It addresses the internal validity of statistical relationships. Earlier multimethod analyses of negotiation addressed issues of external validity. These include Hopmann and Walcott’s (1977) pioneering effort to combine simulation and content analysis of transcripts in seeking to understand the behavior of arms-control negotiators. They also include the simulation/case study analyses by Beriker and Druckman (1996) on multilateral post-WWI peace talks and by Ozcelik (2004) on multilateral environmental regime talks. Similarly, my research on turning points and models of responsiveness, discussed earlier, shows how findings obtained from single-case studies can be generalized by conducting statistical analyses of many cases. Another example of combined methods comes from a study on mediating international crises. Wilkenfeld and his colleagues (2003) explored the same research questions with two methods: the International Crisis Behavior events data set and an experimental simulation based on the Ecuador/Peru border dispute of 1981. The historical events data analyses showed that mediated crises were usually characterized by compromise among the disputants, more likely to end in agreement, and indicated a tendency toward long-term tension reduction. The simulation findings confirmed these findings while also adding other results: mediation leads to crises of shorter duration and to greater satisfaction

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with the outcome. In addition, the simulation data revealed that a manipulative mediation style produced more benefits from crisis termination than a facilitation style. These findings illuminate several advantages of a multi-method approach. One concerns the validity of results: confirmation with another method increases confidence in the results. Another concerns additional discoveries: new findings extend our understanding of mediation impacts. And, a third advantage is the opportunity to explore questions that cannot be addressed with events data: information on crisis duration and on mediator style were obtained from the laboratory study. Going further, the laboratory allows for imaginative construction of conditions that did not occur in the case but have theoretical relevance as illustrated by this study and that conducted by Beriker and Druckman (1996). (See Sprinz and Wolinsky-Nahmias, 2004, for more on counter-factual analysis.) These studies illuminate the value of multi-method research on negotiation. Conceivably, this topic is suited to these sorts of complex analyses. One reason is that there is a treasure trove of well-documented cases for content analysis. Another is that the processes in many of these cases are relatively easy to simulate. And, a third reason is that the literature is well developed in terms of theories, models, and empirical research. For these reasons, among others, we have learned much about processes and strategies of negotiation. Among the remaining research challenges are connecting negotiation to the sources of conflict that gave rise to the issues and to the aftermath of the implementing phase where relationships between disputing parties undergo change. These problems would also benefit from studies that view them through a multi-method lens.

Conclusion The multi-method approach taken in this chapter was inspired by the innovative approach to research developed half a century ago by Campbell. The Campbell and Fiske (1959) idea of a multi-method multi-trait matrix was a major departure from the way that psychologists did research. The idea that methods can contribute to findings and their interpretation was novel. It challenged the prevailing positivist assumptions about the way that empirical research was to be performed. Continuing along these lines, Campbell trumpeted the value of quasi-experimentation. First, with his colleague Stanley (Campbell and Stanley, 1963), he provided a foundation for field experimentation by showing that valid findings can be obtained even when the hallowed assumption of random assignment is not satisfied. Then, with Cook (Cook and Campbell, 1979), he further developed the statistical tools for inferring causality from field data. Cook

170 | Daniel Druckman (1985) took the gauntlet from Campbell and proposed a philosophical departure for social science referred to as “post-positivist critical multiplism.” The strategy that was being advanced by these pioneers was that of “triangulation.” According to Stern and Druckman, this refers to “multiple data sources and multiple modes of analysis to correct the characteristic sources of error and bias in each and to help analysis converge on results that can be accepted with reasonable confidence” (2000: 60). This approach to research is also gaining momentum in international relations (Sprinz and Wolinsky- Nahmias, 2004) and conflict analysis (Maoz et al., 2004; Druckman, 2005). The variety of examples discussed in this chapter illustrate pluralism in research on problems of conflict and conflict resolution. Although pluralism is more evident between studies, there is a discernable trend in the direction of using several methods within studies. Increasingly, conflict researchers are becoming aware of the advantages of compensating for the weaknesses in a particular method by adding another approach to data collection and analysis.129 The multi-method lens may be best understood in terms of the tradeoffs between methods. The age-old challenge of bridging internal with external validity has become the joint plight of the experimental and field researcher. For the experimentalist, a turn toward simulation with its emphasis on scenario design has provided a way of addressing issues of context (external validity) without forfeiting the analytical advantages of laboratory controls. For the field researcher, a turn toward focused comparisons has provided a way of introducing “controls” (internal validity) into case study designs without forfeiting the advantages of the context provided by field or archival research. Teaming up by conducting simulations and doing focused comparisons, the experimentalist and field researcher can accomplish their joint goal of developing and testing || 129 The idea of methodological pluralism differs from cumulation in research. A key difference is that pluralism is based on methods variance, while cumulation depends to a large extent on methods invariance. The former emphasizes robustness, while the latter “adds up” results obtained from replicated studies. These different aims are also reflected in technical approaches to doing research: complementary methods that address the same research question versus effect sizes calculated with meta-analytic techniques. Both approaches are concerned with the issue of generality but approach that issue from different angles. Just as replicated findings provide evidence for general effects, similar results from different methods also provide evidence for generality. However, the multi-method approach allows for the possibility of contingent findings. A number of multi-method studies illustrate both types of findings (e.g. Wilkenfeld et al., 2003). The meaning of cumulation in an age of methodological pluralism is an issue that merits more attention. It is relevant to the debate over internal versus external validity.

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theory-inspired ideas in relevant settings. Going still further, the team can address the problem of counterfactuals by creating hypothetical laboratory scenarios of unrealized pasts or futures. They can also probe more deeply – in the form of an enhanced case study – into particular conflict processes by selecting a case from the focused comparison for more detailed examination of conflict cycles and third-party interventions. Although this dual-method strategy would bridge internal and external validity challenges, weaknesses remain. Neither approach includes a random sampling design. Without random – or representative – sampling, results are subject to the possibility of selection bias. This means that experimental and case findings may be limited to the particular subjects and cases chosen. The challenge is to define a universe from which subjects are chosen and cases are selected. Nor do the approaches explicitly analyze data collected over time. This entails more data points in a repeated-measures experimental design or a time series of events that are documented for a defined period. The “data points” can also be stages in a process-tracing design or sequential interviews of stakeholders in a formative evaluation design. The importance of these data, whether coded numerically or categorically, is that they capture change, which is an essential feature of conflict. Change is also important in the applied world of conflict practitioners. Placing the experiments and case studies in an evaluation or action research context would create another bridge, between the research and applied communities. Proceeding in sequence from one method to another satisfies the checklist of weaknesses to be addressed by a research project. It also pushes the investigative envelop in the direction of more holistic research programs.

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Marc Howard Ross

CHAPTER EIGHT How cultural contestation frames escalation and mitigation in ethnic conflict Cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, the yearly visit of Japan’s prime minister to a Shinto shrine honoring the country’s war dead including World War II war criminals, displays of the Confederate battle flag over the capitol of South Carolina, and French schoolgirls wearing Islamic headscarves have all set off political conflicts and sometimes violence in recent years. Why is conflict so intense over these cultural expressions? Why do people invest so much emotional energy in these battles? What is at stake in these conflicts and what does winning or losing represent? The answer explored here is that cultural contestation is about inclusion and exclusion from a society’s narratives and symbolic landscape and that such inclusion or exclusion is important to the politics of allocating a society’s resources and opportunities. For more some time, I have analyzed the dynamics of cultural contestation in ethnically and racially divided societies asking when such conflicts are part of polarization and escalation and when they provide opportunities for conflict mitigation and improved relationships (Ross 1997, 2001, 2007, 2009b, 2009a). This work has emphasized how framing group identities and issues is an integral part of cultural contestation and why making sense of the frames disputants use, how they evolve over time, when they communicate escalation and polarization, and when they signal diminishing hostility and inclusiveness is highly relevant to theory development and the practice of constructive conflict management. Framing has a long and rich literature particularly within sociology and media studies (e.g. Benford & Snow, 2000; Chong & Druckman, 2007; Goffman, 1974; Iyengar, 1991). It emphasizes several ideas that are particularly relevant to the study of ethnic conflict that are developed in this article: frames direct people’s attention to particular lines of division in society; they emphasize particular features—both past and present—of the parties in conflict, and frames ascribe moral qualities and motives to the parties and their actions. In short, by directing people how to think about a conflict, frames communicate

180 | Marc Ross important information about what to think about the conflict, the parties, and actions that are reasonable or not for each side to take.130 Underlying my argument is that while ethnic conflict is about clashing interests and incompatible identities, political scientists too often frame and analyze it exclusively in terms of the former and too often the issue of cultural and identity contestation receives little or no serious attention. Yet, a good deal of intense conflict cannot be explained simply by reference to competition over material interests, and to address this imbalance I have tried to take identities seriously and not just as epiphenomena without making the claim that interests are unimportant. To continue along this line here, my goal is to emphasize how framing shapes the contextual understandings that make conflict so emotionally intense using conceptual tools that offer a language with which to analyze the identity side of ethnic conflict to help understand why and how at certain times cultural expressions and enactments exacerbate conflict and why at others they serve as tools for mitigation. As we come to understand how and when frames shift, we see that more inclusive symbols and rituals are significant in drawing former opponents into a new, less polarized relationship while more exclusive ones harden the lines of polarization. This also means that ethnic conflicts are not one time events; nor are they unchanging. As part of an ongoing process the within and between group meanings of events matter when they alter the intersubjective understandings of the disputing parties and their relationship. My own work has examined conflicts over Loyal Order parades in Northern Ireland, language policy in Catalonia and Québec, control over the holy sites in Jerusalem, Muslim headscarves in French schools, challenges to, and changes in, the monuments, museums and memorials in post-Apartheid South Africa, and Confederate battle flag displays in the United States (Ross 2007). In this article I use the key concepts I have found useful: in cultural contestation through the concepts of symbolic landscape, psychocultural narratives and dramas, and cultural contestation to explore the dynamics of framing in ethnic conflict. The conflicts that particularly interest me are centered on questions of control over, inclusion in, and exclusion from a society as seen through its symbolic landscape and psychocultural narratives. The narratives are the emotionalladen accounts groups offer that frame the past and present, perceived friends

|| 130 Sometimes the distinction is made between framing and priming in which the former is directing people to what they need to think about and the later is how to think about it (Brewer, Graf, & Willnat, 2003)

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and foes, threats and fears and explanations for why and how they and others behave and they do, while the symbolic landscape, represented in visual images, sacred sites, physical objects, music, media or sacred and solemn public celebrations frames group identity and perceptions in visual, rather than verbal terms, providing another route to understanding how and when contending groups view each other and make competing claims to valuable resources. Representational battles that are played out through cultural expressions and enactments are hardly new; they are, however, understudied and under theorized among students of conflict in general and ethnic conflict in particular. This article begins with a short glance at two contrasting cases: France where the issue of Islamic headscarves in public schools has raged for over twenty years and has left all parties angry and uncertain, and South Africa where the democratic government that came to power in 1994 had to decide how to constitute the country’s symbolic landscape which was dominated by apartheid-era monuments, memorials, and museums and gave little public acknowledgment to the lives and achievements of the country’s African majority. Second, it discusses framing in cultural contestation, through the analysis of a society’s symbolic landscape, its psychocultural narratives, its psychocultural dramas and its collective memory. Third, it concludes with four general hypotheses connecting cultural contestation and the politics of inclusion/exclusion in ethnic conflict and its mitigation to the symbolic landscape, narratives and dramas, rituals and cultural performances.

Two brief cases: France and South Africa Before introducing the key analytic terms, it useful to describe two of the cases I have written about in developing my argument that psychocultural expressions and enactments are significant in framing ethnic conflict. The central dynamic at work is the extent to which those holding competing positions move to either acknowledging or denying the core identity needs of the opposing side through more inclusive or exclusive framing of the conflict.131 Change is considered as a matter of degree. For example, while tension in France between supporters of the right of schoolgirls to wear Islamic headscarves and opponents is high, in || 131 In discussing conflicts, it is rhetorically useful to write as if there are two clearly defined opposing parties. Empirically, this assumption is rarely accurate as most long-term conflicts involve multiple parties with multiple goals, and ignores important ways that groups we refer to with a singular noun such as Israelis and Palestinians are socially and culturally diverse, and internally divided politically.

182 | Marc Ross no way has it produced the level of mutual denial or violence found in conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, or Sri Lanka. Likewise, while the change in South Africa’s symbolic landscape and the mitigation of racial tension there is significant, there are still important visible manifestations of white domination and privilege, and political tensions related to the extreme inequality still present in the country. An important reason to examine these cases is to emphasize that change has occurred in the narratives that frame competing positions in each over the past twenty years and to view conflict and its mitigation along a continuum and not as an all or nothing matter. Islamic headscarves in French schools. The conflict over headscarves in schools first erupted in France in 1989 when three young girls were expelled from a middle school in Creuil, forty miles north of Paris. However, it is important to point out that the conflict involving the country’s Muslim residents, many of whom are France citizens, over issues of immigration and integration was hardly new and that there were marches, demonstrations and political demands made throughout the preceding decade—most of which emphasized Muslim demands for inclusion and integration. Although an administrative court rendered an authoritative ruling in the headscarf dispute in 1989, holding that wearing headscarves or other religious symbols was not necessarily a problem if they were not provocative, proselytizing, did not pressure other students, or were tools of propaganda, and that such conflicts were to be handled locally. But the matter hardly went away.132 On the contrary. While the original dispute was apparently settled at the time, it was hardly resolved as the question morphed into additional political issues and periodic crises that have been at the center of French political life (Bowen, 2004, 2007; Ross, 1993b, 2007). Fifteen years later, in 2004, France passed a law that outlawed all conspicuous religious signs in public schools including headscarves after an animated period of debate involving political speeches, a Presidential commissions, extensive media coverage and strong public expressions on the matter. Why, one might ask did a conflict of great emotional intensity erupt over what a handful of young girls wore on their head in a country where dress codes are hardly rigid and where public nudity is often tolerated. My answer is that as in many cultural conflicts, the presenting issue (headscarves) is not the underlying source of the conflict. To put it another way, conflicts framed in terms of

|| 132 In this conflict, like many others, shifts in language took place over time. Originally called a headscarf (foulard), the word voile (veil) which has a more religious connotation increasingly was used over time. In addition, some people began to the Arabic words chador or hijab especially when referring to a full-length garment and not just a head covering.

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headscarves are really about identity, ideology, belonging, inclusion and exclusion, and power in French society, yet the discussion of the dispute in homes, in workplaces and in the press rarely recognized that the headscarf was a symbolic expression of these deeper issues and the powerful fears underlying them. The dominant French frame throughout the period emphasized ways that the headscarves were religious expressions that violated the French principle of laïcité— state neutrality in matters of religion. As a result, there was a widespread belief that French culture was at risk and the refusal of French Muslims, most of whom are either North African immigrants or their descendents (Hargreaves, 1995), to integrate as the majority demanded raised anxieties that fed xenophobic rhetoric and confrontation: What ensured were tempestuous debates about what laïcité should be and how Muslims ought to act, not in light of a firm legal and cultural framework, but in light of a disappearing sense of certitude about what France was and will be. Hence the desperation; hence the urgency (Bowen, 2007: 33).

The frame that dominated the debate swirled around the concept of laïcité, often imperfectly translated as secularism. For the French, laïcité means state neutrality with respect to religion and it is the state that protects citizens from the church. This notion is rooted in the long struggle to curb the power of the Catholic Church going back to before the French Revolution. During the Third Republic (1870-1940) the French established a centralized state system of universal primary education that explicitly designated the schools as the responsibility of the state not the church. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon notion of civil society that protects citizens from a state that is too strong, the Republican idea is that there should be no strong intermediary groups between the citizen and the state, all citizens should be treated equally, and the expression of religion is a private matter that should be excluded from the schools, government offices, and other public spaces.133 Interestingly, while only a few hundred schoolgirls wore headscarves and most French Muslims oppose the headscarf, the tone of the conflict has increased their sense of alienation and the discrimination directed at them. The violent outbursts in the large French suburban ghettos near Paris since 2005 provides ample evidence that legislation regarding school attire is hardly a

|| 133 Of course there are more than a few contradictions here from an American perspective such as the fact that the must approve the appointment of all Catholic bishops, the state maintains church buildings, and in recent years has funded the construction of mosques (Ross 2007: 192-94).

184 | Marc Ross meaningful response to ethnic relations and discrimination in the country. One measure of its inadequacy is to consider the list of over two dozen proposals President Jacques Chirac’s Stasi Commission made in 2003 and to recognize that the headscarf law was the only one adopted while proposals that would have increased the teaching of languages and courses with more historical content relevant to the Islamic world in schools, others to mark Muslim (and Jewish) holidays) as well as social and economic proposals to improve the daily lives of France’s Muslims living in the suburban ghettos were never seriously discussed or considered. A way that many analyses (e.g. Bowen 2007) including my own have examined this conflict is to emphasize the clashing frames or worldviews that have produced competing narratives about what the French nation has been, is, and should be. I have termed these hard versus soft Republicanism but these are not the only frames relevant in this conflict (Ross 2007: Chapter 7). There are Muslim ones as well that reflect the diversity within this social category. As the conflict escalated, proponents of each position tended to dig in their heels refusing to acknowledge or engage each other in ways that could produce flexibility, creative problem-solving and social experimentation that would begin to address the complicated issues of the increasing diversity in France and other European societies. This inability to define common ground has meant that the mutually exclusive narratives and the control over public space, including the media, remains highly contested and those with more social power continue to emphasize ways that they expect and are willing to compel those with less power to conform to their demands. South Africa: Memory and expanding the symbolic landscape. We have many expectations from the emotionally powerful acts taken to symbolize radical regime change. Think about the heads of statues sliced off in French churches at the time of the Revolution, the destruction of Lenin and Stalin statues throughout the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s’, or the Taliban’s exploding the ancient Buddha of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001. Given these dramatic examples, we should ask why after the fall of the venal apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994 was there no destruction of Afrikaner sacred sites, no wholesale renaming of cities, towns and streets, and no rapid effort to impose a new exclusivist narrative on the country? How and why did a state that symbolized intolerance to the world exhibit tolerance and inclusion? Most of South Africa’s symbolic landscape, like its government, was under white control for centuries and the country’s black majority had few political rights and no social equality. Black protests from the early days brought little significant change and only more repression. While this is not the place to go into the story of almost 350 years of white rule, it is important to note that there

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was long-term high conflict among whites as well as between whites and blacks. It pitted the Afrikaners, the descendants from the early Dutch and other settlers opposed to British rule against the English speakers. While tension lasted longer, the violence between them ended when the British secured control over the country in the early 20th century following the Second Boer War (18991902) and the establishment of the Union of South Africa. The Afrikaners mobilized culturally and politically and took power in the country in 1948 and establish apartheid, the legal and formal separation of the races. Opponents of the regime were blacks as well as coloreds (mixed race), Asians, and a certain number of whites. Opposition led to repression and trials that sent the top leaders to jail or exile. More than a few observers felt that the white regime would end only through violence but despite scattered sabotage within the country, attacks from exiled military units, and domestic protest and violence, the Afrikaner led Nationalist Party remained in control and its security services were never really in danger of being defeated militarily. Yet change did occur and it was not violent as many expected when in late 1989 President F. W. de Klerk announced that the government would release most political prisoners including Nelson Mandela and allow exiled opponents to return, that the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party would be unbanned, and that the government planned to negotiate a transition to a power sharing and possibly a majority rule regime (Gastrow, 1995; Sparks, 1995). Incredibly this was accomplished by 1994 when the country held its first election in which all citizens were eligible to participate. Nelson Mandela was easily elected South Africa’s President and the ANC gained control of the Parliament. While Mandela said that there would be no wholesale destruction of apartheid and colonial era monuments and memorials, that no new capitol would be built, and that streets and cities would not be renamed wholesale, we still have to understand how this was actually accomplished. Both inside and outside South Africa, people want to give Mandela full credit for the transition and indeed he made it clear, for example, that that he would not support the destruction of sacred Afrikaner sites such as the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, the Blood River Memorial, or the Paarl Language Monument near Cape Town. While there were countless significant gestures, statements and actions that Mandela made, it is too simple to say that Mandela is all that mattered. Indeed, there were a wide range of people from all races in South Africa who put a great deal of energy into thinking about and imagining a multi-cultural, majority rule South Africa. At the same time, there was vocal opposition from those on the right who opposed majority rule and threatened violence and from those on the left who wanted more radical change. Finding a middle way was not just a political matter but one that required significant at-

186 | Marc Ross tention to how to frame cultural expressions and actions. In the end, South Africa used three parallel strategies with respect to its symbolic landscape: appropriation, modification, and addition (Coombes 2003; Rassool and Prosalendis 2001; Ross 2007: Chapters 8-9). Appropriation was relatively simple and meant that the new government moved into places that the former white regime had controlled and that symbolized its power, such as the Union Buildings in Pretoria and the Parliament in Cape Town. Modification meant that key elements of a site’s meaning and presentation were framed in new ways. Obvious examples here are that universities, official museums, housing and employment look very different than they once did. At the universities, the composition of the student body is now multiracial, and museums present exhibits from all parts of society. Modification has also meant that the Voortrekker Monument Heritage Site now welcomes visitors of all races and presents itself as more of a cultural than political site placing the Afrikaner experience in a larger historical context than it once did. Addition meant developing new sites or sometimes framing old ones symbolically and politically in radically different ways. Examples include new museums that tell the story of the resistance to apartheid as in the Hector Peterson Museum in Soweto, the Apartheid Museum in Gold Reef City, or documenting the personal lives and fate of the more than 50,000 residents of District 6 in Cape Town who were displaced when the area was designated for destruction and redevelopment under the White Areas Act. For some, the radical transformation of two former prisons has been especially significant. Robben Island, long a prison for dissidents and the home of a Leper Colony, was Mandela’s home for over 25 years when he and other top ANC leaders not in exile were imprisoned there. Today it is the home of a museum that offers the uplifting story of resistance and ultimate triumph told in a particularly moving way that includes a visit inside the prison with a former prisoner who takes you to the cell where he was housed and graphically recounts his harrowing experiences. In an equally moving and creative gesture, Johannesburg’s notorious Old Fort Prison complex which also housed important regime opponents over the years has been transformed into Constitution Hill, the home of the country’s top court. In South Africa there was a great deal of uncertainty about what the political transition would bring in terms of race and ethnic relations given the country’s past history. The political transition was an inclusive one. Of interest here is that a central element of this inclusiveness was framed through specific cultural expressions and enactments. I have mentioned just a few of these, but the point is that the consistency and magnitude of the messages and actions were clearly significant in the articulation of a vision of a new South Africa and a

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narrative intended to make space for people from all racial groups. Will that be sufficient to overcome the great inequalities that still exist in the country or to deal with its high rates of AIDS and insure long-term democratic stability? For example, in 2008, political splits in the ANC and attacks on immigrants occurred in a number of townships that raised red flags for many people. One would be foolish to offer a definitive answer at this time; we can say however that South Africa did teach us a number of lessons about the importance of inclusive cultural narratives and rituals in the mitigation of ethnic conflict.

Frames and cultural contestation Culture has been an elusive concept with a wide range of shifting meanings and usages in the social sciences. Here I define culture an as a system of shared meanings and meaning-making through semiotic practices (Geertz, 1973a; Ross, 2009b; Schweder & LeVine, 1984; Wedeen, 2002). Culture, from this perspective, is a worldview containing specific frames and scripts that shape why and how individuals and groups behave as they do, and includes both cognitive and affective beliefs about social reality as well as assumptions about when, where, and how people in one’s culture and those in other cultures are likely to behave in particular ways. For purposes of political analysis, I emphasize that shared understandings occur among people who also have a common (and almost invariably named) identity that distinguishes them from outsiders. Culture, in short, marks what people experience as “a distinctive way of life” characterized in the subjective we-feelings of cultural group members (and outsiders), and expressed though specific behaviors (customs and rituals) —both sacred and profane—which mark the daily, yearly, and life cycle rhythms of its members and reveal how people view past, present, and future events and understand choices they face (Berger, 1995). Cultural frames expressed as metaphors, narratives and objects in the symbolic landscape have cognitive meanings that describe group experiences of high affective salience that emphasizes unique intragroup bonds that set one group’s experience apart from that of others, and scripts that direct action. Often people have an image of culture as unified and monolithic. This is a serious mistake. Rather, the fact that different individuals understand each other and share a common identity does not imply agreement that widely-held meanings are necessarily acceptable to all or that all share the same intensity of identification with the group (Cohen, 1991). On the contrary there are invariably intense intracultural differences and conflicts over meaning and identity, con-

188 | Marc Ross trol over symbols and rituals, and the imposition of one interpretation rather than another on a situation (Ross, 2007; Scott, 1985). In this same vein, Laitin contends that culture highlights points of concern to be debated and not just areas of agreement (1988: 589). Sharing a cultural identity and participating in a system of shared meanings is not the same as agreement on specific values or engage in the same behaviors. As Levine argues, “Culture represents a consensus on a wide variety of meanings among members of an interacting community approximating that of the consensus on language among members of a speech-community” (1984: 68). However, this does not mean there is unity in thoughts, feelings, behavior and even conceptions of the social order. This point is crucial for understanding that within cultural communities there is frequent intragroup conflict and competition such as one finds between religious and secular Jews in Israel, Hindu nationalists and socialists in India, and Republicans and Nationalists among Catholics in Northern Ireland. Because culture and its narratives offer in-group agreement about meaning but not necessarily about substance, conflict and its management is (at least) a two-level game: one level focuses on differences within the group and the second on actions between groups. Finally, it is crucial to recognize that what people who share a group identity believe is shared often overestimates what is actually shared. Cultures and cultural differences do not themselves cause conflict (eller, 1999; Posner, 2004) but are the lenses or frames through which the causes of conflict are refracted (Avruch & Black, 1993: 133-34). As a result, cultural meanings and the emotions associated with them are not invariant within a group and intergroup interaction and contestation in turn affect them. For example, in the Middle East and South Asia there are sacred sites that different religious communities have at times shared, while at other times as conflict between groups has intensified, exclusive claims about their ownership have increased. Cultural conflicts are not just out there ready to happen as Kaplan’s (1993) “ancient hatreds” argument would have us believe. Rather, as conflicts evolve the intensity of emotions surrounding cultural expressions and enactments often changes—sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing. Culture connects people across time and space and provides powerful tools for expressing inclusion and exclusion and provides the basis for cultural contestation that becomes intense when it engages core group identity issues (Ross 2007). Often cultural contestation is polarizing and emphasizes mutually exclusive, zero-sum options. Cultural contestation can rarely be resolved through reference to higher order authorities or a shared set of standards since typically these do not exist or are not accepted by all sides. As a result, politics rooted in cultural and identity claims easily escalates to a position of mutual denial in

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which each party simply ignores or denies the claims of the other and is fearful at times that even acknowledging an opponent’s existence weakens their own claims (Kelman, 1987). Conflicts that revolve around existential issues involving group recognition, acknowledgment, and legitimation become embodied in objects, places, cultural expressions, and enactments and can be very intense conflict. Cultural contestation can be significant analytically and practically in that the frames that emerge from it in the form of narratives often reveal the parties’ deepest fears and threats and can lead to a richer understanding of a conflict’s core issues. The messages they communicate can offer guidance to those interested in conflict mitigation through the identification of central concerns that any settlement must address. In such situations, each side is wary of the other so that peacemaking and peacebuilding offer daunting challenges. Yet because cultural identities have been constructed, they can also be reconstructed as opponents develop more complex views of each other and come to realize that despite all that divides them, there are some important things they share and ways that their futures are interdependent. In such a context, one-time opponents in search of peace discover new metaphors and images, build integrative narratives, and develop inclusive ritual expressions that communicate their shared past and linked future as we see in post-apartheid South Africa and more recently in Northern Ireland.

Symbolic landscape A society’s symbolic landscape communicates and frames social and political messages through specific public images, physical objects, and other expressive representations. It includes public spaces and especially sacred sites that are not necessarily religious ones as well as group representations found in the mass media, theater, school textbooks, music, literature, and public art. Symbolic landscapes reflect how people understand their world and others in it but they can also be significant shapers of these worlds when they establish and legitimate particular normative standards and power relations within and between groups. As a framing mechanism: The landscape idea represents a way of seeing—a way in which some {…] have represented themselves and to others the world about them and their social relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations. Landscape is a way of seeing that has its own history, but a history that can only be understood as part of a wider history of economy and society…whose origins and implications extend well beyond the

190 | Marc Ross use and perception of land; that has its own techniques of expression, but techniques which it shares with other areas of cultural practice (Cosgrove, 1998: 1).

Symbolic landscapes communicate inclusion and exclusion, hierarchy, and portray dominant and subordinate groups in particular ways. The meanings a symbolic landscape conveys invites us to ask: Who is present and who is absent in public representations? What are the qualities of those people and objects portrayed in it? Who controls the representations and to what extent are they contested? How is hierarchy portrayed and what qualities are associated with particular positions within a society’s hierarchy? Inclusion and exclusion is often powerfully expressed through the restriction or expansion of a society’s symbolic landscape. Exclusion of groups from the symbolic landscape is an explicit form of denial and assertion of power. In contrast, a more inclusive symbolic landscape is a powerful expression of societal inclusion that communicates a mutuality and shared stake in society. It renders the previously unseen visible, gives voice to those once voiceless, and can offer powerful messages to young people and help to reshape relations between groups as in post-apartheid South Africa, or to talk about what was previously kept invisible as in the conflict over marking the fact that George Washington kept slaves in his home in the nation’s capitol when it was in Philadelphia from 1790-1797 on what is now Independence Hall National Park (Mires, 2009).134 Inclusion offers acceptance and legitimation that can reflect and promote changes in intergroup relationships. Through inclusion, groups can more easily identify and help mourn past losses and express hopes and aspirations for a common future. As symbolic statements of acknowledgment, it is no wonder that particular sites and the representations they contain can become the source of intense controversy between groups but also within the previously socially invisible group. What stories do they choose to tell about themselves? How is this related to who can speak for the group? Who controls its narrative and the images associated with a site? All of these issues provoke discussion that can be both thoughtful and heated as in the cases of the Holocaust Museum in Wash-

|| 134 There are hundreds of sites in the US that have only recently been excavated and made public that contain fragments from African-American individuals and communities that had previously been unmarked. Examples include cemeteries in New York, civil war burial sites in South Carolina and rural and urban settlements from which they had either been expelled or left.

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ington (Linenthal, 2001a) and the District 6 Museum in Cape Town (Rassool & Prosalendis, 2001; Soudien, 2009).135 All groups have sacred sites (Hassner, 2003) and these often are the most emotionally charged, treasured, and defended places in their symbolic landscape especially when they are threatened in ways that are experienced as threats to the group itself. These sites can be religious or secular and mark key events in a group’s past and are associated with emotionally significant victories or defeats, miracles, and the exploits of heroes (Levinson, 1998). Sacred places containing relics linking a group’s past to its present and future are particularly powerful emotionally (Benvenisti, 2000), and often there are restrictions on admitting outsiders to them. Sharing these sites with others is frequently hard to even imagine, let alone achieve, as we see in conflicts in Jerusalem (Abu El-Haj, 2001; Hassner, 2003) and Ayodhya (Davis, 2009). The emotional power of sacred sites is precisely what makes demands for exclusive physical control over them so strident and why loss of control over a site easily heightens a group’s vulnerability. In South Africa, through the addition of important representations in new sites and the inclusion of formerly ignored ones in others, the country’s symbolic landscape is far more inclusive than it was in the apartheid era. In contrast, in France there is a strong resistance to what are viewed as Islamic representations in the public arena as seen not only in the ban on headscarves in public schools but also in the strong preference for small, discrete Muslim prayer spaces as opposed to large, visible mosques despite the fact that the France’s Muslims are perhaps 8% of the population.

Psychocultural narratives Psychocultural narratives are explanations for events—large and small—in the form of short, common sense accounts (stories) that often seem simple. However, the strong images they contain, and the judgments they make about the motivations and actions of one’s own group and opponents, are emotionally powerful and offer important insights into the frames that motivate different parties in conflict. As frames, widely shared narratives meet a number of needs and people are especially likely to call upon them when they are disoriented and struggling to make sense of events in situations combining high uncertainty

|| 135 There has been a particularly rich recent writing on the issue of landscape and memory in South Africa. For example see Coombes (2003) and Rassool and Prosalendis (2001).

192 | Marc Ross and high stress. In such contexts, group narratives and the familiar shared images link in-group members providing reassurance, relieving anxiety and reinforcing within group worldviews while differentiating it from out-groups. We should also note that within group narratives are never fully consistent, and that there is almost always variation in how members of an in-group understand and react to any narrative. As a result, narratives as frames are best understood as existing at different levels of generality with specific parts that can be added, discarded, rearranged, emphasized and deemphasized. All cultural traditions have access to multiple pre-existing narratives and images that provide support for diverse actions in anxious times. Narratives, therefore, are not made from whole cloth, but are grounded in selectively remembered, interpreted experiences and projections from them that resonate widely. Yet there is no simple correspondence between narrative beliefs and action. As a result, there is generally within-group diversity in the frames and narratives in any conflict reminding us that the plasticity of culture means that it can give rise to multiple narratives to cope with what outsiders often naively see as the same event or series of events when in fact any event’s ambiguity can evoke different responses about what constitutes significant dangers to a group and who can best defend it. Psychocultural narratives frame conflict in three different ways: as reflectors, exacerbaters or inhibiters, and causes of conflict. As reflectors, narratives tell us how those involved in a conflict understand it; and narratives can increase in-group conformity where such reflections of the “real world” provide significant cues to in-group members that make dissenting from a societal consensus potentially risky. For third parties, narratives can bring critical “hot spots” in a group’s narrative to the surface and identify each party’s central fears and concerns that must be addressed if a conflict is to move towards a constructive outcome (Volkan, 1997). They also can reveal what each side needs to understand about the other since in many conflicts, one side has an incomplete, and often inaccurate, sense of what opponents need and what they think the conflict is about (Jervis, 1976). As exacerbaters or inhibiters of conflict, narratives frame differences or commonalities among the parties that variously support continuing hostility and escalation or moderation and de-escalation. Sometimes a dominant narrative leaves no room for negotiation as was the case of Franco’s national narrative that made regional languages incompatible with a Spanish identity and a unified Spain. However, following his death, the new government quickly endorsed a different way of thinking about being Spanish, that a person could have multiple identities, for example, as a Spanish citizen and a member of the Catalan or Basque nation. Whereas the first narrative about Spanish identity

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exacerbated conflict between the central government and Spain’s historic nationalities, post-Franco frames diminished it. In France, being a devout Muslim is widely viewed as a rejection of integration in France so there is little or no space for a person who maintains both identities (Bowen 2007) Narratives play a causal role in conflict when they frame cognitions and emotions in ways that structure the actions individuals and groups consider as plausible (Bates, de Figueiredo, & Weingast, 1998). As Smith notes in writing about myths of ethnic descent, “By telling us who we are and whence we came, ethnic myths of descent direct our interests like Weber’s ‘switchmen’ and order our actions towards circumscribed but exalted goals” (Smith, 1999: 88). When narratives are framed in ways that there is no common ground between opponents, search for alternatives to fighting is unlikely. Rather, there will be political pressures on leaders in such settings to pursue aggressive actions, while less confrontational options will have already been eliminated from consideration. From this perspective, narratives do not force parties to take a particular action if for example they lack the capabilities or support, but narratives may be crucial in severely limiting the range of options taken seriously. Elsewhere I have explored ways that psychocultural narratives have a number of features that help in the analysis of cultural contestation (Ross 2007 Chapter 2). To explain the power of narratives, I discuss how they evoke past events as metaphors and lessons for the future; they emphasize collective memories; they are highly selective in terms of what is included and excluded; they identify group fears and threats to identity; they emphasize in-group conformity and externalization of responsibility; they evolve over time in response to changing events in any political context; they are not just verbal accounts but they are also enacted in a variety of ways; and group narratives are ethnocentric and filled with moral superiority claims. These features are not mutually exclusive; many have overlapping elements and spelling out connections among them helps spell out how narratives shape cultural contestation. Narratives as collective memories. Ethnic groups commonly recount their narratives in a chronological fashion that selectively blends key events, heroes, metaphors and moral lessons (Kaufman 2001). These recountings can be usefully thought of as collective memories that connect people across time and space that are products of social interaction and individual memory processes (Devine-Wright, 2003: 11). Collective memories, as Halbwachs (1980) and others have pointed out, are selective and what is emphasized is facilitated through socially produced mnemonic devices such as physical objects that serve as repositories of group memories. Social memory for Pierre Nora is at odds with history and “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects” Nora (1989:9). However, it should be noted that what Nora (1989) terms lieux de

194 | Marc Ross mémoire (sites of memory) are best understood as not only physical sites of memory for they are more than simply physical locations that hold memories but can be thought of as images and expressions as well. For Connerton too collective social memory is clearly different from the more specific activity of historical reconstruction, which is more dependent upon evidence than is social memory (1989: 13-14). He argues that: We may say, more generally, that we all come to know each other by asking for accounts, by giving accounts, by believing or disbelieving stories about each other’s pasts and identities… We situate the agent’s behavior with reference to its place in their life history; and we situate that behavior with references to its place in the history of the social settings to which they belong (Connerton, 1989: 21).

Groups, from this perspective, remember many of the same events, battles, and heroes that a historian might consider important. However, the explanations for them is highly divergent, as is the way in which the two modes of understanding interpret their significance. In addition, while groups see collective memories as unchanging, objective accounts of a group’s history, it is clear not only that there are often major changes in emphasis and the specific events or people included in group narratives over several generations, but in addition, at any one time there is also variation in which memories are most salient across generations (Devine-Wright 2003: 13): 13). Memories associated with historical events may often be far more recent and develop as political claim making a good deal after an event takes place. For example, the French did not celebrate Bastille Day until a century after 1789; the 1690 Battle of the Boyne in Northern Ireland that only became significant in the 19th century (Roe & Cairns, 2003: 174); the 1838 Battle of Blood River in South Africa was unmarked for several decades after it took place (Thompson, 1985: 164); and the close emotional connection between Jewish and Muslim identity and the ancient holy sites in the old city of Jerusalem have dramatically increased the past century. All of these are examples illustrate how the emphasis on lessons and metaphors associated with particular events varies as collective memories evolve. The objective manner in which collective memories are often recounted should not blind us to their emotional significance as links between the individual and the group as well as the past and present. Otherwise how could we explain the strong reactions people have to totally non-utilitarian physical objects such as remains of buildings, potsherds, and statues on the one hand or to pieces of cloth or household objects on the other? For Connerton, the past matters because it shapes our present needs. My argument emphasizes the opposite relationship, namely that how we understand the past grows out of our present needs. However, like Connerton, I em-

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phasize the role that social participation and especially ritual commemoration play in conveying and sustaining knowledge about the past. For Connerton, commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices are important because they are performative and participation builds commitment to the group and to its core narrative. Like Halbwachs (1980) Connerton emphasizes that through group membership “individuals are able to acquire, to localize and to recall their memories” (1989: 36). Memories exist in relationships and because the group is interested in the memories that “provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localized and memories are localized by a kind of [group] mapping” (Connerton, 1989: 37). In South Africa, narratives about the past are used to recount the atrocities from the apartheid era as in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Gibson’s research shows that it probably had important healing effects on all groups in the country (Gibson, 2004; Krog, 1999). In France, while there have been some attempts to bridge the diversity of the country, polarization around questions such as the meaning of laïcité and the issue of headscarves has polarized rather than bridged group differences.

Psychocultural dramas Psychocultural dramas are conflicts that arise over competing, and apparently irresolvable, claims that engage the central elements of each group’s historical experience and contemporary identity (Ross 2007: Chapter 3). Examples of them are found in most ethnic conflicts. 136 The manifest focus of a psychocultural drama can be over the allocation of material resources, or can involve cultural differences over issues such as language, religion, social practices or music and popular culture. At a deeper level, psychocultural dramas are polarizing events about non-negotiable cultural claims, perceived threats, and/or rights that are connected to narratives and metaphors central to a group’s core identity. As psychocultural dramas unfold, they produce reactions that (a) are emotionally powerful, (b) clearly differentiate the parties in conflict, and (c) contain key elements of the larger conflict in which they are embedded. Through the lens of psychocultural dramas, the multiple levels of these conflicts and the frames that the parties hold come into clearer view revealing both barriers to, and opportunities for, their constructive management.

|| 136 Not all conflicts are psychocultural dramas. I exclude disputes that do not mobilize intense feelings and as those which do not divide a community on group lines.

196 | Marc Ross My use of the psychocultural drama is adapted from Victor Turner’s (1957; 1974) concept of the social drama (Ross 2001; Ross 2007). The social dramas Turner analyzed are conflicts that are not ever fully resolved, but they are settled for a time when the conflict is redefined away from incompatible principles to the symbolic and ritual domain where disputants can emphasize shared concerns and superordinate goals. The social dramas Turner described took place in a society with shared core values. Yet despite shared values, conflict regularly arose over serious breaches in the social order where there is disagreement over the relative importance of the competing principles that groups or individuals invoke to support their divergent positions in the absence of a jural mechanism to choose among the competing principles (Turner 1957: 89-90). “In a social drama it is not a crime [that constitutes the breach], though it may formally resemble one; it is in reality, a ‘symbolic trigger of confrontation or encounter’” (Turner 1974: 38). As a social drama unfolds, tensions mount and the conflict escalates as each side works vigorously to strengthen its position and to draw in new allies. New issues are easily interjected into expanding conflicts including memories of past disputes and latent feelings of hostility that resurface as social dramas unfold. Social dramas that are especially difficult to resolve involve structural contradictions between norms that cannot be easily settled in the absence of centralized authorities able to render an authoritative and acceptable decision. Lacking an obvious solution or a jointly sanctioned effective decision maker, Turner emphasized the importance of ritual mechanisms of redress especially when jural mechanisms such as a judicial system, an administrative process, or legislative process that the parties accept as legitimate either do not exist, or are inadequate because none of the competing principles is clearly more important any of the others. In such conflicts, the scope and intensity of disputes quickly escalates and the initial conflict grows into a crisis. Turner suggests that redressive action through ritual can follow mobilization of the wider society, including many who had little involvement in the original dispute and the performance of reparatory rituals refocuses peoples’ emotional energy and situates the conflict in a context where disputants can emphasize shared norms and goals. It is not so much that the original conflict is resolved in any profound sense because the competing norms are still present. Rather, the emotional significance of differences diminishes as part of mutual acknowledgment so that people can find a “solution” that lowers tension. Turner’s observation, that the intensity of social dramas can be diffused through the transformation of disputes over competing interests into ritual actions emphasizing what the parties share, has important general implications for mitigation of cultural conflicts when it becomes possible for opponents to

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participate in mutual or joint ritual expression as in South Africa’s its new museums, monuments and especially in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and by its absence in France where public discourse regularly viewed devotion to Islamic practices and beliefs as incompatible with being French.

Ritual and performance in cultural contestation Psychocultural narratives and dramas are politically important because they use familiar and emotionally salient frames to evoke, build and reinforce strong emotions that frame conflicts, stake claims, and mobilize actions in the name of the group and in defining the out-group. In such mobilization, cultural expressions and enactments offer specific action frames that increase shared withingroup beliefs strengthening the emotional persuasiveness of political and social connectedness and requiring the defense of the group. Political claims are particularly compelling when they are framed in terms of culturally-rooted shared images, metaphors, significant events, and personalities that connect people across time and space. What is particularly important here is how convincing the imagined community becomes for people when they see themselves at risk as, for example, in French fears for their culture in the face of Muslim immigration (Bowen 2007). Community can be framed in terms of highly abstract or concrete expressions. As with all symbols, their power lies not in their explicit content but in how they are perceived in specific social and political contexts. For example, flags and insignias are “mere” pieces of cloth” of particular colors but when they represent a nation at risk they become a stimulus for the generation of intense pride and in-group solidarity and attacks upon them easily motivate counter-action including violence as Bryan and Stevenson (2009) point out in writing about insignias in Northern Ireland. We see the same dynamic of alternative interpretive frames around “a piece of cloth” in France which can variously be a fashion accessory or an Islamic headscarf. What is important to realize is that frequently very ordinary objects or expressions become politically powerful frames not because of their inherent qualities but because of the meanings people attribute to them. Ideas are emotionally powerful frames, however it is often only when people engage in actions or activities intimately linked to them that their full power is reached. These actions can be mundane or sacred, and often have a repetitive quality to them that enhances their emotional power. Ritual enactments, sometimes assisted by venerated objects, make emotionally significant connections between a group’s past and present experiences as individuals participate in

198 | Marc Ross specific, often very ordinary, activities that link people across time and space. The demands on individual participants vary from very modest to extremely heavy. Some participants do nothing more than attend an event, or view it on television; others devote a great deal of time and personal resources to it including suspending their daily routines to participate as people on pilgrimages do. Rituals are behaviors whose central elements and the contexts in which they take place frame group identity in ways that are emotionally powerful. Ritual cultural performances communicate the core parts of a group’s selfunderstood identity and history. Of particular interest here are those used to build or frame political narratives and claims based on them.137 As Connerton argues: repetitive cultural rituals are a crucial way of creating and solidifying collective memories that are transmitted over time (Connerton, 1989; Jarman, 1997). Participation in a wide range of activities such as festivals and commemorative ceremonies are important in Connerton’s analysis in which he emphasizes that rites are not merely expressive; rites are not merely formal; and rites are not limited in their effect to ritual occasions (1989: 44). Rituals commemorate continuity and in so doing shape collective memory (Connerton 1989: 48). As noted above, invented rituals such as national holidays often begin long after the events they mark. In addition, “Ritual is not only an alternative way of expressing certain beliefs, but that certain things can be expressed only in ritual” (Connerton 1989: 54). Ritual as a frame has its own performative, formalized language encoded in postures, gestures and movements (Connerton 1989: 58-9). For many people in France the act of a young girl wearing a headscarf in school is a counter-ritual, one in which she is denying her allegiance to France. States are keenly aware of the value of ritual performances that frame and enhance their legitimacy and the political loyalty of their citizens, and all states have ceremonial occasions, which are moments of high ritual that assert the state’s power and legitimacy. State rituals mark occasions such as political transitions, national holidays, military victories, the deaths of leaders, and the achievements of past and present heroes. Some are celebrations are planned in advance and follow a calendric cycle, while others are a response to unfolding events. These large-scale rituals involve elaborate pomp and ceremony, and often large numbers of people are present. However, not all ritual expressions of interest here are state organized or sanctioned. In addition, many cultural per-

|| 137 Normally we think of people as performers, but Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) argues that objects in museums presentations or public exhibitions, festivals, fairs, memorial and tourist sites perform as well. Performances, as she analyzes them, simultaneously reflect and produce plausible accounts of a group’s past and present.

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formances that are meaningful to one group are simply ignored by others. At other times, however, public cultural performances, such as Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland are politicized and provoke counter demonstrations and alternative rituals (Bryan 2000; Jarman 1997). For example, in Israel, Jewish Israelis celebrate the anniversary of Israel’s independence each May, while Palestinian Israelis publicly commemorate “Al Nakba,” the catastrophe, which places the same events in 1948 in an entirely different frame. While there is significant variation in the specifics of how celebrations are framed and marked, a common feature is that they are occasions for retelling and enacting a group’s narrative. Participation in cultural celebrations is a crucial mechanism for maintaining powerful psychocultural narratives and the memories associated with them, and there are always many ways to participate ranging from observing a performance that includes festive and solemn elements to taking part in one that requires months or even years of preparation and can involve high cost and risk to participants. Some are solemn and controversial, while others are mundane and not problematic. Through involvement in enactments, the emotional salience of events is often reinforced in ways that are more powerful than in verbal accounts alone (Jarman, 1997; Verba, 1961). As a result, the narrative’s key metaphors and lessons can serve as accessible frames for everyday political discourse and in periods of high stress, political leaders readily turn to its core images when they seek support for favored action strategies.

Conclusions Cultural expressions and enactments often serve as flash points that frame ethnic conflict even though in many of these conflicts relatively little is at stake materially so that the parties’ deep emotional investment in the conflict requires explanation. A challenge is to understand how cultural frames explain how specific conflicts developed, escalated, and in some cases, were managed constructively. Such analyses communicate the complexity of culture and the power of framing to reveal some of the mechanisms that make culturally rooted conflicts so difficult to settle. Here I have sought to describe useful conceptual tools to do this. A general point to reiterate is that culture frames conflict but this is not to argue that cultural differences cause it directly as the ‘ancient hatreds’ or ‘clash of civilizations’ arguments assert (Huntington, 1993; Kaplan, 1993). Framing provides structure in ambiguous and threatening situations evoking specific scripts so that groups in conflict can explain what took place to themselves and

200 | Marc Ross to outsiders. Frames draw on core beliefs about the world and human behavior, past experiences, and specific assumptions about opponents’ motives to render an emotionally plausible account of a conflict that contains implicit or explicit assumptions of how to react to it. In some situations a single narrative emerges that is widely accepted, as occurred in the US following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that were viewed as a terrorist action and compared to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.138 Many times, however, multiple framing narratives are available and considerable in-group contestation around competing accounts occurs. For example, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there have been hard-line narratives on both sides that deny the legitimacy of the national aspirations of the other, and more accommodating narratives that offer mutual recognition and frame a two-state solution as in everyone’s self-interest. At least four general hypotheses emerge. First, while contestation around cultural expressions takes many forms, these disputes are most intense when the participants’ core identities are threatened. Second, cultural expression itself does not cause intense conflict but rather whether or not conflict occurs depends not only on how particular cultural acts are framed but also on how they are interpreted. While cultural expressions are reflections of what people believe, cultural worldviews also frame political conflicts and render some actions and discourse more or less likely in the eyes of group members. Third, culture serves as a tool for the articulation of political demands and mobilization. At the same time, while it is clear that some leaders use—and even manipulate—cultural expressions in their own interests, this is not always the case and there are many situations where leaders draw upon culturally based frames that represent their long-held, sincere positions and are not merely developed for instrumental reasons. Fourth, while it is easy to focus on culture as a divisive frame as seen in terms such as culture wars or the clash of civilizations, cultural expressions and rituals can also play as important role in peacemaking as disputants find ways to express what it is that they have in common not just what divides them. If we return briefly to the cases of France and South Africa, we can see that both provide evidence consistent with each of these hypotheses. Where in France, threats to identity increased over time, in South Africa the new government went out of its way to emphasize that there was room in “the rainbow nation” for people from all racial and ethnic groups. In France cultural expres-

|| 138 It should not be forgotten, however, that when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the event was treated as a criminal action, not a terrorist attack.

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sions such as the headscarf were interpreted as a rejection of French identity, while in South Africa interpretations often were benevolent—for example, it was often said that whites who remained in the country wanted to help build a new South Africa and space was made for Afrikaners, Zulus and others who “lost out” in the transition to express their cultural identities through festivals, sacred sites, and memorials to past events. In France Le Pen’s ultranationalist National Front and then politicians from the center-right and the left mobilized supporters, especially in electoral campaigns using cultural references to make the case that they were defending the national identity and French culture against outsiders who threatened it. In South Africa, while ethnic and racial appeals certainly have not disappeared, they are far more muted than they once were as national leaders have built broad governing coalitions and most have tried not to exclude any ethnic or cultural group. Finally, while the daily worlds of France’s Muslims and non-Muslims are separated both geographically and culturally, in France there is little public effort to bridge the divide. For example, because any form of affirmative action (what the French call positive discrimination) is inconsistent with popular understanding of laïcité, there has been almost no recruitment of France’s five million Muslims into either elected or appointed political positions; nor are there more than a few token Muslims visible in the media. In contrast, in South Africa, there are many public references to the shared future of the country, many visible activities involving members of different ethnic and racial groups, and many symbols and rituals that communicate this message. In South Africa, the great divide is class not race. In France there is strong division based on both ethnicity and class. Cultural frames and identities, from this perspective, are both barriers to, and opportunities for, the mitigation of ethnic conflict. Movement towards constructive conflict management in long-term intergroup conflicts is tied to the development of inclusive narratives, symbols, and rituals in contexts where mutually exclusive claims previously predominated. In this way, conflict framed around cultural issues offers an opportunity to reduce the intense emotions associated with contested identities and can serve as a powerful vehicle for bringing former opponents into new institutional arrangements and for framing a society’s symbolic landscape in new more inclusive ways as has occurred in South Africa. Signed agreements between long-standing opponents are only one step in a peace process and their implementation requires attention to its implementation in domains beyond formal governmental institutions including more inclusive expressions and enactments that frame and communicate a new relationship among previously opposing groups.

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204 | Marc Ross Ross, M. H. (1993b). The Management of Conflict: Interpretations and Identities in Comparative Perspective. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ross, M. H. (1997). Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis. In Lichbach, M. I. & Zuckerman, A. S. (Eds.), Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure (pp. 4280). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, M. H. (2001). Psychocultural Interpretations and Dramas: Identity Dynamics in Ethnic Conflict. Political Psychology, 22, 157-178. Ross, M. H. (2007). Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, M. H. (Ed.). (2009a). Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies: Contestation and Symbolic Landscapes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ross, M. H. (2009b). Culture in Comparative Political Analysis. In Lichbach, M. I. & Zuckerman, A. S. (Eds.), Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure (2nd ed., pp. 134-161). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schweder, R. A., & LeVine, R. A. (Eds.). (1984). Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, A. D. (1999). Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soudien, C. (2009). Emerging Multiculturalisms in South African Museum Practice. In Ross, M. H. (Ed.), Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies: Contestation and Symbolic Landscapes Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sparks, A. (1995). Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, L. (1985). The Political Mythology of Apartheid. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Verba, S. (1961). Small Groups and Political Behavior: A Study of Leadership. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Volkan, V. D. (1997). Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Wedeen, L. (2002). Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science. American Political Science Review, 96, 713-728.

Christopher Mitchell

CHAPTER NINE Causing conflicts to continue The issue of “conflict causation” seems to lead immediately into a debate about theories of relative deprivation or of perceived injustice; about (perceived) threats to human needs, such as identity or security, or even to existence; or about scarcity models, in which adversaries compete over inadequate supplies of water, land, pigs, oil, defensible boundaries, fish stocks or sovereignty. On the other hand, an equally interesting and relevant issue for the field of conflict research, especially in today’s world of persistent and re-occurring conflicts, raises the puzzle: Why do (some) conflicts, once started up, persist and protract, often far beyond the point at which some ‘rational’ observer would feel that there was no reward for anyone at all in persisting? Approached slightly more formally, key questions for conflict research then become: Do we have any theories of—or even some good ideas about— conflict continuation? What causes conflicts, once started up, to resist resolution?

Alternative lines of thought Initially, there appear to be two basic approaches to tackling this problem of “conflict continuation.” (1) The first approach is to search for structural features of conflicts that increase the likelihood of conflict continuation—or, as the phenomenon has become better known in current literature, “conflict protraction” (Kriesberg et al. 1989). In other words, according to this first approach we try to answer the question: What are the common features of protracted, intractable and deep-rooted conflicts? While this is not the focus of this article, there seem, in passing, to be some obvious answers to this. If adversaries’ mutually incompatible goals involve issues that are highly salient, widely shared, and are over non-expandable and non-substitutable goods, then—obviously—the conflict is going to be hard to manage or mitigate, let alone resolve. Hence, it is likely to resist efforts to end it and is not unlikely to re-ignite periodically, even when it seems settled. Moreover, continuation seems especially likely when the conflict appears to involve the continued existence of one or other of the adversaries—at least in a form acceptable to that entity. Very many conflicts come to be perceived as

206 | Christopher Mitchell being about “continued existence.”139 Those involved become convinced that: “We are fighting for our very lives!!” An alternative line of thought to this—what my colleague Dennis Sandole discusses as “conflicts as start up explanations”—takes the form of viewing conflicts “as process” (Sandole 1999 pp.129-132). This involves (2) searching for common dynamic or processual factors that decrease the likelihood of conflict resolution, and necessitates finding answers to the question: What are common conflict maintaining dynamics that make resolution unlikely?

Some common explanations for conflict continuation Over the last 30 years or so, the field of conflict research has developed a hugely varied set of answers to the question of what maintains conflicts and keeps them going, often in spite of high levels of destruction and sacrifice. In addition, we have a rather less than satisfactory set of remedies or alternative dynamics that might—potentially—lead towards a solution for the most intractable conflict. It is possible to divide these—very roughly—into three types of explanation all describing dynamical factors that help to perpetuate conflicts: psychological obstacles; what might be termed “dynamical deficits”; and behavioural dynamics. Psychological dynamics. Much of the early work in the field of conflict research arose from an understanding that people locked in a conflict relationship were likely to experience a number of common and self-reinforcing psychological dynamics that arose from finding themselves in a stressful situation. This invariably involved a threatening ‘Other,’ considerable uncertainty, the likelihood of suffering much damage and loss, and hence the need for solidarity with their fellows in adversity. The working out of these frequently observed processes posed formidable barriers to finding solutions to conflicts from the interpersonal to the international level. The development of such phenomena as negative stereotypes, hostile enemy images linked to virile and moral self-

|| 139 This does raise a conundrum about what to do when a leading actor in a complex conflict system has been created specifically to pursue the goals in dispute, often by violent means, so that their compromise or abandonment will lead to the total demise or extinction of that entity. (For example, the LTTE in Sri Lanka or the IRA in Northern Ireland). What resistance to a resolution might arise from such “struggle organisations”, and how might they be transformed into entities with different goals, skills, and equally rewarding activities ?

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images and the growth of defensive mistrust all helped to explain the way in which conflicts persist over time. Among the most important psychological dynamics that help to perpetuate conflicts could be mentioned Ralph White’s (1970) observation of the growth of a shared inability to empathize with an adversary and Lee Ross’s (Ross & Stillinger 1991) concept of “reactive devaluation.” For White, intense conflicts produced—for those involved—huge barriers even to begin envisaging what the situation looked like for the adversaries, so that even understanding the Others’ outlook, beliefs, aspirations and assumptions became virtually impossible. The remedy was to fall back on stereotypes based on assumptions of fundamental malevolence and, ultimately, evil. White was insistent that an inability to empathize with an adversary did not involve any elements of sympathy with the Other’s positions, goals or behavior. Rather, inability to empathize basically produced a psychological blank, which usually led to strategies that eventually produced quite the opposite effect that was anticipated. Lee Ross extended this idea and applied it to the interpretation of, and reaction to incoming information from those involved in intractable conflicts. His work showed that exactly the same proposal, suggestion, or idea was received, interpreted, and reacted to very differently depending on whether it emanated from an adversary or some other source. The input from an adversary was likely to be disbelieved, discounted or devalued. The same input but from a different source would be treated far more seriously and sympathetically. More recently, scholars working on the implications of attribution theory (Kahneman & Tversky 1979) and prospect theory (Levy 1992) have elucidated other psychological processes that help to keep conflicts going by posing obstacles to de-escalation, the reduction of mistrust and the discounting of concessions. Ernest Jones’ early work (Jones and Nisbett 1971) noted the psychological tendency of those in conflict to assume that an adversary perceives—and actually has—a wide range of strategic options, so that the selection of harmful acts is a matter of malevolent choice. In contrast, our own side has almost no ‘room for maneuver’ and is forced to take decisions that may, unfortunately, bring unpleasant results, cause harm and even border on the unethical. In contrast, later work on attribution theory has proposed that there exists a general tendency to assume that others act as they do (malevolently in the case of adversaries) because of some inherent and hence relatively unalterable, characteristics, whereas ‘we’ are very much the victims of constraining circumstances, forced to act as we do because of a hostile environment (including the adversary) but malleable—and reasonable—should circumstances change. Prospect theory has noted that the sending and reception of concessions are much affected by adversaries’ often very different starting assumptions about

208 | Chris Mitchell ‘anchoring points’ and what seems a concession to one party—the offer to hand over something—may not be viewed as a concession if the other party does not recognize the adversary’s right to possess the ‘something’ in the first place. The same theory has also elucidated the general tendency of people to be ‘loss averse,’ so that they will struggle harder to avoid losing something they regard as having rightfully been in their possession for a considerable time, compared with something they have recently gained or are about to achieve. Dynamical Deficits. All of these psychological factors have been advanced as one level of explanation for the protraction of intense conflicts, which frequently call into being common psychological processes that then pose obstacles to any search for a resolution. Other explanations for conflict continuation rely less on the presence of psychological barriers and more on the increasing absence of stabilizing processes that prevent the escalation and maintenance of a conflict, once certain thresholds are crossed. In other words, conflicts continue because of the absence of certain ‘dampening’ factors that could, in other cases, operate to prevent destructive escalation, to moderate behavior and to enable solutions to be sought jointly and without the resort to threats or violence. For example, in conflicts that arise between friends, family members, colleagues or fellow members of in-groups, ethno-linguistic communities or religions, there are usually ample opportunities to check out misperceptions, conflicting interpretations of events, motives and intentions or salience of issues. In such relationships, communication remains relatively open and reliable. During intense and destructive conflicts, communication between adversaries becomes less frequent and less transparent, while the content narrows down and contains an increasing number of attacks, accusations, threats, complaints and self-justifications, plus a great deal more misinformation deliberately designed to mislead. (My colleague Wallace Warfield argues that one of the most important deficits in many conflict relationships is an absence of any “rumor control” processes.) Another deficit that helps to maintain a conflict is the absence of opportunities for the other side to demonstrate trustworthiness and thus diminish the overwhelming sense of mistrust that adversaries come to feel about the others. Allied to this is a tendency of parties in conflict to engage in behavior that involves self-fulfilling prophecies, as when one side pursues activities that actually ensure an unpleasant and basically undesired reaction from the other, which then serves to confirm the first’s existing negative stereotypes. Finally, although by no means exhaustively, many conflicts often continue at least partly because of the lack of any real opportunity to think creatively about possible solutions, some of which might involve compromise but might equally avoid the costs of ‘fighting it out’ in court or through violence and

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counter-violence. In many conflicts, there are increasingly being created arenas in which adversaries can jointly explore public bargaining positions, core issues, underlying interests, alternative course of action and likely costs of various strategies. Because they often involve all the stakeholders and not just the main protagonists, such arenas can be used to help end conflicts before they cross thresholds into mutual threat, harm and violence and become wholly intractable. They can be particularly effective if entered early enough in the development of a conflict. However, in many other cases, it is often the absence of such non-coercive, non-bargaining mechanisms that helps to prolong otherwise containable and resolvable conflicts. Behavioral Dynamics. A third way of trying to answer the question about what keeps a conflict ‘going’ over a long period of time has been to look for common dynamic processes that have the effect of maintaining the conflict at a high or increasing level. While some of the most obvious ‘conflict continuing’ dynamics consist of interactions between the adversaries others are internal to the parties themselves, such as the development of groupthink and of sycophantic feedback within stressed decision making circles. Elsewhere (Mitchell 2011) I have discussed the common dynamic of “mobilization” as a blanket term to cover many of the intra-party changes that take place as a complex and politically organized social entity becomes involved in a conflict. Many aspects of this phenomenon can and do contribute to ensuring that the conflict will continue over a long time and be difficult to contain and resolve: 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

Diversion of resources (material, organizational, informational, intellectual, temporal etc.) to the prosecution of the conflict, with the result that less is available for non-conflict related tasks. Change in leadership circles with those charged with the (often coercive and violent) prosecution of the conflict taking on more central roles and gaining influence, and those involved in other tasks ‘taking a back seat’ or being cut out completely from decision making processes. Increased focusing of attention and information within the society on the issues central to the conflict, and on the course of the struggle. Greater efforts to achieve unity of purpose and uniformity of beliefs about the issues in conflict within the society. More efforts to involve all the population in the society in efforts to win the struggle and in the sacrifices called for to achieve success.

210 | Chris Mitchell In their analysis of the common dynamics of conflict, Pruitt and Kim (2004) identify mobilization as one of the key processes that move a conflict from a low level of intensity through a number of thresholds to a state of intractability that may defy efforts to contain or resolve it. In common language, this movement is usually labeled “escalation” but in fact the dynamic seems to involve a number of distinct processes, all of which interact and contribute to the continuation— and frequently to the intensifying—of many conflicts. A full list of such conflict continuing dynamics would start with intra-party mobilization, and include (at least): 1.

2.

3.

4.

Escalation—a process whereby the adversaries, in reaction to each other, increase the frequency and intensity of their coercive, and ultimately violent, behavior with the intention of imposing such a high level of costs, damage and destruction that the other side abandons its effort to achieve the goals in contention. Enlargement—a process whereby the adversaries attempt to recruit other parties as allies, supporters or patrons with the result that the conflict directly involves an increasing number of antagonists in rival coalitions and often spreads geographically into previously uninvolved areas.140 Polarization—a process whereby adversaries come to (1) perceive themselves as complete and inevitable rivals, (2) take up opposing positions on more and more problems so that opposing the other becomes almost habitual, and (3) undertake moves to counter what they see as the other’s efforts to gain advantage or achieve their goals across a wider and wider range of issues. Dissociation—a process whereby inter-adversary communication becomes coarsened and attenuated; specifically, the adversaries cut down on actual contacts (from avoiding meeting with one another to formally breaking off diplomatic relations) and on the level of information they exchange. At the same time the content of any remaining communication diminishes in richness and complexity, becoming focused on information that is accusatory on the one hand and defensive on the other.

|| 140 The pioneer conflict and peace researcher, Kenneth Boulding (who was also something of a poet) once likened conflicts to dangerous whirlpools that had a tendency to drag into their depths all who strayed too near. Once in, erstwhile outsiders found it almost impossible to extricate themselves.

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5.

Entrapment—a process whereby the leadership of the parties in conflict become trapped into their coercive course of action, initially undertaken to achieve desired goals. Later. They become so committed to this chosen strategy that there appears to be no way of changing policy or ‘backing away.’ It seems to be the case that, for both rival leaderships, there is no alternative to continuing with the struggle until final success, as there seems to be no graceful or low cost way of extricating themselves from the chosen course of action.141

This last dynamic has increasingly seemed to me an important key to explaining conflict continuation, as time and again one can observe the way in which the leaders of parties in conflict (and frequently many of their supporters and constituents) become trapped in a course of action from which there seems to be no escape, even when the costs of continuation increase geometrically (in terms of both real and opportunity costs) and the prospects of ‘success’ in achieving the original goals in conflict become less and less. Presidents and their advisers, prime ministers, key military leaders, media pundits, all become convinced that ‘There is No Alternative’ to carrying on with the struggle. The further the leaders of a country or a community or an organization pursue the original goals by the chosen course of (coercive) action, the more difficult it becomes to extricate themselves and their party from the process. The next part of this paper considers the process of entrapment in somewhat more detail and suggests a variety of ways in which the concept can help to explain why conflicts continue, once they have started up.

The promise of entrapment theory My initial contention, then, is that conflicts—like many other human activities, such as setting up a commercial enterprise, engaging in a major development project or establishing a new department in a university—can be thought of as a goal seeking process that develops over time. As it develops, it typically goes through stages that keep it going, even if the original goals seem increasingly remote, the costs of pursuing them become increasingly large and the likelihood of actually achieving them becomes less and less. Leaders—and frequently

|| 141 Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1992, used the phrase “There Is No Alternative” so frequently that she briefly became (un)popularly known as “Tina” Thatcher.

212 | Chris Mitchell many of their followers—become entrapped in the enterprise. The conflict continues and frequently the only way of abandoning seems to be through changing the leaders. In other words, parties in a conflict often find themselves caught in a particularly intractable form of a “social trap” (Brockner & Rubin 1985) Some time ago I tried to illustrate this general process of entrapment in conflicts through a simple, linear model (Mitchell 1991) which—of course—suffers from the weaknesses of all linear models, but which may not be too inaccurate a starting point for describing how complex socio-political ‘parties’ can become entrapped in an increasingly costly and frustrating conflict. The model suggests that protracted and intractable conflicts typically go through four stages, the first—“reward pursuit”—being the one in which leaderships focus on the gains and goods to be attained through the pursuit of the disputed goals, even if this involves the—apparently minor—costs of coercing an adversary. After a while, leaders become conscious of the likely, long term costs of continuing the existing course of action to attain the original goals. The war is not going to be over by Christmas, the strike will not bring management to its knees (and the negotiating table) within weeks, the insurgents will neither enter the capital in triumph nor dissolve into small criminal gangs forever on the run. However, costs have been incurred, sacrifices made and reputations staked on final success and on the achievement of the original and ostensibly increasingly important goals. The conflict now enters into a second stage of “cost justification” whereby the strategy continues but now partly in order to justify the original decision to prosecute the dispute and also to justify the sacrifices already called for—and made. The third stage develops when the overall costs of the chosen course of action increase and even come to outweigh the value assigned to ‘success.’ The costs of victory become larger than any gains obtained through the achievement of victory itself. Moreover, the fruits of victory have yet to be obtained and may seem to be becoming increasingly remote. However, failure to achieve final success means that all the past sacrifice will have been in vain and something has to be gained to off-set the costs and the sacrifices made—and still to be made. Hence, it seems ‘rational’ to go on, as long as there is a hope of gaining the original goals. (Ending up with half a supersonic airliner, or a half completed bridge or a cathedral with no roof, seems a less than optimal conclusion to an enterprise, no matter what the cost overruns.) Furthermore, other less apparently ‘rational’ motives seem to enter into this “loss minimization” stage—for example suitably punishing the adversary for opposing and for damages inflicted, or in order to extract compensation for losses suffered once the conflict has ended and the other side has conclusively ‘lost.’

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Eventually, of course, what economists would recognize as ‘rationality’ begins to dawn on at least one and perhaps on both leaderships. Available resources become depleted and ultimately exhausted, the likely future costs of continuing become a huge proportion of what’s left to expend and come increasingly to dominate thinking. Often, the original goals seem to diminish in value once the overall costs of trying to attain them become real through experience. Opportunity costs begin to loom larger in minds of the leaders—always providing they are still there, in office. In this “goal relinquishing” stage leaders begin to seek for a way out, for a way of not continuing the conflict, and the often agonizing process of trying to end the war, conclude the strike, abandon the insurgency, wind up the favored programs, begins. Only a few leaders are so wedded to continuing the conflict to the bitter end that they are willing to accept Masadas or the ruination of a Third Reich. Like all models, this four-stage model of ‘changing evaluations’ of an increasingly costly course of action is something of a caricature. For one thing, it focuses on only one of the adversaries in the conflict interaction, and ignores the argument that it takes at least two sides to come to the conclusion that conflict continuation is no longer an optimal strategy, so that a search for alternatives can begin. However, the model does raise a number of—hopefully useful— questions about processes of entrapment in conflicts. Many have to do with the nature of the ‘thresholds’ which mark points at which at least some leaders recognize that the trap is closing—or has closed—and the ostensible reasons for continuing have to be altered, or the enterprise itself has to change and at least some of the goals be abandoned.142 Other related issues raised by the model and its idea of four broad stages have to do with the nature of the events leading up to, and bringing about a major change in the ‘frame’ through which key leaders view the conflict—and where exactly they are in their efforts to fight their way through to success. Suggestions that have been put forward to explain major shifts in frame—and policy—include a sudden, unexpected but very real disaster, such as the National Liberation Front’s Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 or a sudden, symbolic loss, such as the death of a leader or the defection of an ally. Other thresholds can involve the failure of a hope or aspiration, as when, in 1901, the Boer leaders || 142 Lewis Coser wrote an article in the early days of conflict research in which he outlined a number of potential losses - some real but many symbolic - that had historically acted as major turning points, after which leaders started to think about changing strategy. Such things as the loss of a capital city, the capture of a key leader, the defection of a crucial ally or the loss of remaining means of concealment or mobility (Coser 1961).

214 | Chris Mitchell fighting the British in South Africa realized that the German Emperor was not going to come to their aid, or when the Japanese Government in 1945 realized that the Soviet leaders were not going to act as mediators to help develop a negotiated end to the Second World War in the Pacific. On the other hand, some more positive events can also bring about changes in leaders’ frames and lead towards their discontinuing the prosecution of the conflict through coercion and violence. A major conciliatory gesture from the adversary, for example, or an offer of ‘honest brokership’ from a valued or respected outsider can both be events that lead to a major re-conceptualization of alternatives, as it begins to dawn that there are alternatives. It may be that these sudden changes can act as a means of radically changing leaders’ frames through which they view their situation and likely future fortunes, but it seems unlikely that these alone will mark crucial thresholds in evaluating options. It seems more likely that Karl Deutsch and Richard Merritt’s original idea (1965) about changing strategies is also relevant to escaping entrapment; that a symbolic event—a shock or a major loss—has a major impact only when it is the culmination of a long slow drip of disappointments and failures. It is difficult for leaders to continue arguing—and themselves believing— that there is light at the end of the tunnel when the latter is slowly filling with water and half the roof falls in! Whether this particular model itself is helpful or misleading in thinking about why conflicts continue when observers might ‘rationally’ feel that—the past, present, or future costs outweighing any likely gains—they should be brought to an end can be debated. However, I would argue that there is promise in some theory about the dynamics of entrapment which offers ideas about there being alternatives to continuation143—or at least some factors whose alteration might make it easier for leaders to rethink and alter course—that is, to ‘deentrap’ themselves. The problem is that when one examines entrapment theory it turns out to be highly complex; the theory has at least four important and inter-related components: 1.

Psychological, which deals with findings that there is a relationship between perceptions of the worth of the goal pursued, of the sacrifices made (and to be made), and of the chances of success. In brief, there is much evidence to the effect that human beings have

|| 143 After all, conceptually there always are alternatives. Recall Charles Osgood’s classic study of de-escalation strategies entitled “An Alternative to War or Surrender” (1962).

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2.

3.

4.

a tendency, among others, to overvalue ‘goods’ in pursuit of which they have invested much time, effort and resources, as well as to over-estimate their chances of obtaining those ‘goods.’ 144 Economic, which deals with findings that humans do not regard ‘bygones as bygones’ as rational economic beings are supposed to in calculating whether continuing to pursue a course of action is ‘worth it.’ Rather, sunk costs become an investment to be taken into account in evaluating the worth of a goal and continuing to pursue that goal. More in line with economists’ views of ‘rationality,’ conflicts resemble bridge building in that the costs incurred are ‘front loaded.’ They come due early on in the inter-action, while the rewards of success are deferred until the very end, so that it makes more sense to carry on (hopefully) to victory rather than quit and absorb the costs without any reward at all.145 Political, which emphasizes the factors pushing leaders towards continuing the prosecution of the conflict because of their public commitment of ‘political capital’ and reputation to that strategy and in spite of their followers’ sacrifices (for which they have called) in resources, time, security, and possible loss of life. At least, admitting error could lead to loss of office, position power and possibly even their own lives. Cultural, which draws attention to factors that encourage persistence, determination and ‘not giving up’ and which equally discourage backing down or ‘quitting.’ 146

However, while complex, the theory—or perhaps ‘theories’ would be more accurate—of entrapment does offer the possibility of a rather less daunting way of

|| 144 However, the legend of the fox and the grapes reminds us that, once we perceive that there is absolutely no chance at all of our gaining that which we so ardently desire, there is a tendency to revalue that goal downwards. The grapes become undoubtedly sour. 145 In the middle of a long drawn out and costly miners strike in Britain during the mid-1980s, the union leader Arthur Scargill is said to have commented; “We have suffered too much to give up now.” 146 During his struggle to stay in office in spite of the revelations over Watergate, President Richard Nixon reflected prevailing cultural values in the United States with his comment that; “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” It is interesting to wonder whether anyone has ever responded to similar conflict situations by proclaiming; “When the going gets tough, the tough start thinking.”

216 | Chris Mitchell tackling the whole issue of conflict continuation. This would be through a decision making approach.

Decisions to quit or continue? The most straightforward way of using the insights from entrapment theory to understand why conflicts continue is to look at the problem from the point of view of the leaders of the parties involved in a conflict. On many occasions, such ‘decision makers’ become entrapped in a course of action that increasingly seems less and less likely to achieve the goals they had originally set out to achieve, while it is costing more and more in terms of real values (money, material, lives), symbolic values (reputation, respectability) and sacrificed alternatives. In other words, it seems fruitful to look at the issue of conflict continuation and the question of how to change course and try other ways of ending the conflict either as: 1.

2.

A problem of choice of leaders—following from the common observation that policies change when leaders change, either regularly and legitimately via elections, the fall of governments etc, or sporadically and (often) illegally via coups, golpes or revolts; or more complexly as: A problem of leadership choice, which involves existing leaders ‘changing their minds,’ a process that can be (over) simplified by using a model of a binary decision involving a major choice between:

Continue—with the present (coercive) course of action  Decision  Change—and abandon the current basic strategy147

|| 147 There is always a third basic choice which is to increase—or even redouble—one’s efforts, rather than simply continuing along the present course of action—invest more, involve others as allies or patrons, widen the struggle to other arenas. However, this seems to be a different kind of choice—an incremental one—compared to the decision to change direction completely,

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If one answer to the question of what helps to ensure conflict continuation lies in thinking about it as a matter of leaders—or some of them—collectively ‘changing their minds’ and choosing a radically different course of action, then the next questions involve asking what factors help to determine the choice between continuing or changing, but also what triggers this process of reevaluation in the first place. We should consider two caveats before trying to deal with the first of these questions: First, fundamentally re-evaluating a basic course of action —that is, to continue a conflict mainly through coercion—is not an everyday occurrence for a set of leaders, especially in the early stages of that enterprise, when it is highly unlikely that doubts and questions of continuation will even arise. Leaders do not roll out of bed every morning and go through a fundamental policy reevaluation. Second, there will however usually be some, within a complex party involved in a conflict, who oppose the existing course of action and advocate alternatives. The question then becomes how do the ‘opposers’ come to dominate the intra-party discourse or assume top decision making roles; or alternatively, when do key leaders in office adopt ideas about a change of strategy (especially if these have been hawked around by their opponents) and what makes this such a difficult process? Keeping these warnings in mind, let us pursue this line of enquiry about factors that might induce leaders to: (1) consider that the time might have come to re-evaluate the basic utility of continuing a protracted and violent conflict and (2) choose—or not—an alternative course of action that might lead to negotiation, compromise and settlement.

Factors that affect decisions to continue One of the most comprehensive considerations of this whole question of which factors help explain the continuation of any apparently failing course of action, including the continued prosecution of an intractable and costly conflict, is the model developed by Barry Staw and Jerry Ross (1987). Originally, this model was designed to help answer questions about why business enterprises continue with failing projects long after their worthlessness has been clearly demon-

|| to reverse course or undertake a U-turn (however gradual), which involves a fundamental change.

218 | Christopher Mitchell strated. Suitably adapted, it can help our understanding of conflict continuation as an analogue of project continuation—provided we can suspend disbelief and for a moment treat conflict as a project intended to achieve certain goals. The basic model suggests that occasions for re-evaluation of an increasingly costly course of action are most likely to occur when those conducting the project—or, in our case the conflict—begin to receive constant and undeniable information to the effect that the current strategy increasingly appears unlikely to achieve the original goals—market domination, major profits, or victory. (The model refers to these as “Questionable or Negative Outcomes.”) When this likelihood of failure becomes undeniable—at least to some leaders—an opportunity to re-evaluate strategy and possibly to make a radical change of course arises. The Staw-Ross model then suggests a variety of complex and interrelated factors—what are termed “determinants”—that can affect the choice of carrying on, or making a major change of strategy. These are grouped under four broad headings: project, psychological, social and structural determinants, although in the case of conflicts as a “project” the “social” determinants could well be called “socio-political” (see figure 1).

Figure 1: The escalation cycle and its variables

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Relevant “project” variables in the original model include such factors as whether or not the enterprise is seen at the outset as a long term investment with a delayed pay off structure yet one that ultimately involves a large pay off. This seems often to be the case with intractable conflicts once the ‘short war’ myth has been abandoned. Then again, the model suggests that if the negative outcome seems to be the result of a purely temporary setback, this will be one factor encouraging continuation rather than change. Many of the “psychological” determinants in the models also seem highly relevant to intractable conflicts, when leaders’ egos become involved in the successful completion of the conflict in victory, or where leaders are publicly and personally responsible for the frequent, continuing and irrecoverable commitment of valuable resources to the conflict—all the while arguing that such expenditures are essential and ‘in the national interest.’ Linked to such psychological factors are others that are social or political in their nature, such as the likely personal and political costs of any admission of failure indicated by the abandonment of a course of action in terms of responsibility for the failure. The resultant loss of status, influence, office, freedom and—in extreme cases—life are likely to act as a deterrent to ‘giving up.’ Many of these factors are made even more influential if the cultural milieu in which the conflict is being pursued is one that places great value on persistence, consistency and not quitting, and where both leaders and rank and file followers have been brought up on stories of heroes who have—in the end— triumphed over adversity and initial failure. The dominance in local culture of what Staw and Ross refer to as “turnaround scripts” can also be a barrier to changing course. Among the “structural” factors that affect the choice between continuity and change, the model focuses on such influences as bureaucratic inertia and political support for the existing course of action. Most importantly, the model also emphasizes the degree to which the project is tied in to the organization’s basic goals and values, a factor that seems particularly relevant in many conflicts in which the issues in conflict appear to be connected strongly with the continued existence of one of the parties involved in the struggle. Apart from cases where the very survival of adversaries seems at stake—the continuation of the state of Israel, the physical survival of the Hutus, the establishment of the independent homeland of Tamil Elam—the continuation of many conflicts also comes, as I observed earlier, to involve the continuation of those organizations charged with waging the conflict—Hamas, ETA, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers. Changing strategy will inevitably involve a diminution of the role of such organizations and possibly their demise through irrelevance, should a new course of action prove effective. Anticipation of this possibility seems likely to lead this

220 | Chris Mitchell particular sub-set of leaders to view the idea of not continuing the conflict through existing means with less than enthusiasm. Most of the factors from the Staw-Ross model mentioned above concern variables that seem likely to act against any change that would lead towards the abandonment of the current strategy for winning the conflict and thus to its continuation. There are others which work in the opposite direction—the increasing costs of the current strategy, the increased availability of alternative sources of satisfaction, the opportunity for political de-commitment from previous failure—but in general the model does seem to emphasize the number of factors likely to operate against any major change being adopted both by a business enterprise committed to a market strategy or a country, community, institution or individual engaged in a crucial conflict. On the other hand, a careful examination of the model can suggest factors that can change and be changed, so that the continuation of the conflict unto victory becomes more problematical and the search for alternatives that can lead to a resolution more likely. Political support for continuation can diminish, administrative inertia can be overcome, political futures can be assured for those bringing peace rather than those persisting in war, evaluations of the worth of the pay-off through final victory can change as people begin to factor in the relative costs and opportunity costs of continuation, or the likely future costs as a proportion of residual resources. At the very least, the model suggests aspects of a decision making process that can be altered so that what Staw and Ross refer to as the “Perceived Utility of Change” can be increased in comparison with the “Perceived Utility of the Current Course of Action”. Four major aspects of the model should be emphasized as a final comment. The first of these is that the model says very little about what might actually bring about what can be termed “an occasion for re-evaluation”. Earlier in this article, I talked briefly about the kinds of ‘triggers’ that might cause the leaders—and followers—of parties in conflict to contemplate the possibility of NOT continuing with that conflict and the model returns us to this puzzle. What are the preliminary difficulties of agreeing to recognize failure so that alternatives can be considered in time? Is it necessary for leaders to confront what the poet Roy Campbell refers to as “the dawning of disaster”? What are the signs that a reconsideration of ‘carrying on as before’ is undeniably necessary? Secondly, the central importance of the goals involved in the struggle clearly makes a difference to the likely continuation of that conflict. As mentioned earlier, this is particularly the case when the continuation of the party itself is tied to the continuation of the actual conflict. I have already noted the tendency of what might be termed “struggle organisations” (entities actually created to undertake the pursuit of the contested goals via coercion ands violence) to link

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their own continued survival with that of ‘continuing the fight.’ However, what I have in mind here are cases where there exists a genuine—and in many cases a well-founded—fear that ending the conflict short of complete victory will result in the demise and disappearance of one of the adversaries—at least in its present form. Such situations, where ‘the fate of the country is at stake,’ are likely to perpetuate a conflict in the face of almost any setbacks, any level of costs being suffered—or to be suffered—and any criticism from intra-party rivals. For parties apparently facing absolute destruction, there probably is no alternative to fighting on—and hoping. Thirdly, the model also points up the importance of cultural factors in keeping conflicts going, especially in cultures within which persistence, commitment to values, not reneging on promises made, and not retreating from a stated position are valued most highly.148 In contrast, there are also cultures that emphasize and honor flexibility and learning from experience. However, the model makes the point that the issue is overcoming barriers to changing course, which raises questions about how key cultural variables that do pose barriers to abandonment of a conflict strategy might be overcome and the strategy changed. Lastly, there is the fairly fundamental question about the relevance of this model in conflicts where the prosecution of the conflict itself is the reason for its continuation rather than any goals that were initially involved. The Staw-Ross model is, at base, a model that assumes that decision makers will make some kind of quasi-rational choice between courses of action which are means to an end—continuing the struggle through efforts to harm the adversary versus seeking some other way of achieving desired goals. But supposing the object of the conflict is to harm the adversary, so that abandoning the harming strategy would, in it, is the equivalent of losing? I noted earlier that, in my four-stage model, an intractable conflict might arrive at a stage in which punishing an adversary became at least one dominant reason for continuing the conflict. In other cases, harming the other might have been the whole rationale for the conflict in the first place. For example, in cultures where ‘honor’ is a dominant consideration, or where offences to honor can become the sources of intense and lasting conflict, or where a duty to obtain redress through revenge is a dominant cultural imperative, will any of the factors contained in the Staw Ross model be at all relevant?

|| 148 “…In an uneven fight, when a North Caucasian warrior is surrounded by enemies he will throw his bourka (cloak) on the ground and stand on it to show he will not retreat one step from the surface covered by his bourka…” (Le Carre 1995)

222 | Chris Mitchell The “War of Yugoslav Disintegration” seems to offer many examples where the conflict continued and escalated simply because of the widespread imperative for all parties to obtain revenge for wrongs suffered at the hands of the other side.149 On an individual level, Jared Diamond recently wrote about a relatively westernized young man in the New Guinea Highlands having a revenge killing carried out on the killer of his uncle because that was what his traditional culture demanded, although he himself apparently felt no personal animosity towards the killer (Diamond 2008). Naturally, the revenge killing in turn started off another cycle of revenge killings, again because the culture demanded it. In other words, the reason for some conflicts continuing might well be the previous action in the conflict cycle. Moreover, this possibility raises a central conundrum about whether any kind of choice model would be appropriate for understanding behavior in what might be called ‘revenge’ or ‘retribution’ cultures, where honor demands ‘getting even’ and there are no substitutes for this as choice of strategy? Conflict becomes ‘revenge fulfillment’ necessitated by cultural imperatives concerned with ‘getting your own back’ or ‘restoring a balance.’

Concluding conundrum This last point seems to take us to a suggestion that the puzzle over the continuation of ‘conflicts’ presents two very different challenges, one of which focuses on conflicts as means to achieve contested goals and another on conflicts that are ends in themselves. We seem to have a number of useful theories about factors that keep means conflicts going, but which can be influenced—often with difficulty—to move the adversarial relationship on to another basis and to resolve the conflict. In the case of ends conflicts, in which the coercive or violent behavior itself is its own reason for continuation, we seem to have less insight into overcoming the difficulties of finding appropriate conciliatory moves that might halt the continuation of the conflict and begin a process moving (at least) in the direction of some ‘solution.’ If the whole object of at least one of the par|| 149 In his book on the early days of the war in Bosnia, Ed Vulliamy describes the massacres and destruction carried out by Bosniac strike forces from the besieged enclaves of Goradze and Srebrenica, attacking Serbian positions, villages and civilians. As a response, and overlooking “…the barbarism they had wrought on the Muslims for five months, the Serbs began talking about ‘revenge’. Within ten days…word was reaching Serbian held Foca that 200 Muslims had been summarily murdered in vendetta killings north of the town…” (Vulliamy pp.177-8).

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ties to the conflict is retribution for previously suffered wrong, (i.e. the only solution is to inflict an equivalent wrong on ‘the other’ ) what conciliatory move can an adversary offer that would divert the vengeful party from its ‘honorable’ task of achieving revenge? Apology for insult or compensation for injury might—or might not—turn out to be ways terminating such ends conflicts. However, these seem fragile alternatives when wrongs are seen as absolute so that they have to be responded to in kind. Such conflicts pose huge problems for any seeking to avert their continuation.

References Brockner, J. & Rubin, J. (1985). Entrapment in Escalating Conflicts. New York: Springer Verlag. Coser, L. (1961). The Termination of Conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 5, 347-353. Deutsch, K. & Merritt, R. (1965). Effects of Events on National and International Images. In Kelman H. (Ed.) International Behaviour—A Social Psychological Analysis. New York: Halt, Rinehart & Winston. Diamond, J. (2008). Vengeance is Ours. The New Yorker April 21, 74-87. Jones, E. and.Nisbett, R. (1971). The Actor and the Observer—Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behaviour. New York: General Learning Press. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory; An Analysis of Decision Under Risk. Econometrica, 47, 263-291. Kriesberg, L. et al (Eds.) (1989). Intractable Conflicts and Their Transformation. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Le Carre, J. (1995). Our Game. New York: Alfred Knopf. Levy, J. (1992). An Introduction to Prospect Theory. Political Psychology, 13, 171-186. Mitchell, C. (2001). Gestures of Conciliation. London: Palgrave. Mitchell, C. (1991). Ending Conflicts and Wars; Judgement, Rationality and Entrapment. International Social Science Journal, 127, 35-55. Mitchell, C. (2011). Conflict, Social Change and Conflict Resolution; An Enquiry. In Bloomfield, D. et al. (Eds.), Social Change and Conflict Transformation (pp. 75-100) Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series II, Berlin: Berghof Research Center. Osgood, C. (1962). An Alternative to War or Surrender. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Pruitt, D. & Kim, Sung Hee (2004). Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate And Settlement. Boston; McGraw Hill. Ross, L. & Stillinger, C. (1991). Barriers to Conflict Resolution. Negotiation Journal, 7, 389-404. Sandole, D. (1999). Capturing the Complexity of Conflict—Dealing with Violent Ethnic Conflicts in the post-Cold War Era. London: Pinter. Staw, B. & Ross, J. (1987). Behavior in Escalation Situations. Research in Organizational Behavior 9, 39-78. Vulliamy, E. (1994). Seasons in Hell; Understanding Bosnia’s War. New York: St Martins Press. White, R. (1970). Nobody Wanted War. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

Geneviève Souillac and Douglas P. Fry

CHAPTER TEN The human quest for peace, rights, and justice Convergence of the Traditional and the Modern Cross-cultural dialogue constitutes an integral part of a peaceful vision of our complex global society. Two features characterize such a vision. First, it is oriented towards common responsibility with regard to conflict prevention, resolution, and transformation. Second, it assumes a shared world. While violence and the intractable conflicts on our planet cannot be changed overnight, overlapping networks of knowledge and the pooling and sharing of resources about peace also exist. A realist and idealist approach to generating a peaceful global society challenges common assumptions about human nature, relationships, community, and politics. A degree of willingness to work with complexity, and a new orientation that encourages inclusive rather than dualist thinking are needed, without giving up the necessary critical, comparative and evaluative tools that we have at our disposal. A peaceful vision is value-based, encompassing the existing plurality of worldviews, and allows for dialogue between these. This chapter proposes to establish a dialogue between traditional and modern approaches to what might constitute the conceptual and institutional foundation for a global society oriented towards peace. It demonstrates how the articulation of the different components of peace systems brings to life an inherently democratic and participatory vision in which complex forms of belonging, including normative belonging, play a pivotal role in implementing peace. As the chapter moves topically from a consideration of values supportive of positive peace, to democracy and decision-making via consensus, on toward belonging, social identity, and citizenship, to arrive lastly at an exploration of how history, memory, symbols, and ritual can be evoked in the interest of positive peace, we will comparatively reflect on how the peace systems of two traditional societies, the Upper Xingu River basin tribes of Brazil and the Iroquois Confederacy carry implications for the further development of positive peace at the global level. We suggest that values, consensus decision-making, normative citizenship, and memory are pivotal to the creation and continuance of peace in both these traditional systems and among modern globally interdependent societies.

226 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry This chapter also critically examines how harnessing existing, traditional forms of knowledge about the creation and maintenance of peace systems and positive peace can shed light on those modern concepts which are being increasingly recognized as foundational to local, regional, and global peace. Care must be deployed in establishing a dialogue between traditional and modern knowledge, as such a dialogue is necessarily enshrined in an asymmetrical power relationship, and perceptual differences may exist. An exchange on traditional and modern forms of knowledge brings up the fundamental divide in perceptions and worldviews relative to community, human nature, and the sacred between traditional and industrial/post-industrial societies. Thus, members of industrialized countries who are active on behalf of ecological concerns, such as the preservation of biodiversity, and critical of industrialized societies’ pattern of disregard for the various human and ecological crises of survival, have shown interest in exploring the connections between their struggle, and the movement for the recognition of the human rights of indigenous peoples (Suagee, 1998: 81). Integrating traditional forms of knowledge for the purpose of peace must continue in a line of development of awareness around both the destruction and exclusion of traditional societies since the earliest colonizing conquests, and the importance of cultural recognition in the implementation of human rights and indigenous cultural rights in particular. In such a context, it must be observed that the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples sixty-five years after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been intrinsically connected to self-determination and independence in a modern world. Such recognition has centered on rights associated with living as self-governing communities within traditional homelands (Suagee, 1998: 81). In this way, the struggles of indigenous communities to retain their livelihood and cultural memory of traditional ways of life and governance that are now extinct or endangered positively contributes to the recognition of the importance of traditional knowledge in a modern world. In this chapter, we highlight how traditional forms of knowledge about governance that are still intrinsically related to survival through peaceful means can be successfully and respectfully applied also in the modern world, premised upon a recognition of the inherent value of traditional knowledge and its powerful contribution to an inclusive global world for generations to come. This chapter envisions a participatory global world that employs collective wisdom and people-power in nonviolent, dialogic ways (Christakis & Bausch, 2006), thus revisiting the basic principles of modern democracy, once articulated around the basic values of freedom, equality, and fraternity, and now moving in the direction of increased bottom-up participation and the sharing of global knowledge resources for common peace purposes.

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Peace Systems Contrary to recent opinions voiced by non-anthropologists such as Bowles and Gintis (2011), Pinker (2011), Diamond (2012), nomadic foragers and tribal peoples do not always live in a state of chronic war and violence (Fry, 2006, 2012). One line of evidence that contradicts this Hobbesian-Hollywood stereotype of the indigenous world is the existence of peace systems. Peace systems—clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war on each other and sometimes not with outsiders either—have been documented on various continents (Fry, 2006, 2009, 2012; Fry, Bonta, & Baszarkiewicz, 2009; Kupchan, 2010). The members of some peace systems abstain from the practice of war altogether, as shown, for example, for the neighboring Malaysian Batek, Btsisi, Chewong, Jahai, and Semai cultures, whose nonviolence is well established (e.g., Endicott & Endicott, 2008; Dentan, 2004; Howell, 1989). In other cases, societies within a peace system make war only with enemies outside the system. Peace systems also have been described in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and elsewhere (Fry, 2009, 2013; Fry, Bonta, & Baszarkiewicz, 2009). Across the sections of this chapter we will consider two well-described peace systems in some detail. The first case consists of ten Upper Xingu River basin tribes (representing four different language families) that have a combined population of 1,200 (Gregor, 1990: 109; Gregor, 1994a: 235). The Upper Xingu peoples are slash-and-burn horticulturalists, relying upon manioc and maize as their staple crops. The men clear garden plots in the forest that are tended by the women. Four of the tribes, the Kuikuru, Kalapalo, Nafukuá, and Matipú speak Carib languages; three groups are Arawak-speakers, including the Mehinaku, Wauja/Waurá, and the Yawalapití/Yaulapití; the Tupian language speakers are the Kamayura/Kamaiyura and the Aultí; and the remaining tribe, the Trumaí, speak the language called Trumaí (Carneiro, 1994; Basso, 1973). Despite their different languages and dialects, the Upper Xingu River basin peoples are interconnected through trade relations, intermarriage, and ceremonies. Although sometimes raided by outside tribes, violence from which they protected themselves, “Intertribal bonds within the upper Xingú Basin were based on peaceful relations between the tribes. These tribes formed part of a bounded social system in which groups outside the area did not take part” (Murphy & Quain, 1955: 10). The Upper Xingu peace system goes back at the very least to the 1880s when it was first mentioned by German explorer Karl von den Steiner (Basso, 1973; Gregor, 1990). Gregor writes:

228 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry What is striking about the Xinguanos is that they are peaceful. During the one hundred years over which we have records there is no evidence of warfare among the Xingu groups. To be sure there have been instances of witchcraft killings across tribal lines, and rare defensive reactions to assaults from the war-like tribes outside the Xingu basin. But there is no tradition of violence among Xingu communities(1990: 105-106).

Our second example of a peace system comes from North America. For the original Iroquoian peoples of what is now New York State, archaeology and ethnohistory reveal that chronic feuding, warring, and cannibalism existed before the original five nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca (later joined by the Tuscarora)—united into the Iroquois Confederacy, a peace system also called the Great Peace (Dennis, 1993; Kupchan, 2010). The Iroquois peace system promoted values conducive to peace and developed an overarching system of governance, the grand council of chiefs, to oversee the common affairs of the confederacy and to resolve conflicts amongst themselves without violence. The Iroquois peace system was also strengthened over time as the bonds deepened across tribal boundaries and a common sense of belonging developed (Fry, 2013). The memory of the birth and growth of the Iroquois Confederacy was kept alive generation after generation by regular recitation of the oral history, mixed with legend, of how the prophet-peacemaker Deganawidah delivered peace to the peoples of the five nations (Dennis, 1993; Wallace, 1994). The Iroquois employed symbols laden with meanings of peace, harmony, and unity, for example, in drawing a direct parallel between how related family units, each with their own hearth, nonetheless share the warmth and security of a common longhouse and how the five nations symbolically can be seen as sharing the same common longhouse, living together in harmony as do relatives. Since its beginning in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Great Peace, “proved remarkably durable, maintaining the peace among the Iroquois for over three hundred years” (Kupchan, 2010: 308).

Values Values can be defined as the principles that guide one’s life (Triandis, 1994: 111). Each culture has certain core values, those of particular importance to the social group. Core values are learned during socialization and regularly reinforced in social life. Psychological research shows that values influence behavior (e.g., Bardi & Schwartz, 2003; Schultz et al., 2005; Verplanken & Holland, 2002). Values can highlight what type of behavior is socially esteemed in comparison to undesirable behavior, the latter being greeted with ridicule, criticism, shaming,

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and other social sanctions. Generosity may be praised in contrast to greediness, kindness valued over cruelty, courage rewarded instead of cowardliness, or contra-wise, timidity favored over bravery (Fry, 2006). Values are reflected in and reinforced though the social customs and institutions of a society; they tend to be reflected in speech events, rituals, myths, and drama. A study of internally peaceful societies highlights the association of nonviolent beliefs and values with very low levels of violence (Bonta, 1996; Bonta & Fry, 2006; Fry, 2006). Among the Kuikuru of South America where fighting is virtually nonexistent, “a dislike of being thought stingy, quarrelsome, or aggressive keeps village life running smoothly” (Carneiro, 1994: 208). Spiro (1952: 497) writes of the nonviolent Pacific atoll-dwelling Ifaluk, “the culture is particularly notable for its ethic of non-aggression, and its emphasis on helpfulness, sharing, and cooperation.” The Trio of South America retreat from disputes: they “lack tolerance for conflict and the tendency is always to move in order to avoid confrontation” (Rivière, 1994: 336). The nonwarring, non-feuding, conflict-avoiding Paliyan of India have “an explicit code of nonviolence” (Gardner, 1972: 425). In fact many internally peaceful societies are nonwarring also (Bonta & Fry, 2006). A system of core values may favor war or peace, hierarchy or egalitarianism, authoritarianism or democracy and at times contradictory values may exist within the social group, especially in pluralistic societies. Overall, a culture’s core values may correspond with positive peace—a concept that views peace as more than just the absence of war (negative peace) and includes interrelated elements such as social justice, human rights, equality, sustainability, and human security. To take an illustrative case, the core value orientation of Norway is in large part geared toward positive peace as reflected in its social institutions, foreign policy, and public and private discourse. Norway has youth mediation boards in every city and town and actively promotes peace mediation in international affairs (Dobinson, 2004; Fry, 2006). Dobinson (2004:160) concludes, “the point is not only that peace is highly valued in Norwegian society and a central element in Norwegians’ self-understanding, but also that dominant discourses reinforce this self-image of Norwegians as essentially peace loving.” Core values are the life-guiding principles that reinforce individual behavior and also are apparent in the functioning of social institutions and practices. Values are foundational in the establishment of peace. All dimensions of peace, from the cessation of violent altercation in cease-fires, to the negotiation of peace treaties, to the complex operations enabled by the international community in the areas of peace-building, conflict prevention, and reconciliation and the restoration of war-torn communities, rely on an assumed set of life-

230 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry enhancing principles and actions in contrast to the destructiveness of war. Since the Second World War, additional features such as human rights have come to form an integral vision of a peace with justice, where the sustainability of peace is understood as being based on the recognition and promotion of basic rights, human security, and welfare. The preamble to the United Nations Charter establishes the legal framework that ideally should govern the peaceful interaction of states (United Nations, 1945). The preamble states that the prevention of the scourge of war is accompanied by the respect for human rights and the equality of nations, the observance of just rules of coexistence and dispute resolution, and the provision of social welfare. Whether from the point of view of individuals, groups, or nations, values expressive of peace and inclusive of justice and welfare constitute the nuts and bolts of a global normative order whose primary purpose is to counteract the destructive effects of chaos, disrespect, abuse of power, and violence. In other words, in the world today the collective establishment and observation of norms based on values of positive peace provide a counter-force to the rule of coercive power and violence. A consideration of peace systems at a comprehensible ethnographic scale illustrates how nonviolent and antiwar values are mirrored in custom and practice and thus help to sustain the peace. The peace-supporting value system of the Upper Xingu tribes has several mutually reinforcing facets. First, violence and war are viewed as immoral and uncivilized, activities unworthy of Xingu participation. One reflection of these nonviolent values is that the spilling of blood, whether of animals or humans, is vile and disgusting. In short, peace is moral and war is immoral. Second, according to the values of these people, desired personal traits include being nonviolent, self-controlled, and calm. “A good citizen is therefore peaceful in response to both the moral imperative of peace and the aesthetics of behavior” (Gregor, 1994b: 246). Third, the Upper Xingu peoples contrast themselves to their neighbors—who they consider immoral, accusing them of beating and kidnapping children, murdering their own kin, raping their wives, and relishing war— in order to remind themselves that civilized people such as themselves should never become violent and warlike (Gregor, 1990, 1994b). Finally, the role of the warrior is devalued in Upper Xingu society. No prestige, status, or material gain is culturally prescribed to valor in war. As Murphy and Quain (1954: 15) explain, “warfare was an occasion for fear, and not an opportunity to enhance one’s status.” The Iroquois also made explicit the valuing of peace within their confederacy. For example, chiefs dedicated themselves to “righteousness, justice, and peace” (Dennis, 1993: 87). And like their chiefs, both male and female citizens were enjoined to be respectful of others, repress any feelings of anger or hostility, and contribute to the common good (Dennis, 1993). The Iroquois equated law

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with peace. The name of their confederacy was the Great Peace or the League of Peace. They also regularly recounted the epic legend of how the prophetpeacemaker, Deganawidah, established the Great Peace (Wallace, 1996). The emphasis that the Iroquois placed on peace as a core value within their society is readily apparent in the expectations of their leaders and citizens alike across the member tribes to shun violence, their origin epic involving the peacemaker Deganawidah, and in ceremonies, meetings, and symbols that reflect, remind, and reinforce positive peace within their peace system. As in these geographical peace systems, the role of values and norms for promoting peace at the international level is important to consider. The significance of positive peace at a global level should not be underestimated. The legal framework already existing within the international community provides a compelling adjunct and means of actualizing peace promoting ethical values. While conceptual in nature, the celebration and institutionalization of ethical peace-conducive values have played a significant role in maintaining peace since the end of both World Wars, particularly in a post-Cold War world with the advent of a global society where NGOs have contributed to the democratizing the international society of states and developing a cosmopolitan approach to citizenship (Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Falk, 2000; Linklater, 2007; Bellamy, 2005; Bohman, 2010; Held, 1995; Held, Barnett, & Henderson, 2005). While great strides have been made in the area of peace-building, intervening on behalf of human rights (though not uncontroversial) and the promotion of human rights both through transnational activism and in peace-building, the values of peace, nonviolence and conflict resolution at local and national levels have not been emphasized in a way that comes close to the value reinforcing practices within the Iroquois and Upper Xingu peace systems. A modern democratic approach to peace and conflict resolution, as well as to the critique of violence, has not been fleshed out. Indeed the emphasis on normative values emerges as critical to the development and sustenance of democratic frameworks oriented towards peace, in a context of pluralism and complexity. However, gaps remain in our understanding of what role the value of peace may play in approaching the complex pluralism and conflictuality of our modern democratic societies, whether at national or international levels. Inter-cultural dialogue and an inclusive approach to the management of difference remain elusive in the midst of entrenched power imbalances and imperviousness to the more pernicious aspects of conflict. Democratic theory, in dealing with the challenges of cultural complexity, has progressively integrated new dimensions from which to source democratic legitimacy. In such proposals, deliberation, dialogue, and the public sphere play an increasingly crucial role in forging a new type of democratic justice based on the inclusion of a multiplicity of voices

232 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry and viewpoints. As Marcel Gauchet (1997, 2007) has shown, democratic legitimation follows a historical process. New forms of political legitimization, based on secular values rather than the divine right of kings, first emerged historically as a result of the exit of religion. Gauchet refers to this evolution as the move from the heteronomy to the autonomy of values with the elaboration of norms grounded in rational and egalitarian values. For Jürgen Habermas (1986, 2001) in turn, the autonomization of democratic societies developed through normative solidarization, or the coalescing of consensus around key normative values. As a result of this process so crucial to European social democracies for example, a public sphere highlighting the commonality of normative traditions, as a forum for dialogue between voices ranging from government, media, civil society, and private enterprise, clearly emerged. The public sphere accentuates common values and orients deliberation on matters of public importance, which in turn either reinforces the consolidation of key norms and values, or offers opportunities to contest and revise these. An intriguing question is whether a positive peace value constellation might actually be the default (or natural) human core value system. Clearly, the development of war-supporting value constellations also has occurred many times in human history, but societies with warrior values and features are a relatively recent development generally postdating the adoption of agriculture and sedentism in human societies. The actual evidence of warfare anywhere on the planet before 10,000 years ago is negligible, whereas the evidence for the multiple recent origins of war within the last ten millennia in different regions of the globe is clear cut (Ferguson, 2013; Fry, 2006; Haas, 1996; Haas & Piscitelli, 2013; Kelly, 2000). As Kelly points out: In the relatively brief span of 4,500 years, a global condition of warlessness that had persisted for several million years thus gives way to chronic warfare that arises initially in the Near East and subsequently in other regions where a similar sequence of transformative events is reduplicated (2000: 2).

While not proving the proposition that human nature leans towards positive peace values (e.g., nonviolence, egalitarianism, cooperation, sharing, and caring) as a default, certain observations and reasoning suggest that this may be so. For the vast majority of human evolution, humans and their predecessors lived as nomadic foragers. This ancestral type of social organization places virtually no emphasis on social hierarchy, tends not to be warlike, and is renowned for a value orientation that includes egalitarianism, individual autonomy (i.e., freedom), working together, and generosity. After surveying the eth-

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nography on nomadic foraging societies, Boehm (1999) concludes that this ancestral social type is “fiercely egalitarian.” Additionally, cooperative hunting and other activities regularly occur and the sharing of meat in nomadic band society is a universal (Fry, 2006; Hrdy, 2009). These overall social patterns recur across nomadic foragers, whether they are from North or South America, Africa, Asia, or Australia. Nearly universal characteristics of nomadic forager society include minimal leadership within bands, no overarching authority among groups, high levels of egalitarianism in both the ethos and as manifested in social relations, high levels of gender egalitarianism, decision-making by consensus, minimal material property, a social emphasis on sharing and cooperation, group fission and interpersonal avoidance in response to conflict, a devaluation of physical aggression, and a paucity of warrior values and warfare (e.g., Bicchieri, 1972; Boehm, 1999; Fry, 2006; Gardner, 1966, 1991; Lee & Daly, 1999; Kelly, 1995; Knauft, 1991; Marlowe, 2010; Service, 1966). The nomadic forager social conditions represent those of the archetypal human social order, and nomadic forager analogy suggests that many elements of positive peace— equality, autonomy, sharing, caring, and a paucity of war—were present. Lee and Daly write that nomadic foragers: …lived in relatively small groups, without centralized authority, standing armies, or bureaucratic systems. Yet the evidence indicates that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as ‘the war of all against all’ (1999: 1).

Living without war in societies oriented toward positive peace may actually be the human social and behavioral default. However, if this is true, the longstanding ancestral pattern apparent across extant nomadic forager societies can be corrupted and clearly has been distorted in recent millennia with the development of agriculture, sedimentary living, worldwide population growth, the accumulation of material wealth, social hierarchy and inequalities, and ever more complex forms of social organization such as early states, kingdoms, and nations. On the other hand, the ethical and normative trends in recent centuries have been toward protecting rights and democracy and away from totalitarianism, torture, slavery, and unjust wars. Values appear foundational to the maintenance of governance at a sophisticated level, and further, the peaceful integration of complexity within societies appears to be necessarily accompanied by the promotion of values. A difference emerges however between modern, free and democratic societies and the peace systems of the Iroquois and the Upper Xingu peoples with respect to the peaceful integration of complexity.

234 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry Modern, industrial, large-scale democratic societies are institutionally hierarchical (citizen-state) and feature asymmetrical social relationships even as they are normatively egalitarian. Certainly, they rely on the possibility of the status quo being challenged even as normative consensus is sought on basic values. However, in democratic societies, a negative approach to peace appears dominant, in that procedures and norms are institutionalized and enacted so as to prevent violent conflict, yet encourage the peaceful airing of disagreements on the basis of reciprocity. In the peace systems discussed here on the other hand, peace and nonviolence also appear as positive and explicit values. In the next section, traditional and modern approaches to the value of consensus will be compared as they feature in the development of both a democratic, negative peace framework, and in a traditional, positive peaceful framework.

Consensus and decision-making Beginning with the original form of human social organization, the nomadic foraging band, the ubiquitous egalitarianism in such societies leads naturally into a pattern of democratic decision-making through discussion and consensus formation. For the most part, people make up their own minds about what they wish to do. Group decisions such as when to break camp and move on, and into which direction to travel, tend to be made by consensus. Woodburn (1982: 444) explains that “there are either no leaders at all or leaders who are very elaborately constrained to prevent them from exercising authority or using their influence to acquire wealth or prestige.” Leacock (1978: 249) goes even further, writing: “what is hard to grasp about the structure of the egalitarian band is that leadership as we conceive it is not merely ‘weak’ or ‘incipient,’ as is commonly stated, but irrelevant.” In the absence of a form of ossified social hierarchy or authoritative leadership, decisions affecting the group tend to be discussed until the members arrive at a consensus. Should there be dissenters, then they can either decide to go with the wishes of the majority or else simply leave the band and join up with another band. In fact, band composition is not static but reflects instead a regularly shifting composition as individuals come and go over time. These primal forms of equality, democracy, and liberty manifested in nomadic band society go back over many millennia, far predating agriculture and civilization; the ancient Greeks actually were not the inventors of democracy after all. Turning to democratically-based decision making and peace systems, it is relevant to note that the functioning of the Iroquois grand council was based on arriving at accommodation, compromise, and unanimity. The Iroquois set into

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place democratic rules and procedures that promoted unity and peace. Arriving at consensus was the central goal as representatives from the separate nations met to consider issues that concerned the entire confederation (Dennis, 1993). The grand council consisted of chiefs from all the nations. The chiefs represented matrilineages and were appointed by matrons. In terms of structure, the Mohawks and the Senecas, the “big brothers” sat to one side of the council fire and the Oneidas and Cayugas, the “little brothers,” sat opposite to them (Wallace, 1994). The Onondagas were the official keepers of the council fire and sat between the other two groups, mediating the discussion (Dennis, 1993). They would refer a matter under consideration from side-to-side. If a consensus emerged, then the Onondagas ratified the decision. However, if disagreements occurred, the Fire-Keepers would refer the matter back to one side or the other for further discussion. “Unanimity was essential” notes Dennis (1996: 95), and hence we see the overriding importance of consensus. The grand council also followed certain rules to promote respect, unity, and peace ethics. First, no debate was allowed after nightfall to minimize the chance that emotions might flare or hasty judgments might be made due to the weariness of the council (Dennis, 1993). Second, it was not allowed to interrupt a speaker in the middle of his oratory (Engelbrecht, 2003). Third, there must be no open expression of disagreement. This self-control in the expression of anger was in accordance with the Iroquois cultural values more generally. Jesuit Father Joseph-François Lafitau observed early on that the Iroquois have “an admirable composure and do not know what it is to burst out into insult. I do not remember ever seeing any one of them angry…[They] would think themselves degraded if they showed any emotion” (Lafitau quoted in Dennis, 1993: 111). Specifically, council debate was to remain respectful and courteous at all times. The prophet Deganawidah had cautioned the grand council never to quarrel with each other: “If you chiefs by the council fire should be continually throwing ashes at one another, your people will go astray, their heads will roll, authority will be gone; your enemies then may see that your minds are scattered, the League will be at a standstill, and the Good Peace and Power will be unable to proceed” (Dennis, 1996: 96). Finally, important issues were not discussed in the grand council on the same day they were first presented to allow reflection and consensus building to take place before the formal council debate even began. If the topic was controversial, then chiefs discussed the matter informally and worked to arrive at accommodations and compromises beforehand (Wallace, 1994). This consensus-seeking approach to governance achieved for the Iroquois League of Peace, according to Father Lafitau, “harmony and an admirable unanimity” (quoted in Dennis, 1993: 95).

236 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry Turning to the twenty-first century, that democracy remains a means to guarantee a peaceful society appears to constitute a necessary historical rupture in the development of modern values. Our contemporary social and political condition emerges out of a complex conceptual modern history which has accentuated the phenomenon of autonomization and normative solidarization, after the exit of religion (Gauchet, 1997, 2007; Habermas, 1986, 2001). Yet for Gauchet, the sense of social cohesion and values such as solidarity and mutuality can be lost in modern forms of social and political organization (2002). Nonetheless, the function of consensus, while necessary, remains an open-ended question in modern democratic societies. In the work of Habermas (1996/1998), consensus is important in establishing and deepening democratic legitimacy. Communicative action is the main framework sustaining democratic deliberation, and is conditioned by the dialogic and hermeneutic functions of rationality. However, attempts to counteract the effects of the dominance of mainstream cultures in democratic societies have focused on developing stringent critiques highlighting existing assumptions about the evident nature of participation in the democratic public sphere. Habermas’ focus on deliberation and consensus-seeking for the purpose of grounding at least the most basic democratic norms such as human rights, which Seyla Benhabib (1996, 2002, 2006/2008) also defends as the best normative structure for a plural universe, has been criticized for failing to appreciate the cultural diversity of voices and asymmetrical relationships that compose democratic societies (Young, 1990/2011, 1997, 2002). As critics point out, in a democratic framework, consensus must not only be accompanied by dissensus or critique, but the latter sometimes privileged over the former to prevent universalist discourses from historically dominant cultures to remain unchallenged (Thomassen, 2006b, 2007b). To this end, emphasis must be maintained on both respecting the effects and variations of rhetoric, and varying degrees of access to language capital, and on keeping meaning-making as open-ended, critical, and thus as inclusive as possible (Thomassen, 2006a, 2007a). Otherwise there is a risk of imposing, in the name of respecting the outcomes of a rationally structured discourse, a particular group’s perspective that is more powerful than others (Thomassen, 2006b). The concern with the arbitrary imposition of dominant universalist norms and the problem with the accommodation of particularist viewpoints has thus been perceived as the principal downfall of rationalist and universalist accounts of democratic legitimacy. Renewed attempts to circumscribe the normative power of such basic principles as reciprocity and inclusion have led to the reexamination of methods to identify universal principles on the basis of cultural diversity, so that dissensus and consensus can harmonize in a more democrati-

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cally just manner that includes minorities (Benhabib, 2002, 2006, Kompridis, 2006). These critical perspectives on rational and deliberative account of consensus building around norms in democracy are commendable from the point of view of deepening democratic justice from the point of view of inclusion. However, they do not extend the value of peace and conflict transformation to democratic societies as a whole, whether from a national or international perspective. For Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2009), democracy requires both contestation and conflict. This is integral to the sustainability of democracy. In Mouffe’s agonist model of democracy, realistically recognizing the injustice and bias of interest-based politics can better be addressed by a theory of civic engagement that encourages the role of contestation (Mouffe, 1993/2006, 2005, 2009). Democratic contestation most efficiently addresses the deficit and limitations of popular democratic politics and majority rule. Mouffe warns against “the illusions of consensus and unanimity…[which] should be recognized as being fatal for democracy” (Mouffe, 1993/2006: 5) as they appear in the allegedly universalist, and difference-erasing designs of Habermas’ ethical theory of communicative action. Whether one adheres to a modernist optimism with regard to the rational management of social complexity, or Mouffe’s concern with the contingent and ongoing nature of contestation, the attempt at theoretical reconciliation recognizes that gaps remain that can only be pointed out once all sides of the debate have either acquired sufficient reflexivity, or once commentators from outside have “stepped in” for the purpose of mediation. The limitations inherent in a democratic process oscillating between the requirements of both consensus and dissent, concern the omission of conflict resolution as a guiding principle, since the existence of conflictual viewpoints must remain for the reevaluation of the status quo (Souillac, 2011). The limitations of a dualist model that emphasizes the difficulties of thinking beyond the divide between a universalist, consensus-based, and a pluralist, agonist approach to democratic justice and the normative autonomization of societies remain in place, as is exemplified in the debates on the normative function of secularism in modern democracies (Souillac, 2011). Indeed the positive values of peace and conflict resolution appear to have been lost, as the fluid, overlapping aspects of normative community formation are not emphasized. A dualist framework pitting state against citizens, or state against civil society, or groups between each other, remains the principal approach to decision-making and negotiating legitimacy in modernity. Other avenues appear elusive especially as values emphasizing common interests remain understated. How then might peace, conflict resolution and nonviolence as a positive system of values be further enhanced for the benefit of plural modern societies?

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Expanding citizenship and belonging Habermas’ account of processes of normative solidarization in the history of Western modern democracies demonstrates how the modern experience of autonomy is not only intertwined with discursive rationality, but also with the shift towards intersubjectivity, or the dialogic exchange of views (Habermas, 2000). Since intersubjective, communicative processes are at once individual and collective acts, processes of autonomization cannot avoid being grounded in historical processes of solidarization. Normative solidarity hinges on the reconciliation, notably through the concept of intersubjectivity, between, on the one hand, the allegedly isolated subject of liberalism whose rationality, uninfluenced by the exterior, is the guarantee of just outcomes, and, on the other hand, the contextualized democratic participant. The latter is better envisioned from the perspective of a republican virtue ethics that emphasizes the situatedness of subjects and the positive function of citizenship and the public sphere, in expanding and strengthening democratic and negative peace values. The approach to autonomization through solidarization defended here is neither purely individual nor purely collective, and both cognitive and historical. Normative solidarity emerges when consensus around certain core values, such as human rights or democracy, coalesces out of a collective process of critical reflection and debate that requires contextualization. Ultimately, this conceptual approach addresses the constitution of collective and individual democratic consciousness, as it underpins and reaches beyond the experiences of belonging and identity, thus beginning to bridge democratic with peace-making values. It also supplements the argument for transborder ethics, in particular as it questions the enduring claims of national sovereignty (Souillac, 2012). The notion of higher levels of citizenship as shared normative belonging has thus emerged in recent democratic theory, as one vehicle for the ongoing process of normative solidarization for multi-layered, complex societies, both within and across national borders, and it serves important functions for positive peace. First, it serves to challenge the more exclusionary effects of borders in a state-based modernity, and to address violence, whether direct or structural, as a matter of common responsibility and common interest. Thus the structural violence that exists in a global system within a specific political economy, such as poverty, has been addressed as a matter of common responsibility shared by both states and citizens (Pogge, 2001, 2007). Secondly, a regional and normative approach to citizenship can supplement the framing of civic belonging that remains tied so far to cultural and national allegiance, and foster the experience of allegiance to values. Etienne Balibar’s ar-

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gument that a normative regional citizenship can successfully supplement the more violent and exclusionary effects of a citizenship grounded only in territorial belonging is thus an interesting alternative approach (2001, 2009). Here, much potential remains to foster peace values through democratic citizenship. Normative solidarization around the positive value of peace, dialogue, and mediating processes, all of which are necessary for the growth of civility in a divided world, is possible (Souillac 2012). An epistemic sphere of shared knowledge, in which an alternative language of human security, based on the common requirements of survival, justice and peace, can be created (Souillac, 2012). We can begin a new phase in our process of collective and individual autonomization and emancipation, by highlighting the importance of peace values. How might these features be approached from the point of view of a dialogue with traditional perspectives on citizenship within the Iroquois and Upper Xingu peace systems, and demonstrate some commonalities in the conceptualization of peace? There are, in fact, striking conceptual similarities between traditional approaches to citizenship and the building of normative solidarity around peace through an ever-expanding citizenship. Citizenship, and the open-ended, dynamic relationship to borders and belonging it can also imply, reconciles both consensus and the recognition of conflict, offering a new perspective on the need for the transformation of conflict precisely as consensus is sought. Here, insights from traditional peace systems in these areas can contribute to a vision of the positive role of global normative belonging for a more peace-oriented 21st century. Successful peace systems expand the sense of belonging to include previously separate social entities. Among the Upper Xingu River basin tribes, individual tribal identity exists alongside a common identity that includes the other tribes (Fry, 2006, 2009, 2012; Gregor, 1990, 1994). The supra-tribal sense of belonging is promoted via performance of common rituals, intervillage trade, tribal exogamy, and a shared constellation of peace-promoting values (Fry, 2006; Gregor, 1994). As one citizen explained, “We don’t make war; we have festivals for the chiefs to which all of the villages come. We sing, dance, trade, and wrestle” (Gregor, 1990: 113). The same types of identity expanding social processes could also be applied at higher levels, including at regional and global spheres. The Iroquois also expanded belonging. Dennis (1993: 44) writes that “The historical experience of consolidation in the interest of peace—understood in terms of balance and harmony among kins-people within a single domestic world—became central to Iroquois identity and culture.” The development of a pan-Iroquois belonging is reflected in various ways. As the Iroquois peace sys-

240 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry tem evolved, the practice of exacting blood revenge following a homicide was replaced by the payment of compensation, and the practice of cannibalism among the member tribes became obsolete. Outsiders became insiders; nonrelatives were transformed into kin. The distinct pottery styles that archaeological investigations show characterized earlier times became progressively uniform across Iroquoia, reflecting the development of a common identity (Engelbrecht, 2003). Intermarriage also increased, being both a contributor to and a mirror of an additional layer of belonging; ritualized adoptions connected people within and across tribal lines; and importantly, the construction of kinship imagery reinforced the new view of Iroquoians as relatives (Dennis, 1993; Wallace, 1994). Humans have the capacity to hold simultaneously multiple levels of belonging, as members of a family, neighborhood, clan, village, nation, and so forth. A sense of belonging to humanity as a whole, as world citizens, is but another extension of identity. Numerous cases also demonstrate the human capacity to define and enlarge social identity, as outsiders and even enemies are transformed into insiders. Engelbrecht (2003: 128) points out the process for the Iroquoians was first to add to their local identities (lineage, clan, and village) a new higher level of belonging as they came to perceive themselves over time also as Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. Then second, the unifying Iroquoian identity of the Great League of Peace developed as even a higher mark on the social and political belonging scale. United States history reflects the same process of expanding identity. Citizens of the new nation perceived themselves at first as Virginians or New Yorkers and the larger identification with the whole country only developed over time. Within the European Union (EU), a new supranational identity also is emerging (Kupchan, 2010). This gradual shift in identity is mirrored in the issuance of EU passports, vehicle license plates, the Euro as a common currency (in most member countries), the free movement of people across national borders, the democratic election of Euro-Parliamentarians, and so on (Fry, 2009, 2012). Nationalism and national sovereignty are often assumed to be ancient and natural. In fact, the nation is a very recent invention. On the other hand, humans have long had the capacity to form multiple identities and to change their social borders, not only to exclude others but also to bring them in. As we contemplate the development of regional and global identities—global citizenship— the challenge is not one of eliminating local or national identities, but rather it is the creation and elaboration of additional higher levels of belonging. Concordant with this process is the elevation of values, ethics, norms, and laws that effectively assure rights, justice, and peaceful civil life within local and national settings to higher strata to accomplish the same goals at regional and global levels. In a like manner to how the Iroquoian nations gave up practicing canni-

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balism, exacting blood revenge, and making war within their peace system, so too evolving planetary society could give up war and other violent practices as immoral, uncivilized, and unacceptable within the larger global society. As among the Upper Xingu peoples, peace could be conceptualized as moral, good, and right whereas war and violence could be (re)conceptualized as immoral, uncivilized, and simply unacceptable in global society. Borrowing the analogy from the Iroquois, people who share a planetary longhouse should not kill one another. Such an identity transformation to include global citizenship comes automatically with a shift toward human security for everyone and an actualization of positive peace on a planetary scale. A dialogue with traditional peace systems can provide many insights for making a global transformation from war to peace (Fry, 2013).

Memory A final crucial feature of normative belonging is memory and historical consciousness. These play a vital role in ensuring the continuity of the value of survival and the survival of values. The controversies around processes of autonomization from arbitrary, imposed sources of legitimacy, towards ever more participatory forms of democratic life, as mentioned, must include the historical contextualization of values even as consensus on their universality is sought. History, memory and transmission all play a vital role in maintaining and revising norms in general, but in particular those related to peace (Souillac, 2011). Reflections on the public function of history and memory, where contestation and conflict resolution, as well as the pooling and recognition of alternative viewpoints on history, serve to further displace the potential teleological undertones of a history narrowly and naively oriented towards progress alone. Our modern moral and political universe, for all its internationalist ambitions, is steeped in history both conceptual and experiential. The contemporary social and political world features an unprecedented awareness and experience of history itself, in the form of an ambivalent awareness of the advances and horrors associated with a general discourse on progress. A plural social and political life has combined with the experience of rapid historical change, and with the modern paroxysms of war of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, the experience of wars has provided an important impetus for the development of international peace and the consolidation of human rights norms at a global level after the Second World War. The existential arena of survival, violence and conflict requires that paths be highlighted that point towards a critical, public function of history (Souillac, 2011). History must be

242 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry clarified to structure and support the public function of epistemic processes, the implications of which for an intensification of normative solidarization around peace values, norms, institutions, and practice must be spelled out. The Iroquoian people did exactly this. They recited, rehearsed, and renewed their peace norms and values as they institutionalized structures and social mechanisms for peace (Dennis, 1993). They projected their conception and actualization of peace across time beginning with the transformative shift away from war beginning in the fifteenth century. They maintained a high level of historical consciousness through ritual, public oratory, and the iteration of symbolic meanings in support of peace and in remembrance of and in contrast to their war-plagued past. The centerpiece in the Iroquoian historical consciousness of peace was the epic tale of Deganawidah, the prophet-peacemaker. This legend of transformation from war to peace was kept alive in public memory, for instance, at the meetings of the grand council of chiefs and at bereavement ceremonies at which times it was recounted. Dennis explains how condolence ceremonies for regular citizens as well as for the chiefs reinforced core values of unity, reciprocity, and peace: …By performing it the Iroquois institutionalized the procedures prescribed by the prophet Deganawidah; the ceremony included the direct recitation of the Epic of Deganawidah— the creation myth of the Iroquois as a social and political entity. In short, it represented Iroquois history and reality, explaining to themselves their achievement of peace through domestication and naturalization and providing them with a practical means of conserving and expanding that peace (1993: 81).

A related mechanism through which the Iroquois enshrined the memory of the great transformation from fear, distrust, and war to unity, brotherhood, and internal peace was through the use of symbols in support of their peace system. At one point, for instance, in the Deganawidah epic, as recounted by Wallace (1994: 40), a woman questioned the prophet-peacemaker: “…a word is nothing until it is given form and set to work in the world. What form shall this message take when it comes to dwell among men?” “It will take the form of the longhouse,” replied Deganawidah, “in which there are many fires, one for each family, yet all live as one household under one chief mother. Hereabouts are five nations, each with its own council fire yet they shall live together as one longhouse in peace.”

In shifting from the Iroquois as an illustrative case of how history and memory support normative values for peace sourced in the survival challenges faced by humankind in the twenty-first century, another motivation for recognizing the

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public function of history relates to constitutional interpretation. As Habermas and Ratzinger (2006: 33) write, “despite a very common misunderstanding, ‘patriotism linked to the constitution’ means that the citizens wholeheartedly accept the principles of the constitution, not only in their abstract substance, but very specifically out of the historical context of the history of each nation.” For this reason, Germany is a potent example of a nation whose “shared patriotism linked to the constitution can be formed and can renew itself even in the political sphere” (Habermas & Ratzinger, 2006: 29). The historical events of the rise of fascism, the Second World War and the Holocaust have generated awareness on the part of the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany who have been made conscious from a careful examination of their own history, as well as a sincere attempt of processing collective guilt, of the fact that their constitution was a positive gain. Moreover, the need for a “self-critical ‘politics of memory’” (Habermas & Ratzinger, 2006: 33) in Germany contributed to this form of public awareness. Both the context-transcending value of the German constitution, and its historical specificity as a literally conscious intervention in a horrific course of historical events could be realized in the German public context. Such intervention need not be localized however. Indeed a nation’s life regularly calls for renewed critical inquiry into the specificity of norms and their recuperation by more violent forms of discourse and policy. By granting freedom of communication, the constitutional state invests in its citizenry the authority of its legal norms and encourages citizens to pursue an ongoing debate about their validity in the public sphere. In the ultimate democratic process, citizens commit themselves to a longue durée cognitive engagement with their laws and norms, collective issues, and ultimately, the normative foundation of democracy itself which is its constitution. In a postnational constellation, normative solidarization is accompanied by a renewal of civic identity, and national belonging is supplemented by normative belonging that can offer a bulwark against historical and contemporary violence through continued appeal to the defense of human rights (Habermas, 2001). This expands our understanding of democratic belonging as an inclusive identity, as a unique form of belonging that both emerges in a distinct historical process, and reaches towards universal or shared meaning. A contemporary inclusive and participatory identity is one that easily incorporates both all levels of allegiance: local, national, regional, and globally normative, even while consensus is constantly renewed and vigilance with regard to the status quo, maintained through critique and open debate in the public sphere. Finally, it is an identity that functions inclusively because it recognizes its own historical roots, and thus can reach out to other particularist forms of historical struggle for democracy, with peaceful alliances and programs forming across global communities

244 | Geneviève Souillac and Douglas Fry and nation-states on behalf of democratic rights and nonviolent approaches to conflict transformation. An ethics of encounter for the mediation of historical experience and the confrontation with the violent effects of history emerges from the consideration of common existential concerns with survival and the reduction of violence (Souillac, 2011, 2012). This includes cross-generational encounter and the responsibility incumbent on citizens to transmit peace related values to future generations (Innerarity, 2012). Symbols and ceremonies can reinforce a commitment to peace at the same time that they participate in the transmission of peace values across generations. The Upper Xingu River basin peoples, for example, convene ceremonies that reinforce and reiterate normative belonging and a historical consciousness existing above and beyond their individual tribal identities; they are one people who live together in peace within a larger nonwarring society (Gregor, 1990, 1994). As mentioned, the Iroquois employed the longhouse to symbolically represent how unity and peace spanned all the nations within their confederation and to remind the people that they live peaceably as one family under the same roof. The Tree of Peace was another powerful symbol for Iroquoian peace and unity. According to the origin legend, Deganawidah and his converts to peace buried the weapons of war beneath the Great Tree of Peace. The instruments of war were miraculously washed away by an underground river, symbolizing that hostility within the confederacy has given way to peace. Whereas the Iroquois continued to war with nations outside their confederation, the white roots of the Great Tree of Peace represented their desire for peace to spread beyond the confederacy to embrace neighboring societies in all directions (Dennis, 1993; Wallace, 1994). The symbols of the longhouse and the Great Tree of Peace as well as the regular reference and reiteration of the Deganawidah epic in public dialogue and discourse kept the historic transformation from war to peace centrally in the living memories of the Iroquoian peoples. This achievement of the Iroquois demonstrates the human potential to create peaceful social systems and in so doing introduces the possibility of constructing a peace system of global scale in the twenty-first century. When the Longhouse with five fires had been erected and the Tree of Peace planted at Onondaga, Deganawidah’s mind leaped forward to the next great adventure: the union, under the shelter of the Tree, of all the nations of mankind….to make peace and contentment ‘prevail among the peoples of the whole earth’ (ibid.).

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Conclusion The approach proposed here expands from multiple sites of practice and specifically from traditional knowledge about conflict resolution, transformation and peace-making. This dialogic perspective both theorizes about dialogue and practices it, reaching across boundaries between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ approaches to peace, and reestablishing a continuity in the human desire and quest for peace across time and space. As discussed, certain features of positive peace values appear to be particularly suited to the current historical development of democratic forms of management of social, political, and cultural complexity at a global level. Sustaining representative democracy at a national or local level requires that classical agonist forms of dissent be retained for the purpose of challenging the status quo as it also coalesces around nationhood and national identity. Still, the role of consensus and, by extension, of conflict resolution, remains an open question and has not been successfully addressed in democratic theory. On the other hand, the promotion of positive peace values appear as vitally important to the management of complexity at a global level where civilization dialogue, consensus seeking on matters of common interests and global survival, and normative belonging, play a fundamental role. Indeed at the global level, democracy exists in the form of governance values, but is less developed in its representative forms. Here, civil society plays an important dissenting role, challenging the powers-that-be, as in complete national democracies. However, the extension of normative solidarization from democratic to positive peace values appears not only possible but desirable at a global level. Based on the assumption that a global society of states, as well as overlapping networks of advocacy working on behalf of peace and human rights, exist, endeavors in the extension of global knowledge and practice as this chapter has elucidated, hypothesize a “third community” that combines the gains and insights of civil society and the public sphere, but moves beyond them with a new agenda. This space of practices is decentralized, borderless, and yet recognizable in its emphasis on nonviolence, conflict resolution, and peace-making. Cosmopolitan citizenship here becomes the vehicle of an expanding society of such practitioners, beyond the classical formalization of territorial or cultural belonging. It emphasizes an experiential and cognitive expansion of the global purposes of democratic, human rights and peace ethics, norms and justice, at the local, national, and global levels. By dialogically crossing the traditional/modern divide, it deepens the inclusion of hereto excluded forms of knowledge such as traditional knowledge, for the goals of global peace with justice.

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Introduction Proponents of intercultural dialogue are often criticized for their supposedly irresponsibly idealistic view of the developmental potential of human nature. This criticism is applied most loudly when dialogue is recommended in the context of social and international politics. To counteract this charge we introduced a thematic focus on cultural conflicts in part II. In fact, proponents of intercultural dialogue rarely harbor the illusion that the rhetorics of inclusion and pluralism is a cure-all for the deeply antagonistic attitudes that may be generated by divergent cultural values, since, after all, they are often motivated by their awareness of the history of cultural conflicts. But it is true that a more direct and explicit association with the findings of empirical conflict research is crucially important for both the theory and praxis of dialogue. The difference between naïve reconciliationism on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the empirically informed dialogical engagement of cultural differences should be kept in mind as we now turn to the way dialogue is being envisioned as a new root metaphor for strategy development in global politics. Part III is focused on the “dialogue of civilizations” as a strategy concept in political theory or political philosophy. Above we mentioned that the term “dialogue of civilizations” covers two of the four forms of dialogue we distinguished, namely, (i) dialogue as scholarly inquiry or intercultural thought and (ii) dialogue as model of international relations or political strategy150 In accordance with the main hypothesis of the book, the chapters of Part III explore the question of what the “dialogue of civilization” as scholarly inquiry can contribute to the “dialogue of civilizations” as political strategy. Before summarizing the chapters, however, we want to embark on a short historico-philological excursus tracing the development of the ‘dialogue model’ in political philosophy. In its first terminologically relevant appearance, the ‘intercivilizational’ relation (the proto-form of the “dialogue of cultures”) was assigned a double role. At the beginning of the 1970s the Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler first || 150 To restate a terminological note from the general introduction, we think it problematic that in political contexts the expression ‘dialogue of civilization’ is often considered interchangeable with ‘global dialogue’—since the latter inevitably evokes ‘globalization,’ a process that is not at all dialogical but, in essence, structured by relations of economic competition and technological power, which gives to the original dialogic principle inappropriate connotations of cultural expansionism.

254 | Introduction Part III coined the term to characterize both hermeneutic and political relations between civilizations. Köchler claimed that successful action presupposes selfcomprehension, which in turn requires—both at the level of individuals but also of supra-individual agentive subjects such as nation states—understanding of that from which the subject wishes to distinguish itself – that is, what is ‘other’ to a culture. However, the other cannot be articulated with the classificatory concepts of the culture that is discovering its other, and thus cultural selfcomprehension can only be achieved by “dialogical relations.” International relations that take the form of cooperative dialogical relationships are thus required to advance to ever greater cultural self-realization.151 Köchler’s early argument for dialogical relations between cultures derived from philosophical insights about the conditions of cultural self-comprehension. By contrast, as the reader may recall from Daryush Shayegan’s reflection in chapter 1, the explicit program of a “dialogue among civilizations” originated in the personal experience of disintegrative cultural forces (“cultural schizophrenia”) within postcolonial societies.152 As director of the Iranian Centre for the Study of Civilizations (1976-1979), Shayegan coined and propagated the notion in 1977, focusing exclusively on the scholarly program of the crossculturally comparative and intercultural study of cultures. After the Iranian Revolution the program was abandoned and the notion remained largely dormant until 1998, give or take some few references and resonances in Chinese, African, and US cultural studies. In the early 1990s much of Western political thought was in the grip of the idea of “cultural identities,” a concept imported from ethnography and sociology. Differences in cultural identities, treated as rigid and timeless properties, thus seemed to lead us inexorably to the clash of cultures in which one or another identity would be broken. In 1992 (and more extensively in 1996) Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington thus made a mark on Western public || 151 These are the contours of Köchler’s argument presented in two public lectures in 1972 and 1974, the latter being held at the Royal Scientific Society at Amman (Jordan), cf. Köchler 1973 and 1978. The argument is restated in greated detail below in chapter 11. It should also be noted, however, that Köchler already in 1972 occasionally also used the term “Dialog der Zivilisationen” (cf. http://i-p-o.org/Koechler-letter-UNESCO-26Sep1972.jpg) and undertook active efforts to promote cross-cultural dialogue also at the political level, e.g., by the organization of a “Global Dialogue Expedition” in 1974. For Köchler’s early theoretical and practical work on the dialogue of cultures see http://hanskoechler.com/Koechler-Dialogue_of_Civilizations-early_years.htm. 152 The different context of origination is reflected in somewhat different conceptions of the dialogical relationship in Köchler and Shayegan, an emphasis on dialectical dependency versus an emphasis on plurality, respectively.

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opinion with the striking thesis that the post-Cold War political order would be characterized not by ideological conflicts but by a “clash of civilizations,” i.e. by conflicts based on cultural differences. Huntington’s thesis proved enormously influential in creating a framework for the theory of international relations, and was used by some as theoretical legitimization for aggressive international politics. At the same time, critics soon pointed out conceptual and, in particular, empirical deficiencies of Huntington’s line of thought—even lambasted it as the “clash of ignorance.”153 A much more effective neutralization of Huntington’s thesis was produced by Seyyed Mohammad Khatami’s strategy of repeating the slogan with a counter-concept. Khatami, one of Iran’s influential political thinkers and president of Iran from 1997 to 2005, adopted Shayegan’s notion of a “dialogue of civilizations” (later also “dialogue of cultures and civilizations”) as well as some of the theoretic underpinning of the concept, e.g., the rejection of any idea of immutable cultural identities. However, while Shayegan used the structural model of dialogue in a new theory of cultural subjectivity, offering dialogue as a new root metaphor for the cultural self-understanding of individuals and societies, Khatami employed the dialogue model as centerpiece of a new paradigm of international relations. From 1998 onwards Khatami presented the counter-vision to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” namely, “a process between and within civilizations, founded on inclusion, and a collective desire to learn, uncover, and examine assumptions; unfold shared meaning and core values; and integrate multiple perspectives through dialogue” (Khatami 2001). The new “paradigm of dialogue” called for re-valuations and reconceptualizations in various areas of political thought, which Khatami (1999) summarized as follows. First, the paradigm of dialogue includes an account of political communication that stresses the role of “active listening.” Second, the new paradigm ties politics closely to ethics, championing moral virtues and psychological dispositions such as “modesty, commitment, and involvement”. Some of these attitudes are requirements of the communicational form of dialogue. In contrast with diplomatic negotiation, “dialogue among civilizations cannot take place without sympathy and affection, and without a genuine effort to understand others without the desire to vanquish them”(ibd. 33). Third, the paradigm of dialogue also amounts to a new stage in the development of theories about human rationality and knowledge. This is the tech|| 153 Cf. e.g. Said 2001.

256 | Introduction Part III nical, metaphilosophical sense of Khatami’s notion of dialogue as a new stage in the ‘dialectics of rationality’. “[The axioms of dialogue] are not compatible with the dogmas of positivism and modernism and they are not in so much agreement with the extreme skepticism of the post-modernists either” (ibd. 30). In other words, the structural model of dialogue replaces so-called ‘modern’ thinking, i.e., the assumption of ready-made universal values and truths, as well as the ‘post-modern’ relegation of such universal values and truths to mere elements of a contingent ‘grand narrative.’ According to ‘modern’ thought in the tradition of the European Enlightenment, universal truths are pre-existent and discovered by rational discourse. Since cultural conflicts did not disappear as the Enlightenment conception of universalist rationality became the dominant framework for politics in the 19th and 20th century, post-modern philosophers concluded that universal truths are socially constructed and arbitrarily postulated as part of a discourse. By contrast, Khatami can be taken to embrace a conception of ‘dialogical truth,’ according to which universal truths are neither pre-existent nor fictional but ‘appear in the course of dialogue’. Fourth, we must move from “negative tolerance” to “positive cooperation,” which Khatami associates with a conceptual reorientation from the ‘modern’ idea of pluralism to an alternative conception of diversity to be developed in interaction with “Eastern religions and philosophies.” Fifth, the paradigm of dialogue includes an insight about the dynamic constitution of value and truth, including religious truths: “Religious faith, which is nothing other than giving an affirmative answer to the divine call from the bottom of one’s heart, should not be considered as something unchangeable, and lacking dynamism. Also, our understanding and interpretation of religion should not be at odds with the spirit of faith, because such a disparity will be an obstacle in the way of dialogue among religions, which itself is the first step in the realization of any viable peace…Faith should flow like a river in order to exist; there can be little hope for a stagnant swamp”(ibid. 32). Sixth, the paradigm of dialogue includes a model of peace that is not guaranteed by power but by “the rational maturity of human beings” (ibid.). Finally, the paradigm of dialogue not only pertains to form but also implies content. It is a precondition for dialogue to make global justice an issue, and it is a consequence of the dialogical stance to make “lasting peace between man and nature…a top priority”. The Western “disenchantment of nature” has created global environmental problems that in the long run can only be solved by means of intercultural dialogue. In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 1998, Khatami proposed to the United Nations to proclaim a “‘Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations,’ in the earnest hope that through such a dialogue the real-

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ization of universal justice and liberty may be initiated.” Shortly thereafter the General Assembly declared 2001 as the “United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations.” Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a personal representative for the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations and selected a group of 20 “Eminent Persons”, consisting of Nobel Laureates, former heads of state, and other distinguished individuals, to “ assist his personal representative in examining how confrontation and hostility in world politics could be replaced by discourse and understanding” (Smith 2003: 555). After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, “issues associated with the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations immediately assumed a more prominent place on the UN’s agenda across the 56th Session of the General Assembly” (Smith 2003: 557). During two full days of plenary debate more than 60 speakers discussed the role of dialogue. This debate stimulated a more extensive reflection on the future role of the UN in promoting the Dialogue of Civilizations, with three main models being discussed. On the one hand, the UN could continue its previous role as passive framework, i.e., as a forum where dialogue is facilitated and grievances can be aired; on the other hand, the UN could also become an active framework, as “catalyst and participant in the process of building mutual understanding and reconciliation”, especially by facilitating the interaction between states and NGOs; finally, the UN could be an “autonomous actor” in promoting dialogue, especially by providing social and economic assistance in tandem with grassroots work in post-conflict areas, as well as by the greater involvement of the person of the secretary-general.154 As the recent years have shown, the UN increasingly has adopted the last one of the three roles.155 We have begun with this brief historical excursus since it supplements the content of the chapters of Part III in two ways that we find important in relation to the overall aims of the book—as the reader may recall, in the general introduction we presented the investigative focus of this book in form of the hypothesis that global dialogue as praxis, policy, and strategy can be greatly facilitated

|| 154 Cf. Smith 2003: 559-565. 155 In 2009 the award committee of the Global Dialogue Prize nominated both Daryush Shayegan and Mohammad Khatami as joint recipients of the inaugural award, in recognition of “Mohammad Khatami’s work in developing and promoting the concept of a ‘Dialogue Among Civilizations and Cultures’ as model for international relations”; since Khatami in 2009 “was not in the position to accept the award in person,” Shayegan was selected as the sole recipient. The award committee’s acknowledgment was exclusively directed at Khatami’s achievements pertaining to theory and praxis of international relations; it was unrelated to Khatami’s reform efforts in national Iranian politics. For a profile of Khatami’s work as thinker of dialogue see www.globaldialogueprize.org.

258 | Introduction Part III by global dialogue as scholarly inquiry. First, as will become clear in connection with chapter 11, the short history of the ‘dialogue model’ of international relations after its public recognition in 2001 shows the fragility of the strategy concept within a context dominated by the prestige of so-called ‘realpolitik’, which takes its bearings from an outdated political philosophy that vaguely melds together a Hobbesian view of human nature, the inevitable and ubiquitous ‘will to power,’ and the idea of sovereign autonomy. As Hans Köchler argues below, without an alternative political “philosophy of dialogue” that can guide the “politics of dialogue,” the strategy concept of the ‘dialogue of civilizations’ cannot get a proper hold in political culture. One might add here, with a pointer to our brief reconstruction of Khatami’s efforts at providing philosophical grounding for the dialogue model, that the supporting “philosophy of dialogue” must be developed from an intercultural perspective that would allow all political partners to relate to it. This brings us to the second consideration we wish to highlight. Comparing Khatami’s original conception of the ‘dialogue model of intercivilizational relations’ with the reformulations that will be offered in the following chapters of part III, with different cultural resonances, we can see that there are sufficient congruences to claim that idea of dialogical relations between civilizations is transcultural, in the sense of dialogically accessible. This attests to the conceptual viability of the dialogue model. If the dialogue model of international relations has failed to transform the field thus far, this is likely due to the absence of an embedding political culture of dialogue. In order to establish an international political culture of dialogue, however, we have to popularize the notion of intercultural political philosophy so as to make public opinion aware of it. As a matter of fact, the chapters of part III seem to form a prolegomena to a future popularization by criticizing the norms of the global political culture from the angle of comparative political philosophy. In chapter 11 Hans Köchler critically points to the political instrumentalizations of the dialogue model. Köchler charges that neither political theory nor political praxis pays sufficient heed to the particular hermeneutic requirements that derive from the basic constellation of civilizational diversity itself. For Köchler the task of a “philosophy of dialogue” is to highlight these hermeneutic requirements as guidelines for a “politics of dialogue,” making them ground rules relative to which one distinguishes sincere efforts at dialogue from the “political instrumentalization of intercivilizational and inter-cultural issues.” Köchler states four requirements for authentic intercivilizational dialogue. The first principle is a postulate of civilizational equality; this postulate is supported by the methodological tenet that evaluative predicates are, as such, restricted to the civilizational domain in

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which they have been established. The third principle is a corollary to the first: once one concedes civilizational equality, it follows that the interaction between civilizations must abide by certain “meta-norms” or rules of conduct. The second and fourth principle state requirements of “civilizational selfcomprehension” that articulate two insights of a dialectical model of identity, namely, that civilizational self-identity is constituted by its conceptual (internal) and historical (external) relationships to what is other to itself. In addition to these four principled hermeneutic requirements that are implied by civilizational diversity as such, Köchler identifies three aspects of inter-civilizational relations that characterize our current historical situation. These three aspects generate a particularly problematic constellation, reminiscent of a ‘double bind’ scenario, where political action across civilizations is both inevitable and incalculable, since the same political measure may have different dynamical implications in different civilizational contexts, and local actions may have unforeseeable global consequences. A “politics of dialogue” must acknowledge the complex political reality of our current constellation of cultural diversity and the special hermeneutic and action-theoretic constraints it implies for political action. Once these constraints are in sight, Köchler argues, it becomes possible to discern concrete directions of political strategy. One of Köchler’s key positive maxims of a sincere politics of dialogue is the “right to diversity based on mutuality”; another is to replace the guiding concept for international relations in the era of the Cold War, “co-existence” with “dialogue.” In addition, the preconditions of intercivilizational dialogue also reveal which political strategies “instrumentalize the civilizational paradigm” against its original intentions. Deconstructing the conceptual space of the UN initiative for the so-called “Alliance of Civilizations” Köchler warns that the rhetorical shift from ‘dialogue’ to ‘alliance’ bolsters polarizations and war mongering in the name of an allegedly civilizational and humanitarian mission, while pursuing a “quasi-imperial civilizational agenda.” In chapter 12 Fred Dallmayr presents his version of a more detailed description of the ‘dialogue model’ of global politics. At present the ‘dialogue model’ or the ‘dialogue of civilizations’ still has the status of a guiding principle that is not yet sufficiently anchored in concrete strategies of global policy. Dallmayr offers as an initial characterization of the guiding principle that dialogue is “predicated on equality and interdependence and the cultivation of lateral ethical responsibilities and is oriented toward the vision of a global ‘good life’,” and then proceeds to characterize it by way of contrasting it with familiar forms of global politics. The type of interrelated of civilizations that the ‘dialogue model’ seeks to bring into view is neither traditional “interstate rivalry”

260 | Introduction Part III that is the so-called “realist” default template, nor is it to be achieved by institutional relations within a ‘world state,’ nor, even, as a relation between nations. The political entities ought rather to be related in the form of a “community,” in ways that enable “ethical cultivation” and the “dialogical fostering of civic responsibilities.”156 Importantly, Dallmayr takes “political struggle and conflict” to be an integral part of the dialogical relationship among civilizations. Transposing the Habermasian idea of the discourse-theoretical account of truth into the intercultural context, Dallmayr suggests that the dialogical relationship should take the form of a non-violent “ethical-political struggle,” which is not guided by rationality in the modern sense of the term but rather understood as a process driven by a force that generates existential truth. The last section of chapter 12 thus can be read as expressing the characteristic process-ethical core intuition that certain forms of process can reveal contextual ethical truth—in this case a truth that can guide political action. By contrast, chapter 13 shows that a more concrete characterization of the strategies implied by the idea of a “dialogue of civilizations” does not necessarily require a substantive commitment to a process ethics. In this chapter, the Chinese philosopher Tingyang Zhao presents an approach to the problem of cultural diversity that hews more to a pragmatist-deflationary line. Zhao begins with a forceful plaidoyer against the mindset of modernity. The basic categories of modernity, especially the modern notion of the individual as well as the notion of nation states, prevent us from developing productive conceptualizations and strategies for the action scenarios that globalization has generated. In Western game theory and rational choice theory, individual rationality is geared to the maximization of individual utilities or self-interest. Our current agentive scenarios, however, are precisely those where—as game theorists and rational choice theorists well know—this model of rationality fails, namely, scenarios where cooperation yields better outcomes. But so deeply rooted are our modernist prejudices, Zhao charges, that we persist in applying the model of individual rationality in our attempts to develop solutions to global problems, engaging in actions that are, in the long term, self-defeating and irrational. Zhao presents a countermodel of “relational rationality” that he gleans from the “methodological relationism” of the Confucian philosopher Xun-Tsu, who argued that cooperation is the ‘natural condition’ of human coexistence and conflicts occur only when ‘good relations’ are intentionally disturbed. On the model of relational rationality, Zhao suggests, rational agents || 156 One could consider here whether the organizational structures of world citizenship suggested in chapter 10 above would provide relevant candidates for such communities.

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follow the strategies of “minimizing mutual hurt” and “maximizing mutual support” since these strategies are inherent to the ‘natural state;’ it is thus within our best interest to choose a course of action that improves our relationships.157 On the basis of a relational model of rationality we can, Zhao argues, escape the contradiction of modernity, in which modern rationality, having made globalization possible, cannot furnish a notion of ‘world’ in a sense of the term that would enable us meaningfully to speak of ‘world peace’ or ‘world citizenship.’ To make the world that we do not yet have, we need to introduce a new concept that would offer, comprehensively, the political structure that best enables and stabilizes peaceful relations. The heuristic core for such a notion Zhao finds in ancient Chinese political thought, in the concept of ‘all-underheaven,’ which indicates a network of cooperative relations. Of particular interest for the question of intercultural dialogue is Zhao’s treatment of cultural diversity. While Zhao points out that dialogue as such holds out no guarantee of producing rapprochement, he describes a particular kind of intercultural value inquiry that holds out the promise of yielding concrete practical results. We should accept a multiplicity of irreconcilably diverse value systems, Zhao suggests, and identify in any system those values that denote transitive and symmetric or reciprocal relations; since such values denote relationships that are straightforwardly universalizable, we can thus deduce a collection of action goals that everyone can endorse and that we can agree to realize in cooperative actions. In this way, Zhao’s schema converges with the Kantian idea that action principles should be identified on the basis of the logical criterion of universalizability, transposing it into a new key—it appears here as a pragmatic criterion for the selection of principles that can de facto be universally accepted and be used to bootstrap a comprehensive network of co-operations as the organizational structure of the world. Importantly, as Zhao stresses, this deflationary and pragmatist approach to the problem of cultural diversity is backed up by a suitable “ontology of coexistence.” From a meta-philosophical point of view it may be useful briefly to compare arguments and results of chapters 11 and 12 on the one hand and chapter 13 on the other. Loosely following Hegel’s ideas of dialectical identity and existence as self-relation, Köchler and Dallmayr (as well as other authors in part I and part IV) derive the dialogical situation—the category of co-existence—from || 157 Game-theoretial support for these claims can be found, for instance, in studies on the rationality of “constrained” interest maximization (Gauthier 1986 ch. 2) and pro-group actions (Hakli et al. 2010).

262 | Introduction Part III the dialectics of cultural self-comprehension—cultures are what they understand themselves to be and such understanding, which is both conceptual as well as physical in concrete social practices, ‘lives’ only in the interaction with that which is other to itself. This creates a tension that stands out most clearly perhaps in Köchler’s call for the abolition of “civilizational double standards” and the “monocultural nostalgia” of “Eurocentrism.” Since this call is based on philosophical principles—an ideal of rationality and the dialectical logic of cultural self-comprehension—that belong to, and even are often taken to be central, to European and more largely Western civilization, a critic might view the dialogue model as an artificial product of these philosophical premises. That dialogue is a necessary moment in the historical dialectics of self-transcendence of modern rationality only follows, one might argue, if we accept the Hegelian account of identity and its implications for cultural self-realizations. However, as chapter 13 tacitly shows, the Hegelian model of self-realization is only one among many possible routes to the dialogue model. Zhao arrives at the postulate of an ‘ontology of co-existence’ by following an altogether different path of reasoning based on rationality considerations alone. Dialogue and the ontological truth about human being that dialogue conveys, namely, that human being is co-existence, is not an artefact of certain assumptions in socalled ‘continental’ Western philosophy. As Zhao’s contribution shows, conclusions based on criticism of theories of rationality developed within so-called ‘analytical’ Western philosophy—combined with elements of Chinese thought— also point us to an ontology of co-existence. If chapters 11 to 13 seem to agree that the categories of modern political thought, as well as the modern notion of rationality, need to be extended to enable a notion of world citizenship and a political culture that allows for “the cultivation of lateral ethical responsibilities” as much as “mutual respect for diversity,” the following two chapters shed light on the concrete challenges that arise for the heuristics and propagation of new political categories. Chapter 14 and 15 reflect on the difficult relationship between, on the one hand, the religious concepts of Islam, and, on the other hand, the political categories of Western democracies. These chapters—which are first publications of texts written in 2011 and 2004, respectively—were included partly because the question of Islamic democracy has become a hot topic in comparative political theory, the area of expertise required for any proponent of the ‘dialogue model’ of global politics. Primarily, however, these chapters offer important illustrations of three further problems that matter crucially to the overarching hypothesis that intercultural dialogue as inquiry can facilitate intercultural dialogue as praxis, policy, and strategy. The first problem concerns the relationship between conceptions of truth and conceptions of political decision-making, which is well illustrated in recent

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discussions of the models and realities of Islamic democracies.158 The difficulty centers on the philosophical (epistemological and axiological) foundations of the structural elements of ‘civic society’—freedom of speech, freedom of press, independent judiciary—and on the role of civic society for democracy. Can a society that does not endorse the philosophical foundations of civic society ground the latter in other ways? Or can it bypass civic society and develop alternative structures that warrant and support a democracy? For our purposes here we can formulate the problem more abstractly as follows: political structures reflect (i) assumptions about doxastic procedures (e.g., rational discourse), which generate assessments of the agentive situation, and (ii) assumptions about practical procedures for the generation and implemention of political decisions. The idea of a ‘deliberative democracy’ is to tie decisional procedures very closely to doxastic procedures. If doxastic procedures are individualistic (divine inspiration, ‘expert’ opinion) while decisional procedures are majority-based, tensions arise that can be addressed by (a) changing decisional procedures (reduction of civil society, political repression), (b) by ideological manipulation so that individual assessments are adopted by a majority without questioning, or, (c), by a form of communication that effectively amounts to a change in the style of the public discourse, in as much as it tries to convince rather than manipulate or coerce a majority of individuals and, to that extent, respects the epistemic autonomy of the individual. How will proponents of the ‘dialogue model’ concretely react to these different ways of responding to tensions between doxastic procedures and decisional procedures? If, that is, they are not to be indifferent to the differences between response strategies (a) through (c), which epistemological and axiological premises will proponents of the ‘dialogue model’ be able to use to evaluate the three different response strategies? The second problem illustrated in chapters 14 and 15 can be put into the form of the following simple question: who shall be the promotors of the ‘dialogue model’ in the political arena—will it be sufficient to leave this task to global organizations and the media, or will the ‘dialogue model’ need the local and regional support of intellectuals to encourage and assist the ‘cultivation of civic responsibilities’? In the latter case, are there ways to ensure that intellectuals will be able to resist local political instrumentalizations? The third problem is closely connected to the first: which categories, which type of discourse is suited in principle to guide the implementation of the ‘dialogue model’ and the associated cultivation of civic values of world citizens? Are there some forms of discourse, e.g., religious discourse or ideologies, that by their very premises can be excluded from the outset, and if so for what reasons? || 158 Cf. Hashmi 2002.

264 | Introduction Part III Chapter 14 brings the second problem into full view. Here the exiled Iranian political theorist Ramin Jahanbegloo suggests that the success of the “democratic awakening” of Islamic societies hinges on the degree to which the members of these societies are committed to “civic values” beyond the “passion for democracy.” In Jahanbegloo’s view, democracy and civil society are a package deal—“without civil society, democracy is lame, but without democracy, civil society is blind”—but of even greater importance are the individual commitments to “a pluralist acceptance of a common human horizon in the process of democratic development.” To foster such commitments to pluralism is the task of a country’s intellectuals. Yet, analyzing the recent political history of Iran, Jahanbegloo points out that many intellectuals were politically instrumenttalized, and often agreed to be. Jahanbegloo questions whether intellectuals—in Iran and elsewhere—can show “an ethical engagement that allows them—via practical reason rather than as political agents—to struggle against all forms of tyranny.” The concrete task for intellectuals in Islamic societies is to build “moral capital” for a position of nonviolence that “contests hegemony of both religious and political fundamentalists,” but creates the space for a “pluralist and nonviolent Muslim public sphere, engaging themselves for a form of tolerances that is born out of constant communication and interaction between the secular and the religious.” Chapter 15 illustrates the third problem, by way a reflection on the relationship between religious, political, and ideological discourse. Daryush Shayegan presents here the thesis that the notion of an ‘Islamic revolution’ is a contradiction in terms, at least with reference to Shia Islam. Shayegan draws attention to the fact that the categories of traditional Shia Islam operate within a semantic framework of cyclical time and already for this reason belong to an entirely different hermeneutic space than political discourse—they cannot be used to interpret phases or events that happen according to the linear time of sociopolitical history. In the course of the past three to four decades, Shayegan argues, religious discourse in Iran underwent four shifts which in combination amounted to a profound deformation of its original content, turning religion into ideology. To substantiate this claim Shayegan first defines the hallmarks of ideology. The outstanding methodological mistake of an ideology consists in the assumption of one simple principle of explanation of all phenomena, based on boldly associative assimilations and analogies and creating the impression of an inexorable logic for historical action. In a second step Shayegan demonstrates in which ways the doctrine of Alî Sharî´atî, a particularly influential proponent of “instrumentalized Shiism” manifests these characteristics. Of particular interest is Shayegan’s observation—which agrees with Jahanbegloo— that this process of the semantic deformation of religious contents was enabled

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by preceding ideologicalization by “vulgar Marxist” theories in response to the colonial experience. Shayegan’s penetrating analysis is itself a prime example of what scholarly inquiry can contribute to the development of the ‘dialogue model’ of global politics. Moreover, as we tried to highlight above, the specific investigation that Shayegan undertakes here raises a much larger issue. Does it hold in general that “ideologies have the propensity to sacralize secular ideas, [while] religions that enter abruptly into the arena of historical movement have, on the contrary, the tendency to secularize sacred ideas”? Can religious categories, of any denomination, ever facilitate the “ethical cultivation” of world citizens that are willing to create the political culture of dialogue?159 Does history suggest that the combination of religious categories, with their special alethic procedures of prayer and the grace of inspiration, should not be inserted into political discourse and the procedures of political decision-making if we want to avoid violent conflicts and war? Is not religion the greatest obstacle to dialogical relations in the politically relevant sense, or does this hold merely for exclusivist religious doctrines? These questions, among others, will be taken up in the chapters of the following part, which investigates possible approaches to dialogue on conflicting religious values.

References Gauthier, D. (1986). Morals by agreement. Oxford University Press. Hakli, R., Miller, K., Tuomela, R. (2010). Two kinds of we-reasoning. Economics and philosophy, 26, 291-320. Hashmi, S .(ed.) (2002). Islamic Political Ethics—Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Khatami, M. (2001). Global Agenda for a Dialogue Among Civilizations. UN-documents, http://www.un-documents.net/a56r6.htm, accessed October 2009. Khatami, M. (1999). Dialogue and the New Millenium. Address delivered at the Annual Session of the UNESCO on October 29, accessed at http://www.al-islam.org/islam-dialogue-andcivil-society-khatami/dialogue-and-new-millennium, accessed October 2009. Khatami, M. (2001). Islam, Liberty and Development. Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University.

|| 159 The reader might want to compare Shayegan’s analysis of the relationship between Shia Islam and history in chapter 15 with Buber’s refusal to connect religious concepts to political history, as reported in the concluding pages of chapter 18 below.

266 | Introduction Part III Khatami, M., Bekker, T. Pretorius, J. (2001). Dialogue among civilizations: a paradigm for peace. University of Pretoria, Centre for International Political Studies. Unit for Policy Studies. Köchler,. H. (1973). Kulturelles Selbstverständnis und Koexistenz—Voraussetzungen für einen fundamentellen Dialog. In Köchler, H. (Ed.), Philosophie und Politik. Dokumentation eines interdisziplinären Seminar, Veröffentlichungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Wissenschaft und Politik an der Universität Innsbruck, Vol. III (pp. 75-78) Innsbruck: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Wissenschaft und Politik. Köchler, H. (1978). Cultural-philosophical aspects of international cooperation. Lecture held before the Royal Scientific Society in Amman-Jordan (1974). Studies in International Cultural Relations, Vol II, 4-13. Said, E. (2001). The Clash of Ignorance, The Nation, October 22, 1–5. Smith, C. (2003). The UN as Vehicle for Dialogue. Peace and Change 28, 555-569.

Hans Köchler

CHAPTER ELEVEN The philosophy and politics of dialogue “Dialogue of civilizations” has become a buzzword in today’s global discourses. The phrase is often used to justify mutually exclusive strategies and policies. Those who propagate a peaceful vision of multicultural society (whether at the regional or global level) refer to the notion of “dialogue” as do politicians and state leaders who pursue an effectively confrontationist agenda; the latter also have discovered the usefulness of “civilizational dialogue” as a paradigm to achieve common acceptance of a strategy that is ultimately aimed at reshaping the balance of power in favor of a particular civilization, which is defined by themselves, and themselves alone. To allude to a famous literary quote, something “must be rotten in the state of the world” if a generally accepted fundamental principle of peace, namely dialogue, can be interpreted in, and subsequently used for, such contradictory goals. How else could it be explained that states that have officially declared themselves as “Friends” of a United Nations Alliance of Civilizations actively engage in confrontations with and wars against other states, which they often justify with civilizational undertones? Although membership in that Alliance’s “Group of Friends” commits all of them to tolerance and mutual respect, the antagonistic relationship some of them have entered into with Muslim countries—and Islamic civilization in general—conveys an entirely different message. The “politics of dialogue” at the global level has eroded the real meaning of the concept. It therefore appears appropriate to revisit the original paradigm and briefly reflect on the philosophical context in which it will have to be defined if its instrumentalization for political purposes, whether shortsighted or not, is to be prevented. At the same time, we must not be ignorant of the historical fact that the concept of dialogue has been launched on the world stage in an essentially political context, namely in response to a “counter-paradigm,” that of the “clash of civilizations,” as a possible post-ideological element of the global power game after the end of the Cold War. Before we proceed, I should clarify the use of the concept. In the context of this lecture, I use the term “civilization” in the sense of a universal worldview that comprises “culture” as a sub-category and includes theoretical and practical aspects. I do not juxtapose “culture” and “civilization” as two distinct forms of human self-realization whereby “culture” would mean the totality of a society’s knowledge, beliefs, artistic expressions, etc., and “civilization” would be

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defined as the sum total of the means by which this worldview is enacted (as e.g. in “industrial civilization”). In that regard, I follow Samuel Huntington’s usage of the term.160

The hermeneutics of civilizational dialogue When, during the 1990s, the “clash of civilizations” was first identified as major factor determining the global order, almost everyone, including the paradigm’s foremost exponent, Samuel Huntington,161 rushed to the opposite, the “politically correct,” side—to ensure compatriots and the world of the importance that we all commit ourselves to dialogue, not confrontation, as basis of lasting peace among nations.162 This, albeit superficial, “consensus of political correctness” manifested itself in the last decade’s global media spectacle of dialogue proclamations, diplomatic initiatives, summit conferences, etc., all dedicated to that noble goal which no one dared to object. The underlying public relations agenda was itself part of the politics of dialogue. In the majority of cases, however, the conditiones sine quibus non—i.e., the necessary preconditions—of the co-operative relationship on which dialogue has to be based in order to be meaningful, were overlooked—whether deliberately or out of ignorance. This is where the philosophy of dialogue comes into play, as a reflection of and corrective against the political instrumentalization of inter-civilizational and inter-cultural issues. The principles—or necessary conditions—of dialogue As a first step, we shall identify the principles and indispensable requirements of dialogue that have to be acknowledged if “dialogue of civilizations” is intended to be a sustainable feature of international relations:163

|| 160 Huntington 1993: p. 24. 161 The first to use the term “clash of civilizations” was Bernard Lewis 1990: pp. 47–60. 162 Huntington further clarified this point in his subsequent book Huntington 1996. – He also confirmed his commitment to dialogue in a personal conversation with the author on the sidelines of the Second International Seminar on Civilizational Dialogue “Japan, Islam and the West” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2 September 1996). 163 The author has initially outlined those principles in a lecture before Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society in Amman on 9 March 1974. See Köchler 1978-2.

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(1) Equality of civilizational (cultural) “lifeworlds,” including value systems, in the normative sense: This excludes any form of patronizing or supremacist attitudes from the part of one civilization (culture) towards another. “Sovereign equality,” one thus might say, is not only an attribute of states as entities of international law, but also a principle that can be used to describe the inalienable right to civilizational identity.164 It is obvious, in this context, that the notion of “development,” if it is understood in a normative sense (which would allow a kind of external evaluation), cannot be applied to civilizations. Development (in a normative sense) can only be measured from within a given civilization or culture. (2) Awareness of the “dialectics of cultural self-comprehension” and selfrealization: A civilization (culture) can only fully comprehend itself, and thus realize its identity if it is able to relate to “the other” in the sense of an independent expression of distinct worldviews and value systems, i.e. perceptions of the world, which are not merely an offspring of one’s particular civilization. The process of civilizational or cultural self-realization is structurally similar to how the individual human being achieves self-awareness: re-flexio (reflexion) implies that the subject looks at himself/herself from an outside perspective, making himself/herself the object of perception (“subject-object dialectic”).165 As has been explained in the philosophy of mind, particularly since Immanuel Kant, individual self-awareness is the synthesis in a dialectical process in which the ego defines itself [in the sense of de-finitio: drawing the border] in relation to “the other.” The same applies to the collective self-awareness of a civilization. Only if the latter is able and willing to see itself through the eyes of “the other,” will it achieve a status of maturity (in the sense of its internal development, not in regard to external evaluation!) that will allow it to overcome the fear of the other as “the alien” and, thus, to take part in a global interaction (“dialogue”) with other civilizations. (3) Acknowledgment of meta-norms as foundation of dialogue: Derived from the normative equality of civilizations (point [1] above), these norms at the meta-level are logically prior to any material norms and have to be subscribed to by all partners in a credible undertaking of dialogue. “Tolerance” and “mutuality” (mutual respect) are two such examples of meta-norms; they are to be under|| 164 This right is also implicitly enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as a collective right. Art. 1(1) clearly states that the peoples’ right of selfdetermination implies that they “freely pursue their … cultural development.” 165 For details see Köchler 2008-3. – On the epistemological problem of self-reflection see Köchler 1974.

270 | Hans Köchler stood as formal (as distinct from material) values that determine the interaction between civilizations on the basis of dialogue and, as such, are non-negotiable. They are the very “conditions of possibility” (Möglichkeitsbedingungen) of any such process, enabling an individual civilization to realize its specific, i. e. materially distinct, value system. Due to their general, formal nature as quasitranscendental preconditions in the Kantian sense, they cannot be attributed to just one particular civilization; their status is obviously trans-cultural. (4) Ability to transcend the hermeneutical circle of civilizational selfaffirmation: In order to be able to position itself as a genuine participant in the global interaction among cultures and civilizations, a given civilizational community has to go beyond what Hans-Georg Gadamer described as Wirkungsgeschichte (“Reception History,” referring to the exclusive impact of the respective community’s “autochthonous” traditions on the formation of cultural identity). When it comes to the shaping of its identity, the need for a civilization to “free” itself from exclusive dependence on its own history is particularly obvious in all educational processes.166 In view of the lasting impact on the global power constellation, reference to Eurocentrism as basic feature of Europe’s—and the West’s—cultural identity formation can most pertinently illustrate this hermeneutical dilemma. Over hundreds of years, the Western civilization has been accustomed to export its worldview, value system and lifestyle to “the rest” of the world, a process that has often been accompanied by a strategy to reshape the identity of those other cultures and civilizations. Against this background of claimed, and enforced, civilizational hegemony, international cultural exchanges have all too often been mere self-encounters—or “civilizational soliloquia”—of the dominant partner. However, a civilization will only be able to fully understand itself and define its place in the global realm of ideas, if it is able to reach out to the worldviews that have developed independently of it, namely those that have not already been shaped by that civilization. This is indeed the essence of the dialectics of civilizational self-comprehension or self-definition (point [2] above): de-finitio means the ability to see what is beyond the (civilizational) border, and to understand one’s own civilization with regard to the other. Absence of self-reflexiveness has all along been the handicap of Eurocentrism and its mirror-like phenomenon, Orientalism, which Edward Said has aptly described as the ideological legacy of the West’s colonial encounters with the

|| 166 This aspect and the resulting need for comparative cultural studies were particularly emphasized in the Final Resolution of the International Progress Organization’s conference on “The Cultural Self-comprehension of Nations,” held in Innsbruck, Austria, from 27 to 29 July 1974: Hans Köchler 1978-1, p. 142.

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rest of the world.167 Accordingly, the “colonial,” in fact colonialist, approach that has recently been revived under the auspices of a “New World Order”168 has meant the rejection, ex principio, of the realities and requirements of civilizational hermeneutics; constructive dialogue has been ruled out in favour of a “reinvention” of other civilizations along the lines of the “colonizer’s”—or the cultural hegemon’s—definition of civilizational standards.

The multi-faceted politics of dialogue The rejection of civilizational hermeneutics has been particularly obvious in the ambitious Western (mainly U.S.) project of remodeling the region of the “Greater Middle East” according to Western standards of democracy and secularism— if need be, by use of force. The civilizational undertones of the justification for the Iraq war of 2003 have made this tendency particularly obvious.169 In the meantime, the tensions and deep rifts between civilizations caused by the selfproclaimed hegemon’s crude military approach have made the promotion of dialogue almost “mission impossible.” It should not surprise us, however, that the tendency towards cultural and civilizational uniformity has always been strong in constellations that are characterized by the absence of a balance of power. The situation resulting from the collapse of the bipolar system at the beginning of the 1990s is one such instance. In this context, the buzzword “civilization” has increasingly been used as a tool to legitimize otherwise unpopular and legally dubious wars.170 Against this background of conflicts and increased geopolitical tensions revolving around issues of civilization, we shall briefly analyze the “politics of dialogue” in the sense of (a) the political requirements and consequences of dialogue, and (b) its political instrumentalization. As regards the first aspect, the basic question can be formulated as follows: How is politics to be structured—or “reshaped”—so as to enable a dialogue of cultures and civilizations at the local, regional and global levels? A simultaneously existing multitude of cultural and civilizational lifeworlds (if we may use here this phenomenological term) has become a fact of life under the conditions of globalization. The era of cultural homogeneity in an insular nation-state is long past. To draw the appropriate conclusions from this || 167 Said 1979. 168 For details see Köchler 1993. 169 On the geostrategic aspects of the instrumentalization of “civilization” see Köchler 2008-1. 170 See the title of Robert Fisk’s critical book: The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. 2005.

272 | Hans Köchler new status quo is one of the major political challenges at the beginning of the 21st century. The complex interrelatedness of local and global dimensions is a basic feature of today’s civilizational diversity. It is most visible, though only partly and reluctantly acknowledged, on the European continent, but has also existed, to varying degrees, in other regions of the world (e.g. South-East Asia). The multicultural reality in the domestic context of Europe—mainly a result of the migration processes over the last decades, which have brought profound demographic changes—mirrors the cultural and civilizational diversity at the global level. Developments in the relationship between the communities within a state will often have an impact on global civilizational relations, and vice-versa. This interdependence has become increasingly obvious in Muslim-Christian relations, with potentially far-reaching political consequences. The Danish experience with the “cartoon controversy” is just one of the more dramatic examples of a traumatic local event with worldwide repercussions. The most recent example is the “minaret controversy” in Switzerland. In this regard, Europe may, and should, learn from the experiences in other continents where multicultural societies have emerged much earlier, and partly due to the (economically motivated) demographic policies of European colonial powers. Politics also has to take into consideration the complex hermeneutical constellation of inter-civilizational relations, and in three different respects: (a)

(b)

(c)

Concerning the fact that distinct cultures/civilizations, in different phases of their internal development, exist simultaneously at the local level: This situation can be described by reference to the paradoxical term of ungleichzeitige Gleichzeitigkeit (“non-simultaneous simultaneity”); Concerning the necessity to interact in the face of often irreconcilable differences in the ontological (or metaphysical) as well as normative perceptions of the world (“unavoidability of interaction”): This requirement is most obvious at the domestic level, but it also cannot be ignored in terms of the reality beyond the borders of the nation-state; due to the integration of almost every country’s economy into an ever more complex global network and in view of the rapid development of information technology, “splendid isolation” is not a viable option anymore; a country can only indulge in such a policy at the expense of stigmatization and at the cost of economic progress (e.g. the experience of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea). The simultaneity of distinct civilizational (cultural) life-worlds at the local level is complemented by the global simultaneity of hitherto sepa-

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rately existing civilizations, whereby the latter may directly impact on the assertion of civilizational identity “at home” (“double, or interdependent, simultaneity”); the ever increasing flow of information and communication in cyberspace and by means of satellite-based technologies has created a “global village” of civilizations—even if, in some (increasingly frequent) instances, they do not want to take notice of one another.

The principle of affirmative action in the domain of civilization The complex realities of civilizational diversity can only be managed in accordance with a philosophy of dialogue (according to the four principles and requirements of the self-comprehension and self-realization of a civilization we have outlined earlier). This makes it imperative that politics acknowledge diversity and adopt a set of clearly defined rules that ensure respect of the right to diversity on the basis of mutuality; any rejection of this principle is a recipe for conflict and may threaten the stability of the respective political order, and in the long term even the very survival of that polity. The time for measures to ensure, or reestablish, a ‘monocultural reality’ has long passed—and not only for Europe, which has itself triggered a ‘multicultural development,’ first through colonization and, later, through an economically-driven immigration policy and, as partner of the United States, through the globalization of the economy.171 The ‘civilizational dynamic’ these historical processes have activated cannot be suddenly stopped, or ‘switched off,’ just as the process of industrialization cannot be reversed for the sake of a new ‘romantic’ encounter with nature. Responsible politics has to create the organizational framework in which distinct—and often (not only geographically) distant—cultural and civilizational identities can develop and interact without threatening the stability of the respective system, and without alienating a country from the rest of the world.

Europe’s multicultural challenge The ever more complex interrelationship between the local, regional and global dimensions of cultural identity brings about new challenges for an increasingly multicultural Europe. The future stability, indeed the viability of the European project (as regards the European Union as an intergovernmental and partly || 171 On the socio-cultural implications of globalization see Köchler 2000.

274 | Hans Köchler supranational entity)—and of Europe as a global player—will depend on how the countries and peoples of the continent will deal with the fact of cultural diversity.172 The simultaneity of distinct civilizations, each in a different phase of identity formation, and at the same place—in the same European πόλις –, is an existential challenge from which decision-makers cannot escape lest they will be ‘punished by history.’ Even if they would try to solve what is perceived as a ‘problem’ by the use of naked force (as through population transfers of the sort of ethnic cleansing that were practiced in the Balkans not so long ago),173 they will, if at all, only achieve a Pyrrhic victory since, whether we like it or not, the world is about to become the πόλις within which the reality of everyday life will be determined; the nation-state—in the sense of an entity that is sealed off from the rest of the world, vested with “sovereign” power as the sole origin of the state’s political and legal order—is not anymore a viable concept. The notions of the nation-state and of national sovereignty are undergoing a profound transformation in the direction of a co-operative system of international relations,174 which has materialized, to some extent, at the (regional) level of the European Union. Accordingly, a civilization cannot simply ‘delink’ itself from the global interplay of forces; it cannot just ‘opt out’ of interdependence. History cannot be reversed—unless one risks perpetual confrontation between civilizations, or more precisely: between their state protagonists, and under conditions of nuclear armament.

|| 172 On the implications for the European state system see Köchler 1995-1. 173 Extreme right wing and racist groups in Europe have become increasingly vocal about “repatriation” of Muslims. Although leaders of right-wing parties would, for the moment, only call for “voluntary repatriation,” principiis obsta! The speech which Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom), delivered on 14 June 2009 before the Danish Free Press Society in Copenhagen is symptomatic of this approach. As part of a program of action “to combat the Islamization of Europe effectively,” he demands, inter alia: “… we will have to stop mass immigration from Muslim countries and promote voluntary repatriation.” What makes this demand particularly dubious is that all measures he proposes as part of his six point-program of action are, according to point 1, based on the premise that “our Western culture is superior to Islamic culture.” The option he offers to Muslims who want to live in Europe is “assimilation.” Wilders 2009. 174 For details see Köchler 1995-2.

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Co-existence / dialogue / alliance of civilizations The potentially disastrous consequences of ‘civilizational revisionism’ are the reason why, at the beginning of the third millennium, the ‘politics of dialogue’ will have to be more than an attempt to preserve a precarious status quo, or a strategy merely aimed at the co-existence among civilizations. This term denotes the simultaneous existence of distinct civilizational entities on the basis of mutual tolerance, but without necessarily implying genuine interaction or mutual engagement. It can also be described, in reference to its consequences, as ‘civilizational non-interference’ or ‘civilizational apathy.’ In international relations theory, the term “co-existence” was used to characterize the status quo in the relations between the political blocks and their ideologies in the era of the Cold War. Commitment to the doctrine, it was argued, ensured a precarious peace, which, in actual fact, was more guaranteed through the mechanisms of “mutual deterrence” (that were based on the expectation of mutually assured destruction in case of nuclear war). In the present historical constellation, however, the Cold War’s paradigm of peaceful co-existence among nations cannot easily be transferred to the realm of cultural and civilizational diversity. While commitment to the doctrine may be an ad hoc measure of last resort—meant to avert Huntington’s clash of civilizations –, to insist on co-existence between artificially isolated entities will not be a sustainable strategy in the long term because, in an era of global interconnectedness, constant interaction between cultural and civilizational collectives simply cannot be avoided. Only if “co-existence” is reinterpreted in the way of active mutual engagement, can it contribute to inter-civilizational relations under the conditions of globality.175 This is the reason why, in our analysis, the model of dialogue (which, by definition, includes mutual engagement) may be better suited to deal with the consequences of civilizational diversity. It takes heed of the actual interdependence of our life-worlds and bids farewell to the splendid isolation of civilizations (an idea which appears to be modeled according to the paradigm of the sovereign nation-state). In recent years, a third notion has been advanced, which is situated in a different position on the ‘intensity scale’ of inter-civilizational relations: in addition to “co-existence” and “dialogue,” an “alliance” between civilizations has been propagated as part of a broad strategy to counteract the confrontational

|| 175 This is how the author has tried to define the term in the context of contemporary international relations theory. Köchler 2009.

276 | Hans Köchler paradigm and promote durable peace at the global level. There should be no doubt about the noble motives, which led the Prime Ministers of Turkey and Spain to launch such an initiative within the framework of the United Nations Organization. In the meantime, however, the project appears to have become part of the politics of dialogue in the second sense: namely as instrumentalization of the paradigm of civilization by some of the “allied states,” and for partly hidden political motives (which, in some respects, are directly opposed to dialogue). While one may reflect about a possible metaphorical use of the term “alliance” (in a way similar to the semantics of the 19th century’s “Holy Alliance”), one cannot avoid asking as to which civilizations are “allied” under this phrase, and against which common enemy, since the term is only too well remembered from war-like constellations in earlier epochs. So far, more than one hundred states have joined a so-called “Group of Friends” of the Alliance of Civilizations in order to “support” its efforts to “counter the forces that fuel polarization and extremism.”176 It cannot be overlooked, however, that some of these “states-friends” –a civilizational version of states-parties, so to speak—are themselves, like their 19th century predecessors, actively engaged as allies in wars—even a so-called “global war” –, which are justified with arguments that appeal to civilizational prejudice. Certain of these states-friends are also systematically oppressing ethnic and cultural minorities in their own domain. The “politics of dialogue” have indeed become part and parcel of a global political game in which the players seek to gain legitimacy for their parochial political agenda—whether domestic, regional, or international—through associating themselves with the noble goal of civilizational peace, something no one can object to. They proclaim that they aspire to something even higher than abstract dialogue, namely an alliance, and thus partnership, among all civilizations against their common enemies: “extremism” and “polarization” (according to the language of official UN documents).177 The political instrumentalization of the civilizational paradigm has become particularly obvious in the ongoing military confrontations in the wider Middle East and in Central and South-East Asia: Since the tragic events of the year 2001, a new form of “polarization” is taking root in global affairs, which juxtaposes the “enemies of civilization” as such with its self-proclaimed defenders—whereby, in a kind of reverse pars pro toto terminology, “civilization” is

|| 176 United Nations, Alliance of Civilizations, Mission Statement. 177 Loc. cit.

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implicitly, and exclusively, understood as Western civilization. (Apparently, this antagonism along an almost Schmittean friend-enemy pattern is not subsumed under the category of polarization that is officially abhorred by the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations.) These “modern” wars are portrayed (by their perpetrators) as necessary struggles for the supremacy of a supposedly morally superior civilization, indeed as wars in defense of civilization against alleged new forms of barbarism, labeled as “terrorism,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” etc.178 It is a sublime irony that the underlying rationale very much resembles the ideology of the 19th century’s “Holy Alliance.” While the main proponent of this epic confrontation is not itself a statutory “Friend” of the Alliance of Civilizations,179 several of the Alliance’s supporting countries have joined “coalitions of the willing” that give those wars an aura of international acceptance and legitimacy. At the same time, this military engagement has undermined the stated civilizational agenda of those states; in the long term, it may even threaten religious and civilizational peace on a global scale, particularly between the Western and Muslim world. It goes without saying that these supposedly just wars totally contradict the very principles which underlie the hermeneutics of civilizational dialogue, and in particular the acceptance of diversity as conditio sine qua non of a community’s self-comprehension.

Logic of war versus rhetoric of dialogue Thus, the previously referred to members of the “Group of Friends” of a peaceful, UN-sponsored “Alliance of Civilizations” act as military allies in a battle that is supposedly directed at the enemies of civilization as such. One cannot ignore the strange and delicate co-existence of the ‘logic of war’ with the ‘rhetoric of dialogue’ when reflecting on the long-term political implications of these military campaigns (which were given poetic names—such as “Operation Enduring Freedom”—to underline the proclaimed humanitarian, or civilizational, mission). This ‘simultaneity’ of contradictory paradigms is unacceptable in our modern era where the rules of ‘civilized’ behavior require consistency of the principles that underlie the actions of states as members of the ‘international community.’

|| 178 For a critique of the underlying ideology see, inter alia, Salter 2005 and Foster & Clark 2004. 179 For the current list of members of the “Group of Friends” of the Alliance of Civilizations see United Nations, Alliance of Civilizations, Group of Friends, Members.

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Should one, thus, not suggest that modern states adopt the practice of the Greek city states of ancient times whose citizens had well understood that the Olympic spirit of open competition is not compatible with the use of force between their communities? The “Sacred Truce” (Ὀlυμπιaκὴ ἐκeχειρίa) meant that arms had to be silent during the Olympic games.180 Although this may sound naïve: should one not equally expect of those who claim to support an “Alliance of Civilizations” that they abstain from using violence against other states as long as they formally adhere to that Alliance’s “Group of Friends” (except in obvious cases of self-defense)?181 There can be no doubt that such a proposal will be quickly dismissed as an overly idealistic demand which, as the pundits of international affairs will say, is not compatible with the imperatives of realpolitik. What cannot be challenged, however, is the assertion that the ‘politics of dialogue’ will be utterly discredited if, under the disguise of a “global war on terror,”182 partners in this undertaking wage wars with a quasi-imperial civilizational agenda in mind. As has become all too obvious since 2001, these campaigns have also been aimed at reinventing a civilization that was perceived as different—or shaping it in the image of the dominant one –, insofar as that civilization’s value system and perception of the world were seen as a threat to the dominant paradigm.183

Conclusion: A philosophical reminder Those who engage in the rhetoric and politics of peaceful partnership among civilizations—certainly the vast majority of UN member states—should be reminded of the philosophical principles of dialogue, which do not allow a policy of double standards. Philosophy underlines that the equality of civilizational expressions necessitates mutual recognition, plain and simple, and without any mental reservation. What states claim for themselves (in terms of national sovereignty), they also have to be prepared to accord to the other; the application of the reciprocity principle to issues of communal identity means that states have to abstain from any claim to civilizational supremacy or hegemony. In

|| 180 For the importance of that maxim in the history of the modern Olympic movement see, inter alia, Mezö 1951. 181 The author posed this question to an official of the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations Secretariat (New York) at the Seventh Doha Interfaith Dialogue Conference in Doha (Qatar) on 21 October 2009; as expected, he got only an evasive answer. 182 On the ideology of the war on terror cf. Köchler 2008-2. 183 For details see: Köchler 2008-1 loc. cit.

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order to be credible and sustainable, the politics of global dialogue have to incorporate these principles. The multicultural reality, which is a fait accompli in many polities that used to define themselves in the tradition of the nation-state, has plunged those states into a deep identity crisis. Unless the new reality is also acknowledged at the global level, the world will be headed towards an era of perpetual confrontation along cultural and civilizational lines. Accordingly, those who promote the goal of civilizational dialogue internationally can only do so credibly, and consistently, if they recognize the equal rights of cultural and religious minorities in their own countries. In our era of global interdependence, ‘peace at home’ and ‘peace in the world’ are intrinsically linked. Civilizational identity cannot anymore be defined within, and confined to, the parameters of an insular and culturally secluded nation-state; much to the dismay of the apologists of a monocultural society in an ethnically homogenous framework, that type of state does not exist anymore. In many parts of the world, our old continent included, multicultural societies have become a fact of life. Politics cannot negate this fact; it can only weigh the options as to how best to ensure the future stability and global competitiveness of the state in question—in an open space of ideas and worldviews. Monocultural nostalgia should thus give way to intercultural openness and civilizational curiosity, which alone will ensure a polity’s long-term stability and success (including economic competitiveness) under conditions of an ever more complex interdependence between the realms of cultural diversity at the local, regional and global levels. That history cannot be arrested is a truth, which the holders of power of all epochs have tried to ignore. However, when it comes to the dynamic of civilizational identity, it would not only be self-delusional, but dangerous in terms of world peace, to insist on the perpetuation of supremacy in the tradition of Eurocentrism (that has anyway become fictitious under the conditions of globalization). The only rational, indeed ‘civilized,’ answer to the many local and international conflicts that are related in one way or another to the increasingly felt, and feared, social and political consequences of cultural diversity184 is the pursuit of an agenda not of mere tolerance or co-existence, nor of exuberant alli-

|| 184 Post scriptum, 30 November 2009: The Swiss people’s decision to ban the building of minarets is a dramatic illustration of socio-political consequences in Europe. See Statement of the International Progress Organization 2009.

280 | Hans Köchler ance, but of a prosaic and philosophically ‘sober’ dialogue among cultures and civilizations.

References Fisk, R. (2005). The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. First American edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Foster, J. B., & Clark, B. (2004). Empire of Barbarism. In: Monthly Review, 56-7 (December 2004), at www.monthlyreview.org/1204jbfclark.htm, accessed on 2 December 2009. Huntington, S. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72-3,22-49. Huntington, S. (1996).The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976). Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 6 December 1966 Registered ex officio on 3 January 1976 Köchler, H. (1974). Die Subjekt-Objekt-Dialektik in der transzendentalen Phänomenologie: Das Seinsproblem zwischen Idealismus und Realismus. (Monographien zur philosophischen Forschung, Vol. 112.) Meisenheim a. G.: Anton Hain. Köchler, H. (ed.) (1978a) Cultural self-comprehension of nations (Studies in International [Cultural] Relations, Vol. I.). Tübingen/Basel: Erdmann. Köchler, H. (1978b). Lecture before Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society in Amman on 9 March 1974. In Cultural-philosophical Aspects of International Cooperation. Studies in International [Cultural] Relations, Vol. II. Vienna: International Progress Organization. Köchler, H. (1993). Democracy and the New World Order. Studies in International Relations, Vol. XIX. Vienna: International Progress Organization. Köchler, H. (1995a). The Concept of the Nation and the Question of Nationalism: The Traditional ‘Nation State’ versus a Multicultural ‘Community State. In Dunne, M. & Bonazzi, T. (Eds.), Citizenship and Rights in Multicultural Societies (pp. 44-51). Keele: Keele University Press. Köchler, H. (1995b). Democracy and the International Rule of Law: Propositions for an Alternative World Order. Selected Papers Published on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations. Vienna/New York: Springer-Verlag. Köchler, H. (2000). Philosophical Aspects of Globalization: Basic Theses on the Interrelation of Economics, Politics, Morals and Metaphysics in a Globalized World. In H. Köchler (Ed.), Globality versus Democracy? Studies in International Relations, Vol. XXV (pp. 3-18). Vienna: International Progress Organization. Köchler, H. (2008a). Civilization as Instrument of World Order? The Role of the Civilizational Paradigm in the Absence of Balance of Power. IKIM Journal of Islam and International Affairs / Jurnal Islam dan hubungan antarabangsa IKIM, 2 (3), 1-22. Köchler, H. (2008b). The Global War on Terror and the Metaphysical Enemy. In Köchler. H., (Ed.) The “Global War on Terror” and the Question of World Order. Studies in International Relations, Vol. XXX (pp. 13-35). Vienna: International Progress Organization. Köchler, H. (2008c). The Philosophical Foundations of Civilizational Dialogue. Philosophy, Islamic Views & Modern Attitudes. The Papers Presented at the Second World Congress on Mulla Sadra . (May 2004 - Tehran), Vol. 4 (pp. 3-15). Tehran: SIPRIn Publications.

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Köchler, H. (2009). Civilizational Dialogue versus Civilizational Coercion: The Risks of Unilateralism and the Virtues of Co-existence. In H. Köchler, World Order: Vision and Reality. Collected Papers (E. Armstrong, Ed.) (pp. 503-510). New Delhi: Manak. Lewis, B. (1990). The Roots of Muslim Rage. In: The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 266 (3), 47–60. Mezö, F. (1951). Olympic Peace—World Peace. Bulletin du Comité International Olympique, 29, 22-24. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism (2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books. Salter, M. (2005). A New Civilizing Mission: Trauma, Crisis, Critique. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, 5 March 2005. Draft version published at www.allacademic.com/meta/p70816_index.html, accessed on 2 December 2009. Statement of the International Progress Organization (2009). Swiss minaret ban violates basic human rights and threatens religious peace in Europe. Vienna, 3 December 2009, P/RE/22013c-is, at http://i-p-o.org/Swiss-minaret_ban-IPO-nr-03Dec09.htm, accessed on 7 December 2009. United Nations, Alliance of Civilizations, Group of Friends, Members, at http://www.unaoc.org/about/group-of-friends/members/ accessed on 22 June 2013. United Nations, Alliance of Civilizations, Mission Statement, at http://www.unaoc.org/content/view/39/187/lang,english/, accessed on 3 November 2009. Wilders, G. (2009). Speech delivered on 14 June 2009 before the Danish Free Press Society in Copenhagen (Quoted according to the text released by Partij voor de Vrijheid at http://www.pvv.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2045&Itemid=1, accessed on 7 December 2009).

Fred Dallmayr

CHAPTER TWELVE Dialogue community as a promising path to global justice Cultural interaction does not always occur in the “space of dialogue.” The purpose of this paper is to discuss alternative models of global politics, in an effort to profile the so-called “dialogue of civilizations.” The question I want to raise is: what is meant by dialogue as an alternative model of global politics? In which way does dialogue add a new dimension to global politics? The answer I want to offer is that dialogue opens a promising path toward global justice and peace, because it is predicated on equality and interdependence and the cultivation of lateral ethical responsibilities and is oriented toward the vision of a global ‘good life.’ My discussion will concentrate on three main issues. First, how does the dialogue model differ from other familiar models of global politics? Secondly, how in particular does the model differ from the more recent conception of a “world state” or world government? And lastly, what are the concrete political implications of the model? Is dialogue completely free of political conflict?

Alternative models of global politics From a historical perspective, global politics has been dominated chiefly by two models: empire and inter-state rivalry. Ancient history, both in the East and the West, is replete with examples of “empire” or at least strong imperial ambitions. Digging deep into the past, we find records of a Sumerian empire, of Assyrian, Babylonian and other Mesopotamian empires. Particularly impressive— stretching over several millennia—are the records of the Egyptian empire which left its imprint on many subsequent developments. Of even greater longevity was the Chinese empire in the Far East. Turning to the ‘Western’ world, we find the examples of the Macedonian empire and somewhat later of the Roman Empire. In all these cases, ‘empire’ designated the effort to provide an efficient, more or less centralized administration governing or ruling over major segments of the then known world. Empires, of course, are not confined to ancient history. During the Christian Middle Ages we find the Byzantine Empire (characterized by “caesaropapism”) and the Holy Roman Empire (governed by the dual authority of Em-

284 | Fred Dallmayr peror and Pope). As we know, these Christian structures were challenged by the rise of Muslim empires: first, the Ummayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and later the Ottoman, the Persian Safavid, and the Indian Mughal empires. There is no need here to talk about familiar modern Western analogues: the Spanish, the British, the French, the Portuguese, and other empires. What characterizes all these empires, again, is the attempt to impose a uniform and more or less homogeneous structure, in “top-down” fashion, on vast expanses of territory (despite occasional concessions to regional or local customs and traditions). Briefly put: empire is built on command not dialogue. Following the religious wars in Europe, a new model emerged in the West: the model of inter-state rivalry, also called the “Westphalian” system. In terms of this model, nation-states live in their mutual relations in a “state of nature” which (in the language of Thomas Hobbes) is a state of overt or latent warfare due to the absence of a superior arbiter. The justice or propriety of the claims of nation-states is ultimately decided (and can only be decided) by armed force— despite the slow emergence of an always fragile “law of nations” seeking to impose legal rules on the arbitrary conduct of states. During modern times, the Westphalian system has steadily extended its sway from Europe to the rest of the world. The school of international “realism” (so-called) is firmly wedded to this model and counts among its devotees politicians and experts around the world (including such experts as Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and Samuel Huntington). It is evident that the dialogue model cannot subscribe to the Westphalian paradigm. What the dialogue model appreciates is the decentralization effected in that paradigm, that is, the replacement of a monistic top-down structure by lateral relationships and by the emphasis on regional, national, or ethnic freedom or autonomy. Where the dialogue model parts company is in the conception of sovereign autonomy—which, in the Hobbesian-Westphalian paradigm, boils down to the pursuit of selfish interests (national interests, security interests), usually without any regard for lateral ethical responsibilities. Here the dialogue model insists on the close linkage of independence and interdependence, or differently put: on the linkage of freedom and ethics or autonomy and civic virtue. The question is how ethical interdependence can be cultivated in the modern context.

World state, global government I turn here to the second issue mentioned above. The perceived need to foster interdependence and to overcome the pitfalls of the Westphalian system has

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prompted many scholars to seek refuge in the conception of a world state or global government. For many or most of these scholars, the idea of a world state does not involve a simple return to traditional forms of ‘empire.’ Most of them do not favor heavy-handed or monolithic global structures; in opposition to topdown modes of imperialism they advocate a ‘democratic’ world state or world government, where ‘democratic’ means the active participation of people around the world as ‘world citizens.’ The so-called ‘anarchy’ of states is overcome here through the establishment of global political institutions capable of effective global policy-making. How should one respond to this global agenda from a dialogical angle? Clearly, devotees of dialogue must appreciate the stress on global interdependence and the endeavor to curb the pointless rivalry between states—which in our time may issue in a global nuclear holocaust. Moreover, one needs to emphasize that dialogue is not in principle opposed to political structures and institutions. What is at stake is a matter of emphasis.185 In the absence of ethical cultivation and transformation, the global world state is likely to follow in the footsteps of the modern nation-state which (in Max Weber’s terms) has become a soul-less machine or an “iron cage.” In the absence of the dialogical fostering of civic responsibilities, world government is likely to function as a totalizing super-bureaucracy smothering freedom and difference—and this despite wellmeant ‘democratic’ rhetoric or intentions. As it happens, my dialogical reservations concerning world government are supported by Kantian philosophy, and especially by Kant’s famous treatise on “Perpetual Peace”. As will be recalled, Kant in that treatise proposed a “peaceful (or pacific) federation,” a “foedus pacificum,” which would link together states or political entities while respecting their integrity, autonomy, and diversity.186 Thus, Kant’s proposal sought to correlate freedom and moral responsibility, political autonomy and public ethics—which is precisely also the aim of the “dialogue of civilizations”. His proposal is admirable and can be endorsed, to an extent, by proponents of dialogue, but the latter would wish to recast the proposed federation as an alliance not so much of nation states as of broader civilization, cultures, and civil society associations.

|| 185 Compare in this regard my 2004. 186 See Kant 1970 [1795]: 104.

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Political struggle and conflict The dialogue model is often criticized as too optimistic and too naive; especially the idea of a “dialogue of civilizations” is often attacked as too “un-political,” that is, insufficiently concerned with the role of power struggle, and conflict in public life. This criticism has been articulated with particular vigor by Carl Schmitt (the recently rediscovered German thinker). For Schmitt, any genuine reflection on politics must start from the premise of a basically flawed or “evil” human nature—a premise which necessarily leads to the conclusion that only governmental power or a coercive public authority (in fact: a “sovereign” authority) can establish order in society and the world.187 There is a logical cogency to Schmitt’s argument which friends of democracy and a dialogical world order should not ignore. This is not the point to subject his argument, and especially his “concept of the political,” to a detailed assessment and critique.188 Only a few points must suffice here. The assumption of an “evil” human nature is only a speculative hypothesis; it by no means universally confirmed by human experience nor universally endorsed by all philosophers and theologians. For humanists, the assumption is an insult to humanity; for religious believers, it is equally an insult to the divine “creator.” Many prominent thinkers—for example, Mencius and Rousseau—held the precisely opposite view, namely, that humans are essentially good and benevolent. For myself, I hold a middle position, to the effect that there are both good and evil potentialities in human beings. Which of those possibilities is actualized, depends on the mode of cultivation and habituation, that is, on the nurturing of either destructive impulses or else of private and civic ‘virtues.’ To the extent that civic virtues are properly cultivated, the need for coercive governmental power (though not government per se) is reduced and potentially canceled. The dialogue model does not ignore the role of conflict and struggle. But note: the accent is shifted here subtly from power-political struggle to ethicalpolitical struggle. The Mahatma Gandhi had a word for the latter: “satyagraha” (often translated as “truth force”). Why is there struggle? First, in dialogue all concerned parties must be enabled equally to participate in the contest. But there are enormous inequalities in the world obstructing dialogue: inequalities between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. To rectify or ameliorate this situation, agonistic struggle is clearly necessary—but struggle not in the sense of warfare but in the sense of

|| 187 See Schmitt 2007. 188 See Dallmayr 2010.

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satyagraha and non-violence (ahimsa). Secondly, the struggle is ultimately for justice and truth, and in that struggle no one has a monopoly of the definition of these terms; hence, struggle must mean an open, fair-minded and tolerant search for a just society and just world order. This does not amount to an endorsement of relativism or the view that “anything goes.” Here, the basic meaning of “dia-logue” comes to the fore: that the “logos” or truth is “between” participants. Thus, despite different perspectives, all have to take seriously the need for justice and the removal of obstacles standing in its way. This means: we need to struggle with each other in the search for justice and truth. This search, in turn, points the way to peace. According to the old proverb: “peace is the fruit of justice” (opus justitiae pax).

References Dallmayr, F. (2004). Cosmopolitanism: Religious, Moral, and Political. In Peace Talks—Who Will Listen? (pp. 89-110). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Dallmayr, F. (2010). The Concept of the Political: Politics between War and Peace. In Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (pp. 23-44). Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Kant, I. (1970). Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch [1795]. In Reiss, H. (Ed.) Kant’s Political Writings ( H. B. Nisbet, Trans.; pp. 93-130). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, C. (2007). The Concept of the Political (Schwab, G., Ed. and Trans). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tingyang Zhao

CHAPTER THIRTEEN How to make a world The disorder generated by globalization is deeply problematic since it is so comprehensive—it involves all places, all peoples, all nations, all cultures, and all powers, and magnifies old and new dangers. Moreover, global dangers spread uncontrolled, since effective collective action cannot be taken as long as we do not have any rules for global action. In fact, globalization is a paradox—it is supposedly “world”-wide but there is no world yet. As I have argued more extensively elsewhere, our supposed globalized ‘world’ is essentially and institutionally a non-world.189 Globalization is a consequence of modernity that we cannot control and regulate if we remain within the confines of the modern mindset. Modernity has engendered globalization while limiting its own conceptual horizon to the notion of nation-states. This renders modernity powerless vis-à-vis its self-imposed global problems. The modern system of thought, its values, and the forms of life it governs, centers around the notions of the ‘individual’ and the ‘nation-state,’ the two most important political inventions or products of modernity. In fact, individual and nation-state form the Archimedean points of modernity, we might say, bearers as well as measures of modern values, or the metric of modern truth. We still judge about current situation in terms of individuals and nation states, but in this way precisely keep global problems out of our conceptual reach. This explains why modern solution strategies largely fail when applied to global problems. The symptoms of this structural conceptual problem are quite visible—in the form of self-defeating actions or, as Joshua Cooper Ramo describes it, by that ‘tragic paradox’ of modern policy making that characterized by an inverse proportionality of results and intentions—best intentions yield worst results: Policies designed to make us safer instead make the world more perilous. History’s grandest war against terrorism, for instance, not only fails to eliminate terrorism, it creates more dangerous terrorists. Attempts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons instead encourage countries to accelerate their quest for an atom bomb…Decisions taken to stem a financial crisis appear, in the end, to guarantee its arrival. Environmental techniques engineered to protect species lead to their extinction. Middle East peace plans produce less peace (Ramo 2009: 9).

|| 189 Zhao 2009-1

290 | Tingyang Zhao This mismatch of intentions and results is not due to strategic mistakes but reveals a fundamental methodological problem. Self-defeating actions show that the methodological tools of modernity do not fit the global situation and, in fact, only increase the risk of catastrophic political, social or economical conditions. Thus, in my view, it is very dangerous to continue reacting to global challenges with a modern mindset. Ultimately this constitutes a greater peril than any other of the much discussed threats of our times, such as terrorism, climate change, food shortage, or economic crisis. Global problems can only be solved if there is universal peace and cooperation. We all know this but, ironically, universal peace and cooperation are precisely rendered impossible by the actions we de facto undertake. We act for the sake of our particular interests, as individuals and nations. We do not for the sake of the world, since there is no world yet. In order to solve any worldwide problems, we need to make a world. God has created the physical world, but mankind must create the civilized world or, as I prefer to put it, the humanized world. What a humanized world consists in is not so much an ontological question than a ‘creationological’ task for human-being. In other words, our globe as a geographical and physical whole does not yet constitute a world in the sense of a political unit or a coherent world society with a universally accepted system and values; rather, as such the globe is nothing but an anarchical unit of non-cooperation. The first step towards the making of a world should be to map out a new world-view, a philosophy of world politics instead of international politics, and a new methodology that will help us to rethink the role of conflicts and the requirements for cooperation. The categories of modern thought, with the notions of individual, community, and nation-state as conceptual baseline, as well as the methodological individualism of modern thought, restrict our scope of inquiry to a limited perspective from which one cannot fathom what the worldness of the world would consist in. The world of-and-for all peoples will not come into view unless we see the world from a view of worldness. Fortunately, there are conceptual tools which we could avail ourselves of to make the worldness of the world comprehensible. In particular, as I shall suggest below, we should explore the category of all-under-heaven (Tian-xia), a traditional Chinese political term that denotes the most comprehensive political unit in the trias families, states, and all-underheaven (Jia-guo-tianxia).

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Why Kantian peace fails to address Huntington’s problem My recommendation that we revisit the traditional Chinese concept of all-underheaven, as well as the methodological relationalism associated with it, is partly motivated by S. Huntington’s well-known thesis of a “clash of civilizations.” Every Chinese is familiar with the term ‘all-under-heaven,’ which belongs to the traditional (3000 years old) vocabulary of the Chinese language. As a philosophical ‘Idea’ or eidos, however, as a category denoting the most comprehensive unit of political order, it has been theoretically neglected and almost forgotten during the last century when China tried to become a modern state. Even though Huntington is not sufficiently familiar with Chinese culture to avoid certain misunderstandings, his analysis of civilizational relationships certainly puts the finger on a neuralgic point of modern thought. In my own case, Huntington’s thesis challenged my belief in Kantian peace and led me to rediscover all-under-heaven, a lost great ideal of world peace. Elsewhere I worked out a proposal that adapts the notion of all-under-heaven to our current global context; I tried to motivate a theoretical renewal of the notion, not a return to the ancient Chinese system. I argued that on the basis of all-underheaven we can arrive at a notion of world peace that is more attuned to our current situation than Kant’s.190 A world in which there is peace must be a world of-and-for all peoples, definitely not the Pax Sinica that W. Callahan worries about.191 Before I offer a discussion of all-under-heaven, I want to take a brief look at the shortcomings of Kantian peace. Alexander Wendt identifies three international cultures: Hobbesian culture that sees conflicts or war; Lockean culture that substitutes competition for war; and Kantian culture that advocates collaborative alliances.192 The difficulty I want to draw attention to is that the Kantian culture of collaborative alliances still would not engender worldwide perpetual peace. According to Kant, peace will obtain as soon as the “Federation of Free States” ensures international trust and cooperation. However, despite all its attractions, if Kant’s project is applied to the condition Huntington describes, it runs into serious problems—what to do if there is no mutual agreement about the concept of a “free state,” and what to do if states do not wish to share the federation in the first place? How should we deal with cultural differences involving values and forms of life incompatible to ours, or with alternative political systems that are repressive in our view?

|| 190 Cf. Zhao 2005. 191 Cf. Callahan 2008: 749-61. 192 Cf. Wendt 1999: ch.6.

292 | Tingyang Zhao Kant’s theory does not address, nor provide a recipe for how to overcome, cultural and spiritual conflicts or, using Huntington’s somewhat ill-chosen formulation, the clash of civilizations. States committed to political values or political cultures incompatible with ours would be very likely identified as ineligible for the Kantian alliance and excluded from the society of “perpetual peace.” Kantian theory thus does not offer an escape from the typical modern thinking of monoculturalist universalism after all.193 Moreover, even within the society of “free states” there is not much peace, it appears—in view of financial ‘wars’ and other forms of non-cooperation between the US, Japan, and Europe, the chances for “democratic peace,” in contemporary terminology, seem rather dim. Kantian cosmopolitanism does not assure the creation of a world of all peoples, although Kant mentions a “civitas gentium” that would embrace “all the peoples of the earth,”194 and rightly points out that people “must necessarily tolerate one another’s company. And no one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth.”195 Yet Kant quickly abandons the idea of a “world republic,” seemingly in anticipation of Huntington’s problem: a world republic is not possible “since this is not the will of the nations.”196 A world of all peoples, whether or not a world republic, must be institutionally or systematically created taking into view the ‘focal points’ and ideals of many cultures—there is no ‘universal ethics’ on which we could ground a ‘will of the nations.’197 On the other hand, cosmopolitan tolerance by itself is too weak to mitigate serious conflicts of interest, power, or organization, and it does not help us in addressing our current global problems, which need to be responded to by cooperative collective actions. Moreover, the idea of world citizenship remains a mere conceptual fabrication as long as the world is not made—without the world ‘world citizenship’ does not exist and does not carry any rights or obligations. I believe Kant would feel quite frustrated in trying to || 193 Editors’ comment: with the author’s permission the original text has been slightly adjusted, mainly to highlight systematic connections across chapters. In particular, in some places we have replaced the expression ‘unilateral’ and ‘unilateral stance’ with ‘monocultural’, ‘subsumptive universalism,’ and ‘monocultural universalism,’ respectively. 194 Kant 1970 [1795]: 105, Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch. Second definitive article of a perpetual peace. 195 Ibid:106, Third definitive article of a perpetual peace. 196 Ibid: 105, Second definitive article of a perpetual peace 197 Editors’ comment: the term ‘focal point’ is used in the game-theoretical sense introduced by the economist Thomas Schelling in 1960, referring to the mutually expected solution to a coordination problem in the absence of communication. In game-theory ‘focal points’ are also called ‘Schelling points.’

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apply his conceptual apparatus to problems such as the Israel-Palestine dispute, terrorism, the energy resource crisis, climate change, global financial risk, and the political tensions between West and East. Cosmopolitan tolerance may be an admirable ethical virtue, but it is not a workable strategy for the solution of our current problems. To restate my argument, the Kantian project is obsolete since it does not theoretically entail nor practically ensure world peace, and cosmopolitanism does not solve any of the practical global problems we are facing. Given that we live in an assembly of incompatible worlds, we need a much wider horizon to accommodate the difficulty that Huntington saw arising with irreducible cultural or spiritual incompatibilities. We also need a new methodology to improve our models of rationality and our rational strategies. In other words, we have to re-culture our cultures, so as to create common ‘focal points’ (“Schelling points”) for world-building.

Why dialogue sometimes may bring us farther apart Western politics began with the noisy voices of different opinions in the agora of a polis, a sort of market place for opinions, doxa. It marks the beginning of domestic politics, which later became the national politics in modern times. Dialogue is often recommended as a way to bridge between, or shorten the distance between, different opinions, and often it is reasonable to expect that dialogue will produce public agreement as well as international consensus. But this does not hold in all cases and sometimes dialogue brings us further apart, quite against our best intentions. This phenomenon is indicative of an important shortcoming of our conception of rationality. Jürgen Habermas has famously proposed that we replace the Kantian monological model of rationality with a model of communicative rationality, since all social or political problems should be reconsidered in the horizon of intersubjectivity rather than subjectivity. Habermas’ ‘update’ of the Kantian program by switching from monological to communicative rationality, and from monological universalism to dialogical universalism, seems quite successful in helping modern rationality to jump from the frying pan of subjectivity, but—in accordance with the saying—this is a jump that lands modern rationality in the fire of intersubjectivity, as it were. The vehicle that Habermas suggests will send communicative rationality on a safe voyage towards universal consent is the utopian communicational platform called the ideal speech situation, a context in which everyone always communicates truthfully, effectively, sincerely, and rationally, so that universal agreement can be achieved by

294 | Tingyang Zhao means of ‘deliberative discourse’ guided by the force of rational argumentation that all participants are taken to be able to engage in with the same (maximal) ability and degree of understanding.198 In a sense, the ideal speech situation revives the model of the Greek agora but in its purified version, with all participants pursuing the Kantian spirit of perpetual peace. However, Habermas’ experimental agora cannot be used as a guiding model to resolve conflicts and hostilities based on differences in cultural or religious values. Such ‘Huntington scenarios’ show that Habermas’ notion of rationality still falls short. What Habermas fails to take into account is the problem of ‘other hearts’—not only the ‘minds’ of people may conflict with each other but also their ‘hearts,’ and a procedure to settle conflicts between people’s ‘minds’ or epistemic convictions cannot be applied to address conflicts between their ‘hearts.’ In other words, we are facing here the interesting question of how to conceive of rationality. Usually we understand rationality in terms of consistency. A rational mind thinks using consistent arguments and agrees with the ‘better argument,’ those based on ‘sound reason.’ Based on (or: misled by) this view of rationality we might well expect that a conflict of opinions can always be resolved in a Habermasian way if we maximize our efforts to understand each other and listen to the better argument. It is quite straightforward, however, to challenge such confidence in a view of rationality that centers on consistent argumentation. For instance, someone calculating his economical utilities might decide to adopt any strategy that is consistent with the following ranking of choices: (1) to be fairly treated is better than (2) to be unfairly treated, which in turn is better than (3) to be financially completely ruined. Another person, however, might calculate rational courses of action on the basis of the following, ‘deviant’ ranking of the choices: (1) to be fairly treated is better than (2) to be financially ruined, which in turn is better than (3) to be unfairly treated. Should we say that the second person—we might call him terrorist perhaps—is not rational? This does not seem so plausible, since he uses the same procedures of rational decision making as the first. In trying to convince the second person our rational arguments will soon be exhausted, unless we can prove he has a ‘wrong heart’ or is working with the wrong preferences. But preferences are subjective and simply to reject other preferences as irrational would itself be irrational, the expression of cultural imperialism. We can rationally discuss right or wrong reasons and identify a ‘wrong mind,’ but we cannot rationally discuss a ‘wrong heart.’

|| 198 Cf. Habermas 1997 and 1998.

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Resolving a conflict between different minds or epistemic convictions does not necessarily imply the removal of a ‘conflict of different hearts.’ The difficulty is that perfect mutual understanding cannot guarantee mutual acceptance, and better arguments cannot ensure agreement and cooperation. There is a gap between better argument and agreement, which can only be bridged by the mutual acceptance of the other’s heart. Communication is more than a tool to transport information from one subject to another, and matters of the heart cannot be negotiated by rational discussion. A notion of rationality that is only defined in epistemological terms can only be used to formulate procedures that produce propositional consistency. But a commitment to jointly pursue epistemic rationality is not yet a commitment mutually to accept each other’s ‘heart.’199 The problem of hearts does not mean we have to give up our efforts at rationality. On the contrary, it means we have to rethink and improve upon the concept of rationality. As far as I can see, Confucianism is a philosophy that is more concerned with the problem of divergent hearts than with the problem of divergent mind. It offers an alternative concept of rationality, which I will set out in the following.

Why do people err knowingly? As mentioned above, the creation of the physical world could be convincingly explained by science or poetically interpreted by theology, whereas the creation of the humanized world, or the civilized world, has not yet been well worked out. This means that the creationological problem of the humanized world or civilization is still an open question. Humankind often must take a risk in establishing rules and institutions on the basis of ideas that lack sufficient confirmation or validation. But while it may be impossible to know the truths of life, one thing is clear: most human conflicts are self-imposed disasters. Such self-produced conflicts range from military and economical wars to the usurpation of resources, social struggles, international disputes, and the ‘clashes’ of cultures. How to resolve these conflicts or turn them into cooperative relationships surely is an exceedingly difficult problem. Modern philosophy, economical science, political science, sociology and game theory have produced extensive empirical and theoretical knowledge of conflicts. Strangely enough, however, it appears that workable solutions to conflicts are still missing. It is also unclear precisely how conflicts originate. If Socrates is right in

|| 199 Cf. Zhao 2003.

296 | Tingyang Zhao pointing out that no one errs knowingly, why do people knowingly act against their better knowledge that some strategies are self-defeating and will merely escalate a conflict? And why do people enter a conflict in the first place knowing that this is a mistake? Obviously these are very complex questions. That we know better and choose for the worse may be taken to be a fact of our deficient human nature or may be attributed to psychological weaknesses.200 In my view it is the methodology and mindset of modern thought that encourages us to persist in our mistakes. The greatest asset of modernity is the establishment of individual rights, whereas its biggest mistake lies in the rationalization and moral justification of our natural selfishness. The most dangerous conflicts actually come from greediness in terms of maximization of exclusive interests rather than from selfishness as such. We know that selfishness lies in our nature, but greediness is a culture. While it is unproblematic to point at selfishness as part of our true nature, it is a fatal mistake to develop a culture of greediness by rationalizing selfishness. As a matter of fact, once selfishness has been theoretically rationalized and morally justified, turning into legitimate greediness, it becomes—ironically due to its rationalization—an irrational factor that booms into uncontrollable dimensions, destroying natural resources, creating social tensions, and threatening world peace. Greediness explains most human tragedies. And I think that greediness or straight interest maximization is also the explanation for the paradox that, on the one hand, Socrates’ insight that no one errs knowingly seems perfectly correct while there is, on the other hand, overwhelming empirical evidence against it. The modern mindset holds people in a state of paradoxical confusion since they are to perform rational actions directed at the irrational goal of interest maximization, which means that they cannot act in conformity with themselves and thus act knowingly in self-defeating ways. In other words, the modern individualist game of rational actions with the irrational goal of maximizing the individual’s exclusive interests is in itself paradoxical and generates paradoxical actions. Since the individualist game has a theoretical description within a framework constructed according to the principles of methodological individualism and a ‘scientific’ and ‘sober’ understanding of human behavior as guided by selfish motives, the presuppositions of game theory seem quite natural to

|| 200 Editorial comment: on the issue of the origination and persistence of conflicts, as well as on the question of whether humans have a universal natural inclination towards conflict, compare also chapters 9 and 10 above.

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most people. The individualist game not only appears to be a correct description of rational choice but also ‘the only game in town.’

From methodological individualism to methodological relationalism Although widely recognized by modern social sciences and philosophy, methodological individualism is questionable. By ‘methodological individualism’ I actually refer to a collection of methodologies standing in relations of “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein’s concept), that is, methodologies developed by Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Weber, Hayek, Rawls, and most of modern economists and political scientists. While occasionally criticized, methodological individualism stil dominates the theoretical landscape. Economists and political scientists have carefully and convincingly explained all kinds of paradoxical deadlocks, such as prisoner’s dilemma, free-riders, tragedy of the commons or the anti-commons, the unstable balance of powers, unreliable hegemony, counterproductive sanctions, deterrence or interference, uncontrollable international anarchy as well as the clash of civilizations, etc. Yet there is one glaring shortcoming of methodological individualism and its conceits: while all its problems received a thorough analysis, these analyses do not lead to any solutions. While methodological individualism does well as a descriptive tool, it does not lend itself for the purposes of problem-solving—it furnishes detailed descriptions but none that would entail feasible solutions. Briefly, methodological individualism demonstrates that knowing-what does not guarantee knowinghow. The absence of a valid problem-solving methodology is the main shortcoming of modern social sciences, and it situates modern knowledge in an ironical situation: the problems are made clear but solutions are not available. When interests and values are measured by the unit of individual and explained in terms of individuality so that exclusive interests always rank first, all possible solutions to conflicts are logically and practically excluded. As often observed, the aggregation of individual rational choices does not guarantee rational collective choice. In fact, stating this theoretical situation more candidly, individual rationality likely leads to collective irrationality. If the individualist game is leading us astray into self-defeating actions, so that we incur more damages the better we play, we surely would have good reasons to abandon this approach. Whatever clever individualist strategy we might take in an effort to escape from the trap of collective irrationality, instead will ensnare us more deeply. The source of the problem lies in the default assumption that individual rationality is the natural point of departure. As a matter of course, actions that

298 | Tingyang Zhao maximize one’s exclusive interests are often counterproductive precisely because the other players of the game, using the same logic, take it rational to choose non-cooperation or counterattacks. In a theory of rationality all hinges on which view of human nature we take to be the theoretical starting point. The Hobbesian state of nature in terms of the war of all against all renders the transformation of conflicts into cooperations the impossible task of a creation out of nothing. Whatever sophisticated procedures have been devised for this purpose, from Hobbes to Rawls, none of these is strong enough to prevent new conflicts due to greediness and ambitions. For instance, Hobbes’ approach cannot yield genuine and permanent conflict resolutions since a strong power can only institute order by coercion, instead of ensuring it by cooperation, and only temporarily. Rawlsian approach represents an major advance over Hobbes’: in the counter-factual situation of the “veil of ignorance” people will choose a fair contract since it is in everyone’s interest that the worst conditions—which may befall oneself—are acceptable. Yet in the next round of the game, after the veil of ignorance has disappeared, problems will arise. Following the logic of interest maximization those in advantaged positions will attempt to expand their advantages, and those in disadvantaged positions will try to change the contract in their favor, if necessary by force. So a contract produced under the veil of ignorance also does not warrant stable conditions of social cooperation. By contrast, the Confucian philosopher Xun-tzu postulates that the original situation must be a societal state, since coexistence of people is a necessary condition for the survival of any individual. The baseline of a cooperative organization will only be spoiled by conflict when goods are distributed unfairly or in other situations of injustice, which may drive people to fight.201 The most important insight in Xun-tzu’s interpretation of the original situation is that conflicts are essentially due to the wrong relations of human beings instead of being the consequence of natural aggressiveness as Hobbes thinks. These differences in the interpretation of human nature lead to different assessments of conflicts. In Hobbes’ view the natural state of war cannot be ended without external force because of the unchangeable human nature, whereas in Xuntzu’s view fights can be settled because human relations are changeable. I think Xun-tzu is correct in presenting this more optimistic vision of antagonism: even when conflicts pervades, some minimal and irreducible cooperative interactions are still in place, which can function as ‘genes’ for any possible evolution of the forms of cooperativity. It is correct that we cannot generate cooperation ex ni|| 201 Cf. Xun-tzu, The work of Xun-tsu, Ch.10 On Great State; Ch. 19, On Nomos.

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hilo—we need to have some minimal presence of cooperativity from which more substantive forms can be bootstrapped. We need a new methodological perspective in the social sciences that proceeds from a ‘genetic’ conception of cooperative practices and investigates conditions for promoting cooperation. In my view Confucian methodological relationalism holds out the prospect of resolving or dissolving many of our conflicts. Methodological relationalism explains human actions and values in terms of relations rather than with reference to individuals, assessing interests and strategies in regards of their relational rationality rather than individual rationality. Relational rationality gives priority to relational security and reciprocal interests, since these will better serve our individual interests; the better our mutual relation, the easier it will be to pursue our self-interest. Methodological relationalism does not deny any individual interests; on the contrary, it endorses that a realistic account of rational behaviour should not reckon with agents motivated by ethics alone but should acknowledge the motivational force of individual interests. Confucius himself holds that interests and values must somehow coincide. If Confucius had been familiar with Hume’s thesis that ought cannot be derived from is, he would have agreed yet would have pointed out that we can derive is from ought. In this sense methodological relationalism aims to develop a better way to be by realistically rethinking what ought-to-be. This means in the first instance that we develop a more reasonable concept of rationality, relational rationality within a horizon of interaction, as a replacement for the concept of monocultural individual rationality. That relational rationality is superior to individual rationality can be argued on the basis of the following thought experiment, which I call the ‘test of universal imitations.’ Assume an individualist game in which all players try to maximize their exclusive interests. Everyone would learn and imitate the more successful strategies from the others. As the game goes on, successful strategies cannot remain the dominating ones for long. At some point a stable equilibrium of strategies will arise, when all players have learnt and copied all available successful strategies and become equally smart, or equally stupid—a scenario where “all are made donkeys.” Now the question is whether a universally imitated stable strategy will be one that benefits all or one that hurts all. But it should be clear that if there were a strategy this prescribes negative retribution or retaliation, this strategy would be self-defeating if it were universally accepted; so on rational grounds it could not be universally accepted at all. On the other hand, it is also obvious that relational rational strategies can stand the test of universal imitations, since they cannot become self-defeating. To follow the paradigm of relational rationality essentially means that one first aims for the minimization of mutual hurt instead of aiming for the highly risky

300 | Tingyang Zhao maximization of exclusive interests. In this sense, relational rationality is more rational than individual rationality in that the minimization of mutual hurt also minimizes risk, which guarantees the long-term possibility to pursue one’s own interests and thus is within our true self-interest. If we pursue relational security by minimizing mutual hurt, and pursue relational interests by choosing strategies of mutual support, we create the best and most stable conditions for everyone to maximize the possibility of pursuing their own individual interests. From the relational viewpoint, individual rationality does not lead to choices that are truly prudent, since it runs the risk of generating conflicts by the unilateral pursuit of—ultimately irrational—strategies that maximize exclusive individual interests. Even if guided by maxims of fair play, individualism cannot increase happiness. Just consider the old story of dividing the cake. According to individual rationality, the fair deal is that I divide the cake and you choose first. By contrast, relational rationality would recommend a hospitable deal that benefits one who is in need of the larger share. Relationally rational choices highlight universal obligations more than individual rights—this humanization of human relations stabilizes peace and cooperation. A mind cannot be said rational if it does not care about the heart, because it is the heart that decides what amounts to the best or worst ‘utility’ or reward. In this sense, methodological relationalism can claim to amount to a superior model of rationality since it reduces risks and thus has greater utility in the long run. Modern individualism is deeply rooted in modern societies since it pervades all institutions. Problematically, modern individualism supports human greediness in two regards. First, it insinuates that individuals are independent, setting up ‘political borders’ around the individual. Individuals are endowed with the ‘human right’ to defend their exclusive interests, instead of imposing the ‘human obligation’ to ensure shared happiness. People are estranged from each other by the nervous consciousness of ubiquitous competition, living with the default expectation of potential hostility instead of potential affinity and support. Second, modern individualism justifies the maximization of exclusive interests, which is quite irrational since it increases the chances for unnecessary hostilities and conflicts. It would seem an obvious truth that we are working with the wrong model of rationality if the course of action recommended by that model leads to more hostility rather than develops our potential for compatibility202; a model of rationality is dangerous if it encourages mutual hurt instead of

|| 202 The Chinese term ‘hexie’ is usually translated with ‘harmony,’ but it is more accurately transliterated as ‘compatibility of diversities’; in some ways it is close to Leibniz’ idea of the ‘compossibility of the richest collection of beings.’

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mutual support; and a model of rationality keeps us in a state of immaturity if it often leads us to make self-defeating or disserving choices. So we urgently need a second enlightenment to improve our model of rationality. We need to replace individualism with a less harmful and more prudent way of thinking. Individual rationality creates problems, and communicative rationality articulates problems, but relational rationality holds out the prospect of solving problems. I count on relational rationality because the minimization of mutual hurt also is a necessary condition for the long-term maximization of self-interests. Contrary to the modern illusion that power creates safety, Mencius’ insight seems right: “be good, be safe,” meaning that we will remain unchallenged not if we have defeated all enemies, but if we have made enemies with no one. 203 Philosophically speaking, if modernity means that to be is to be individual, or to be is to be independent, globality should further means that to be is to be related to the others, or to be is to be coexisting. Setting aside the ontology of existence, methodological relationalism is based on the ontology of coexistence, reflecting the insight that existence is made possible only by virtue of coexistence, and that coexistence ensures better existence. To change the world is very difficult, so we better first change our world-view, and then see how the world might be changed.

World peace in terms of all-under-heaven In the following I will offer a very brief introduction to the all-under-heaven system,204 a universal system for making a world, and maybe the best political ideal based on methodological relationalism. In Chinese philosophy, the term “all-under-heaven” (Tianxia) is a complex concept of “world” that unites a trinity of meanings: (1) the earth under the sky; and (2) the public choice made by all peoples in the world, or the universal agreement of the “hearts” of all peoples; and (3) a universal system for the world, with a world institution responsible for universal order and peace. Approximately 3,000 years ago, the Zhou Dynasty revolutionized political institutions by establishing an all-under-heaven system. In a similar situation as Europe before the Greek polis, there was no conceptualized politics (in Chinese literally “justified order”) before the Zhou’s all-under-heaven in China. Zhou’s invention of all-under-heaven initiated a politics oriented towards the world

|| 203 Mencius, The Works of Mencius, Chapter 1: The Talk to Lord Lianghuiwang. 204 For more details, see my 2005a, 2009a, 2009b, and 2006.

302 | Tingyang Zhao and geared to the task of making, serving and managing the world, whereas Athens started politics with an orientation to the polis, and geared to the task of making, serving and managing a city state. It seems quite unusual or unnatural for Chinese political thinking to begin with the problem of making a world in such an early period of civilization. In fact, the situation that drove Zhou to make a world was quite extraordinary. By a very fortunate turn of events Zhou came to be the head of all Chinese tribes, and accordingly confronted an unprecedented problem of governance: how to control all tribes and enjoy their continuous support, while some of them more numerous or potentially stronger than Zhou? At that time, it is said that about 1,000 culturally and ethnically diverse tribes lived in China. The population of Zhou, estimated less than 70,000 persons, was quite small in comparison to the larger tribes, especially to the Shang tribe with a population of more than one million. The problem of how to control bigger powers by a smaller one thus became the outstanding political challenge and world politics the primary focus of political thought, before all national politics. The political and cultural heritage of Zhou’s all-under-heaven is a universal system of a comprehensive network of economically and culturally independent and autonomous sub-states with a central supervisory government in charge of the universal laws, world order and peace, responsible for the promotion of universal well-being and common goods of the world. This system proved to be successful in response to the challenging demand of managing so many states. The most important insight implemented by the all-under-heaven system is that the successful solution to the problems of world politics is to make a world, and that the making a world should resort to a universally benefiting therefore universally acceptable form of system instead a system governed by force or imperial domination. It is an old story with significant implication for future world peace. One of the most useful contributions of all-under-heaven is its political thinking beyond antagonism or confrontation, free from the anxious and nervous consciousness of potential hostility, thus fundamentally opposite to Hobbes’ claim about war as natural condition or Carl Schmitt’s thesis of the political significance of enmity.205 The modern political culture of war and enmity reflects unreasonable hostility toward the irreducible otherness of others, an oversensitive consciousness or sub-consciousness that may have been engendered or at least amplified by the Christian notion of the pagan. From the Confucian point of view, mature and decent politics should be based upon the phi|| 205 Schmitt 1996: 26.

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losophy of compatibility instead of hostility; by focusing on compatibility it is possible to establish universal relations on the model of the family, and to change hostility into hospitality by mutual acceptance, so that everyone can benefit and no one is assigned the role of the enemy. Simply put, the best concept of the political is to conceive of it as the art of compatibilization and not as the art of antagonism and domination. To make a world for our future requires that we develop a new all-underheaven system that differs in various ways from the old Chinese conception. Since we do not have the wisdom to foresee the future, we cannot determine the concrete details of the most suitable institutional arrangement for a new allunder-heaven. But I believe the best possible form of all-under-heaven should be based upon at least the following three philosophical principles: (1) The ontology of coexistence. Traditional ontology is a theory of being or existence, that is, the ontology of things. But ontological questions take on a different character when we investigate our civilized world, a world of facts about norms and values established by us. So the explanation of the world of facts needs an ontology of facts rather than an ontology of things. The key point is the ontology of facts is at the same time the creationology of a civilized world. We make the civilized world so that we are there. And the fundamental fact of the civilized world is our coexistence in terms of relations, in other words, my existence is made possible and meaningful if and only if I am in coexistence with the others. Moreover, all problems of existence, such as conflict and cooperation, war and peace, happiness and misery, have to be resolved in virtue of better coexistence. Therefore I say coexistence is prior to existence and better relations create better being.206 The creationological question of how to make a better world thus must be answered on the basis of an ontology of coexistence. (2) Relational rationality. We know we should think logically and do things in a rationally justifiable way. But we betray good reason when we let individual rationality mislead us into thinking that maximizing our own exclusive interests is the rational course of action. So we need wisdom beyond logical calculations. According to Confucian relationalism, the best strategy to settle conflicts is to recognize the priority of relations over individuals, and among the various possible relational strategies to choose those that maximize shared or reciprocal happiness to such an extent that it is acceptable for all. The best expectable situation is a compatibility equilibrium. In Chinese philosophy, compatibility (hexie) means the best of all possible relations. There is a small but important difference between cooperation and compatibility. Cooperation is the principle || 206 Cf. Zhao 2009c

304 | Tingyang Zhao of live-and-let-live—this at least is Robert Axelrod’s interpretation, who sets great store by it in his excellent studies on game theory207—whereas compatibility means a stronger principle as in: live-iff-let-live and improve-iff-let-improve.208 In this sense, compatibility requires more than cooperation. The strategy of compatibility aims at implementing the best of all relations that maximize the reciprocal interests for all players. It could be stated as follows. Given any two players X and Y, compatibility is a reciprocal equilibrium in which X and Y share their fortune to such an extent that X benefits iff Y benefits, and X loses iff Y loses. In other words, X attains fulfilment iff Y attains fulfilment to such an extent that the promotion of Y’s fulfilment becomes X’s best strategy, so as to promote his own improvement, and vice versa. It means to create a game of necessary and inevitable mutual accomplishment. Compatibilitygeared improvement goes beyond Pareto-optimality, unless a Pareto-optimal distribution happens to coincide with a compatibility improvement. To acknowledge Confucius for his contribution to the theory of compatibility, I call the strategy of compatibility the Confucian Improvement. Even though it may be the best condition, Confucian Improvement is not so easy to achieve, given its rather demanding conditions. In terms of the contemporary discussion, the problem relates to the conditions for collective action. As Mancur Olson argues, collective action by “large groups” is often hampered by ‘free-riders,’ even when people obviously have common interests.209 Confucius might have been partly aware of the ‘free-rider’ problem as well. He insists on relationally-rational institutional arrangements that are designed to generate and cultivate relational interests in the spirit of family relations; these institutions also are to have the power to promote common goods and control non-exclusive resources, so much as to restrict the maximization of exclusive interests of economical men—in Confucian words, the “small-minded men” (xiao-ren). Confucius thus insists that universal moral principles—similar to Kantian categorical imperatives—should be institutionalized as the rules of the social game. Translated into the contemporary context, this means that human obligations should be justified and legitimated in the same way as human rights, so that rational collective actions could be taken. In my view universal human obligations based on relational rationality should be taken to be one of the necessary conditions for making a world.

|| 207 Axelrod 1984, Ch. 4. 208 For this revised Confucian principle see Confucius, Analects, Chapter 6. 209 Cf. Olson 1971.

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(3) New universal values and new golden rule. Universal values are of course needed to make a world because they are the conditions or ‘focal points’ (“Schelling points”) of our collective choices. The question is: which values can be justifiably taken as universal in the multiversal world of cultural diversities? In an attempt to devise a “global ethic,” many people try to identify universal values based on cross-cultural similarities of values.210 But I think the ranking of values, or the comparative significance of certain values, matters much more than their similarities. Suppose three cultures endorse similar values but rank them differently such that culture A prefers liberty to order to equality, and B prefers order to equality to liberty, whereas C prefers equality to order to liberty; these cultures would differ profoundly in their social systems and it would be rather difficult to find joint goals as possible interfaces for cooperation and peace. The diversity of cultures is a given fact that we have to accept. The only way to make these diversities compatible is to look for relevant goals of collective action. Whether a value can become a joint agentive goal depends on how well we can justify it as a universal value. As far as I see, values can be justified as universal only with reference to relationships and not with reference to individuals, since it is reasonable to postulate that it would be good to universalize relationships that transitive and symmetrical or reciprocal, whereas it is unreasonable to postulate that it would be good to have everywhere individuals that are similar in their conceptions of well-being. For instance, values such as justice, harmony, and liberty can be more easily justified as universal values to the extent to which one can show that they are best defined in relational terms, and more specifically in terms of transitive and symmetrical or reciprocal relationships. From the point of view of methodological relationalism, the golden rule of “never do to others what you would not like done to yourself” should be reformulated as “never do to others what they would not like you to do to them,” which respects cultural diversity and otherness.211 My conclusion is that, the world of all-under-heaven should be constituted institutionally so as to create universal relations representing universalizable relational values (e.g. justice). In this fashion the system will take the form of a transitive network instead of a world republic, which would be too demanding to organize and maintain, or a union of nations, which likely will always remain purely symbolic. A world constitution of universal relations among all political entities, stating human obligations and human rights, should be drafted in

|| 210 See Küng 1993 211 Cf. Zhao 2005b.

306 | Tingyang Zhao order to create an overall relationship of compatibility among cultures, peoples, and nations. This differs from the Kantian notion of world peace, which requires that all political entities should have a similar structure (Kant claims that “every state should be republican”). By contrast, all-under-heaven focuses on universal relations of compatibility among all political entities of all sorts. This leaves us with the question of how a new all-under-heaven can come about if “it is not the will of nations”? This Kantian problem remains and I have no solution for it. But I would want to point out that having a better conception of how to make a world is quite important, since may lead us to a better ‘focal point of cooperation’ (“Schelling point”) by way of a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Alas I have not found a fully satisfactory explanation to the question of why that people continue to err knowingly in our times. But I think it is an evident truth that perpetual peace will not come into the world until we make a world.

References Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of Cooperation, New York: Basic Books. Callahan, W. A. (2008). Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-hegemonic or a New Hegemony. International Studies Review, 10, 749-61. Habermas, J. (1997). Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge, UK: Polity press. Habermas, J. (1998). The Inclusion of the Other. UK: Polity press. Kant, I. (1970). Kant Political Writings ( Reiss, H., Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Kant, I. (1970). Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch [1795]. In Reiss, H. (Ed.) Kant’s Political Writings (Nisbet, H., Trans.; pp. 93-130). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Küng, H., Kuschel, K.-J. (Eds.) (1993). A Global Ethic: the declaration of the parliament of the world’s religions. New York: Continuum. Olson, M. (1971). The Logic of Collective Action : Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Ramo, J. C. (2009). The age of the unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what to do about it. New York : Little, Brown, and Company. Schmitt, C. (1996) The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Zhao, T. (2003) Understanding and Acceptance. In Le Pichon, A. (Ed.), Les assisses de la connaissance reciproque. Paris: Le Robert. Zhao, T. (2005a). Tianxia tixi: Shijie zhidu zhexue daolun [The Tianxia system: A Philosophy for the World Institution]. Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, Nanjing. Zhao, T. (2005b). On the Best Possible Solution of the Golden Rule. Social Sciences In China, 3, 007. Zhao, T. (2006). Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tianxia,). Social Identities, 12, 29-41.

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Zhao, T. (2009a) ‘A Political World Philosophy in terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia).’ Diogenes, 221, 5–18. Zhao, T. (2009b) Huai Shi Jie Yan Jiu: Zuo Wei di Yi Zhe Xue de Zheng Zhi Zhe Xue (Investigations of the Bad World). Bejing: Renmin University Press. Zhao, T. (2009c). ‘Ontology and Coexistence From Cogito to Facio,’ Diogenes, 9, 35-49.

Ramin Jahanbegloo

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Struggle for democracy and pluralism in the Islamic world212 The relationship between Islam and democracy is best understood in a bifocal perspective that takes into view both the global context of democratization and the distinctive concepts and experiences of Muslims. The Tunisian and Egyptian experiences of democracy building in 2011 have shown that democratization in the Muslim world takes place less within the framework of the existing state systems than at the level of civil societies. When the East European dissidents of the 1980s were struggling against communist authoritarian regimes, they returned to the concept of civil society. What Eastern European intellectuals and civic actors understood by civil society was not just the eighteenth century concept of the rule of law, but also the notion of horizontal self-organized groups and institutions in the public sphere that could limit the power of the state by constructing a democratic space separate from state and its ideological institutions. Recent democratic awakenings around the Arab world have demonstrated once again that civil society can help to provide the independent space that is needed, to use Sir Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction, for “negative” rather than “positive” liberty. What united Tunisians and Egyptians in their democratic uprisings, as is the case today with the people of Oman, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Iran, was freedom from interference and a struggle against the concentration of arbitrary power. For those Egyptians who gathered for several weeks in Tahrir Square, freedom meant putting an end to the unjust accumulation of power by President Hosni Mubarak and his regime. In so doing, they were constantly negotiating their desire for democratic governance based on secure civil society. Despite their heterogeneity, groups from Arab civil society that were leading the protests found a common enemy embodied in Arab authoritarian personalized regimes. The democratic protesters from Tunisia to Tehran have been demanding governments based on public accountability and popular sovereignty. Actually, if we take a closer look at the young people who launched these demands, it is clear that they represent a ‘post-ideological generation.’ For this young

|| 212 Editorial comment: This essay was written in the Spring of 2011.

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generation of Arabs, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the great Islamist movements of the 1980s and 1990s are history. However, what their slogans express is mainly a demand for democracy and not necessarily secularism. As such, the democratic revival in the Arab world is occurring not necessarily through political ideologies in search of postindependence models of state-building (Kemalist or Arab nationalist) for their societies, but in terms of shared adherence to civic values that are fully compatible with the necessary pluralism of civil society. Interestingly, in such ethnically heterogeneous nations, a civil society allowing individuals to collaborate as individuals on non-ethnic and democratic lines appears as a real paradigm shift. Yet, civil society structures in some Arab countries (as in the Persian Gulf region) might not be sufficiently robust to contain future ethnic and tribal conflicts. A civil society strategy, in other words, should assume that democratic passion is not enough to contain civil strife. Democratic passion cannot become real democracy until civil society becomes strong enough to control the state from the bottom up. It is in the institutions of civil society—a free press, trade unions, student and intellectual movements, private firms, publishing houses and so on—that the future of a democratic society is written. Many analysts fail to imagine what models of social, political and economic organization could result in the near future from these mass mobilizations around the Middle East and the Maghreb. Pessimism about the prospects for the post-Islamist Arab world is centered on this issue. In Western Europe, civil society took centuries to emerge from the bottom up, while Arab societies need democracy immediately. This said, without civil society, democracy is lame. But without democracy, civil society is blind. What does seem sure, however, is that within the political framework of each of these societies in ebullition, a new generation of civic actors will have a major part to play in writing the new rules of the game in the Arab world. Without a doubt, this will entail ruptures with old systems and with illegitimate and corrupted regimes. The focus on constitutional changes accompanied by citizen rights, political representation and the accountability of governing bodies affirms the new political attitude that emanates from civil societies in the Arab world. This new political culture is the heart and soul of the change that Arab citizens have initiated in their countries, noticeably without violence or foreign intervention. Before the appearance of the new democratic paradigm in the Arab and Muslim world, many observers ascribed the weakness of the civil societies in the Middle East to cultural factors. This perspective forgot two things. First, the sheer ruthlessness of regimes that refused society any room to manoeuvre: no free trade unions, no real opposition, no free press, no tolerance of even a hint of dissent. Second, the miracle that stubborn civil societies did per-

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sist in countries like Tunisia and Egypt; even after decades of brutal rule underwritten by external economic and diplomatic support, courageous activists continued their work, and helped to lay the ground for the democratic revolt. Moreover, the Iranian experience shows that even within a religiously dominated society a basis for “civic pluralism” can be created. Although other forms of civility and civic discourse exist in Muslim societies, this civic pluralism— with roots in a spiritual-based reading of pluralism, in opposition to moral and political “monism”—offers a rich model for those seeking to make democratic change sustainable. There is potential here for a Muslim politics that is both civil and democratic, and thus transcends the banal choice that has dominated much of the last decade: between an ossified view of the Qur’an (proclaimed by a rigid Islamism) and uncritical adoption of Western norms (advocated by a dogmatic mindset impervious to reality on the ground). But to realize this potential, each Muslim society needs to refine such concepts as civic decency, institutionalized pluralism, and individual rights, to fit within its own principles of political reasoning. This is the challenge for civic activists in Muslim societies. The core principle that should shape their work is a pluralist acceptance of a common human horizon in the process of democratic development. This is the basis on which they can contest the hegemony of both religious and political fundamentalists.

Democracy and intellectuals in the Middle East The era of democratic change, as it was experienced in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere, a century after some Arabs started thinking of their independence from Ottoman and European rule, is also a defining moment of Islamic intellectual history. For it is in such historical moments that writers and thinkers—Arab, Turkish and Iranian—have an opportunity to prove whether they have become critical enough to help transform their societies in a democratic direction. The role of public intellectuals in any society is indeed one of the elements crucial to its development. Yet for many decades the region has been held back by intellectual elites who surrendered their critical independence to the dogmas of ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism and Islamism. The result is that these intellectuals have been less agents of enlightenment than handmaidens of power, who have to a great degree merely reinterpreted local political realities in accord with their purposes rather than putting ethical and critical issues at the heart of their scholarly and professional activities. This approach involved a kind of contract, whereby some intellectuals became the icons of discontented, disillusioned and frustrated generations—in return for allowing themselves to be used by political parties and Muslim clergy as instruments of

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organizational power and political control. Instead of speaking truth to power (as Václav Havel and Edward Said put it), they chose to spread ideological messages: a role that reflected their view of themselves as guardians of the "true" vocation of socialist, nationalist or communalist movements, as against what they saw as corrupt politicians willing to make unacceptable political compromises. As intellectuals in the Middle East put overarching narratives of modernization—whether framed in terms of liberalism, nationalism, fascism or socialism— ahead of democracy, what could appear as ‘oppositional’ intellectual practice was made to serve the quasi-theological dogmas of states and party or movement politics. These narratives could not succeed even in their own terms, in great part because they were anchored in Western ideologies and could find no deep roots in Middle-Eastern societies. The unfolding of their monumental distortions and failures on the ground opened the way to Islamism as the only credible option. The various influential Islamist movements have formed their own elites, whose close resemblance to their secular opponents suggests that a wider process of de facto secularization is underway that makes support among elites for radical Islam in countries such as Egypt, Iran and Turkey less rather than more likely. The implication of these trends is that authoritarian modernization has run its course in the Middle East. In Turkey, the retreat of Kemalism under the AK party’s non-theocratic Islam has allowed a more open society to emerge; in Iran, a young and vigorous civil society is searching for a non-violent and secular democratization of the Islamic regime; and now the Arab world is again showing a remarkable potential for mass mobilization against oppression and in favor of democracy. The developments both of ideas and on the ground in the Middle East pose a new challenge to public intellectuals there about their role in relation to the democratic evolution of their societies. Do they have more to offer than political opinions or a contract with power; can they also respond to changing circumstances with an ethical engagement that allows them—via practical reason rather than as political agents—to struggle against all forms of tyranny? Indeed, the true struggle of public intellectuals in the Middle East today is the moral and non-violent one against injustice and oppression and for democracy. This struggle requires courage, and cannot be surrendered to any political elite, for it means moving to a higher ground beyond particularistic interests in order to create and to support new democratic spheres.

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Reading Gandhi in the Middle East The question of non-violence is indeed crucial, for—as the events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 2 February 2011 again show—violence needs to be tamed and transcended for societies to achieve democratic maturity. As the movement of peoples across the Middle East again puts questions of progress and democracy on the agenda, intellectuals have a vital new role to play as part of the change that they seek—this time, free of the shackles of the past. Despite their geographic and cultural diversity, these nonviolent movements across the Muslim world exhibit a remarkable similarity to Gandhi's strategy for checking power and opposing violence in India decades ago. This raises the hopeful prospect that nonviolent campaigns for democracy might be the essential paradigm of change in the Middle East and Maghreb—areas of the world that have been marked by violence for so long. Many in the West are familiar with the nonviolent strategies which helped bring civil rights to the United States as well as democracy to Eastern Europe. But this path has been discounted in the Muslim world where the media has perpetuated stereotypes of Muslims as dangerous and violent fanatics. The present movements certainly challenge that stereotype and may indeed remind the world that many nonviolent Muslim activists and thinkers have played a role in opposing and checking the levels of violence both within their own communities and against others. Gandhi had the good fortune to have among his companions two important Muslim figures: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Both Azad and Ghaffar Khan had a great impact on Gandhi. They in turn were deeply influenced by Gandhi's character and his philosophy of nonviolence, accepting the Gandhian invitation to selfexamination and self-criticism which stemmed from his belief that no one possesses the whole truth. For Gandhi, truth emerges only through empathetic encounter with "the Other." The time may be right for the emergence of a Muslim Gandhi for the 21st century. Today, political Islam is largely an ideological response to the dominance of the West in our time. The success political Islam has enjoyed in recent times has largely been a result of the failure of the secular state, modeled on the West, to provide a space where democratic culture and faith traditions can both thrive. Post-colonial secular governments have often been aggressive in their project of modernization, lacking in sensitivity toward religion and forcefully authoritarian in their politics. As such, they have failed to capture the allegiance of faithful Muslims. This does not mean that Muslim societies are somehow averse to de-

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mocracy, pluralism and nonviolence. It only means democracy and modernization must arrive organically, from the grass roots up, not the top down. Indeed, under the rule of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, we have seen how dynamic a society can be when faith and democracy are not shut out by authoritarian modernization. The nonviolent campaigns erupting across the Muslim world today, largely based among the middle class, clearly indicate the practical success of an ethical commitment to norms of transparency, negotiation, compromise and mutual respect. Their links to the networks of global civil society, tied together by information technologies from Facebook to YouTube, reinforce a universal ethic, as Gandhi preached, which transcends religious and cultural particularities even as it is channeled through local grassroots movements. This is where the Gandhian spiritual approach to politics can be distinguished from the fundamentalist approaches to religion. Far from being utopian, the Gandhian emphasis on an ethical politics based on nonviolence and mutual respect may be the most practical path to achieve democracy in a region exhausted from the seemingly endless repression and bloodshed that has resulted from the belief that violence is the real source of power. “Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed, which consent is often forcibly procured by the despot,” Gandhi wrote. “When the subject ceases to fear the despotic force, the power is immediately gone.” What we have seen in Tunisia, and what we saw on the streets of Cairo, suggest that Gandhi understood power better than the autocrats and ayatollahs who are now trying to hang on.

Democratization and the dignity of nonviolence in Iran It seems that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have reenergized Iranian civil society, helping it become firmer and more outspoken in its demand for democratization in Iran. After twenty months of imprisonments, torture, executions, and house arrests of the opposition’s key figures, the scale of the protests in Iranian cities contrasts profoundly with government affirmations that there is general popular support for the Islamic regime. Once again, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran and other Iranian cities have eroded the image of the regime as the vanguard of the resistance against oppressors in the Muslim world. The recent revolts of the Arab streets against corrupt dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Jordan, and Bahrain were more synchronized with the pace and rhythm of nonviolent demonstrations in Tehran than with the violent actions of truncheon-wielding Basiji thugs. The regime has based much of its international appeal upon being a righteous Islamic answer to corrupted

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regimes around the Middle East; now the government’s anti-democratic domestic policies are steadily sweeping away its legitimacy as “popular” and “Islamic.” What is certain is that the current power holders have lost moral credibility by virtue of their brutal crackdowns on Iranian civil society. Moreover, by asserting the republican principle of popular sovereignty, the Green Movement has posed a counter-claim of legitimacy against the Iranian theocracy. The Green Movement faces a troubling situation, but it is banking on its strategy of nonviolence as moral capital. The Movement is defining itself distinctly and democratically, exposing the intellectual weaknesses and political brutalities of the Islamic regime. Thirty-two years after the revolts that did away with the Shah and his regime, there is an absence of an organizational factor to unite the diverse inspirations of Iranians. Whether the Islamic Republic evolves into more of a democracy or will crumble in revolution is anyone’s guess. For the vast majority of Iranians living inside the country, a people who are already disenchanted with one revolution and have suffered from a brutal eight year war with Iraq, peaceful evolution is a more favorable option. For the younger generation, the 70 percent of the population under the age of 30, the change has to come sooner or later because they are looking for jobs, social freedom and opportunity. So the practical problem the Islamic Republic faces can be interpreted along two poles: on the one hand, subjecting practical problems to so much religious dispute that solving the practical problem becomes secondary, and on the other hand, the danger of secularizing Iranian society. Secularization is less apparent in domestic politics, however, where a strict Islamic system is still enforced, and no political parties, factions or candidates other than those supporting the system, are allowed into the political arena. So, as long as the constitution remains in force, Islamic republicanism will have practical difficulties and the tension between the “republican” and the “Islamic” will continue. The crisis in Iran, therefore, is not simply between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad; it is not an opposition between the pragmatics and the utopians or between reformists and conservatives. It is basically over how the political agency and political sphere are defined in Iran. What we have been witnessing for over a year in Iran is a conflict between the realm of politics, which aims at an absolute sovereignty through the practice of violence and the realm of the political, or rather, the popular agency in the public sphere. Through massive participation in the presidential elections and later by protesting against the results of the elections, many representatives of the Iranian civil society were not only trying to refute the legitimacy of the sovereignty but also to discover the better angels of their social nature and try to form and express their moral capital. The level of future

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success in the democratization of Iranian society is closely related to the level of moral capital expressed and practiced by Iranian civil society. Those who seek to repudiate the Iranian regime’s equation of truth with itself, knowingly or not, have started to slowly and subtly reject the “life of a lie.” Iran, with its young population, has become a society that has achieved moral and political progress through its ability to understand the motives and meanings of dissent as a resistance to unjust laws. The ongoing protests in Iran demonstrated that resistance against unjust laws has become not only a way of life but the only way to survive as a nation. This means that in these uncertain and dangerous times, with the air filled in Iran with the idea of plots and conspiracy theories, Iranian civil society has found the urge to struggle for democratic legitimacy. The foundation of this legitimacy is a moral capital that could have a certain weight in Iranian politics at a time of serious crisis. It is interesting to underline that while the Iranian political structure is going through a crisis of legitimacy and current power holders have lost moral credibility by virtue of misgovernment and lying in politics, the Iranian civil society is redefining its legitimacy by re-founding and refining its republican principles.

The republican gesture in Iranian Green Movement The republican gesture in Iran pays attention almost exclusively to the legitimacy of the public space in opposition to the political theology that is represented and expressed by the absolute sovereignty of the faqih. It is true that the presence of these two incompatible and conflicting conceptions of legitimacy have always been a bone of contention in Iranian politics, often defining the ideological contours of the political power struggle among contending forces, but the present crisis is over a deep-seated legal and political legitimacy and a moral capital that Ayatollah Khomeini had created with his charismatic authority at the time of the Iranian Revolution. Even at critical times, like the war against Iraq, this moral capital tipped the balance between hope and belief, or at least gave Ayatollah Khomeini the foothold he needed to build stability and security for the Iranian regime. Today, the equation between charismatic moral capital and institutional moral capital is widely absent in the Iranian political system. The second life of the Islamic Republic from the 1990s onwards opened up a credibility gap in the political life of the Islamic regime and initiated a long-term mistrust of the political institutions and the principle of theocratic sovereignty. The crisis of legitimacy that is often said to have afflicted the Iranian political system since the 1990s was a crisis of which Rafsanjani, Khatami and Ahmadinejad have been, in important ways, as much symptoms as causes. Also impli-

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cated in this crisis were the entire government and its various agencies, the Iranian society and the citizens themselves, and the founding myth of the Iranian Revolution, as upholding popular sovereignty, to which they had held for so long. The crisis was, to put it rather grandly, a crisis of the Iranian Revolution and a sharp divide between popular sovereignty and authoritarian rule at the heart of the Islamic Republic’s political framework. Iran had emerged from its revolution in 1979 with its faith in its own goodness reaffirmed by the defeat of the Shah and the war against Saddam. But the heroic stamp and the revolutionary fervor steadily gave way to disillusionment and cynicism. Three spheres of dissent discourse have thrived in post-revolutionary Iran. They include women, youth and intellectuals. These three spheres of dissent have each embodied deliberate and conscious forms of resistance against absolute sovereignty within Iran. Iranian women have been struggling for more freedoms in both the public and private spheres. As for the Iranian intellectuals, they have been highlighting in the past 20 years democratic accountability and value-pluralism as foundations for empowering and enlarging Iranian civil society. One needs to add the Iranian youth to the list of dissenting sociological actors. They belong to a new generation that did not experience the revolution of 1979 and wants another Iran. Most of them were not around or are too young to remember the revolution, but they made up one-third of eligible voters in the presidential election. But due to the hegemonic political discourse and forced Islamization, an alternative and rebellious youth culture emerged that has been increasingly a part of a larger global cultural movement. It goes without saying that the Iranian civil society has been quite vibrant and path-breaking despite theocratic sovereignty in Iran. Therefore, there has been simultaneously a popular quest for the democratization of the state and society, and a violent conservative reaction and opposition to it. As such, one can consider the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 as the final step in a progressive shift in the Iranian revolution from popular republicanism to absolute theocratic sovereignty. In their way, Ahmadinejad and his group gave themselves the task of closing the chapter of popular sovereignty by giving a new life to the authoritarian structure of the Islamic republic and removing any space for dissent. The republic that Ahmadinejad represented in his person and with his presidency was in a very unusual way theocratic and anti-republican. The presidential election of 2009 was the only remaining political sphere where the Iranian nation could express its disillusionment and dissatisfaction and test its republican virtue. At stake was the moral capital of the Iranian nation itself insofar as participation in the public sphere informed the nation’s sense of its own rightness and grounded its morale. Moreover, it was a way for the Iranian citizens to reconfirm their status as natural actors in the Iranian public sphere

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and to ask politicians to uphold a truthful mirror to the nation. The recent events in Iran showed the world that a political system which turns into a Hobbesian form of absolute sovereignty is incapable of having truthful mirrorholders because such a state is not in the business of “living in truth” and fostering transparency; it speaks and uses daggers. Despite Ahmadinejad’s formal swearing-in as president of Iran, street demonstrations against his presidency continued. After several months of postelection turmoil, hundreds were killed or jailed. The dominant methods of the regime to quell the unrest have included intimidation, censorship, arrests, confessions and, of course, warnings to other nations not to interfere in Iran’s “internal affairs.” The same tone was part of the standard rhetoric of all communist dictatorships, and the military dictatorship in Latin America back in the 1970s. The authorities in Iran have driven protestors from the streets by deploying police and Basij militia in almost every major square in Tehran and other cities. It is true that the popular demonstrations in Iran demonstrated the great bravery of a people as they confronted the Basij militia, but it is also true that the Revolutionary Guard and the security forces have both shown the willingness and capability to violently cracking down on peaceful protesters. The emerging power dynamics leave protestors with tough choices. If they continue informing the Iranian rulers of their lawful rights through nonviolent demonstrations they would certainly increase the influence of the military and security forces and risk bloodshed. But if they put an end to their movement of civil disobedience because of the harsh repression they might lose the support and sympathy of the outside world. The “trials” of more than a hundred reformists were a reminder of the Moscow show trials of 1936–38 where the Old Bolsheviks, like Zinoviev and Bukharin – major figures in the October Revolution – were accused of counterrevolutionary activity, sabotage, murder, and collaboration with fascism. As in the Moscow trials, which coincided with the final climax of Stalin’s Great Purges, the Tehran trials are a public symbol of a coup against some of the architects of the revolution, accused now of promoting a “velvet revolution” in Iran. For Stalin, the Moscow trials were a means of shifting the blame for the unpopularity of his regime on to scapegoats who might otherwise have supplanted him. By accusing his opponents of espionage, terror and causing all the ills of the Soviet regime, Stalin made the lie big enough to stick. Here, the “confessions” from those on trial are designed to support the allegations by senior government officials that Iran’s post-election protests were supported by foreign powers and aimed at overthrowing the government, as well as shutting down disputes over the election’s legitimacy. The confessions, almost certainly produced under harsh interrogation, beatings, sleep deprivation, and threats of torture, are also

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meant to frighten Iranian reformers and civil society activists, including topranking political figures such as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and the two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Rafsanjani. Iranian civil society may have lost an election. It may have lost the public sphere. But Iranian citizens certainly learned that if they were going to build the house of Iran’s future, strong and secure, but also honest and beautiful, they would need to dig deep for the ethical foundations. The Iranian public space is faced, then, with the problem of combining a rejection of absolute sovereignty with the need to put faith in a challenge “from below” – in the independent life of “civil society” outside the frame of state power. This, of course, resides in the self-organization of Iranian civil society that defies the violence embodied in the Iranian state and its instruments of control and domination. But it is also closely related to new ethical standards against which Iranian political reality could be measured. By assuming an ethical stance, the Iranian civil society can make a stronger political case. In a violent political society like Iran in which most of the ethical values have been largely discarded, the notion of nonviolent action needs once again to be highlighted. Violence is after all violence, even if it holds up the banner of populism with a cover-up of religious institutions. There is no way today for Iranian civil society to fight against lies in Iranian politics without holding to the truth of nonviolence. Over the past thirty –two years, post-revolutionary Iran has seen two political projects at the heart of the 1979 Revolution fail in both practice and in theory: revolutionarism and ideological Islam. While these qualities once rallied the people and claimed a basis of legitimacy, they are increasingly falling out of favor with the broader citizenry. It is evident that nonviolent action is the new paradigm that is attempting to define itself distinctly and overcome the intellectual and political weaknesses of its predecessors. There is common agreement among the members of Iranian civil society that the main contradiction in contemporary Iran is the one between authoritarian violence and democratic nonviolence. Though this nonviolent paradigm is still in the making, it can nonetheless be characterized as “post-ideological.” This is due to the fact that the protest movement in Iran is nonviolent and civil in its methods of creating social change while also seeking an ethical dimension to Iranian politics. This judgment implies that Iranian civil society is ready to make a distinction between two approaches: searching for truth and solidarity versus lying and using violence. The question of whether the elections were or were not rigged is now a secondary issue. What is now at stake is to challenge the illegitimacy of violence in Iran. Today, the most difficult challenge of Iranian civil society is to face the violence of the dominant political system without descending into violence. Many believe that it is not possible to turn the Iranian political system around through nonviolent action.

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That may be the case. And as Gandhi once said: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” In the past year, many Iranians have shown the world that they have enough maturity and tolerance to be the nonviolent change in Iran.

The future of democracy in Muslim societies It is still too early to venture into speculation about what the future of democracy the revolts around the Middle East might hold, and whether unrest around the region will lead to democratic regimes. There is also no reason to think that this wave of democratization would happen in countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in the same way as it happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, countries like Libya and Saudi Arabia do not possess civil society frameworks with the capacity to force out their leaders without engaging in a civil war. Also in Tunisia and Egypt, the army saw itself as a mediator between the regime and civil society and in the end decided to take the side of civil society. But unlike its neighbors, Libya lacks not only the mediating hand of a military institution; it also has no trade unions, no political parties and no nongovernmental agencies. One can conclude that though free and democratic elections are not for tomorrow in the Muslim world, the spread of freedom and democracy there is unquestionably a positive development for the future empowerment of civil societies in the Middle East. Also, in a violent political society like Iran in which most of the ethical values have been largely discarded the choice of nonviolent action by the Iranian Green Movement is a proof of its political maturity and moral integrity. A year of extraordinary cruelty has passed and no one has been held accountable by the international public opinion for extreme violence against Iranian citizens. As such, perhaps the first step to help Iran’s quest for democracy is to acknowledge and encourage dissident voices inside and outside Iran while keeping human rights issues high on the agenda. As the international community focuses on Iran's nuclear program, it should also focus on the violation of human rights in Iran as a matter of urgency. The fact that more sanctions are needed against Iran is a secondary issue. What is needed now is courage to challenge the moral and political illegitimacy of state violence in Iran. To this end, it is important to have solidarity from other citizens of the world in supporting the Iranian struggle for respect of universal values of human rights. The true hero of the Iranian civic movement is the emerging model of nonviolent resistance that provides the clearest guideline and vision for Iran’s gradual transition to democracy. Today the most difficult challenge of Iranian

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civil society is to face the violence of the dominant political system without losing its hope. Many analysts believe that this is not possible. That might be the case. But after a year of extreme hardship hope is the only pillar that holds up the Iranian civic movement. Hope is the future of a democratic Iran. What is certain is that this hope is closely bound to a silent nonviolent revolution underway in Muslim societies today. The real battleground for a pluralist and nonviolent Muslim public sphere is an engagement-influenced tolerance, a tolerance that is born out of constant communication and interaction between the secular and the religious. It is actually a struggle between those who wish to preserve the essence of their religious beliefs and those who seek to deliberately distort that essence into a theocratic element. To create democracy and preserve political pluralism in Islamic societies, it is important for Muslims to learn from the experience of nonviolent thinkers and activists in Islamic history and in other cultures. It is a matter of time for Muslims to construct democracy and political pluralism as a consequence of nonviolent experiences.

Daryush Shayegan

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Religion and ideology An Islamic Revolution or even an Islamic Republic is a contradiction in terms, because the two terms have no common historical context, they have no isomorphisms, they emerge in fact from different metaphysical backgrounds. When you run through the holy Book of the Muslims, the Qoran, you are constantly reminded that Allâh is the greatest, that this world is transitory, a place of passage and that the most important goal in life is the akhira, namely resurrection, life after death. There is no single hint to history, let alone to revolution which in its modern sense is the quantum leap of history when it wants to give birth to a new order. When we talk of revolution, we are of course immediately reminded of French Revolution, of its tremendous sometimes horrific consequences, of the Age of Enlightenment which made it possible, of the evolutionary process of time that reaches its apotheosis in Hegel´s philosophy of history. Islam is eschatologically oriented and, in the context of Shiism, it is emotionally charged with Messianism, the idea of Mahdi, the Saviour who will come to close the Cycle of Initiation and Sanctity (walâyat). Revolution is a secular concept based on the assumption of linear, progressive time, the former is theo-centric, the latter is historico-centric. These two notions of time do not connote the same concepts, nor the same underlying visions. So what are we conclude when the two terms collide to create a hybrid concept like “Islamic Republic»? The answer to this question is the purpose of this paper. At the beginning of the Iranian Revolution there was a slogan which spread like forest-fire. It said: “Neither West, nor East, but only Islamic Republic.” This idea suggested the claim that we had found a new, original solution to the political impasse of the world. We rejected both the capitalistic system of the West and the Communist regimes of the East. Of course no one really knew what this answer was supposed to be. Some thought perhaps that it meant the spiritual liberation of man, a long-awaited deliverance of mankind, the decisive victory of light over darkness. I remember well when I met Michel Foucault in Tehran on several occasions. He struck me as an exceptional personality, I was impressed by his enthusiasm and his exquisite courtesy, yet his attitude, in spite of all this, was rather ambiguous. On the one hand, he thought that one could venture to affirm that we were witnessing some sort of “political spirituality,” on the other hand, he remained skeptical, at times even critical, as if his fascination was tempered by his critical judgment. Later of course in an article

324 | Daryush Shayegan in Le Monde, he explicitly declared that he was wrong in his evaluation of Iranian events. The non-violent demonstrations in the streets, the collective communion that we all encountered in the social arena, the huge coalition of all political trends which encompassed the whole spectrum of political ideologies: the Mujahedins, the Maoists, the Communists, the National Front, and almost all the intellectuals, gave the impression that we were all cast in the same mould and this unity was concretized by the slogan: ”wahdat-e kalame,” the “Unity of Word.” But as soon as the mob took hold of power, the non-violent manifestations changed in their nature, violence broke out. All the officials, technocrats, and the élite of the ancien régime, were arrested, many were executed without any fair trial. The arrests and executions were followed by massive expropriations. The new system took soon the shape of a bloody revolution. Revolutionary tribunals were installed, paramilitary groups, called “commities” were created, revolution showed its totalitarian, brutal logic. It became increasingly clear to us all that we had just drifted into a furious stream whose current to resist was certainly impossible and likely to prove suicidal. Political structures and behaviors that we had read about, in the revolutions that occurred in France, Russia, and China, suddenly appeared before our eyes. We did not know whether this was a Bolshevik revolution, an Islamic resurrection, or an apocalyptic end of history.’ The themes used were all Islamic. The ancien régime was called Taghûtî, a reference to the evil power in the Qoran, the “Wretched of the Earth» were called Mostz´afîn, the Islamic equivalent of proletariat, although what we were confronted with was more like what Marx called the Lumpenprolatariat. The bourgeois was designated as Mostakbar, the “arrogant,” and imperialism as “the International Arrogance.” Islam, a religious product of seventh century, had undergone a miraculous metamorphosis and had acquired the implacable logic of an irreversible historical movement that would wipe out, in one outburst, all the vestiges of the past. The new Order, outraged by Western cultural aggression, was opposed to liberalism, was hostile to secularism, and, irrespective of all other beliefs and opinions, imposed upon the country from the very beginning the invincible aura of an inexorable God. The whole past—old Persian Empires, even fourteen centuries of Islamic history—was swept away being a prelude or an antichambre of history. History really started with the Islamic Revolution. This was the “Ground Zero” of a new commencement as if we had been all pagans till now and were suddenly converted by the Divine Grace of this Holy Event. What is even stranger is that this new interpretation of revolutionary Islam was at odds with traditional Shiism. In classical Shiism we are supposed to be in

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the period of Great Occultation (ghaybet-kobrâ), the twelfth Imam has been hidden, liable to come back one day in order to close definitely the Cycle of Initiation and Sanctity and install divine justice on earth. This is tantamount to the final transfiguration of creation. In the meantime we are in-between, we live in a transitional period of Waiting. So in this perspective no power, that is, no secular power is legitimate, because it is devoid of purity (ismat). In other words every power whatever form it may take is ipso facto an usurpation (ghasseb). According to this vision, the traditional Shiism had accepted, although implicitly, to withdraw from the world’s government, it had admitted the separation of the spiritual and the secular. The late Ayatollâh Borujerdi, who died in the 1960s, was probably the most eloquent representative of this trend of Shiism. With Ayatollâh Khomeyni’s movement Shiism drifted away from this initial position of non-intervention in secular matters; the very institution of an Islamic Republic meant that the Ulema, by overthrowing the Imperial Regime, had assumed complete power and had changed radically the nature of Shiism. The latter was no longer a religion in quest of eschatological transfiguration, but a government that acted ‘as if’ what was to happen in the future had already occurred—as if, in other words, the Islamic Republic had anticipated the messianic event of the last day. It is true that the religious officials never declared explicitly that they had done so, but it was evident that we were confronted with a veritable reversal of perspective: religion was now trapped in a constellation that Hegel called the “cunning of reason”—by trying to spiritualize the world, it ended up secularizing itself, and by seeking to deny history it got caught, up to the neck, in the swamps of history. This changed also the relationship of Shiism with the masses, since Shiism always had been the religion of the oppressed (mazlûm) vis–à-vis the oppressor (zâlem). By assuming the role of the ruling class, Shiism identified itself with sheer power and could no longer take side with the oppressed against the oppressor, if only because it had become power in its most repressive and uncompromising way.

Ideologization of religion and the four shifts This shifting away or, let us say, this immense displacement is what I have called “the ideologization of religion.” What we see in fact, in this great stir or in this formidable upset, are four modes of displacement: (1) the historical mode; (2) the cultural mode; (3) the anthropological mode; (4) the discursive mode. 1. The first mode is a shift from eschatology to historicism. This I will call the de-mythologization of time.

326 | Daryush Shayegan The second mode is a shift from cultural to literal interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. This I will call the de-memorization of subliminal sediments of collective memory. 3. The third mode is a shift from spiritual man to radical and revolutionary militant, which in the form of terrorism assumes the extreme forms of nihilistic attitudes. This I will call the de-sacralization of man. 4. The fourth mode is a discursive shift from the Mercifulness of God in the Qoran to the repressive and prescriptive verses of the Sacred Book. This I will call the sanctification of violence. The first movement is totally included in the concept of revolution as the radical transformation of society. Marx in his thesis on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feurbach) says that philosophers have interpreted the word in different manners, but what is important is to transform it. Thus transforming the world implies a revolution, that is, the complete overthrow of the established order and the suppression of contradictions inherent in social relationships, since these latter are producers of ideologies belonging to the ruling classes. By introducing this logic in the very foundation of the new state, the Islamic Republic took its legitimacy from the revolutionary movement rather than from some sort of revelation, but in order to justify its claim, it alluded to the will of God. The idea of a messianic dimension was not eliminated but suspended, because revolution had its own momentum and this momentum had already eclipsed the role of the future Messiah. The second movement is an effort to join the Golden Age of Islam. The founders of this new order have the illusion that by bypassing one thousand and four hundred years of history one can link Islam to the original myth of the Salaf: the Pious Forerunners or the Archetypal Figures of Medina, as if by so doing one could easily erase the cultural strata that had been accumulated throughout the ages. Culture is the culmination of a long period of classical patterns of thought and art, and it was precisely this heritage, considered corrupted by the most radical fundamentalists, that the revolution wanted to get rid of. In Iran this phenomenon had a rather limited scope, since Persia is a country of sophisticated Islamic culture, in fact the only Muslim country where philosophy and mysticism are included in the curriculum of learned theologians, where mystical poetry plays a major role in our patterns of thought and aesthetic values. But its repercussions in other countries were fatal. It led to the rise of all sorts of fundamentalisms, which had existed there in dormant forms. The very fact that Islam was in power in Iran, one of the great and important countries in the region, was in itself an incentive of encouragement for others to imitate an Islamic State and to set in motion the potential forces of Salafism that 2.

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had already been advocated by thinkers like Hassa al-Banna (founder of Islamic Brothers) or the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, or the Pakistani Abul A’la Maududi. If we study the genealogy of fundamentalism in Islam, we see that fundamentalism was present right from the outset. If we go back to 9th century Bagdad, during the Abbasid Period, we encounter the figure of Ibn Hanbal, one of the four founders of juridical schools of Sunnite Islam. His doctrine insists on the literal interpretation of the Holy Book and the imitation of Salaf: the old Archetypal Figures of Medina. The idea is to apply the idealized model of the City of Prophet to each period of history. But this idealized model was a failure even in its haydays. Three of the four Califs were assassinated and a great part of early Islamic history was marked by violence and civil war. Then comes Ibn Taymiyya (died in 1328), a Syrian theologian and a radical disciple of Ibn Hanbal. He is the prototype of a literalistic scholar. He fights philosophy because it is corrupted by Greek thought, he attacks all the Sufi doctrines because of the importance they give to spiritual hemeneutics (t´awîl), he denounces vehemently the “experience of Unity» (wahdat-al wujûd) that he considers even more dangerous than the Mystery of Trinity in Christianity. Last but not least we have Mohammad Abd al-Wahhâb (1703-1792) whose name has coined the term of Wahhâbism, a doctrine that became the official ideology of the Saudi House. From Ibn Hanbal to Ab-Wahhâb, says Meddeb in his book la Maladie de l´Islam, we witness an increasing intolerance: from the relative tolerance of the Master of Bagdad, to the radical criticism of the Syrian and finally to the violent action of Wahhabism, which becomes the unyielding adversary of all that the Islamic culture stood for. The third movement from spiritual man to the radical militant is an anthropological shift. As if the homo religiosus was driven away from his mythical quest to become finally a guardian of revolution with a Kalashnikov in hand. In this displacement we find many secularized forms of Islamic concepts. For instance for some thinkers the idea of Jihad (Holy War) becomes a class-struggle in the Marxist sense of the term. Even the concept of martyr, Shahid, takes a new connotation—he becomes the fighter, the indefatigable combatant ready to perish in some sort of nihilistic self-annihilation. The fourth movement is a shift of discursive nature. With the advent of radical Islam, the violent verses of the Qoran took priority over the merciful ones. The prescriptive verses of the Qoran are not so many, they are all related to historical context of war and conquest. In his important book on the “Islamism against Islam” Muhammad Saïd al-Ashmawy points out that in Qoran the word mercifulness (rahma) occurs seventy nine times, while the term Shari´a

328 | Daryush Shayegan and its derivatives occur only four times. 213 This shows in fact that mercifulness is the heart of the Islamic path. Amongst the six thousand verses that the Qoran contains, only seven hundred carry legal prescriptions, either matters pertaining to cult (ibâdât) or concerning the relations between men (mû´âmalât), and if we limit ourselves to the former, we only find two hundred, that is one thirtieth of the Qoran. And if we now subtract from these two hundred verses those that have been abrogated by later revelations, we will be left with eighty verses only. The Islamic legal system focused itself only on the scarce juridical questions treated in the Qoran, elaborating from it judgments and fatwâs. All this became later part of the Sharî´a, in such a way that by Sharî´a, we mean nowadays essentially Islamic jurisprudence (figh). In consequence the Sharî´a was progressively sacralized and Al-Ashmawy concludes : “God wanted Islam to be a religion, but man made it a political doctrine.”214 During the Iranian revolution we saw on many occasions the reversal of this discursive rhetoric; mercifulness and clemency were rarely evoked or celebrated, instead we were bombarded with inquisitorial orders, with violent prescriptions, interdictions, prohibitions and constraints in order to cast people in the same mould, to enroll them into the same frame of mind, to shape them in accordance with a preconceived pattern, to create a common homo Islamicus, without any will of his own, a docile, submitted slave, deprived of all fundamental rights. All this in the name of orthodoxy, and any deviation from the Law was accused of heresy, of blasphemous rejection of divine authority, even worse, of being a “Corrupter on Earth,”(mofsed-e fil arz). Thus began inexorably the abusive reign of censors and inquisitors all tarred with the same brush. Now if we piece together these four shifts or displacements, we reach some sort of closed system of thought, which is neither dialectical, being deprived of all opposition, nor historical, being devoid of progressive movement, nor even critical, since it operates on the basis of a priori categories which need no demonstration whatsoever. This brings us to the concept of ideology.

What is Ideology?215 Let us first say that ideologies assume, or at least used to assume, in our modern world the same function as did mythologies in ancient civilizations. They satis-

|| 213 Cf. Al-Ashmawy 1989: 37f. 214 Ibid, p. 11 215 Most of the ideas developed here are taken fom Shayegan 1990.

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fy, on the one hand, the collective need of the group reintegrating it in a closed society, and, on the other hand, they pretend to be scientific, that is conformable to experience and reality. Every ideology has an intense emotional charge which connects it to the pathos of religious belief and a logico-rational apparatus which tries to give to it scientific and philosophical appearance. However ideology is neither science, nor philosophy nor religion. It is not science because it is not based on experimental knowledge which could invalidate or confirm a given hypothesis; it is not philosophy either, because it avoids to question the basic premise of its deductive reasoning; it is not also a religion because it does not rely necessarily on transcendentally revealed truth. It is focused on some half-truths that some proclaim its absolute and universal value, in spite of all contrary proof. Hannah Arendt says that ideologies admit the postulate that a single idea is sufficient enough to explain everything from a unique premise, because everything is contained in the coherent progression of logical deduction. If, for example, the principal idea postulates that the superior race should survive and vanquish all the other races, being the fittest by nature, or that only a particular class must triumph which has received a historical mission, or that there is no truth apart from what is written in the Sacred Scriptures, it follows consequently from the implacable reductive logic of ideologies, that in the first case, the inferior and ill-suited races must perish, in the second case, the superior agonizing class must fade away, and in the third case, the infidels and heretics must be wiped out from the face of the earth, because they dare to contradict the revealed truths consigned in the Holy Book.216 In an attempt to construct an Ideal-Type in the Weberian sense of the term Joseph Gabel identifies five constitutive elements in the structure of ideologies: the reification and idealisation of the ingroup, the demonisation of the outgroup, the egocentric attitude, and finally the degradation of dialectical dimension.217 Thus ideology is a closed system, non-historical, non-dialectical and it constitutes “the theoretical cristallization of false consciousness.” Its modus operandi is identification or as Raymond Aron affirms in his book: le Marxisme, l´opium des intellectuels, a “chain of identifications” (des identifications en chaîne). For instance there is no structural resemblance between the classstruggle in ancient Rome and the bourgeoisie of the French revolution or the cast-system in India. By reducing one to the other, we carry out a chain of identifications the effects of which are still operational and visible nowadays. “Nothing,” says Gabel, “authorizes us to consider the history of the past as an intro-

|| 216 Cf. Arendt 1972: 216-18. 217 Cf. Gabel 1974: 37 and 1962: 71.

330 | Daryush Shayegan ductory prerequisite to a privileged present, unless we admit the hypothesis of a hidden sense of history.”218 Ideology also is strikingly similar to mythical consciousness. Ernst Cassirer believed that whereas the scientific knowledge connects the different elements in a such a way that it is also capable of disconnecting them through an act of criticism, myth merges everything into the same undifferentiated mass of unity; consequently, mythical thought recognizes only the principle of identity, the part is the whole. The whole is in fact the part, in such a way that it penetrates the part with all the attributes of its mythical substantiality. 219 As I already mentioned before, identification plays a major role in the totalizing vision of ideologies. With regard to Nazi ideology, for example, Gabel points out that ‘the Jew’ remains identical to himself, he disguises himself sometimes as a capitalist, sometimes as a socialist, he gives himself a semblance (simulacrum) of strife while remaining nonetheless the extra-temporal and unique cause of all that is negative in history. In fact, what we are confronted with are mainly the political ideologies, which can either be related to Justice, Liberty, Progress, as in liberal democracies, or they can concern biological myths like those of People, Race, Power or the cult of Heroes. Alternatively, they can also unfold themselves as means to realize a political order: be it Revolution, Communism, or with the Iranian example, a New Religious Order. In a world reduced to the sole dimension of worldly existence, the only way out, says Hermann Rauschning, is “to deify the means” (die Mittel zu vergöttlichen), in other words, to transform the relative into an absolute essence.220 Finally, let me add a few words about the instrumentalization of reason. All great philosophical systems like that of Plato, Aristotle, medieval scholaticism, German idealism, were grounded on the objective theory of reason. This constituted a harmonious and hierarchical totality encompassing all the levels of reality, subjective reason included. On the other hand, the emphasis was laid on the ends, not the means. Max Horkheimer thinks that the crisis of separation between objective and subjective reason started when the basic concepts, drained of their content, had become simple formal envelopes. Thus reason becomes formalized as it gets more and more subjective. By instrumentalizing itself, it becomes also irrational, and by becoming irrational, it yields to drives and impulses and to the interests of privileged groups. The more it undergoes

|| 218 Cf. Gabel ibid. 219 Cf. Cassier 1972:88 volume II (la Pensée mythique) 1975: 281-282. 220 Rauschning 1974: 108f.

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this degradation, the more also it depreciates, drifts away from its original dignity, becoming the facile prey of all sorts of Manichean manipulations, regressing in the end to superstition and paranoia.221 Let us now take a look at the pre-existent ideology in Iran which enabled the process of the ideologization of religion.

Vulgar Marxism as pre-existent diffused ideology In the Islamic world and in Iran Marxism became fashionable after the second World War in the period known as decolonisation. In modern times the Islamic world had, in fact, two periods of encounter with the West. The first period called the Nahda (Awakening) is a sort of Aufklärung where liberal ideas of law, justice, and representative government penetrated slowly the Islamic world. The second period known as Thawrah (the revolutionary period), as depicted by Mohamad Arkoun, commences after the second World War with the progressive infiltration of Marxist ideas, distorted through the reductive lenses of Leninism. Thus a sort of indefinite Marxism floated in the air like a diffused, preconceived pattern of ideas, implying the priority of social realities, the concept of classstruggle, the evils of capitalism, the nostalgia of imminent revolution, and the ultimate conviction that real progress can only be achieved once the repressive established order had finally collapsed. These ideas constituted the ingredients of that period—its spirit or superstructure, so to say. It is within this framework of mind that different ideological tendencies, secular as well as religious took shape and endeavored to integrate themselves into a form of political order. Moreover, in many cases the religious beliefs and degraded forms of Marxism coalesced in order to give rise to a distorted perception of reality. As soon as religious beliefs took form as claims about a political structure, they got—unconsciously—caught in the sociological categories of that diffused ideology; through these diffracting glasses the new ideologues started reinterpreting traditional values which remain in their essence alien to the modern socio-economic praxis. Revolution, modes of production, teleology of history, the utopia of a classless society (interpreted by Muslim ideologues as “unitary society” (jame´e-ye tawhîdî), project per se an “immutable” framework susceptible of accommodating any belief or any idea. Hence the religious content once inserted into this ideological pattern, quits its natural milieu, falls into another mental constellation, submits itself to other laws and, by association, || 221 Cf. Horkheimer 1974: 30, 15,17, 236, 201, 27.

332 | Daryush Shayegan espouses other structures adapted more to revolutionary concepts than to the religious framework from which they emerged and to which they belonged initially. Within this conceptual apparatus, the traditional content may however acquire a new resonance, but never an original idea, because all these ideas remain the local version of a universal Gestalt which powerfully illustrates a pernicious process that I call the unconscious form of Westernization. Let me give two reasons why these displacements occur in the first place. First, the structures of the imposed and imported ideas never appear in their pure forms or initial aspects, but under the most extreme and petrified figures. One becomes a vulgar Marxist and never a true connoisseur of Marx the philosopher and the humanist genealogically linked to the German idealism. Second, these apparently modern, fascinating, floating forms, deprived of all critical judgment, attract the magico-religious content of ancient beliefs, creating the illusion that one has created a new worldview hitherto unknown. In these hasty assimilations there is a whole process of unconscious identification which is all the more dangerous in that those who denounce Western culture are precisely those who succumb to its irresistible temptation, sinking, so to say, under the burden of its power. For in order to break down, or to “deconstruct,” as they say now, these insidious identifications, one has to be able to resort to some sort of demystification on two fronts: first, on imported and halfdigested ideas, and second, on traditional values to which they cling on so desperately. Now if ideologies have the propensity to sacralize secular ideas, religions that enter abruptly into the arena of historical movement have, on the contrary, the tendency to secularize sacred ideas. These two diametrically opposed situations are in fact two sides of the same coin. By way of conclusion I shall offer the example of a typical Islamic ideologue: Alî Sharî´atî. Sharî´atî was the spiritual mentor of a whole generation, enjoying an aura of indisputable authority; he tried in his own reductive way to diagnose the causes of previous failures and to prescribe remedial measures. He was a ferocious defender of some sort of instrumentalized Shiism, cut off from all clerical basis and historical tradition. He died before the revolution, but his speeches in Hosseynieh Ershad, his books, opinion pieces, and emotional writings have moved millions of young people and even clerics. He had, without any doubt, the most direct impact on Iran´s revolutionary destiny. Every Islamic thinker, no matter his age, his rank, or his commitment, was profoundly impressed by his writings. I will summarize here the main themes of his vision and give a broad picture of his thoughts.

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The prototype of an ideologue : Alî Sharî´atî Sharî´atî is a typical ideologue who wants to transform the spiritual drive of Shiism into a historical force. His grand design is to oppose this militant ideology to Western cultural challenges.222 Ideology is therefore a world-vision (jahânbînî) for him, responding to practical questions such as ‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you do?’ ‘What is to be done?’ Such preoccupations concern the practical aspects of life, one’s identity, one’s way of life, one’s total engagement. In this way ideology works against culture. For while culture results in the formation of theologians and ayatollahs, ideology, on the contrary, supports the emergence of Militant Believers (mojahed) and Crusaders of Faith. So the Muslim should necessarily belong to a “School of thought» and this school should have a fundamental infrastructure (zîrbanâ-ye aslî), or, if you will, a pillar upon which to position the vertical axis of the tent of belief, or upholding the arch upon which the whole building stands, with ideology as its keystone. In fact, this worldvision or ideology rests on three pillars: man, history and society. (1) The vision of man is a mixture of common clichés drawn from Islamic mysticism and a certain strand of Hegelianism. Man, he says, is theomorphous in exile, banished from paradise, uniting in himself the dialectical process of flesh and spirit. He is also a microcosm. But where does history begin? Man was banished from Heaven but the real struggle began with the first generation of Adam: Cain and Abel. The murder of Abel is the first archetypal injustice committed in time, it is also the drive of history, the basis of inequalities, oppositions and endless strives and struggles. These antithetic forces put two worlds face to face: the Agricultural Order and the Pastoral Order. ”History is the theatre of war between two camps: the Cainian camp which kills and the Abelian camp which is killed.” Finally the Cainian Order won this battle and its authority was substituted for the primitive pastoral communism. (2) The Cainian pole has three realms: the absolute political power (molk-e estebdâd), the economic power of exploitation (molk-e este´mâr) and the religious power of debasement, the power of sinking people into sottishness (molke estehmâr). On the opposite side, the Abelian pole is embodied in the people (an-nâs). For according to Qoran “the people are God´s family.” It follows hence that government belongs to people and not to those who pretend to represent him. All of Sharî´atî’s unceasing efforts consist in transforming the concept of

|| 222 I have taken Sharî´atî´s ideas from the following books ´Eslam-Shenassî,(Islamology) Tehran, no date, Bînesh-e Târîkhî-ye Shî´eh (The Historic Vision of Shî´ism), Tehran, no date, ´Aqîdeh, (Belief), Tehran, no date.

334 | Daryush Shayegan “people” into a divine substance that ultimately will irrevocably prevail and the Abelian Order will restore justice on earth. (3) Now let us transpose this rather simplistic vision to the history of Islam. What did really happen with the advent of Islam? The prophet of Islam had, according to Sharî´atî, two missions. The first was achieved by the Seal of Prophecy (Mohammad is the last prophet in the cycle of prophecy initiated by Adam) and the second mission was accomplished during the period that followed the succession of twelve Imams (661-940). But somehow history did not fit into this pattern, after the event of Saqîfah (the elimination of the first Imam ’Alî to the advantage of Abû Bakr), history was split into two parts, each pursuing its own specific way. Sunnism became state religion, whereas Shiism remained the religion of the “Wretched of the Earth,” the first was the Islam of the Califate, of oppressors and of exploitation, and the second the Islam of justice, of engaged liberty. The Califate triumphed finally in history and the Imamite had therefore no chance at all to realize historically its ultimate goal. Then came the Great Occulation (ghaybat-e kobrâ) in the tenth century (940). We live now in a period of transition between Occultation and Parousia (the return of the hidden Imam). But the era of liberty and deliverance is inscribed on the decrees of historical determinism: its final aim is the definite overthrow of repressive, Cainian Order, and the disappearance of all social distinctions. It follows that when the people will rise and revolt against the tyrants and the brutal dictatorial powers, resurrection, which is curiously depicted by our ideologue as a world revolution, will also emerge. “So the Imam is the only one who waits for us to rise.” In other words, we have to make a revolution in order to provoke a resurrection. His waiting is tantamount to our rising up. In fact, Marx has to push the hidden Imam to action. So world revolution and resurrection coincide in a very bizarre symbiosis. Here we have a total confusion of Myth and History. Sharî´atî’s Shiism is a religion coupled with a secular revolutionary utopia. If we analyse the metaphysical foundations of Sharî´atî’s thought, we find all its typical ‘ideological’ features fully blown up. We discover all the characteristics of modern ideologies—the demonization of the adversary, the outgroup (Cainian Order), the idealization of the ingroup (Abelian Order). We see also a Manichaean vision of history, whence the tendency to represent the adversary as a package deal: Sunnism versus Shiism, the political oppressors versus the oppressed, the Califate versus the People, the hypostasis of God. His thought is anti-dialectical and a-historical, a thought in which we do not encounter any criticism of fundamental principles, and where the symbolizing functions of analogies are lined up to form transitive chains and magically operate at all levels of reality. What common ground is there between two agricultural and pastoral orders and the concept of class-struggle that we see surfacing

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before the French revolution where the bourgeoisie is already the bearer of an egalitarian utopia? It is always the avatars of the same Cain that we see springing from this so-called history: sometimes as Sunnism, sometimes as Califate, sometimes as Colonialism and Imperialism. Beyond these avatars, Cain remains the extra-temporal and unique cause of all that is evil and negative in history. Seen through the lenses of this reading, Sharî´atî´s thought, which identifies, without any hesitation, the 8th and 9th century Califates with capitalism, colonialism and multinational corporations, is a typical example of “false consciousness,” because all the social, cultural, political and economic relationships are interlocked in an inextricable web that announces, in the end, a single promise: the messianic triumph of the Abelian Order. Sharî´atî’s thought is also a remarkable instance of confusion of cultural and historical contexts. By confusing the myth of creation of Adam with historical drive, by considering our modern world as doomed, where satanic forces have shattered its very foundation into thousand pieces (whence the pantheon of demonology), by falling from cyclical time of mythical vision to the linear time of history, Sharî´atî constantly changes the keys of his mental scales, coining incompatible hybrid ideas, elaborating sometimes abrupt discrepancies between unrelated concepts. Thus myth reduces itself, without any rational explanation, into the antagonistic collision of two sociological orders supposed to convey the driving impulse of history. I shall not have the opportunity here to develop more of his rather simplistic and superficial thought. By way of conclusion let me just add that if we mix up a certain form of Hegelianism, devoid of its conceptual system of Reason, with a shadow of Marx, devoid of his theory of Praxis, with an Islam amputated of its two fundamental poles of Mabda´(Origin) and Ma´âd (Resurrection and Return), we get a very thick and distasteful soup in which all the ingredients have lost their specific flavor. Where, in other words, everything is insipid and tasteless. This kind of thought is not only objectless, in the philosophical sense of the term, but it is also homeless and perfectly irrelevant. It is then quite normal that the world that this thought gave rise to must have suffered in a way from the same ills and drawbacks. That is why a religious revolution trapped in the “cunning of reason” remains an unsolved dilemma not only for those who watch it but also for those who created it.

References Al-Ashmawy, M. S. (1989). L´Islamisme contre l´Islam (Jacquemond, R., Trans.). Paris: Editions La Découverte.

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Arendt, H. (1972). Le système totalitaire (Bourget, J. L., Davreu, R., Lévy, P., & Ferry, L., Trans.). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Cassirer, E. (1972). La philosophie des formes symboliques: La phénologie de la connaissance (Lacoste,J., Trans.). Paris: Les Editions de minuit. Cassirer, E. (1974). 1974. The Myth of the State. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Gabel, J. (1962) La Fausse conscience. Paris: Les Editions de minuit. Gabel, J. (1974). Idéologies. Paris: Éditions Antropos. Horkheimer, M. (1974) Eclipse de la raison (Debouzy, F., Trans.). Paris: Paytot. Rauschning, H. (1974). Masken und Metamorphosen des Nihilismus. In Arendt, D. (Ed.), Der Nihilismus als Phänomen des Geistesgeschichte. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgemeinschaft. Shayegan, D. (1990) Qu´est-ce qu´une révolution religieuse? Paris: Albin Michel.

Introduction Twenty years ago the political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously speculated about the future political development of liberal society. His work was guided in part by a Hegelian analysis of the relationship between human freedom and political institutions that also incorporated Plato’s political psychology, centering on the notion of thymos. In its positive form thymos is the urge to prove oneself, both in the sense that one searches for a heightened self-experience, preserving a virtuous comportment in extreme human situations, and in the sense (this is where Hegel comes in) that one searches for recognition. Liberal democracies, combined with liberalized economies, channel thymotic urges into some stable form of mutual recognition, in which each subject recognizes the other as a morally autonomous equal. However, this social equilibrium is a fragile thing, in Fukuyama’s view, because it is continually threatened by the psychological degradation of thymos into megalothymia, the urge to prove oneself (or one’s group) as superior to others. The decline of community life suggests that in the future, we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts. But the opposite danger exists as well, namely, that we will return to being first men engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons. Indeed, the two problems are related to one another, for the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form (Fukuyama 1992: 328).

Recent political history has thrown into stark relief the ways in which Fukuyama’s analysis falls short. On the one hand, as suggested in Part III, liberal democracy is historically not a fixed political structure but one that expresses a cultural and historical understanding of human freedom, which may be challenged by other forces, such as that of faith. On the other hand, as Part II evinced, the many forms of ‘identity conflicts’ that have filled the international political scene since Fukuyama’s book was published do not seem to be motivated by “a certain boredom” with peace and prosperity. Even though, as chapter nine details, there are certainly conflicts that become self-justifying, the underlying reasons that begin a conflict are ordinarily quite complex. In particular religious conflicts do not seem to allow for a megalothymotic interpretation since here risk and sacrifice are by definition not undertaken to prove one’s own superiority to others but to missionarize by force or to eliminate infidels. From

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this point of view, Fukuyama’s political analysis does not take its underpinnings in philosophical anthropology seriously enough, since the political role of religious commitments cannot be sufficiently explained on the basis of a crude notion of self-interest. Religious commitments are, as we saw in chapter six, attachments that may be reinforced by the kinds of psycho-cultural narrative discussed in chapter eight, but they do not seem constituted by the latter. Instead, they are deeper and more personal than any cultural affiliation. Indeed, nowhere is the conflict between valuative commitments stronger and more visible than in the case of religious norms. Not only do religious norms frequently aim at the formation of so-called ‘exclusive’ identities, but they prescribe actions that sharply separate a religious community from the outgroup of non-believers and from communities of other faiths, and indeed sometimes identify the latter category with the former, in the process devaluing both, a process that can result in the injunction to pursue active hostilities – holy wars - against heterodoxy and non-believers. If we consider peace to be one of the purposes and ideals of humanity, instead of looking forward to the hegemony of some or other religion, then interfaith dialogue seems the most pressing task for dialogue in our times.223 Conflicts between different religious groups are not always religious conflicts, however. Often conflicts are due to independent sociological factors and are merely intensified by commitments to different religious affiliations that operate only as a moral reinforcer. By contrast, when it is religious factors that drive the conflict, the conflict is often inscribed in the religious norms of the conflicting groups, since it is these that prescribe incompatible courses of action for each group. In essence, there are three main strategies that theologians and philosophers of religion can pursue in the face of religious conflicts in this latter sense. The first strategy is to turn to theology to resolve conflict; here the problematic norms are shown to be secondary, or even to be erroneous interpretations of the theological core of the religions involved. This strategy directly confronts the religious norms supposedly in conflict, since it takes the semantic conflict of norms to have immediate pragmatic implications—and thus doesn’t question the normative force of religious prescriptions. In contrast, the second strategy

|| 223 As is evident from scanning the internet hostilities aroused by the very mention of ‘interfaith dialogue.’

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does not aim to eliminate the conflict among religious views but rather embraces it—as a consequence of the contingent conditions under which the divine is revealed. The second strategy also bases its arguments on theological grounds, in that it claims it is in the nature of the divine to reveal itself in perspectival religious views which may well be in literally in conflict. Yet it also claims that the true believer of any of the religions involved will have understood, as part of her or his personal faith, that the object of faith is that which each religious view grasps incompletely. In this view, all religions are on a joined search. In this way the second strategy tries to drive a wedge between the semantic content and the pragmatic force of exclusivist and antagonistic religious norms. It is the experience of the divine that is here taken to expose the human origin of antagonist religious norms and to pragmatically disempower them. Finally, the third strategy does not envision eliminating or neutralizing religious conflicts so much as rendering them obsolete. This is not to be accomplished by rejecting religion and faith altogether, but rather by developing a new conception of religion that contains a safeguard against the possibility of religious conflicts. The chapters of Part IV illustrate each one of these three strategies. Of course, as the reader may have noticed, the choice of strategy is not exclusive and is more a matter of emphasis. The first strategy is illustrated in chapter 16 by the contribution of theologian Reinhold Bernhardt, who argues that those religious claims that carry greatest conflict potential can be normatively deflated on theological grounds. The first step of this project consists in conceding that religious claims are directly relevant factors in inflaming, accelerating, or stabilizing certain conflicts, in which they are deeply entangled as motivating factors. In a second step Bernhardt traces the conflict potential of religions to “claims of absolute validity,” i.e., to claims that present the religion’s core commitments as exclusive, universal, and ultimate truths. This is shown for the main monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even though such claims of absolute validity are in Bernhardt’s assessment “part and parcel of every religious tradition,” religions also contain the resources to diminish the systematic significance of these claims. In step three of his argument Bernhardt draws attention to the fact that each of the three main monotheistic religions contains central theological commitments that can be used to relativize claims of absolute validity. In particular, since all three religions insist on the difference between God and divine revelation, what is issued by divine revelation thus always remains tied to the epistemic perspective of those who receive the revelation. The perspectival character of divine revelation affects the epistemic status and the

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semantic content of religious claims—a perspectival claim about exclusiveness cannot exclude other such claims; moreover, the very idea that God’s word is revealed suggests that the truth of religious claims is to be found within a situation, rather than abstractly universal and ultimate. In essence, then, chapter 16 introduces, on the basis of theological premises, epistemological insights that relativize those religious claims that have the potential to create interpersonal or group conflicts.224 In accordance with the first of the three strategies above, the conflict between religious claims is addressed at the level of semantics. This strategy does not question the normative significance of religious truth claims that is borne out in their direct pragmatic implications; instead, it shows that the “revealed word” is historicallyexistentially situated by its very nature; this reduces the epistemic certainty of religious claims as well as their domain of application, which in turn reduces or blocks the universal imperative force of religious norms. The second strategy of addressing religious conflicts appropriates the pivotal move of highlighting the perspectivalness of religious claims, but then turns into a different direction by insisting on a special epistemology for religious propositions. On this view religious claims of exclusive truth do not, in isolation, have any normative significance, since any religious experience is constitutively pluralistic. That which religious experience is about is experienced as both inextricably perspectival and transcendent to this perspective. If this is the case, it can be further understood only via interreligious dialogue. Chapters 17, 18, and 19 illustrate this strategy on the basis of Christian, Jewish, and Chinese religion. In chapter 17, where the second strategy is explicitly formulated and concretely developed as a guideline for religious education, the theologian Dorothee Schlenke argues that it follows from the structure of “religious consciousness” that interreligious dialogue an integral part of the theological content of any positive religion. Following in the footsteps of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schlenke presents an interpretation of “religious consciousness”—what we are reflectively aware of in religious experience—as “essentially bifocal.”

|| 224 The reader will note interesting links between the epistemological considerations presented here, perspectival relativization, and the idea of religious truth as intrinsically “related” or situated, which is taken up in the epistemological reflections presented in chapter 4 and 5 above.

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Religious consciousness inextricably combines an internal and external viewpoint; we experience a truth that is both absolutely certain and merely one within a plurality of perspectival articulations of the divine. “Aware of its own constructive character, faith is equally aware of its fundamental perspectivalness and thereby of the irreducible plurality of religious world views.” It is important to appreciate that this analysis of religious experience does not postulate some inherently contradictory or ‘paraconsistent’ unity—it claims that we experience a religious proposition as absolutely certain, i. e., we experience the epistemic status of a proposition, but we also reflectively experience the “interpretive” character of the proposition, which becomes part of the overall content of a religious experience. In this way religious experience is one of both “certainty and diversity.” Accordingly, Schlenke argues, a theology of the religions as well as religious education should be approached as a “hermeneutics of differences” (C. Danz). Religious experience is constitutively an “interpretive” stance in which we must try to understand what is experienced from within the context of a plurality of perspectives. Within the plurality of perspectives, we do not need to make any perspective less certain or exclusive, but we do need to make sure that the norms of any religion are informed by and respect this trans-sectarian plurality. Schlenke ends with a sketch of concrete proposals for religious education that construes is as operating between the traditional alternative of ‘teaching/learning from religion’ versus ‘teaching/learning about religion’ and prepares students for the intimate link between certainty and pluralism: Real interfaith dialogue can only take place if the partners involved are willing to concede to each other the right of religious exclusiveness and self-definition, which finally leads to a mutual granting of religious freedom.

Schlenke’s proposal, and the second strategy as a whole, depends upon separating the epistemic status of religious belief—exclusivist religious convictions are subjective certainties— from its normative implications—religious norms should comply with religious pluralism—and its semantic content—the ultimate content of religious claims being constituted by dialogical engagements of different religious perspectives. This threefold separation ensures the logical consistency of Schlenke’s proposal. While endorsing the second strategy in general, the next two chapters deemphasize the concern with consistency in the combination of certainty and diversity and embrace the irreconcilability of religious claims as part of religious experience (chapter 18) or reality (chapter 19).

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In chapter 18 the philosophers Yoram Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup outline the metaphysics of the original encounter as developed in the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, two thinkers who built upon the insights of the Jewish mystical tradition. Commonly philosophers concentrate on the phenomenological part of Buber’s ‘philosophy of dialogue’—on the striking difference between, on the one hand, our cognitive relatedness to the world in classificatory judgments and, on the other hand, the way we are present in the encounter of another person. As Lubling and Jegstrup’s presentation conveys, however, this selective reading of Buber’s account of dialogical encounter obscures the metaphysical core of Buber’s notion. When we let dialogical encounters occur we create, Buber suggests, a “space” of being where conflicting ‘identities’ are not resolved but diffused by an awareness of shared humanity, of our true mode of existence as “partners in God’s ongoing act of creation. The existential moment in an I-Thou relation involves the leap into a moral reality that is independent of our own cognitive operation” (Lubling and Jegstrup). Similarly, Levinas deploys mystical motifs in his thesis that in the face-to-face encounter we are claimed by a primordial ethical dimension, by an immediate awareness of responsibility for another. From a metaphysical perspective, both Buber and Levinas stand the Western tradition on its head, shifting perspective away from an independent self and onto the other, whom we are dependent on and who is to be respected precisely for his/her otherness. The turn from self to other constitutes a profound change in how we view the world and engenders a categorical transition from egoism to responsibility. This metaphysical move has theological dimensions, since both Buber and Levinas assert that the direct encounter has a transformative potential that derives from the fact that in the direct encounter more is present than only human beings interacting: there is also a transcendence that is present, even if only as trace. Ultimately, then, as in the previous chapter, the suggestion is that the solution to religious conflicts does not entail rejecting exclusivist claims. Rather, conflicts are theologically embedded by means of a conception of the presence of divinity in human encounters. In conclusion, Lubling and Jegstrup discuss the trust in the transformative power of the direct encounter against the larger context of the Shoah, to which both Levinas and Buber bore witness. Taking a larger anthropological approach, the author of chapter 19 also argues that the experience of ultimate reality includes contrariness. While the chapter does not directly link to interreligious dialogue between people, it offers a description of reality as ‘dialogical.’ Thinkers of dialogue—such as Mikhail

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Bakhtin, Martin Buber, or David Bohm—are strikingly in accord in their descriptions of the metaphysical features of dialogue modulo individual metaphorics. Dialogue is a dynamic in which contrary factors or voices become entangled and in this entanglement engender an emergent going-on. This emergent goingon in some fashion both ‘exceeds’ the constituting voices yet also remains dependent on them—the emergent dynamics of dialogue is not, thus, a dialectical unity in the sense of Hegelian dialectics but it is a metaphysical category that exists in the ‘adverbial’ mode, as a way of occurring. In chapter 19 precisely these features appear in the terminological guise of Chinese metaphysics. Here the philosopher Zhihe Wang argues that religious conflicts are the product of “Western binary thinking” both at the level of content and norms. According to this binary mindset, classifications and commitments should be univocal; by contrast, the basic notions of Chinese religious and metaphysical thought—process, openness, harmony, yin-yang, organic unity—affirm another, non-binary logical space that is geared to a pluralist stance of “following two courses at the same time.” While Western religious pluralism is a pluralism of mutually exclusive perspectives, Chinese thought allows for a conception of inclusive pluralism. Inclusive pluralism means that different and contradictory claims are recognized as complementary and correlative, which rehearses, in different terminology, the metaphysical category of dialogue as described by modern Western thinkers. Wang’s exposition helps us see another important aspect of the category of the dialogical unity, namely, the way in which the processual nature of the dialogical unity redirects the contradictoriness of its incompatible components: The Book of Change tells us a Chinese version of ‘all roads lead to Rome’ by saying that ‘different roads lead to the same destination.’ This same destination need not be envisioned as a single salvation, but rather as becoming fully human by means of one of many different salvations. It need not be conceived as awakening to the same ultimate, but rather becoming fully human by awakening to different ultimates. It is a destination with many dwelling places, and the process of walking on the road is as important as the destination itself.

That the destinations (e.g., religious convictions, ultimates) are incompatible becomes irrelevant as long as they are followed in a certain way, for it is in this way that a shared ultimate arises that could only have arisen as the way of this process. Wang concludes his exposition of Chinese religious pluralism with a consideration of how this theoretical position has been practically implemented in

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the history of the co-existence of the three Chinese main religions, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. The last chapter of Part IV instantiates the third strategy mentioned above—here the philosopher Augustine Shutte argues that religious conflicts arise as long as we adhere to religions of the wrong kind. Shutte accepts that there are human needs that only religion can fulfill, going so far as to claim that, because human nature includes the experience of transcendence—in human freedom—religion must then be an indispensable part of human life. However, some of the concrete religions we currently adhere to can be shown to be inadequate to expressing that transcendence, Shutte suggests. Based on a broad reconstruction of the role of religion in Western intellectual history Shutte shows that there are two ways in which religions can ‘go wrong’ or be found to be wanting from our present vantage point. On the one hand, they may operate with “an idolatrous conception of god as a less than wholly transcendent being,” a god exercising causal powers in nature that are superhuman in some way yet conceptually commensurable with human control. On the other hand, a religion may fail to acknowledge “freedom as the most important fact about human nature and the most important value for human life.” Shutte believes that this “insight into our own humanity can…possibly provide us with a standard for assessing both the credibility and the adequacy of a particular conception of a god.” As he argues, the period in human intellectual history that we call secularization has provided us with a conception of human nature in which freedom takes center-stage. From our current vantage point of intellectual history we thus need to acknowledge the evolutionary appearance of a creature that has a capacity for which no scientific explanation in terms of evolutionary functionality can be given—the capacity for self-determination. This is the first indication of a transcendent causality immanent in the evolutionary process that has produced beings like us. A further indication of a transcendent power at work in human life is provided, in Shutte’s view, by the way in which in certain kinds of interpersonal relationships we are enabled to exercise, develop, and fulfill our capacity for self-determination by being more (and not less) influenced by others. Thus, Shutte argues, the historical development of secularization has provided us with a conception of humanity— and a conception of a god bound up with it—that can be used as a “standard for authentic religion” on the basis of which we can reject inhumane norms of any faulty religious doctrine, or idolatrous religions, as well as exclusivist fundamentalisms. Shutte’s conception of humanity as capable of a certain kind of interpersonal interaction that

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enables the personal growth of both partners involved explicitly resonates with the African ethical notion of ubuntu—which affirms that the humanity of the self is derived from relations with others. The notion of ubuntu—by now much discussed internationally and far beyond the context of religion and ethics—is an example of how intercultural education has made us aware of the innovative potential of conceptual transfers across different cultural traditions. Since cultural core concepts formulate existential insights about human life in general, the cross-cultural exchange of such core concepts is, and has always been, an important source of creativity. Thus Part IV leads us from theoretical considerations about the dialogical selfconception of religion and the dialogical constitution of religious experience to the topic of the book’s last part, the link between intercultural education and practical creativity.

References Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books.

Reinhold Bernhardt

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Does the claim of absoluteness lead into interreligious conflicts? In the complex debate about the role of religion in social and political conflicts we can distinguish three main positions. In his well-known article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Samuel Huntington raised the hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in the post-Cold-War world will primarily be neither ideological nor economic. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”225 And because cultures are always shaped and permeated by religious traditions, cultural and religious identities will be the main source of aggressive confrontations.226 With this hypothesis Huntington obviously takes a primordialist position227, perceiving cultural and religious groups as the primordial driving force of future conflicts.228 This position has been criticized by those who advocate an instrumentalist approach, arguing that religious convictions and motivations may become instrumentalized by the parties in a given struggle.229 According to this approach, conflicts are in fact instigated and triggered by political, economic, social, ethnic and (in the future increasingly important) ecological causes. The elites in a given society, motivated by anticipated advantages for themselves or for their class or for the society as a whole, have a vested interest in fanning the flames of potential conflicts with appeals to ethnic or national || 225 Cf. www.foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5188/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations.html. Note that the term “Clash of Civilizations” had already been coined by Bernard Lewis, a historian, orientalist and political commentator. In his essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990), he predicted increasing tensions and conflicts between the “civilisations” of the Western World and Islam. See www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/ roots_of_muslim _rage.htm 226 Huntington’s theory has been thoroughly criticized by Müller 2001 and Sacks 2003. 227 The scheme of the three types “primordialism, instrumentalism and constructivism” has been developed by Rittberger and Hasenclever 2000. In his brilliant 2007: 23ff, Markus A. Weingardt summarizes this instructive model developed by Rittberger and Hasenclever to explain the role of religions in conflicts (28ff). 228 Critics of religion like Richard Dawkins or Karlheinz Deschner forcefully employ the argument that religions cause hostility, aggression and war. In January 2006 Dawkins presented his television documentary, “The Root of All Evil” in two episodes (“The God Delusion” and “The Virus of Faith”) on channel 4 in the UK.—See also Deschner 1986. 229 Cf. Meyer 1997; Senghaas 1998.

350 | Reinhold Bernhardt myths, to cultural values and to religious truth-claims. The conflict between interests becomes overarched by a conflict of values, with the result that the conflict becomes emotionally loaded with an empassioned determination to defend the identity of one’s own cultural and religious community against the alien threat. Religious identities are not themselves the cause of aggressive confrontations but they can certainly add fuel to the fire by exalting the groupposition; by creating a feeling of solidarity and the conviction of a common bond within the community; by drawing a clear-cut line of demarcation over and against the other religious/cultural group, and by depicting this “other” not only as an enemy but indeed as the representative of a demonic force. Thus religious identity-formations have the potential power to magnify conflicts enormously. But religious identities are ambiguous, for they can also lead to resistance against such instrumentalization and to the rejection of aggressive strategies. Moreover, they can inspire an ardent commitment to work tirelessly for peace and reconciliation.230 Nevertheless, the more the conflict-fostering elites succeed in suppressing potentially irenic tendencies and harnessing religious identity for their own purposes, the higher the probability that they will gain the active or at least passive support of the masses for their movement. Instumentalists argue that there are no genuine religious conflicts. On the other hand, insofar as religion functions as a legitimizing and motivating system of convictions, it can indeed exacerbate and accelerate latent conflicts — the causes of which, however, are to be located in social disintegration and injustice, economical decline and political corruption. Let us then turn to the third main position. Critics of the instrumentalist approach object that it underestimates the role of religion, and argue that religion is far more than a potential instrument of motivation lending itself to misuse by elites; indeed, it is a driving force in its own right. Against the primordialists, on the other hand, these critics insist that religion is not amonolithic system nor some primordial numinous power, but functions rather as a construction of identity and alterity. Like political ideologies, nationalism or ethnicism, religions form a kind of collective mental framework which shapes and orders worldviews, values, aims and behavioral orientations, expectations, understandings of the self, of one’s own community and “the other”. As such, the religions are in a permanent flux of transition and interaction with the developments in a given society. They are influenced by the self-understanding

|| 230 Cf.: Appleby 2000; Scheffler 2002; Hempelmann / Kandel 2006 2006; Weingardt 2007; Oberdorfer / Waldmann 2008; Beck 2008.

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and self-interpretation of the society, at the same time as they themselves exert an influence on this society. As a form of collective consciousness, religious traditions interpret both history and the present situation—including the constellation that is causing the particular conflict. The traditions hold out prospects for the future and impose intersubjective normative patterns on the consciousness of the individual believers. Thus religions can not only offer elites a set of potential instruments for manipulating the masses but can also play an active role in conflicts. Though they are not actors—only persons and groups can act—religious ideas can enact the actors. The three positions I have summarized—the primordialist, the instrumentalist, and the constructivist—indicate potentials within the religions that can cause, or be used to radicalize, or play an active role in the support of conflicts. I will not discuss the positions now (though I tend towards the third one) but try to identify such potentials—as sets of ideas which can, when they become dominant axioms, shape belief-systems in such a way as to favour hostile attitudes. Perhaps it is more apt to say that they can be used as mental swords to give hostile attitudes a material content. But we have to keep in mind that only those ideas can be used that carry the potential for such a utilization in themselves. In Perry Schmidt-Leukel’s words: I do not want to deny that there are and were cases for hijacking religions for malicious intentions of a non-religious nature, but there must exist a genuine religious potential for conflict, otherwise religions can not be misused. The question that needs to be addressed seriously by the religions is precisely the question of what it is that makes them so suitable and susceptible for such misuse.231

His answer to that question is that religious groups may use violent means or legitimize the use of violence if they feel obliged to defend eternal ultimate religious values. It may appear to them that such a forceful defence of the ultimate truth and the means of salvation—including the persecution and execution of heretics—is a necessary protection of the faithful and a lesson for the infidels— and thus a work of charity.232

|| 231 Schmidt-Leukel 2004: 5; cf. also Schmidt-Leukel 2007. 232 Cf. Karl Barths statement referring to Lessings “parable of the rings“: “eben daraus, dass jeder seiner Liebe nacheifert, die er gewiss immer für unbestochen und vorurteilsfrei halten wird, entsteht ja die Religion und der Konflikt der Religionen“ (KD I/2, 325; editors’ translation: “precisely because each ardently pursues his love, which he will always take to be uncorrupted and unprejudiced, religion and the conflict between religions come about.”)

352 | Reinhold Bernhardt But which are the central convictions to be so rigorously defended? Which are the ideas supporting the presumed superiority—or even the singularity—of one’s own way of salvation over against another way? What are the ‘mental swords’ which may lead to or foster religious violence? I restrict the field of observation to the family of religions of Semitic origin—Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and, as a Christian theologian, I concentrate on this tradition.

Claims of exclusive, of universal and of final validity In the second part of my paper I will depict sets of convictions rooted in the “Holy Scriptures” and traditions of the so-called Abrahamic religions, which can serve as the raw material for the radical interpretations of those traditions referred to as ‘claims of absoluteness.’ In a systematic analysis and reconstruction of such claims we can distinguish between claims of (a) exclusive, (b) of universal and (c) of final validity. This distinction provides the structure for the following overview. Exclusiveness The claim of exclusiveness insists that the universal and ultimate divine truth is revealed only in the Torah or only in Jesus Christ or only in the Qur’an. There may be other revelations by other prophets for other people, but they cannot be regarded as having the same absolute authority.233 It is not primarily the monotheistic claim of the singularity of the one God and the distinction between the true God and false gods which lays the foundation for the claim of religious absoluteness (as Jan Assmann and others suggest234), but rather the claim that the revelation to which one’s own religious tradition refers is singular in its authenticity and ultimate validity. That God is the one and only ground of being and that there is no God beside him is the common belief of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; it follows then that claims of religious exclusiveness do not refer to the oneness of God but to the singularity of the normative manifestations of God in the origins of one’s own tradition. Furthermore, claims of religious exclusiveness refer to the Holy Scripture of the particular tradition, which is regarded within that view as the direct utter-

|| 233 I include the so-called ““inclusivist” position in this description of exclusivism. 234 Cf. Assmann 2005 and 2006; Thonhauser 2008; Manemann 2005. See also: Krötke 2006; Schwartz 1997.

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ance of God, written down by chosen humans whose own intellectual creativity has been overridden by the inspiration of God. As a consequence complete inerrancy is attributed to these written testimonies. They are considered as constituting the unquestionable norm for an understanding of the divine and the worldly reality, for ethical decisions and for moral action. Finally, claims of religious exclusiveness refer to the tradition of the religion from its origins to the present — to the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures and the application of central doctrines to current situations. They cover the teachings of the religious authorities as well as the specific cultic and ethical practices considered to have been established by God. Because the traditions are believed to reflect the will of God, to disobey them is not only a violation of human law but of divine law. This is sin and will affect the relation not only of the individual to God but also the relation of the whole community to God. The members of the community are called to absolute obedience to the divine truth and to fight against deviations from it as against an infectious mental or spiritual disease. Divine truth is more important than human truth, and truth is more important than love. Is it the claim of exclusive validity which potentially leads to such rigid attitudes, or is it rather the claim’s material content? It is hard to draw the distinction between validity claims on the one hand, and the raw subject matter to which those claims apply on the other. Any subject matter can lend itself to this approach. Exclusive validity can be claimed for a pacifist attitude, or for an imperative to regard even the enemy as created in the image of God, or for a preferential option for the poor and suppressed. And that can and probably will provoke conflicts—conflicts within the faith-community itself, in the relation to political authorities or in the relation to adherents of other religious or secular worldviews. The content of the claim might restrict the choice of the means for realizing the imperative, as well as restricting the way in which these means will be employed; ultimately the content of the claim may lead to martyrdom. In any event, it will not prevent but rather foster conflict. There are situations in which resistance is demanded, and the resulting protest receives its legitimation from exclusive truth-claims. The “Barmen Declaration”235 may serve as an example. Conflicts cannot and need not be prevented in every case. Obviously there are conflicts—even violent conflicts—that || 235 In 1934 the Confessing Church issued a theological declaration opposing the “GermanChristian” movement. It stated that “Jesus Christ … is the one Word of God”—“We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation.“ See: www.sacred-texts.com/chr/barmen.htm.

354 | Reinhold Bernhardt bring about liberation, the enforcement of human rights and the overcoming of injustice. Religious convictions founded in divine authority and framed by exclusive claims belong to the most powerful motivating factors for the actors in such struggles. Therefore conflicts and their motivation by exclusive claims must not be seen only negatively as something which should not be. On the other hand there are sets of religious convictions which, when interpreted in an exclusivist manner, can give rise to or support aggression with the aim of edging out other groups, occupying territories or coercing people into conversion. In Judaism, for example, we might consider the conviction that God established an exclusive covenant with his chosen people, a covenant inextricably linked to the gift of the Holy Land. Turned into a political agenda, the belief in the “chosen people” can function as a justification for ethnic segregation and for claiming the “promised land” solely for one’s own people. Thus the exclusivist interpretation of Jewish tradition may lead to an ethnocentric worldview and become the ideological basis for antagonistic attitudes towards those who also lay claim to the land of Israel. According to an exclusivist interpretation of the Christian tradition, only in Jesus Christ can both the revelation of God‘s will and very essence and salvation be found. The New Testament support for this claim is provided above all by John 14:6: “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” In Acts 4:11f Christ is proclaimed to be the “cornerstone.” “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” The belief in Jesus Christ is the only path to God. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mk 16:16). These citations of single verses from the New Testament, isolated from their literary and historical context and interpreted within a militant framework, were to lead to coerced baptisms of Jews in medieval times, to violence against Muslims during the Crusades and to a dehumanizing treatment of indigenous peoples in the course of the colonial-mission. Claims to exclusive religious truth have been present in the Christian tradition at all times, but they did not and need not necessarily support hostile attitudes or violent behaviour. They could also be associated with the Pauline trias of faith, love and hope, along with strict pacifism and active engagement for liberation and justice. It is not the claim itself nor even its material content but rather its framework of interpretation and application which renders it susceptible to militant attitudes. The attitude shapes the truth-claim—the truth-claim expresses the attitude.

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Let me take the declaration “Dominus Iesus” (2000) as an example. It intended to “reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ” (§ 5). And because the Church is the body of the risen Christ in history, it represents the salvific mystery (§16). Belonging to the Church is necessary to achieve salvation (§ 20). Followers of other religions “are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation” (§ 22).—With these words the declaration expresses an exclusive truth-claim, but one cannot then conclude that such a position leads by its very nature to interreligious conflicts or violence against non-believers. An exclusivist interpretation of the Islamic tradition rests upon the claim of its superiority over other religions. Thus we read in Sura 9.33: “It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammed) with guidance and the religion of truth, to make it superior over all religions, though the idolaters may be averse.”236 Despite the distinction between idolaters on the one hand and Jews and Christians as “people of the Scripture“ on the other, Sura 9.29f instructs the Muslim to “fight against those among the people of the Scripture who do not believe in Allah and in the Last Day, and who do not forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, and who do not acknowledge the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) …” Allahs curse will be on Jews and Christians, because they believe Esra or Christ to be the Son of God. They have been taken in by a delusion. It is obvious that such statements could and can be used to legitimate the oppression of Jews and Christians — not to mention polytheists and atheists. In Sura 3,85 we read: “Whoso desires another religion than Islam, it shall not be accepted of him; in the next world he shall be among the losers.” Universality The claim of universality insists that the revealed truth is not only valid for the adherents of the given religion but for the whole creation. Thus it gives rise to missionary activities aimed at spreading this universal truth throughout the world. Where religions with a universal message meet up with one another, a “clash of universalisms” is unavoidable.237 || 236 Quite similar Sura 48.28: “It is He Who sent His Messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may exalt it above every other religion. Allah suffices as Witness.” 61.9: “It is He Who has sent His Messenger forth with the guidance and the religion of truth, to make it triumph over every religion, even though the idolaters may be averse.” 237 Cf. Beck 2008: 207ff. “If the clash of universalisms ties in with political or economic crisis, violences may erupt suddenly” (213; editors’ trans.).

356 | Reinhold Bernhardt Islam not only denotes a particular religion but is above all the originary revelation to all humankind (Sura 7,172) and the ‘natural’ alignment of all humans to God. Islam in that broader sense of the term means devotion and obedience towards God. In addition to the verbal revelation in the book of the Qur’an Islam also teaches in a continuing, nonverbal, symbolic revelation in the creation, which is addressed to all people (2,164; 6,95ff). And even the verbal revelation of the Qur’an calls all men and women to believe that there is no god but God and Muhammad is the prophet of God, and thus all people are called upon to follow his guidance. According to Sura 13,7 and 35,24 God has sent apostles to every people to warn and teach them his truth. Every Muslim is called to proclaim the message of the Qur’an and to spread the “invitation to Islam” (da’wa).238 But as a consequence of the belief in predestination lslam did not develop missionary activities aiming towards the conversion of individuals, as Christianity did. An important reason for that restraint is proclaimed in Sura 2,6f: “As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them whether thou hast warned them or hast not warned them, they do not believe. God has set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing, and on their eyes is a covering, and there awaits them a mighty chastisement.” More important than missionary activity for realizing the claim of universality is the pursuit of expanding the “house of Islam” (“Dar alIslam“). Thus “jihad” can be understood and put into practice as the militant expansion not only of Islam as religion but also of the Islamic rule. The most important point of reference for Christianity’s claim to universality is the Great Commission (Mt. 28:18-20) which obliges the disciples to preach the gospel to all nations, baptizing them in the name of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. When linked with the theological claim of exclusiveness it can even seem to be a work of charity to save humans by bringing them to believe in Jesus Christ—by whatever means. Aggressive methods of missionizing whose goal is the conversion of adherents of other religions to Christianity are the cause of conflicts in a number of countries today, for example India. In a speech given in September 2000 at the United Nations Millennium World Peace Summit in New York the Indian Vedanta-scholar and monk, Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, voiced a sharp criticism of missionary activities as he experienced them in India mainly by Christian missionaries. “Conversion is violence” was his central message. In a previously published “open letter” he had drawn the conclusion: “Religious conversion should stop—the aggressive

|| 238 Cf. Wrogemann 2006.

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religions should realize that they are perpetuating violence when they convert.”239 The claim of universality is central to Christianity and Islam, but not to Judaism which is closely linked with ethnicity and focussed on the land and people of Israel. Though the Hebrew people pursued strong missionary activities in the ancient world there has been virtually no Jewish mission since. As a rule, one’s birth from a Jewish mother constitutes one’s belonging to Judaism—and not (or only exceptionally) an act of conversion. Whereas claims of universality lead in practice to the expansion of one’s own religion, the particularism inherent in Jewish self-understanding tends towards a separation from other groups. The chosen people should not mingle with other people (Esr 9f). In its radical forms that kind of separatism can lead to the drawing-up of clear lines of division, and when these “borders” are then militantly defended conflicts may well arise. Thus we see that both extremes—an absolutized claim of universality on the one hand, and an absolutized claim of particularity on the other—can produce the same kind of hostility towards adherents of other religions. Particularism easily can become attached to the exclusivist attitude. Finality The claim of finality insists that the manifestation of the divine truth in the fundamental and central revelation of one’s own tradition is of ultimate validity and thus unsurpassable. The decisive breakthrough in God’s selfcommunication, in his revealing, saving and guiding activity, has occurred in the event which constitutes the given religious tradition: the Torah, Jesus Christ or the Qur’an. That breakthrough is considered to be the centre of history, dividing time into a period of preparation and a period of fulfilment. And even if the ultimate fulfilment of God’s promises is yet to come, a further or “superior” revelation is not only not to be expected but is even strictly ruled out. At the heart of the conflicts between Islam and Christianity lies a clash of claims to ultimate finality. According to John 5:36 and 17:4, Jesus has finished the work which the Father has given him. He announced that the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand (Mk 1:15). Those who believe in his proclamation and follow him participate in the kingdom of God. It was thus a severe stab in the very heart of Christianity’s selfunderstanding when Islam appeared on the stage of world-history, raising the claim that Mohammed is the seal of the prophets (Sura 33,40) and spreading || 239 Cf. Sarasvati 1999.

358 | Reinhold Bernhardt with terrific speed into former Christian territories. John Damascene answered the challenge of Islam’s claim of finality theologically with a theory which laid the intellectual foundation for the Crusades and for the later antagonism towards Islam: He applied the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation to Islam, elaborating a view of Islam as the ‘final power of temptation’ announced by God. Mohammed is the false prophet of Rev 19:20. With him the Antichrist (or at least his forerunner) has appeared, recognizable (according to I John 2:22) by his denial of the Son of God. The beast from the abyss prophesied in Rev 11:7; 17:8 is here or is very near: “Therefore we know that it is the last hour” (I John 2:18). This apocalyptic interpretation of Islam furthered the readiness to do the utmost in order to defeat the satanic power. Thus the clash between Christianity’s claim that the revelation in Christ is the ultimate word of God and Mohammed’s claim that the Qur’an is the final revelation created an enormous potential for conflicts and for the legitimation of hostilities between the two religions. Apocalyptic visions potentially provide a most powerful motivation for combatting the adherents of other religions as enemies of God. Whether or not they actively function that way depends on the type of eschatology involved. For on the one hand, if the world is seen as wholly sinful and therefore eternally lost, it does not make sense to fight to make it a better place, but only to save as many souls as possible from extinction. The expectation that the world is in tribulation and will perish—characteristic of the pre-millenniarist view—will lead to a retreat from the world, perhaps even to an engagement in the final battle which will annihilate the world. The word “Armageddon” was written on the cannon barrels of some American tanks in the first Gulf War in 1991. In interviews the soldiers involved stated that they understood the war as the last day’s battle and their engagement in it as their Christian situation. The more destruction, the earlier the end would come. On the other hand, if the world is seen as a place of probation and of the realization of God’s promises—characteristic of the post-millenniarist view— then it is worthwhile to engage in evangelization and to work for the transformation of the world into the kingdom of God. Yet this strategy may lead to conflicts when the attempts to evangelize are implemented in a coercive way or when the attempts are associated with political and military power.240 In such cases the conviction that there is an eschatologic time-pressure functions as a driving force of conflicts and in conflicts.

|| 240 Cf. Mühling 2007:217: “Post-millenarism inevitably tends to become totalitarian.”

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Claims of absolute validity—exclusive, universal or particularistic, and ultimate—are part and parcel of every religious tradition. It is not the claim itself but a certain interpretation, contextualization and application of it which make it amenable to conflict-supporting ideologies. The claim is not in itself aggressive; it can however be ‘armed and loaded,’ so to speak, and thus utilized to justify violence. It then becomes a sharp mental and spiritual sword, which can indeed call forth the real swords. In the history of the three religions and right up to the present day, the claim of absolute truth could be exploited as a key element in a belligerent attitude, creating and sustaining violent conflicts. Those claims have been able to trigger certain constellations of the collective consciousness, and these can, in turn, increase the willingness of those who participate in this consciousness to actively engage in conflict-strategies or at least support them. In addition to their presence in large-scale interreligious conflicts, claims of absoluteness can also be present in authoritarian or even coercive social and mental structures within religious communities, and can indeed destroy families or friendships. Ironically this can be observed even in communities which are emphatically pacifistic, as is the case in the Jehova’s Witnesses. Claims of absolute truth are often accompanied by a metaphysical dualism and a moral rigorism: as torn between a good and an evil power, between light and darkness, heaven and hell. In the cosmic struggle, those who follow the one and only path to God will prevail. The moral rigorism is based on the distinction between clean and tainted. Whatever is not in accordance with the divine commandments—be it in the life of the individual or in the community—must be expelled. This notion can lead to projections of the evil onto those who follow other religious paths and who will therefore be eternally lost.

Theological counterparts to the claims of exclusiveness, universality and finality Religious communities and their authorities can contribute to the prevention or suppression of such negative interpretations and applications of the religious traditions, as well as to the encouragement of their peace-promoting potentials. For one thing, the communities and their representatives can strengthen the solid core-convictions which foster peace-furthering attitudes. For another, they can work to de-absolutize the claims of exclusiveness, universality and finality. No external principle of tolerance can compel them to do that but only the insight that these irenic potentials constitute a vital part of the very essence of

360 | Reinhold Bernhardt their tradition. Only on the basis of their central convictions can such an irenic self-understanding be generated and intensified. It may seem naïve to trust in the power of rational insight, of theological argumentation and ethical obligation as a means of de-escalation. Yet though this approach will not work in every case, nevertheless the constructivist position, as sketched in the first part of the present paper, holds that this power should not be underestimated. Religious differences are normally not the causes of conflicts; rather, insofar as they constitute an appeal to specific convictions, they may add fuel to the fire. In this light the “fire” can be contained and perhaps even extinguished by de-legitimizing any justifications for the so-called ‘holy war’ and by calling instead for respect for the opponents while criticizing one’s own community’s pretensions to theological superiority. In this way, community leaders can influence the attitudes, motivations, strategies and behaviour of the actors and—no less important—of the masses who support them.241 In the third part of this essay, I would like to suggest three sets of theological ideas that can work as counterbalances to the three claims of exclusiveness, universality and finality. They might function as ‘fundamentalism-blockers’, i.e. as strategies of self-relativization—not in terms of an external critique of “religion” but rather as the particular religion‘s own internal, theologically appropriate critique of its own self-absolutization.242 Thus ‘”relativization” has is to be clearly distinguished from relativism. Against exclusiveness Against any claim of religious exclusiveness a double distinction can be advanced: The distinction between the reality of God in himself, the revelation of God and the religious concepts that are built upon that revelation. Now every || 241 Cf. Rittberger2006: 82: ”There are…indications that the appeal to religious convictions not only can escalate but also de-escalate conflicts” (editors’ trans.); cf. also Appleby 2000. 242 Cf. the five theologumenons pointed out by Krötke 2006: 58-61: (a) The belief in a transcendent God transcends and thus relativizes all worldly situations and interests. (b) The conviction that faith is a gift of God who reveals himself makes it impossible to take that revelation into one’s own possession. (c) The God portrayed in the Bible has on the one hand the character traits of a stringent ruler, but on the other hand is portrayed as a caring shepherd: gracious, benevolent and unconditionally loving. (d) God created all human beings in his own image, which entitles them to claim an inalienable dignity, (e) and calls them to strive for God’s truth in an atmosphere of freedom, corresponding to the freedom that results from their relation to God. If those five theologoumenons are taken seriously, monotheism cannot unleash destructive power.

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religious tradition which is founded on a divine revelation must distinguish not only between its own teachings and practices on the one hand and the divine revelation on the other, but also between that revelation and the revealing God. The “revelation” itself states that God is ‘greater’ than his revelation, just as a person is ‘greater’ than all of his/her self-revelations. The ‘Word’ of God—the Torah, Jesus Christ, the Qur’an—is the fully authentic representation of God, but it is not God. The revelation is the self-mediation of God which establishes a relation to God. But the transcendent God transcends his revelations. The revelations at the basis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam themselves give clear evidence of this distinction: (i) The Torah is the declaration of God’s will for the life of his chosen people in the Promised Land. But God’s blessing reaches far beyond the chosen people. In Is 19:25 the Egyptians are called “my people” and the Assyrians “the work of my hands”. To be sure, the Torah is not addressed to those peoples. But they are included in God’s mercy and charity. (ii) Jesus obviously had a clear consciousness of the distinction between himself and God. He pointed beyond himself towards God and the kingdom of God, and said (Mk 10:18): “Why callest thou me good? [there is] none good but one, [that is], God.” God’s infinite and unfathomable mystery supremely surpasses all “solidified” forms of God’s revelation: it transcends them and relativizes them. He is the “Deus semper major” (1. John 3:20), “dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”. The so-called “negative theology” served as a reminder of that transcendence. (iii) The Islamic tradition distinguishes between the heavenly original of the Qu’ran and the worldly copy of it. Sura 18,109 says: “If the sea were ink for the Words of my Lord, the sea would be spent before the Words of my Lord are spent, though We brought replenishment the like of it.” That means: the Word of God is far more comprehensive than the words found in the written Qu’ran. Mahmut Aydin, an Islamic scholar, concludes: “The Qu’ran is truly God’s revelation, but it is not the totality of God’s revelation.“243 The basic prayer of Islam—“Allahu akbar”—means: “God is greater than everything else”. Against universality The claim of universal validity is countered by theological insight into the historicity and particularity of the revelation. God’s word underwent an “inhistorization”—which is to say, an entrance into history as a time-conditioned manifesta|| 243 Cf. Aydin 2005: 234.

362 | Reinhold Bernhardt tion—in the proclamation of the Torah, in the man Jesus of Nazareth, in the book of the Qur’an. Contrary to Greek idealism, the Jewish-Christian understanding of truth approaches the revelation of God not as a set of timeless ideas but as a relation. God’s word has become part of the human world and has thus exposed itself to particularity and relativity, to social and cultural influences. It is in fact not universal and timeless, but historical and concrete, related to persons, people and places. It can be received only in terms of culture-conditioned human perspectives. For the Christian tradition this follows from the very heart of the Christian belief in God’s incarnation. The biblical narratives of the history of God with his people and with humankind in general made him known as a God who accompanies his wandering people and speaks to a particular context in concrete terms related to the specific situation. Precisely in this kenosis, in this selfhumbling, God manifests the power of love. Against finality The counterbalance to the claim of finality lies in the conviction that only at the consummation of the creational process will God’s word be complete and full truth become manifest. Then even the Son of God will be subject unto God, so that God may be all in all (I Cor 15:28). The gospel of Christ stands under an ‘eschatological proviso’—it points to the eternal ground of being, which can only be striven for, and never wholly grasped and possessed. Like the claims to universality the claim to finality is not to be related to the reality of Christianity within history— and this includes the message of Christ. Rather, it hints at the eschatological fulfilment of God’s promise. Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, citing Joachim Jeremias, pointed out that “in Jesus’ own message universalism is … pure promise”.244 The three counterbalances against the three forms of the claims of absoluteness belong to the very essence of Christianity. They can be emphatically put forward against any attempts to interpret the Christian tradition in a way which despises other religions and cultures, and thus they can promote attitudes that lead to respect, esteem and acknowledgement. Theological convictions can then serve as tools for a self-interpretation of the Christian tradition able to stand up against a conflict-creating or conflicting-supporting radicaliza-

|| 244 Ratzinger 1967: 26f.

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tion. They could promote de-escalation and establish a foundation for the peaceful coexistence of different cultural and religious communities. This does not mean that the differences between the religious traditions will no longer be taken seriously; nor does it entail the notion that the religions should be seen as equally valid “ways of salvation”. Human beings have no access to a perspective which would allow such a judgment, for only the absolute perspective of an omniscient observer could arrive at such a judgment. Yet from the Christian point of view it is possible—and even necessary—to state that God did not leave the other nations without witness to himself (Acts 14:17). To state this is by no means to cast doubt on the uniqueness of the Christian path to God, it is merely to question the claim that the Christian path is the only way to God. Such a theological modesty does not undermine the validity of the Christian tradition and the affiliation of Christians with it. On the contrary—this modesty brings to bear that tradition‘s central insights into the mystery of God which extends beyond his revelations: in the unconditional universality of his love for humankind, in the historical concreteness of his self-representations, and in the hope for an ultimate fulfilment that transcends all religious traditions. In the light of the three counterbalances the claims to exclusiveness, universality and finality can indeed be retained as an expression of the Christian certainty of faith—without lapsing into an absolutist attitude. As existential testimonies they articulate the trustworthiness of God’s revelation in Christ. Thus they are not to be understood as rational assertions of facts leading inexorably to the repudiation of other forms of faiths. Rather, their appropriate place is not in the ‘horizontal’ relationship to other traditions but in the ‘vertical’ relationship to God—in the praise of God, in doxology. The claims employ the language of devotion with all its superlatives. It is passionate poetry of the heart, not the theoretical prose of reason.245

References Appleby, R. (2000). The Ambivalence of the Sacred. Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Assmann, J. (2005). Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, oder: Der Preis des Monotheismus. München: Hanser.

|| 245 For further explorations of the so-called claim of absoluteness see Bernhardt 1993, 1994, and 2005.

364 | Reinhold Bernhardt Assmann, J. (2006). Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt. Wien: Picus. Aydin, M. (2005). A Muslim Pluralist: Jalaluddin Rûmi. In Knitter, P. (Ed.), The Myth of Religious Superiority—A Multifaith Exploration (pp. 220-237). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Beck, U. (2008). Der eigene Gott. Von der Friedensfähigkeit und dem Gewaltpotential der Religionen. Frankfurt/M.: Verlag der Weltreligionen. Bernhardt, R. (1993). Der Absolutheitsanspruch des Christentums. Von der Aufklärung bis zur pluralistischen Religionstheologie. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Bernhardt, R. (1994). Christianity without Absolutes. London: SCM Press. Bernhardt, R. (2005). Ende des Dialogs? Die Begegnung der Religionen und ihre theologische Reflexion (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen 2). Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Deschner. K. (1986). Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Hempelmann, R. & Kandel, J. (Eds) (2006). Religionen und Gewalt. Konflikt- und Friedenspotentiale in den Weltreligionen. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Krötke, W. (2006). Sind monotheistische Religionen besonders ‘anfällig’ für Gewalt? In Hempelmann & Kandel, J. (Eds.), Religionen und Gewalt. Konflikt- und Friedenspotentiale in den Weltreligionen (pp. 58-61). Göttingen: V&R unipress. Manemann, J. (Ed.)(2005). Monotheismus. München: LIT. Meyer, T. (1997). Identitätswahn. Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds. Berlin: AufbauVerlag Mühling, M. (2007). Grundinformation Eschatologie. Systematische Theologie aus der Perspektive der Hoffnung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Müller, H. (2001). Das Zusammenleben der Kulturen. Ein Gegenentwurf zu Huntington. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Oberdorfer, B. & Waldmann, P. (Eds.) (2008). Die Ambivalenz des Religiösen. Religionen als Friedensstifter und Gewalterzeuger. Freiburg: Rombach-Verlag. Ratzinger, J. (1967). Das Problem der Absolutheit des christlichen Heilsweges. In Böld, W. (Ed.) Kirche in der außerchristlichen Welt. Regensburg: Pustet. Rittberger, V. (2006). Die Rolle der Religionen in zwischenstaatlichen Konflikten. In Hempelmann & Kandel, J. (Eds.), Religionen und Gewalt. Konflikt- und Friedenspotentiale in den Weltreligionen (pp. 78-83). Göttingen: V&R unipress. Rittberger, V. & Hasenclever, A. (2000). Religionen in Konflikten—Religiöser Glaube als Quelle von Gewalt und Frieden. In Enzmann, B. (Ed.), Politisches Denken. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des politischen Denkens (pp. 35-40). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Sarasvati, S.D. (1999). Letter from Pujya Swamiji. Arsha Vidya Bharati, 4 (2), 3. Sacks, J.(2003). The Dignity of Difference. How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations? Continuum: London / New York. Scheffler, T. (Ed.) (2002) . Religion Between Violence and Reconciliation. Würzburg: ErgonVerlag. Schmidt-Leukel, P. (2004). Part of the Problem, Part of the Solution. In Schmidt-Leukel, P (Ed.), War and Peace in World Religions. The Gerald Weisfeld Lectures 2003 (pp.1-10). London: SCM Press Schmidt-Leukel, P.(2007). The Struggle for Peace: Can Religions Help? Interreligious Insight, 5, 49-63. Schwartz, R. (1997). The Curse of Cain. The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Schweitzer,F. (Ed.) (2006). Religion, Politik und Gewalt (Kongressband des XII. Europäischen Kongresses für Theologie 18.-22. September 2005 in Berlin). Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Senghaas, D. (1998). Zivilisierung wider Willen. Der Konflikt der Kulturen mit sich selbst. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Thonhauser, J. (2008). Das Unbehagen am Monotheismus. Der Glaube an den einen Gott als Ursprung religiöser Gewalt? Eine aktuelle Debatte um Jan Assmanns Thesen zur “Mosaischen Unterscheidung.“ Marburg: Tectum. Weingart, M. (2007). Religion macht Frieden. Das Friedenspotential von Religionen in politischen Gewaltkonflikten. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Wrogemann, H. (2006). Missionarischer Islam und gesellschaftlicher Dialog. Eine Studie zu Begründung und Praxis des Aufrufes zum Islam (da’wa) im internationalen sunnitischen Diskurs. Frankfurt/M.: Lembeck.

Dorothee Schlenke

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Certainty and diversity: a systematic approach to interreligious learning Within political theory, religions are more likely regarded as a factor that increases rather than decreases conflicts. Currently there are three main views of the conflict-increasing potential of religions.246 The first view has been called the position of the Primordialists, whose main proponents are Samuel Huntington, Gilles Kepel, and Bassam Tibi.247 The Primordialists think religions are causally related to political conflicts. According to Huntington, one of the central representatives of this theory, the power vacuum after the end of East-West conflict was filled up by clearly defined religious-cultural allied blocs, such as Western Christianity, Islam and Asian Confucianism, which inevitably drive their followers into violent conflicts. Huntington is heavily criticized by the second view, labelled the Instrumentalists, mainly presented by Dieter Senghaas, Thomas Meyer, and Graham Fuller248 who maintain that religious attitudes are being instrumentalized by violent elites in order to intensify ongoing political or economic conflicts. Under existential pressures people are particularly susceptible to simplified, fundamentalist messages of salvation and religious stereotyping. Finally, the third view, the Constructivists, whose main protagonists are Ted Hopf, Lewis W. Snyder and Valery Tischkov,249 agree with the Instrumentalists on the political instrumentalization of religious attitudes but assert that political elites have to convince their followers first. Religious attitudes may indeed increase prevailing conflicts by polarization and radicalization, especially as far as value and identity conflicts are concerned. Furthermore they might destroy any communicative relationships between the conflicting parties by religious stereotyping and condemnation. There are two main factors that are commonly taken to prevent the political instrumentalization of religion and to decrease religious conflict potentials: religious education and interreligious dialogue. In the following I want to link both fac|| 246 For categorizing these approaches, compare Weingardt 2007: 22-48, 373-403. 247 Huntington 1993; Kepel 1994; Tibi 1995. 248 Senghaas 1998); Meyer 1997; Fuller1995: 145-158. 249 Hopf 1998: 171-200; Snider 1996; Tishkov 1997.

368 | Dorothee Schlenke tors to a systematic approach to interreligious learning. The key question in this context is: How can religious and interreligious learning in particular contribute to an adequate understanding and resolution of both properly religious conflicts as well as conflicts where religion is instrumentalized? The thesis I want to develop in this paper is that the internal structure of religious consciousness, as represented by certainty and diversity, facilitates both the creation or intensification of conflicts as well as their mitigation or resolution. Once the internal complexity of religious consciousness as an “interpretive” stance is fully in view, it also becomes clear that religious education and interreligious communication and learning are primary prerogatives. To argue this claim, I first expound the relevant concept of religious consciousness. In the following section, I explain what this conception of religious consciousness implies for a future implementation of interreligious dialogue. Then I present systematic structures of religious learning based on the conception of religious consciousness sketched in section 1. Finally, I combine the results of the preceding sections to describe what interreligious learning should aim for on the suggested “interpretive” view of religious consciousness.

Religion It is controversial whether religion, in view of its historical and phenomenological diversity, can at all be defined in a general sense. There is an ongoing debate about the adequacy of substantial, functional, or pragmatic definitions of religion, resulting occasionally in the verdict that religion cannot be defined at all. Nevertheless, in order to discuss the role of religion for conflicts, one must proceed from a general concept of religion, so I suggest, for this purpose at least, we need to operate with a notion of religion that combines two perspectives. The internal perspective of religion as religious consciousness (certainty) must be joined with an external perspective on religion as a highly pluralistic phenomenon (diversity) that nevertheless exhibits some common traits. That being said, such a concept of religion can be established only from within a certain religion, otherwise it would not be able to work out the specific meaning of religion. This understanding of religion relates to two basic insights of Western theological-philosophical discourse: 1) human existence differs from other modes of being in that it is essentially hermeneutic, that is, it consists in continuous self-interpretation; and 2) since Kant, it is understood that any cognition of reality always relates to basic conditions of subjectivity and is therefore perspectival.

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The protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher transferred both insights into an interpretive understanding of religion. In order to distinguish religion from metaphysics and morality, that is, from the supernaturalistic and rationalistic paradigms of understanding, Schleiermacher conceived religion as a distinct region of self-experience, which, in view of the elementary passivity of its makeup, is grounded in “feeling” as an “immediate self-consciousness.”250 Thus, according to Schleiermacher, religion represents a mode of selfexperience and correspondingly self-interpretation of finite subjectivity on the foundation of ultimate certainties about man and world, based upon a constituting reference to a transcendent ground of reality. As an individual lifedetermining certainty, faith arises from irreplaceable, individual disclosure experiences conveyed by positive religions. According to Schleiermacher, it is crucial to see that these disclosure experiences, as well as the formation of religious certainty itself, remain contingent and indeterminable. In the light of these specific disclosure experiences (e.g., the revealed significance of Jesus Christ for Christianity), religious individuals seek to interpret themselves, the world, and life in general. With regard to the presupposed transcendent foundation of reality, every religious self-understanding remains provisional and fragmentary. The differences, although being interpreted, cannot be transformed into an ultimate unity. Religious consciousness understood as a “consciousness of differences”251 entails an internal reflexivity: aware of its own constructive character, faith is equally aware of its fundamental perspectivalness and thereby of the irreducible plurality of religious world views. Due to this internal reflexivity, religious individuals can differentiate themselves from their own convictions and thus differentiate between an internal and an external perspective on their religion. Religious consciousness is therefore essentially “bifocal.” Religious conflicts often arise from mixing up the internal and external perspective. Acknowledging the fundamental perspectivalness of any certainty does not mean to deny the right of truth claims since any cognition of reality is considered to be perspectival. Furthermore religious statements also include intentional and cognitive claims about life, humanity, and the world in general, interpreting them with reference to transcendence and individual disclosure experiences. Therefore, religious certainty both entails truth claims and, by

|| 250 See Schleiermacher 1960: 14-74. On Schleiermacher`s theory of religion see in particular Schlenke 1999: 21-193. 251 On this conception of religion as a “consciousness of differences,” see in particular Danz 2005: 45-49, 221-239.

370 | Dorothee Schlenke changing perspectives, can relate to the fact that there are also other certainties with corresponding claims. Nevertheless, religious certainty is dependent on communication in order to clarify and ensure its own self, world and transcendent understanding. Religious consciousness therefore is by its very constitution geared to dialogue, which leads to the issue of interreligious dialogue.

Interreligious dialogue Ecumenical dialogue as well as interreligious dialogue or “interfaith dialogue” seem to have arrived at a turning point, even marked as the “end of dialogue,”252 which is connected with the fact that up to now interreligious communication mainly focused on the issue of consent and reconciliation by leaving actual differences aside. The understanding of religious consciousness I sketched in the previous section would suggest precisely the opposite. If we understand religious consciousness as a consciousness of differences, intra- and interreligious differences are acknowledged as a presupposition of peaceful coexistence and cooperation among different religions and religious communities. The crucial problem for interfaith dialogue with a pluralist outlook is how to connect the validity of one’s own religious certainty with a positive appreciation of other religions. This is the task of a “theology of the religions” insofar as theological thinking comprises both the internal perspective of a positive religion in the sense of ultimate certainty as well as the external perspective on religious diversity. There is an ongoing debate on how to conceptualize such a theology of the religions,253 a closer consideration of which goes beyond the scope of this paper. For the purpose of introducing interreligious dialogue as a precondition for interreligious learning on the basis of an interpretive understanding of religion, it will suffice to introduce briefly the three main models defining interreligious relations:254 1) 2) 3)

Exclusivism: There is only one true religion. Inclusivism/Superiorism: There are various true religions but one is superior to the others. Pluralism: Various true religions coexist with equal rights.

|| 252 Bernhardt 2006. 253 For recent discussion and representative works see Bernhardt 2007: 1-35, 127-149. 254 On the formation, discussion and further development of this threefold scheme see Danz 2005: 51-95.

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Religious certainty, as in aiming for ultimate certainty, is, in view of the internal perspective of religious individuals on their religion, necessarily exclusive. One cannot be a Christian and a Muslim at the same time. But, since religious consciousness is always aware of its own perspectivalness and the contingent character of its disclosure experiences, it also entails a principal recognition of other religious certainties and thereby a principal recognition of the independence of other religions, while neither relativizing them inclusively nor transforming them into an ultimate unity. Thus, a theology of the religions must be unfolded in the sense of a strict pluralism, that is, as a “hermeneutics of differences”255 in the interests of a mutual clarifying and ensuring of the religious understanding of self, world, and transcendence. Real interfaith dialogue can only take place if the partners involved are willing to concede to each other the right of religious exclusiveness and self-definition, which finally leads to a mutual granting of religious freedom.256 All in all, interreligious dialogue includes a continuous dispute about conflicting truth claims that should not be harmonized rashly. It is on this basis of a mutual recognition of difference—even strangeness—that the strife for common ground and ethical consensus may fruitfully contribute to one’s own and others’ religious self-understandings. This of course requires a well-educated and enlightened religious consciousness.

Education and religion: religious learning Political instrumentalization of religious attitudes, as well as crucial tensions within interreligious dialogue, arises from the fact that religion (religious certainty) is strongly related to the question of identity, which is also a central pedagogical issue. Therefore I will first set out the interrelation between identity, religion, and education before I discuss basic structures of religious learning. Finally I will turn to the issue of inter-religious learning. Identity itself is generally considered to be complex and dynamic, shaped in a continuous process of combining mutually modifying self-interpretations, external attributions, as well as functional and situational demands.257 Thus, individual as well as social identity is a highly constructive phenomenon (patchwork and multiple identities), especially since traditional patterns of

|| 255 See Danz 2005: 221-239. 256 See Steinacker 2006: 45-66, especially 58. 257 As a classical reference still see Mead 2008.

372 | Dorothee Schlenke identity ascriptions are no longer taken for granted in a pluralistic setting. Since identity is to be realized in a coherent way of leading one’s life, synthesizing and orientating certainties are required. An enlightened religious consciousness that knows itself as a consciousness of differences can contribute to a successful treatment of differences and fragmentary experiences of identity by interpreting them in the light of certainties that are known to be both ultimate and perspectival.258 Developing an identity is a central task undertaken during the period of adolescence; therefore, this development should be stimulated and accompanied by pedagogical action.259 Since religion is an important factor in identity formation, adolescents will fare better who are given the chance to engage with the orienting and spiritual potential of religious self-understanding as part of the conditio humana. Therefore the argument can be made that religious education should be an integral part of public education and consequently a distinct subject in school. Nevertheless it should be stressed that the successful formation of religious consciousness and even though religious identity can never be produced by instruction, it always remains contingent upon the response of the learner. How then can religious learning take place? Within educational contexts, religion should be treated as the complex bifocal phenomenon that it is, namely a life orienting, ultimate certainty of a transcendent self-understanding and a world-understanding, resulting from individual disclosure experiences, aligned with a certain way of leading one’s life, and related to a system of symbolic communication and ritual practice. In other words, religious education and learning should combine the internal and external perspective on religion, instead of operating with the traditional alternative of “teaching/learning about religion” or “teaching/learning from religion.”260 Teacher and pupils therefore have to differentiate between, on the one hand, religious certainty itself, and, on the other hand, the corresponding interpretive, symbolic, and ritual system; this goes hand in hand with a change of linguistic perspectives from “speaking religiously” to “speaking about religion.”261 In this fashion pupils will not only be able to widen their knowledge and understanding of religion, but also to improve their own (religious) selfunderstanding and, last but not least, learn to deal constructively with divergent religious points of view and truth claims.

|| 258 For the general connection between religion and identity see Gephart & Waldenfels 1999. 259 For the general discussion of this issue see Schweitzer 2005: 294-303. 260 On this difference see Keast 2007: 61f. 261 For this fundamental difference compare Dressler 2006: 144-160.

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This double differentiation or change of perspectives requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of religion; the principal aim of religious education, therefore, is to acquire religious competence. Religious competence comprises the following sub-competences:262 1)

2)

3) 4)

5)

6)

Subject competence: the ability to understand basic structures and issues of religious systems, such as anthropology, concept of God, interpretation of the world, ritual and symbolism. Hermeneutic-methodological competence: the ability to understand historical religious traditions and texts and to relate them to present life. Aesthetic competence: the ability to understand also non-linguistic, creative forms of religious self-expression and interpretation. Linguistic communication competence: the ability to communicate religious experiences, to incorporate external attributions, and to integrate different perspectives. Personal-social competence: the ability to be empathic and to be discerning of oneself, others, and situations, resulting in a willingness to resolve conflicts and find compromises. Ethical competence: the ability to identify and analyze ethical problems, and to account for moral actions in light of ultimate certainties.

Corresponding to the view of religious consciousness as an interpretive consciousness of differences (see section I), religious competence is also mainly to be understood as a competence of coping with differences between oneself and others, traditions and situations, different forms of religious expression, perspectives, claims, and so on. How then can religious competence be at all taught and learned? Every learning process basically depends upon the relationship between teacher and pupils. With regard to the self-related aspects of religion, this is of central importance to religious learning, especially insofar as the presupposed religious or denominational affiliation of the teacher is concerned. On the one hand, the teacher should clearly express his or her affiliation in view of the internal perspective of religion. On the other hand, he or she should equally respect the pupil’s religious or nonreligious self-determination and correspond-

|| 262 On this concept of religious competence see Ministerium für Kultus, Jugend und Sport Baden-Württemberg 2004: 23.

374 | Dorothee Schlenke ing religious or nonreligious beliefs. The teacher is to give an authentic and convincing example of how one might combine an internal and an external perspective on religion, illustrating that religion accommodates both certainty and the acknowledgement of diversity. Since pluralism is already a constitutive dimension of religious learning, religious education self-evidently opens up to interreligious learning.

Interreligious learning The pedagogical setting for interreligious learning presents a particular challenge for the development of religious competence as the fundamental competence to cope with religiously grounded differences. Since adolescents are only in the process of acquiring religious competence, they cannot be regarded as experts in their respective religions. Therefore it should be stressed that models of interreligious dialogue, as for instance the diversity-affirming approach sketched above, cannot be applied directly to settings of interreligious learning. Nonetheless, any religious education or teaching about religion presupposes a specific view of religion and interreligious relationships, which is to be demonstrated by referring to two current models of religious education in Europe.263 Religious studies approach (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Scotland; modified: England and Wales). Religious education is usually a compulsory subject without a general right for students to opt out. In such cases the state is responsible for the training of teachers and for the development of curricula and teaching material; this holds with the exception of England and Wales in the United Kingdom, where state and religious communities cooperatively design the syllabi of religious education. In the sense of “learning about religion,” this phenomenologically grounded approach mainly involves cognitive skills with the aim of transmitting religious knowledge and understanding while strictly refraining from promoting or even imposing a particular religious view. This approach is neutral insofar as it is equally acceptable to all denominations and religions. Denominational approach (Austria, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Eastern Europe). Religious education is usually a voluntary subject; if pupils opt out, they have to choose alternative subjects, such as ethics or philosophy. Religious

|| 263 For an overview of current models of (inter)religious education in Europe see: Schreiner, Kraft, & Wright 2007; Jackson, Miedema, Weisse, Willaime 2007; Lähnemann & Schreiner 2009.

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communities, either alone or in cooperation with the state, are responsible for the training of teachers and the development of curricula and teaching material. In the sense of “learning from religion,” this approach intends to make pupils sensitive to religious meanings and questions by familiarizing them with a specific denomination or religion as represented by the teacher, and thus provides them with spiritual and moral orientation. Occasionally pointers to other religions may be included, but these remain marginal. Roughly speaking, the religious studies approach puts an emphasis on diversity without certainty—all religions are considered to be equally true (or false); whereas, the denominational approach, which favors one specific religion, focuses on certainty while neglecting diversity. There are tendencies in both approaches, however, to overcome this one-sidedness. For example, in 2004 the National Framework for Religious Education in England explicitly required elements of “learning from religion” in order to “develop pupils’ skills of application, interpretation and evaluation of what they learn about religion.”264 In Germany, denominational religious education recently has opened up to include interdenominational and even interreligious cooperation. Basic Educational Conditions. With regard to these two approaches and the central issue of religious identity, the crucial question arises whether pupils should first be familiarized with one religion, most naturally their own religion, before allowing for interreligious encounters, or whether religious identity should not, from the very beginning, be grounded in interreligious learning processes. Based on a description of seven “stages of faith,” religious developmental psychologist James Fowler claims that “individual-reflected faith” (stage 4) clearly develops before “connecting-relational faith” (stage 5).265 In other words, constructive dealing with diversity presupposes the individual formation of certainty. Therefore, pupils must first familiarize themselves with their own religion before interreligious learning in heterogeneous learning groups can take place, which also requires specific methodological settings. Methodological aspects. Given the bifocal structure of religious consciousness as mediating between an internal and external perspective, cognitive skills || 264 Keast 2007: 61. See also Michael Grimmitt’s influential reformulation of the distinction of “learning about” and “learning from religion” in Grimmitt 1987. Grimmitt’s “learning from religion” does not point to a denominational ambition in religious education, but rather to a humanistic pedagogical intention of religious education encouraging pupils to “evaluate their understanding of religion in personal terms and evaluate their understanding of self in religious terms (i.e., in terms of the religious beliefs they have learned about).” See also Grimmitt 1987: 213, and Grimmitt 2000: 36. 265 Fowler 1981.

376 | Dorothee Schlenke such as analysis, interpretation and explanation should be applied as well as more integrated methods, such as experiential approaches (relating to one’s own life, gift-to-a-child approach) or contextual approaches (authentic setting outside the classroom, participation in religious festivals). Working in heterogeneous religious groups in particular requires methods of cooperative learning that foster the development of social skills, the ability to employ empathetic communication, and a positive attitude toward diversity. With regard to the sensitive and intimate aspects of religion, it is also necessary to avoid embarrassment, anxiety, or stress by applying distancing techniques (using imagined characters, stories, and artefacts) and simulations (simulated situations, case studies of a religious or moral dilemma).266 Interreligious competence. Religious competence comprises a number of sub-competencies, namely, competencies relating to subject, hermeneuticmethodological, aesthetic, linguistic-communicational, personal-social, and ethical aspects. Thus, religious competence leads to an educated, autonomous, but nevertheless dialogical and open mindset. Interreligious competence in particular means to be able to apply these distinct dimensions of religious competence to the more complex situation of interreligious communication and its corresponding reciprocal changing of perspectives. Religious selfunderstanding is challenged by its external perception through the eyes of another religion and vice versa. One’s own perception of another religion is limited by its own self-understanding. Therefore, informed and empathic communication and understanding by making consistent use of the sub-competencies listed above are key dimensions of interreligious competence. Another key dimension is tolerance, or more precisely, tolerance of ambiguity,267 meaning, the ability to bear the tensions arising from incompatible differences and ambiguous communication, which nevertheless comes to a positive appreciation of the other. Consequently tolerance of ambiguity leads to a mutual granting of freedom of religion, which presupposes the ability of religious self-reflexivity and self-criticism on either side. Thus, interreligious competence comprises key dimensions of understanding, resolving, and preventing religious conflicts. Constructive dealing with diversity in the light of one’s own certainty presupposes educated religious consciousness. Therefore, qualified religious education in an interreligious perspective remains a central cross-cultural task for the future.

|| 266 On methodological approaches for interreligious settings in detail see Keast 2007: 73-112. 267 For the term “ambiguity” compare Grünschloß 1999: 263 and Kiechle & Ziebertz 2005: 282293.

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Conclusion To summarize, the main aim of this chapter was to draw attention to the fact that a sufficiently reflected view of religious consciousness can lead us to understand that the acknowledgment of and constructive dealing with fundamental religious diversity is a constitutive element of religious consciousness itself. I sketched what can be called the essential “bifocal nature” of religious consciousness as an interpretative consciousness of differences, where always an internal and an external perspective are mediated. Religious experience is understood as both certain and perspectival, that is, articulated in one of several historically, contingent, symbolic, and ritualistic frames. Religious conflicts and conflicts instrumentalizing religion often arise from a conflation of these two perspectives. Therefore, religious education, and interreligious dialogue in particular, are considered as main factors to decrease religious conflict potential. The bifocal nature of religious consciousness implies that interreligious dialogue must explore conflict and difference rather than dodge diversity in order to find a common ground and ethical consensus between different religious self-understandings. This of course requires a well-educated and enlightened religious consciousness. Religious competence as the principal aim of religious education must therefore be viewed from the very beginning as a complex competence, including sub-competencies that pertain to conflict mitigation and the accommodation of diversity. If we operate with such a complex notion of religious competence, it becomes clear that religious education must leave behind the traditional alternative between “learning about religion” (prioritizing the external perspective on religion) and “learning from religion” (prioritizing the internal perspective on religion). Pupils must be given an opportunity to develop both their capacities for religious certainty as well as their capacities to accommodate diversity. In other words, religious education should do justice to the bifocal nature of religious consciousness itself, which requires both aspects of familiarization with a specific religion and an interreligious and crosscultural perspective. Whether it is pedagogically preferable to operate with a temporal ordering of the two perspectives is currently an open question.

References Bernhardt, R. (2006).Ende des Dialogs? Die Begegnung der Religionen und ihre theologische Reflexion. Zürich, Switzerland: Theologischer Verlag.

378 | Dorothee Schlenke Bernhardt, R. (2007). Literaturbericht ‘Theologie der Religionen (I und II). Theologische Rundschau, 72, 127-149. Danz, C. (2005). Einführung in die Theologie der Religionen. Wien: LIT Verlag Münster. Dressler, B. (2006) Unterscheidungen. Religion und Bildung. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. Fowler, J. W. (1981). Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. San Francisco: Harper. Fuller, G. (1995). The Next Ideology. Foreign Policy, 98, 145-158. Gephart, W. & Waldenfels, H. (Eds.) (1999). Religion und Identität:Im Horizont des Pluralismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Grimmitt, M. (1987). Religious Education and Human Development. Great Wakering: McCrimmons. Grimmitt, M. (2000). Pedagogies of Religious Education: Case Studies in the Research and Development of Good Pedagogic Practice in Religious Education. Great Wakering: McCrimmons. Grünschloß, A. (1999). Der eigene und der fremde Glaube. Studien zur interreligiösen Fremdwahrnehmung in Islam, Hinduismus, Buddhismus und Christentum. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hopf, T. (1998). The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory. International Security, 23, 171-200 Huntington, S. P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72, 22-49. Jackson, R., Miedema, S., Weisse, W., Willaime, J. (Eds.) (2007). Religion and Education in Europe: Developments, Contexts and Debates. Münster: Waxman Verlag. Keast, J. (Ed.), (2007). Religious Diversity and Intercultural Education: A Reference Book for Schools. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Kepel, G. (1994). Die Rache Gottes: Radikale Moslems, Christen und Juden auf dem Vormarsch. München: Piper. Kiechle, J and Ziebertz, H.-G. (2005). Konfliktmanagement als Kompetenz interreligiösen Lernens. In Schreiner, P., Sieg, U., & Eisenbast, V. (Eds.), Handbuch interreligiösen Lernens (pp. 282-293). Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus. Lähnemann, J. and Schreiner, P. (Eds.) (2009). Interreligious and Values Education in Europe: Map and Handbook, Münster: Comenius Institut. Mead, G.H. (2008). Geist, Identität und Gesellschaft aus der Sicht des Sozialbehaviorismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Meyer, T. (1997). Identitätswahn: Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. Ministerium für Kultus, Jugend und Sport Baden-Württemberg. (2004). Bildungsplan für die Realschule, Stuttgart. Schlenke, D. (1999). “Geist und Gemeinschaft”—Die Systematische Bedeutung der Pneumatologie für Friedrich Schleiermachers Theorie der Christlichen Frömmigkeit. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schleiermacher, F. (1960). Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt ( Redeker, M. (Ed.). Berlin: De Gruyter. Schreiner, P., Kraft, F., & Wright, A. (Eds.) (2007). Good Practice in Religious Education in Europe: Examples and Perspectives of Primary Schools. Berlin: Lit Verlag.

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Schweitzer, F. (2005).Religiöse Identitätsbildung,’ In Schreiner, P., Sieg, U., & Eisenbast, V. (Eds.), Handbuch Interreligiöses Lernen (pp. 294-303). Gütersloh:Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Senghaas, D. (1998). Zivilisierung wider Willen: Der Konflikt der Kulturen mit sich selbst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Snider, L.W. (1996). Growth, Debt and Politics: Economic Adjustment and the Political Performance of Developing Countries. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Steinacker, P. (2006). Was heißt Toleranz für die Begegnung der Religionen? Islam und Christentum in Dialog und Konfrontation. In Steinacker, P. (Ed.), Absolutheitsanspruch und Toleranz. Systematisch-theologische Beiträge zur Begegnung der Religionen (pp. 45-66). Frankfurt, Germany: Lembeck. Tibi, B. (1995). Krieg der Zivilisationen: Politik und Religion zwischen Vernunft und Fundamentalismus. Hamburg: Heyne. Tishkov, V. (1997). Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflicts in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame. London: Sage. Weingardt, M. A., Küng, H., & Senghaas, D. (2007). Religion, Macht, Frieden: das Friedenspotential von Religionen in politischen Gewaltkonflikten. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.

Yoram Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Back to the Future: Buber, Levinas and the original encounter Individually and collectively, the existence of destructive conflicts around the world is undeniable and painful. Such conflicts are in large part the inevitable result of differences in either personal conception of reality, or in collective ideologies and philosophies about the way reality ought to be. In a forward moving and healthy life, the American Pragmatist John Dewey taught us, conflicts must not only be overcome, but in many cases their overcoming is also necessary for personal and collective rebirth and transformation. Yet, as the press of immediate experience sadly attests, in many slow moving and dysfunctional lives, conflicts become permanent and lead to spiritual stagnation, political unrest, and military violence.268 For the philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, healthy lives are marked by the degree of our success in peeling-off the layers of cognitive experience that stand between us and others. By removing such layers, they argue, we allow access to the original nature of existence and to the true meaning of the other. As such, the failure to overcome contemporary conflicts rests in our inability to any longer recognize the other as our human brother and sister in the act of creation. The path to redemption, for all intended purposes, has been blocked.

Martin Buber’s organicism Responding to the events of the Second World War, the existentialist philosopher, Martin Buber, described the period as one in which God covered His face; when the light of heaven was eclipsed. Indeed, this period displayed the worst in human conduct as citizens of the world rushed to imprison each other, to destroy filial loyalty, to violate bodies, and to gas its minorities in industrial death factories. “Such indeed is the character of the historic hour through

|| 268 Cf. Dewey 1958: 14-15.

382 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup which the world is passing,” Martin Buber correctly observed.269 The eclipse of God and the violations that are associated with its reality have their source in the monadic character of daily life. Here the idea of the person as the relational animal par-excellence was phenomenologically shattered and replaced with a model and minimal self, off on his own hook, lost without a living community, and without a real sense of its history or the educative value of accrued wisdom. Such radical subjectivism, argued Buber, inevitably blocks our access to the original character of creation and to transcendence as such. This is to say, we became blind to the irreducible relational foundation of existence, or as Buber brilliantly expressed it by rewriting the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning is the relation”(1970:69). The latter underscores the pre-epistemic and organic character of existence which, not surprisingly, reveals an extraordinary affinity between the elastic nature of the world and the twofold possibilities of human behavior. As Buber put it, “the world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak” (ibid. 53). To overcome the eclipse, therefore, a metaphysical re-examination and commitment to and celebration of the pedagogical value of relations are required. In other words, a “backward return” to the relational reality that is revealed to us in the original encounter is necessary. Only in the original encounter can one truly hear and recognize herself when she is addressed by God (as creation itself); only through that which is revealed in the original encounter can one become fully human and recognize the humanity in others. An organically relational world contains, according to Buber, two basic modalities of relations that are open to all persons in their relations with individuals and with the environment. The two modalities of relations are captured by the combined words I–It and I-Thou which all individuals are capable of speaking.270 In such a non-Newtonian universe, the question of whether or not

|| 269 Buber 1988: 23. Buber exact words are: “Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God – such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing.” 270 Ibid. p. 3. “To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he can speak.” Buber’s usage of the term “speak” is in its mystical sense, as the ultimate act of creation. It was God, we should remember, that created the world through the act of speech:“And God said, Let there be light.”

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we enter into relationships with others is not open to us, as modern “social contract” theorists have erroneously suggested. The relational priory of creation is not subject to intellectual affirmation or cancelation since relations is our lot. The only genuine question before us is what type of a relational modality we choose to enter into. The choice is of the utmost importance since “the primary words are not isolated words, but combined words … For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It” (ibid. 3). Each modality, therefore, will shape the world as well as the self in radically different ways. For Buber, of course, one choice opens access to Divinity since, “in every Thou we address the eternal Thou” (ibid. 57), while the other eclipses the light of heaven; one leads to peace and understanding, the other to irresolvable conflicts and violence. The origin of the world and the annulment of the world are not in me; neither are they outside of me … they occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decisions, my work, my service. But what it depends on is not whether I “affirm” or “negate” the world in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul towards the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life… (ibid 142).

Most significantly, then, is the implication such a relational world has on our sense of personal and collective responsibilities. An open-ended universe requires special attentiveness on our part since such a universe is subject to continuous re-creation and amelioration. As such, our choices carry with them the ultimate responsibility for the lived conditions of daily life. In the case of contemporary conflicts, they are the direct cause for the contemporary eclipse. A long standing conflict, from Buber’s perspective, is reflective of the choices we make and not of the permanent conditions of creation. Each modality creates a “field of relations” which either establishes the world as an ameliorative, creative, and healing space, or as a space empty of good will and grace. Each choice is creative in a different manner and produces different spaces for our lives. The I-Thou relational modality leads to a rich social life in which individuals are humanized and respected, or as Buber puts it: ”When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no

384 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup longer among things nor does he consist of things” (ibid. 59). And in the same way it applies to the physical environment: … it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate a tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It … What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself (ibid 58).

The I-It relational modality, on the other hand, leads to the objectification of persons and the environment, and consequently, to the appearance of evil, ignorance, and conflict. The former, the I-Thou relationship, establishes a universal model for humanity; the latter, the I-It relationship, establishes a model of violation and relational starvation. In an I-It space, knowledge, the environment, and persons become mere intellectual objects, or “objects of general experience” (ibid. 53), as Buber expressed it. Ordinary men and women get dehumanized; animals and physical resources get used and objectified, and ideas become ineffective and unlived. Here the other is seen through the language and imagery of ideology, history, power relations, or other pre-reflective veils of cognitive intentionality. Here we “experience” the world rather than stand in a living relation with it. True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other [since feelings are cognitive experiences] … but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one other. The second event has its source in the first but is not immediately given with it … A community is built upon a living, reciprocal relationship, but the builder is the living, active center … human life … is created only by a third element: The central presence of the Thou, or rather, to speak more truthfully, the central Thou that is received in the presence (ibid. 94f).

Conflicts between individuals and collectives most frequently are the result of falsification in which the other is seen through the language and categories of ideation, or through what Buber called, “experience.” Here the other becomes the ‘Zionist Jew’; the Arab Terrorist’; or the ‘White Colonist’, and quickly loses his/her humanity. Here one does not know the other directly as a human being but only knows her through the cognitive experiences that are “within them.” In Buber’s language: “Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is ’in them’ and not between them and the world” (ibid. 56). By turning others into intellectual objects we block access to the humanity of the other and to the true purpose of creation. Interacting with others through

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experience alone robs the former of its lived presence in our lives; the space is rendered sterile and ineffective and “all images are illusions and selfdeception” (Buber 1988: 17). The other can no longer be the live creature who is my brother or sister and without whom my life has no independent meaning; the other becomes an object of experiential “having” or “owning.” Only in such a space, killing or violating others becomes possible and commonplace. It is a life of relational blindness that fails to grasp the inter-connectivity and mutual reciprocity of the actual encounter, of life redeemed. What is missing from the I-It relation, according to Buber, is the existential moment of meeting the other in his/her concreteness, prior to ideology. In their phenomenological nakedness, the ‘White Colonist’, the ‘Aryan Nazi’, the Persecuted Jew’, or the ‘Humiliated Arab’ are all identical; they all seek peace with the world, meaning for their predicament, safety in their personal journeys, trust in their causes, the love of a man or a woman, and hope for the afterlife. They are all equal partners in God’s ongoing act of creation. The existential moment in an I-Thou relation involves the leap into a moral reality that is independent of our own cognitive operation. Buber refers to such a leap as the act of “living in relationship to Being ‘believed-in,’ that is, unconditionally affirmed, absolute Being” (ibid. 31). Here one stands as “a whole person” in a deep existential and primitive relational space and meets the other through openness, directness, mutuality, and sense of equality. This space consists of, Buber argues, “what cannot consist in any feeling – the equality of all lovers” (Buber 1970: 66). As a result, both partners are positively ameliorated and genuinely transformed. What is revealed to us in the original encounter, according to Buber, is sixfold: First, that access to truth and meaning is through life’s concrete struggles and not in the escape into cognition and experience. Second, that in one’s firm actions in the world, one confirms with his/her life the meaning that was attained. Third, that through the original encounter one realizes that there is an independent purpose to creation, one that we did not create ourselves. Fourth, one realizes that the purpose of creation is Yihud (unity) and the building of peace, not the creation of division and separation. Fifth, that the world of humanity was meant to become a single body, for only an entire collective can demonstrate a life of unity and peace, of righteousness and justice. Sixth, that those who stand in the encounter, perhaps more than anyone else, experience the world’s lack of redemption against their skin and taste on their tongue the burden of the unredeemed world.

386 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup Finally, what is necessary for the overcoming of contemporary conflicts, according to Buber, is a return backwards to the space and presence that were revealed to us in the original encounter. For Buber, the act of return is associated with the Jewish and mystical conception of Te-shuvah. It is an act of total faith that marks a decisive turning point in one’s life; a renewal and total reversal in the midst of one’s normal course of existence. Short of such a return, access to the living spirit of God and to others’ humanity will forever remain blocked.

Emmanuel Levinas’ pre-ontological ethics Like Buber, the postmodernist philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, saw the Western world he faced as conflicted, grounded in nebulous theories about natural rights that perpetuate this conflicted existence. In this world possessive individuals are isolated from all genuine relation, swallowed up in the materialism that unconditionally ties them to competition, and sunk into a homelessness they are unable to explain to themselves. It is a world where the political and the ethical are not just separated but stand in opposition, and hence it is a world grounded in conflict, war, and violence. Like Buber, Levinas also identified the monadic character of daily life as the cause for our relational poverty and continuous conflicts. Under such self-negating circumstances, attempting to resolve conflicts on any level seems all but impossible. The perspective of opposing parties is their belief in Liberalism's "right to" (un)grounded in nebulous historical, religious or ideological claims. Similarly, the law that undergirds a country's continuity is incapable of producing justice in all cases, for the false belief in a "right to" often overwhelms truth resulting in injustice. Regardless of what is at stake, parties around a conflict see each other as only out for their own good, meaning any attempt to overcome conflict is met with utter mistrust not just about each other but also by an observing world. Sadly, this has been the approach to solving conflicts in the Western world, and consequently conflicts continue such as the Israel/Palestine conflict. However, as Levinas correctly observed, scrutinizing the concepts of justice, peace, and human rights from the perspective of the ego "make it clear that we have not yet grasped their true nature" (Burggræve 2007:85). This paper does not seek to address any one particular conflict. Rather the aim is to show that through the philosophies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel

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Levinas, another approach to conflict resolution is presented, an approach that would immediately seem to be much more positive in terms of the results it could produce. Levinas, who died only a few years ago, had observed and suffered an exaggeration of this conflicted condition during his time in a WWII prisoner of war camp where the everyday was dominated by brutal violence. But brutality hears nothing but its own force, sees nothing but its own force, as Levinas argues. Violence does not allow one to see "the face in the other; one [only] sees the other freedom as a force, savage; one identifies the absolute character of the other with his force" (Levinas 1993: 19) all the while being locked up within oneself. Only the dog Bobby recognized the prisoners as human beings. It was not a world of reason and proper discourse, for reason and language are external to violence, Levinas claims, they belong to another realm, to an exteriority that "overflows thought in a wholly different sense than does opinion" (Levinas 1969: 25). If morality has to be entirely free of violence, Levinas suggests, then "a profound link must join reason, language and morality" (Levinas 1990: 7). What is needed is an understanding of a self that questions its own freedom, questions a typical thinking that is cognitive and aimed at self-interests, in order to reach another kind of thinking "which constitutes probably the very pulsation of the Self" (Levinas 1983: 4). Thus Levinas reaches beyond cognitive intentionality to a transcendence of the finite, arguing it constitutes the irruption of the Infinite into the finite. This ethical significance is the meaning to be found in the proximity of the Other who may be a stranger, perhaps naked, perhaps destitute and undesirable (ibid. 113). As Simon Critchley interprets, [t]he ethical relation begins when I experience being placed in question by the face of the other, an experience that happens both when I respond generously to what Levinas . . . calls the widow, the orphan, the stranger, but also when I pass them by on the street, silently wishing they were somehow invisible and wincing internally at my callousness (Critchley 2007:56).

Like Buber’s Thou, only when I raise the Other, above myself, only then is the Other no longer considered a rival whose power must be overcome. Now the Other is valued as a dignified person with a "right to recognition, and treatment as Other" (Burgræve 2007: 105), thereby reflecting an Infinite Other. In view of this radical observation, Levinas first and foremost de-emphasizes the notion of individual rights and its institutionalized manifestations. "The right of man, absolutely and originally, takes on meaning only in the other, as the right of the

388 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup other man. A right with respect to which I am never released!"271 Instead he appeals to a justice that has its origin in the primordial relation with the Infinite or exteriority, what Buber called “the original encounter.” It is exterior to the totality within which existence takes place; it is a place where the ethical rules, so to speak, where there can be only peace, never war or violence. It is from this perspective that we can finally begin to understand peace from the perspective of peace and not from the perspective of war as we have hitherto done. Thus Levinas posits the idea of the Good over and above essence (Levinas 1979: 179, thereby reaching back to Plato for whom the idea of the Good was the source of being but not itself being, "exceeding it in dignity and power" (Republic 509b-c). Incidentally, Plato plays a significant role in Levinas' political philosophy when he is thinking the ethical or a justice that is prior to ontology, prior to knowledge and indeed prior to language and reason, dependent only on existential experience. But precisely because exteriority is a matter of experience it therefore constitutes a horizontal transcendence removed from all traditional metaphysics and is instead to be understood as a rupture of our participation in the totality of worldly events within which we actually live, and asserts itself in our dealings with the Other toward whom I am absolutely responsible "without having to worry about their responsibility in my regard," as Levinas insists, focusing on repetition and not on reciprocity. And he asks earnestly "if in this way the Other Person is not a value?" (1979: 187). Here Levinas echoes Kierkegaard when he adds that this responsibility is also the serious name of love without lust.272 This kind of transformed comportment lends itself to a deeper understanding of the prevailing conflict, helps us to see its true content, and allows for an entirely different approach to solving it. Why is this so? Because now the conflicted parties can see the Other in a completely different light. Now they can see that the otherness of this Other is as radically other as the origin of the primordial relation where justice is grounded in the Good. It is a justice that calls for

|| 271 Levinas, 1999: 127. See also Levinas 1969: 40. It is interesting to note that in 1990 Levinas found a 1934 article in the progressive catholic journal Esprit written just after Hitler took power. The writer questions whether "Liberalism is all we need to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject. Does the subject arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other man in the act of election that raises him up to this height?" Quoted in Horowitz and Horowitz 2006: 3. 272 Cf. Levinas 1999: 129 and Kierkegaard (1847/1962), in passim.

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absolute responsibility toward the Other precisely because of the Other's otherness, an otherness that we cannot know anything about and therefore cannot form any predispositions about. Rather, "this strangeness underlies the way in which he thrusts himself upon my responsibility, the way in which he places me under his command" (Levinas 1983: 111). It is a face that summons me to a justice grounded in pure peace, and for Levinas, such alterity inhabits its own authority that commands respect precisely because we can have no cognitive knowledge of it. That is to say, Levinas understands metaphysics as transcendence, not as a way of doing philosophy. Thus he identifies this diachronic relation in favor of the Other as the ethical relation; it is the concrete relation of transcendence. Here we need to interject that unlike Kierkegaard, Levinas does not differentiate between the Infinite Other and the Other human being thereby maintaining the emphasis on the otherness of the Other to whom I am absolutely obliged. As Bernasconi interprets, "it is accomplished as service of the Other, so that metaphysical thought is attention to speech or welcome of the face, hospitality and not thematization" (Bernasconi 1991: 235). For Levinas, then, justice precedes all other considerations, ethical and cognitive. It is an ethic before ethics! How is it different from a traditional understanding of ethics? How will it replace the traditional approach to conflict resolution? Traditionally, the ethical has always been burdened by its ontological origin, as Levinas argues; it has always been subjected to ontological determinations, at times presupposed by the cognitive as in Aristotle who argues we are capable of morality because we are rational and have language. Moreover, the ethical has always been located in the constituted subject, existing in and for herself, from Socrates' definition of justice as another's good to Kant's categorical imperative. That is to say, "the ethical significance of the Other challenges the fundamental status of ontology" (ibid). In contemporary times, the ethical has been reduced to its applied format, as if we could take it off and put it on like an overcoat. This kind of "applied ethics" is today a common course in most philosophy departments, where it is not attached to an ought, not attach to a must or an il faut, as Derrida would say, not attached to any conception of a responsible self. Rather it is often understood analogically with disinterested and disembodied historical and cognitive precepts, as a matter of strict rational/logical thought. Levinas, in stark contrast, declares the ethical has its non-origin in alterity, in the altogether Other which is not capable of representation. It is part of our human make-up, a first characteristic of what we call human being in an almost anthropological sense. "The ethical relation is anterior to the oppositions of

390 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup freedoms, the war which, in Hegel's view inaugurates History." That is to say, the alterity of the face does not alienate, but opens up the beyond, opens up to the Other and awakens the me to my responsibility. 273 In this sense, Levinas' face to face encounter is not unlike Martin Buber's conception of the original relation from which being now embodies something more "of which he did not know before and whose origin he is not rightly able to indicate" (Buber 1958: 109). The conclusion we must draw is that this justice that has its ground in the Good, precedes all ontology, indeed precedes existence in totality. It simply is before any other considerations of human existence, it is given. "I am therefore necessary for justice, as responsible beyond every limit fixed by an objective law. The I is a privilege and an election," Levinas declares (1969: 245). Justice is an anteriority that is 'older' than the a priori. As Mark Taylor explains, Since reason is, for Levinas, always thematic, alterity cannot appear to consciousness as such. Alterity, which eludes the binary opposites of being and nonbeing, neither becomes conscious or remains unconscious. Just as nonbeing is bound in a dialectic relation to being, so the unconscious, when understood as the complement of consciousness, is a negativity defined by the polar relation of opposites. Alterity, by contrast, is das ganz Andere, which is other than the otherness of the unconscious. . . . Consciousness, however, is not indifferent to this strange other. The Other, alterity, "interrupts" consciousness and selfconsciousness. (Taylor 1987: 194).

If this is true, how are we to understand Levinas' ethic as first philosophy? In what way is it possible to give justice priority over all other considerations?274 It all begins with the face to face encounter, we have something between us, like a table that both relates us and separates us, an inter-esse, as Hannah Arendt would say.275 But do we not already face the Other across the table, do we not already face the conflict in this sense? We may be face to face with the Other, but we are not seeing the Other, for we form all kinds of ideologically colored

|| 273 Cf. Levinas 1990: 18. 274 See Jegstrup (forthcoming), where I show why it is Europeans think so differently about justice than do the Americans by presenting Dewey and Rawls as continuing the Lockean tradition of placing rights before justice, while Continental philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, all place justice as prior to individual rights, something that has manifested itself to various degrees in Western European countries since World War II. 275 See Arendt 1958: 182.

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presuppositions about the Other, pre-suppositions that keep us from seeing the humanity in the face of the Other. To see this humanity in the Other, we have to acknowledge the Other as other, we have to not rely on any knowledge we may have or think we have about the Other, for it is precisely that kind of opposition that separates us from the Other and induces us to reduce the Other to the same. But the Other is nothing like myself. The Other is entirely Other about whom I can say nothing. It is a strangeness that "coincides with a non-in-difference in myself with regard to the Other." And Levinas asks: Is this not the very meaning of the face, of the primordial speaking that summons me, stirs me, provokes my response or my responsibility, which…would be the for-the-other, whereby the psychic life of humanity would be brought down to earth, and to a break with Heideggerian Jemeinikeit? (1983: 111f).

Through that Other the trace of the ethical before ethics reaches the egoistic I concerned only with his rights and transform him into the obliged me. In such an encounter the Other commands me, and I become absolutely responsible for the Other's welfare. What are his needs? What are his concerns? What are his wants and desires? These are the concerns that occupy me, and only when we face the Other in this sense can there be resolution. In other words, seeing the humanity in the face of the Other, seeing the vulnerability and nakedness in the face of the Other, renders me incapable of harming her. This is where the understanding of conflicts and their resolution has to begin. Does all this sound utopian? I don't think so. Do we not in fact, in history, have just such an example of a face to face encounter that prohibited any more violence?276 || 276 I am thinking of the extraordinary circumstance of World War I, the Christmas armistice, when sworn enemies, who had been bombarding and shooting at each other for months, people who had never met face to face, but had accidentally been thrown together in each their trenches and told to kill those in the other trench. Suddenly, on Christmas Eve, all the parties decided to lay down their arms and celebrate Christmas, and not celebrate it by themselves but together. They came out of the trenches, slowly, they came face to face with each other, and they said "Hello." Together they sang Christmas songs, they exchanged small gifts, and they discoursed with each other. They came face to face with each other's humanity, and they all met up with their ethical responsibility. The Christmas truce finally ended, everyone went back to their respective trenches, and suddenly they were awakened to their responsibility, and no one fired his rifle against the Other. It had become impossible to harm the Other; his humanity had manifested itself in their face to face encounter. Thus from neither trench a sound was heard, and apparently this went on for a while until the various military commands became aware of the situation. As it were, they had other ideas. The soldiers involved in the Christmas armistice were all ordered to shoot and kill, but none did. Instead the various military com-

392 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup In reality murder is possible, but it is possible only when one has not looked the Other in the face. The impossibility of killing is not real, but moral. The fact that the vision of the face is not an experience, but a moving out of oneself, a contact with another being and not simply a sensation of self, is attested to by the "purely moral" character of this impossibility . . . The infinite is given only to the moral view [regard]: it is not known, but is in Society with us (Levinas 1990: 10).

Primordial justice has spoken its silent language and reason concurs. From this perspective peace rules, violence and war become impossible. The trace in the Other points at me and at me specifically. There can be no substitution, I am responsible to the Other. However, "[t]he order that orders me to the other does not show itself to me, save through the trace of its reclusion, as a face of a neighbor" (Levinas 1981: 140). Thus Levinas locates the trace of the ethical in the Other who, so to speak, commands me to not kill him. "It is already an assignation, an extremely urgent assignation – an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment. It is a formula by spontaneity; the subject is affected without the source of the affection becoming a theme of representation” (ibid. 101). Or as Levinas characterizes the ethical in Difficult Freedom, For equality to make its entry into the world, beings must be able to demand more of themselves than of the Other, feel responsibilities on which the fate of humanity hangs, and in this sense pose themselves problems outside humanity (1990: 22).

This is how the original relation can manifest itself. This is how we envision Levinas' philosophy asserting itself in conflicted situations. Coming to discourse without mistrust and without the egological asserting only the needs of the Other, resolution suddenly becomes possible. The face to face encounter happens – we say 'Hello' to each other and we see in the face of the Other what calls upon our responsibility. The point is, we may have many face to face encounters that end in a misrelation, a relation grounded in antagonism where

|| mands finally removed them from this particular front and sent them to other fronts with their respective armies where they would not be faced with an enemy with whom they had experienced a Levinasian face to face encounter. From authentic reports, we know the German soldiers were all shipped to the Eastern front where they continued the violence and presumably died.

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taking precedes giving. But a true face to face encounter can only happen when we stop thinking that proper discourse can include mistrust. The true face to face encounter happens when we see the humanity in the face of the Other, and in seeing that humanity in the Other awakens my responsibility, awakens my generosity, awakens the ethical of the original relation within me. As Levinas claims, the self "is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existence consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it. It is the primal identity, the primordial work of identification" … "To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object" (1969: 36 and 49). Approaching the other in discourse begins with the 'hello.' And Jacques Derrida continues, "Hospitality becomes the very name of what opens itself to the face, or, more precisely, of what welcomes it" (Derrida 1999: 21). It is the trace —that disturbs the order of the world—the expression of the face, countenance, "the absolute epiphany of the absolutely other . . . where the Other calls out to me and signifies for me an order on behalf of his nudity and of his destitution—a summons to reply" (ibid.). Thus Levinas can say: Fraternity is precisely the relation across the abyss that is itself unbridgeable by mere knowledge of human otherness, and which, as responsibility, is neither a diminished knowledge nor a consequence of knowledge. I am responsible for others whether or not we share a common present. I am responsible for others above and beyond anything I may or may not have done in their regard, beyond anything that may or may not concern my own acts (Levinas 1990: 110).

This is my authentic stand—I am responsible before all else. That is Levinas' lesson.

Conclusion As we have shown, in order for our collective lives to become a genuine human community, Buber and Levinas wanted to bring humanity back to the relational priority of the original encounter. Both rejected the vulgar and extreme form of individualism, nationalism, and capitalism that emerged out of modernity and lacerated our lives with continuous conflicts and violations. The outcome, as observed by Buber, was a radical form of subjectivism that blocked our personal

394 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup and collective access to the transcendence. The latter finds its meaning in the living presence of our daily lives. In Buber’s language, reflecting Levinas' lesson, the meaning that is revealed in the original encounter, … is not that of ‘another life,’ but that of this life of ours, not one of world ‘yonder’ but that of this world of ours, and it desires this confirmation in this life and in relation with this world … The assurance I have of it does not wish to be sealed within me, but it wishes to be born by me into the world (Buber 1958: 110f).

Thus, our relational failure is not grounded in psychological dissonance, as some understand Kierkegaard’s self separated from its true origin; neither Kierkegaard nor Buber or Levinas reduced this isolation to a psychological pathology. Rather, they all identify the problem with the lack of a true self, a philosophical/anthropological problematic best characterized by Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias (482b): It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with disorder, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict myself.277

Not in order to escape the worldly as Plato may have in mind, but to meet it as one and not as a fragmented self. As it is, however, they argued, we have mistakenly believed that we as individuals (egos) should be in harmony with the world (as institutions or external objects), ignoring the objective relational nature of existence that ought to dictate our conduct. Buber and Levinas ask us instead to find a relational harmony within ourselves—to become “a whole person”—and in so doing, recognize the necessary relation and responsibility we share with the Other. Only when we start from the inevitability of relations can we begin to approach the world, approach a resolution of our contemporary conflicts, only then can we hope for the end of violence and war, only then can we truly know what justice is, only then, finally, can we begin to understand peace from the perspective of peace. However, it must be noted that Buber's and Levinas' approach to real politik has been seriously challenged for being unrealistic, otherworldly, and involving “leaps” of reason. Both positions, of course, involve a deep mystical (in the case of Buber) and messianic (in the case of Levinas) language that questions ontological claims. They both reflect an affinity to a pacifistic Jewish tradition that began in the Diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple. For

|| 277 Translation adopted from Arendt 1977: 151.

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two thousand years in exile, Jewish thought was inevitably transformed from a normative involvement in the practical flow of experience into one which is highly spiritualistic and voyeuristic. The realistic and empirical participation in the “power-dignity” relations was now the estate of other nations. The Jewish community became an ideational and powerless group of believers replacing real personal struggles with overcoming natural urges and collective conflicts of power with verbal disputes over the Torah. As such, the philosophical and theological observations, analysis, and recommendations made by Buber and Levinas often stand in radical opposition to the press of daily experience. What their pacifist tradition failed to grasp, observed Richard L. Rubenstein, is that, “after Auschwitz … our images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired” (Rubenstein 1966: x). In short, the events of the Second World War, which included the Holocaust, finally exposed the poverty of the pacifist/messianic/mystical tradition of exiled Judaism. In the case of Buber, for example, after the Holocaust he still opposed the 1948 creation of the State of Israel and considered its War of Independence as a moral failure. He also opposed the 1961 trial and execution of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, by the State of Israel. While for many ordinary individuals the capture and execution of the man who was in charge of the “final solution” reflected true and perfect justice, for Buber it was a grievous post-Holocaust moment. Thus, Rubenstein argued that, to assert, as did Buber, that the state has no right to take human life is to betray a fundamental ignorance of the nature of political sovereignty as well as the imperative confronting a sovereign state … Buber’s failure to take the Holocaust seriously as a theological problem was in fact a reflection of a large inability to deal realistically with the world of concrete actuality (Rubenstein 1979: 400).

David Glanz, another critic of Buber, also observed that Buber systematically ignored the actual forces of history. Buber, holding to a “super-historical” process which is unique for the Jewish people, continued to insist that a true relationship with the Eternal Thou was sufficient to lift the Jews out of their historical context, and even out of time itself. In holding to such a view, Glanz correctly observed, the actual process of history was completely abandoned (1978: 143). Levinas, for his part, exhibited “leaps” in judgment when he criticized the heroic Jewish fighters who revolted against their Nazi and Ukrainian tormentors

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in the Treblinka death camp. While most individuals saw in the Treblinka armed revolt the renewal of a new Jewish spirit, Levinas saw in the passivity of Diaspora Jews a virtue unique among people. For Levinas, as for Buber above, taking arms and engaging in the killing of your own executioners may be the easiest way out of a problematic situation but it would certainly pull one to the enemy’s amoral universe, i.e., contributing to the eclipse. For Levinas, the universal hero, like Christ himself, ought to hold eternal moral values while the rest of creation sinks into the depth of immorality. In response to the heroes of Treblinka, Levinas wrote: The highest duty, when “everything is permitted” consists in feeling oneself responsible with regards to values of peace … in not concluding, in a universe at war, that warlike virtues are the only sure ones; in not taking pleasure, during the tragic situation, in the virile virtues of death and desperate murder; in not living dangerously only in order to remove dangers and to return to the shade of one’s own vine and fig tree.278

As pointed out above, the position that genuine ethics is grounded in the desire to maintain virtues of peace rather than join the “virtues of war” belongs to a uniquely exiled, and therefore, pacifistic, history of Jewish thought; a history of the shift in the people’s ability to control the forces of nature to their reduced ability to control their inner selves. Accordingly, a true hero, concluded Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz (Martin Buber’s most consistent student) is one who is capable of controlling his/her natural urges, in particular, the urges to the virtues of war, violence, and revenge. If in such a struggle the individual stands his ground in keeping with his decision and against the prompting of his nature, that is heroism: it is the meaning of the sage’s words: “What is a hero? He who overcome his urges” (M. Avot 4:1).279

For those who use force to defend themselves or others, as national military forces do, Leibowitz argued that it can be determined that military heroism is the least worthy kind of heroism. For it is the only one that is to be found among the masses and in every people and culture in every period in history regardless of the spiritual, moral, or social level of those who possess it.

|| 278 As cited in Moyn 2005: 114. 279 From Y. Leibowitz, “Heroism” as cited in Cohn and Flohr 1987: 365.

Buber, Levinas and the original encounter | 397 This is certainly not the case with regards to the heroism of controlling the natural urges (ibid.).

One may argue that the above position is highly idealistic, and even Kantian, in its emphasis on overcoming instinctual urges in order for the free will, or the true self, to capture the eternal virtues of insight and reason, i.e., to see the Infinite in the finite. However, as most contemporary thinkers would have to acknowledge, such a view of ethics is practically unworkable since it contradicts the experiences of most ordinary men and women. The position that in a morally corrupt universe, taking up arms to defend oneself constitutes a moral failure is analogous to Kant’s conclusion in the Categorical Imperative that one should never tell a lie even if doing so would save his life or the lives of others. Such experiential absurdities, Nietzsche correctly observed, reflect the last stage of our philosophical and intellectual demoralization. As John Dewey also argued against the pacifists, any theory or position that will have nothing to do with power on the ground that all power is force and all force brutal and non-moral is obviously condemned to purely sentimental, dreamy morals … Not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real world (Dewey 1916:361).

The ethical issue that should concern us, concluded Dewey, is not whether or not to use force, this choice is taken away from us by the very nature of reality, but rather who is going to use it and how. Albert Einstein put it best when he remarked on the “pacifist problem” during WWII, “such people are not to be relied on in our time of crisis … In my opinion, the best method in this case is the violent one” (Einstein 1971: 106f). Finally, although the solution of the above problematic is outside the scope of this paper, we want to conclude that Levinas’ and Buber’s assumptions, analysis, and recommendations reflect the hope that cannot be contained in contemporary historical experience. Their insistence on the existence of fixed and revealed justice in the depth of God’s creation is indeed philosophically and politically ambiguous or otherworldly, but it is existentially correct. Where else can one find hope for miracles than in the mystery of our irreducible relational co-existence, i.e., in our face to face relations. When all else is lost, we must hold with Elie Wiesel that, when people of opposite sides meet face to face, miracles happen.

398 | Yorum Lubling and Elsebet Jegstrup

References Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1970). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bernasconi, R. (1991). Levinas: Philosophy and Beyond. In Bernasconi, R. & Critchley, S. (Eds.), Re-Reading Levinas. London: Continuum. Buber, M. (1958), I and Thou (2nd ed.; Smith, R., Trans.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (Kaufmann, W., Trans.). New York: A Touchstone Book. Burggraeve, R. (2007). The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love (Bloechl, J., Trans.). Marquette: Marquette University Press. Burggraeve, R. (1988). Eclipse of God. New Jersey: Humanities Press International. Cohn, A. and Mendes-Flohr, P. (Eds.) (1987). Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Critchley, S. (2007). Infinitely Demanding. London: Verso. Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Brault, P., & Naas, M., Trans). Berkeley: Stanford University Press. Dewey, J. (1958). Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books. Dewey, J. (1916). Force and coercion. International Journal of Ethics, 26, 359-367. Einstein, A. (1971). Ideas and Opinions. New York: Bonanza Books. Glanz, D. (1978). Buber’s Conception of Holocaust and History. Forum, Spring-Summer, 30-31. Horowitz, A. & Horowitz, G. (Eds) (2006). Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics. Toronty: University of Toronto Press. Jegstrup, E. (forthcoming). A Questioning of Justice – Continental Concerns. Kierkegaard, S. (1962) Works of Love (Hong, H., &Hong, E., Trans.). New York: Harper and Collins. Moyn, C. (2005). A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in post war France. Waltham, MA: Brandies University Press. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity (Lingis, A., Trans). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1979). The Contemporary Criticism of the Idea of Value and the Prospects for Humanism. In E. Marziarz (Ed.), Value and Values in Evolution (pp. 179-190). New York: Gordon and Breach. Levinas, E. (1980). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Lingis, A., Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Levinas, E. (1983). Beyond Intentionality. In Montefiore, A. (Ed), Philosophy in France Today (pp. 100-115). London: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. (1990). Difficult Freedom (Hand, S., Trans.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinas, E. (1993). Freedom and Command (Lingis, A., Trans.). Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, E. (1999). Alterity and Transcendence (Smith, M., Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Buber, Levinas and the original encounter | 399 Rubenstein, R. (1966). After Auschwitz. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Rubenstein, R. (1979) Buber and the Holocaust. The Michigan Quarterly Review, 17, 382-402. Taylor, M. (1987). Alterity. Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Zhihe Wang

CHAPTER NINETEEN Following two courses at the same time — on Chinese religious pluralism One Paradox, however, must be accepted and this is that it is necessary to continually attempt the seemingly impossible. Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East

Religious conflicts have been important phenomena in the West, and have led, accordingly to a belief in their inevitability. Many reasons—political, economical, cultural—are given to explain these phenomena of religious conflicts and have led to the popularization of the inevitability of religious conflicts. But philosophically speaking, Western binary thinking and its derivative, exclusivism, has played a very important role in reinforcing the idea of religious conflicts. Binary thinking refers to a Western way of looking at the world according to which, when presented with two options, binary thinking is inclined at the outset to assume conflict. If one option is correct, then the other must be incorrect, or at least incompatible with the preferred option. Closely related, exclusivism is the view that one religion contains all the truth relevant to salvation or genuine human fulfillment—people are excluded from this fulfillment unless they belong to one particular religion and adhere to its truth. Exclusivism is regarded by Richard Cohen as “an obstacle and roadblock” to pluralism.280 Religious Pluralism is the view that many traditions contain truth or truths relevant to salvation. Such an approach can help reduce and harmonize religious conflicts. Chinese Religious Pluralism has, to some extent, provided a good example in this respect. Religious conflicts and persecutions did exist in China for certain times in its history. For example, Daoists and Buddhists quarreled on and off for almost three hundred years from the fourth through the sixth century; however, even at the height of these quarrels, there have never been religious wars in China, no scholars condemned the others as so false or so wicked that they ought to be physically eliminated.

|| 280 Cohen 1996: 2-4.

402 | Zhihe Wang The Daoist idea of “following two courses at the same time,” a crucial feature of Chinese pluralism or non-dualism, has played an important role in avoiding religious wars and conflicts.

What does it mean to “follow two courses at the same time”? In China the idea of “following two courses at the same time” was first proposed by Zhuang Zi (369 BC - 286 BC),281 one of the cofounders of Daoism). This idea indicates a typical Chinese way of thinking: “Always try to be comprehensive in viewpoint, by transcending one-sidedness.”282 Zhuang Zi offers an illustration by pointing out that the sage harmonizes the extremes and “rests in natural equalization.” This means “following two courses at the same time” is not an artificial construct by a Chinese thinker. On the contrary, it is a natural state, an organic state, a harmonious state. From this Chinese perspective, religious pluralism is easy to understand. This way of thinking plays a vital role in the Chinese mentality. The value of Dao lies in its power to reconcile opposites on a higher level of consciousness. To use this power to reach a balanced way of living and a higher integration is the essence of Dao. Wang Yangming proposed the concept of “middle person” to strengthen this thinking. A middle person is a person who keeps the middle way rather than “going to the extreme.” For Wang Yangming, only the “middle person, who is open to the possibility of realizing harmony and integration, can gain access to the Dao.”283 It appears that the Chinese emphasis on “following two courses at the same time”—that is, seeking to affirm what might at first appear to be contrary points of view—parallels Whitehead’s understanding of the deepest nature of the human mind itself. Whitehead clearly stated that Buddhism and Christianity need be “looking to each other for deeper meanings,” rather than remaining “self-satisfied and unfertilized” (1996:146). In the Chinese context, this notion of a mind seeking wider or more inclusive perspectives is not limited to Daoism. “The Mean” of Confucianism also represents the same train of thought. For Confucius, “The Mean is the supremest virtue” (1994: 100). According to Zhu Xi, “Achieving the Mean is the name for not erring to one side or the other, for being neither too much nor too little.” This is the highest form of goodness, but it is also the hardest to

|| 281 Zhuang Zi, Ch.2. in Wing-Tsit Chan 1963: 184. 282 Sun 1971: 167. 283 Cf. Wang Yangming 1982: 205.

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achieve.284 Zhuang Zi realizes that “petty biases” are the obstacles to Dao. That is why he strongly rejects man-made divisions. The lesson of all this is that it is important to have, and to want to have, a generous and hospitable mind: one that wants to know more than it knows, and that trusts that there is more in other people and other religions that is available to be known. Of course, this impulse to know more cannot be arrogant. It cannot want to subsume or smother the other; it must let the other person be himself or herself, and the other religion be itself, too. But it simultaneously recognizes that there can be a smallness of mind, a narrowness, which is counter to the very nature of life. Zhuang Zi stresses that the Dao is often hidden by small achievement, i.e., by the closed systems into which petty minds shut themselves and would presume to shut others out. It is a sad state of affairs when “each side is blind to all but its own small parcel of self-interested truths, which it takes for the absolute” (Kaltenmark 1969:75). Zhuang Zi uses “a frog in the well” as a metaphor for this mentality (1983: 411). That is why he criticizes both Confucians and Moists because “each school regards as right what the other considers as wrong, and regards as wrong what the other considers right.”285 Since all is one to the sage—that is, all is deserving of equal regard—he will never impose his own whims as universal norms. Zhuang Zi believes that conflict is always due to the shortsightedness of human beings. Similarly, Yi Jing or The Book of Change tells us a Chinese version of ‘all roads lead to Rome’ by saying that ‘different roads lead to the same destination.’ This same destination need not be envisioned as a single salvation, but rather as becoming fully human by means of one of many different salvations. It need not be conceived as awakening to the same ultimate, but rather becoming fully human by awakening to different ultimates. It is a destination with many dwelling places, and the process of walking on the road is as important as the destination itself. This process of walking includes “following two courses at the same time,” and then recognizing that even those two courses can be seen from still more inclusive perspectives, not yet attained. The modern dualism or binary thinking that prevails in the Western world makes it very difficult for some Western believers to understand Chinese religious pluralism. As Chang pointed out, “unfortunately our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, not even a name, for the union of opposites through the middle path” (1970: 6). Therefore, it is very hard for a Western believer of one religion to be the follower of another

|| 284 Cf. Yulan Fung 1947: 106. 285 Cf. Wing-Tsit Chan 1963: 182.

404 | Zhihe Wang religion at the same time. Even John Hick, a representative of religious pluralism in the West, stresses his affirmation of either/or logic in religious matters. He remarks: We have to ask concerning these primary affirmations whether they conflict with one another. They conflict in the sense that they are different and that one can only center one’s religious life wholeheartedly and unambiguously upon one of them—upon the Vedic revelation, or upon the Buddha’s enlightenment, or upon the Torah, or upon the person of Christ, or upon the words of the Qur’an; but not upon more than one at once (1989: 373).

However, the dualistic thinking so prevalent in Western thought hardly exists in Chinese thought. In the West, the root of this seems to lie in the problem of divided loyalties, where being loyal to one religion requires, in the words of Hick, wholehearted commitment. Certainly there is wisdom in this idea; but the Chinese way believes that we can be wholeheartedly committed to more than one form of wisdom, guided by a comprehensive perspective that includes the wisdom of both, which itself is growing over time. The wholeheartedness is directed both to the comprehensive vision and to the traditions that are included within that vision. Our perspectives can become wider over time, not unlike the way in which our minds and hearts can create and discover wider contrasts, and then wider contrasts for those contrasts.

The philosophical foundations of “following two courses at the same time” Why is the idea of “following two courses at the same time” alien to the West when it has been so widely accepted in China? It is because of the notions of Process, Openness, Harmony, Yin-yang, the idea of Treating the Three Religions as an Organic Whole and Equality—these concepts constitute the organic components of Chinese pluralism. Process It is well known that Chinese thought lays great stress on process. That is why Whitehead emphasized that his philosophy has a special affinity with Chinese thought compared to Western thought. “One side makes process ultimate, the other side makes fact ultimate” (1978: 7). Whitehead identifies being, which in the West has often been construed in static ways, with process and becoming. Charles Hartshorne, another important process philosopher, also saw this affinity between the Chinese and the Whiteheadian outlook: “Chinese thought lacks

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the prejudice against becoming which is a weakness of Hindu and even Greek thought” (1979: 324). The Chinese outlook on life is in agreement with this emphasis on becoming. For example, an emphasis on becoming is implicitly embodied in its understanding of Dao, the ultimate concept in Chinese tradition. Dao is not a transcendent and self-enclosed substance, not a supernatural God but a dynamic process, the creative advance of the world. It is becoming itself. The word “Dao” is often translated into English as “way” or “path.” In the English language these words are nouns, and English nouns are sharply distinguished from verbs, things from actions. However, in Chinese there is no sharp distinction between nouns and verbs, and a great many Chinese words serve as both. That is the reason why one who thinks in Chinese “has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities” (Watts 1957: 19). Thus, when the Chinese speak of the Dao, they have in mind a path and an action, a way and a process, according to which everything is in process and everything is in the state of incessant transformation. This tendency toward process thinking is also found in the Yi Jing (The Book of Changes), which says that everything that interacts with others is promising and prosperous. For example, since Heaven and Earth interact and communicate, all things in the universe are prosperous. It is the process that “binds all things into one, equalizing all things.”286 This emphasis on process means that there is a subtle but important difference between the Dao and the traditional idea of God in the Western sense. Dao as way is not God as an absolute, transcendent creator-lawgiver who “deliberately and consciously governs the universe” (Watts 1957: 132). Such an idea of God is alien to the Chinese mind. This is not because the Dao lacks consciousness or directivity; it is described in many different ways. It is because the Dao is not transcendent in the sense of being totally outside nature, and it is not governing in the sense of being manipulative or overpowering. On the contrary, Dao according to Lao Zi, the founder of Daoism, is a naturally creative process. The Great Dao flows everywhere. It accomplishes its task but does not claim credit for it. It loves and nourishes all things, But does not lord itself over them.287

|| 286 Cf. Wing-Tsit Chan 1963:177. 287 Lao Zi 1999, Ch. 34.

406 | Zhihe Wang The Dao loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord itself over them. The Great Dao that flows everywhere does bear some resemblance to the everadaptive and ever-changing God of love described by Whitehead, founder of process philosophy in the contemporary West. For Whitehead, God loves and nourishes without dominating or coercing. In this sense, Whitehead’s God is Dao. Dao’s dimension of process is one of its most important characteristics. In addition, in Chinese thought, Dao is not simply a cosmological reality; it is also a way of living that human beings can embody: they can move within its rhythms and it can move within their way of living in the world. In this respect it may be similar to what Christians mean by the spirit of God, or Holy Spirit. As people live in the Dao, they enjoy the process of living itself. In Whitehead’s words, their own reward is in the immediate present. They are not in a hurry to reach destinations; the traveling itself is enjoyable. This traveling can involve being open to people of different religions, learning from them, assimilating their insights, making friends with them, being changed by them. Thus the religious life itself is a process. Dao is regarded as the indefinable, concrete process of the world, the way of life. For Chinese process thinkers, and perhaps for Western-influenced process thinkers as well: “The road (‘the way,’ ‘the Dao’) is better than the inn.”288 The Chinese advocacy of process lays a deep foundation for Chinese religious pluralism. Openness Closely related to the realization of the primacy of process, the notion of openness has been valued by many Chinese thinkers. Here openness refers to two things. It refers to a feature of reality as it can be known: the creativity of the universe itself as inexhaustible. And it also refers to the best way that humans can approach this creativity: by not pretending to have final or “closed” answers to fundamental questions in life, such as “How should we live?” and “What is ultimately important?” That explains why Confucius was “against the fierce attack on heresy” (2008: 22). Such an attack only does harm; it closes off opportunities for mutual interaction and further learning. As an example, to Zhuang Zi, a cofounder of Daoism, it is important to enhance openness by rejecting one-sidedness. According to Zhuang Zi, the “Dao” or “the Way” is infinite. “There is no boundary for Dao.”289 It is open-ended and has never had borders. Zhuang Zi challenges people to abolish their petty dis-

|| 288 Cf. Hall & Ames 1989. 289 Cf. Zhuang Zi 1999: 28

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tinctions and go beyond their usual small world. Zhuang Zi’s rejection of exclusive mentality is another profound part of Chinese religious pluralism. Ancient Chinese thinkers loved to use music as a metaphor for the infiniteness of the Dao. The possibilities of music are infinite. No musician, even the greatest one in the world, can exhaust them. Similarly, no thinker can exhaust the truths of Dao. The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao The name that can be named is not the eternal name.290

The Dao is infinite, so it could never be finally or completely realized in one embodiment. In other words, the Dao or Way is “open-ended.” Dao is also the unity of infinite and finite. On the one hand, Dao as embodied is always particular and finite. On the other hand, the embodied Dao participates in Dao itself. Its inherent freedom is to be manifest anywhere and everywhere, to be more than any of its expressions. The appropriate way to dwell in its rhythms is to be open-minded oneself, not pretending to have final answers. This allows for the co-existence of different articulations of the Dao. According to Berling, the Chinese approach to Dao “entailed humility about the limitations of any single articulation of doctrine and an openness to the fact that truth will be never exhausted as long as human beings live in a world of changing circumstance” (1997: 98). In Chinese tradition, she further points out, “religious persons could disagree strongly and fundamentally on how best to embody the way in a particular circumstance, but none could claim to articulate a final and definitive statement of the Dao” (ibid.). A defining characteristic of this refusal to claim finality is humility. In Chinese process thinking this humility is described in “Autumn Flood,” of Zhuang Zi, through the self-mockery and self-reflection of the Lord of the river who thinks “he is better than anyone else.” The Lord is Yelang, and Zhuang Zi criticizes Yelangism by describing the smallness of the human situation: I sit here between heaven and earth as a little stone or a little tree sits on a huge mountain. Since I can see my own smallness, what reason would I have to be proud of myself. Compare the area within the four seas with all that is between heaven and earth—is it not like one little anthill in a vast marsh? Compare the Middle Kingdom with the area within the four seas—is it not like one tiny grain in a great storehouse?291

|| 290 Lao Zi 1995, Ch. 1: 58. 291 Zhuangzi 1968: 176.

408 | Zhihe Wang The second plank in Chinese religious pluralism, then, is this emphasis on Dao as infinite and inexhaustible, and on the heart of authentic living as requiring an attitude of openness and humility. Harmony The concept of harmony is another important constituent underlying Chinese religious pluralism.292 Although different Chinese religions have their own emphases, all of them recognize the primacy of harmony. Harmony, in Chinese tradition, pervades the cosmos and is a central goal of all personal, social, political, and religious relationships. To some extent, harmony can be regarded as a “deeper faith” in Whitehead’s sense, which refers to “the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness.”293 In China, the sages are always open to harmonious engagement and thus exhibit this faith. For Confucius, “achieving harmony (he) is the most valuable function of observing ritual propriety (li).”294 So “at the core of the classical Chinese worldview is the cultivation of harmony.”295 What is the meaning of harmony?. It must be stated again and again that harmony is different from sameness. Yan Ying, the prime minister of Qi in Warring Period, said: Harmony is like soup, there being water and heat, sour flavoring and pickles, salt and peaches, with a bright fire of wood, the cook harmonizing all the ingredients in the cooking of the fish and flesh… If water be used to help out water, who could eat it? If the harp and the lute were the same, who would delight in them? In this way sameness is of no practical use.296

Thus harmony is a creative process amid which things are balanced with one another, but amid which something new also emerges. Harmony is itself a building up, not a tearing down. The salt flavoring is the other to the bitter, and the bitter is the other to the salt. With these two “others” combining in due proportion, a new flavor emerges, and this is what is expressed in “Harmony” and what brings things into existence. Where water helps out water, the result is just || 292 Editors’ comment: Note that in chapter 13 above the notion ‘harmony,’ which is the usual English translation of the Chinese ‘hexei,’ is replaced by ‘compatibility.’ 293 Whitehead 1967: 18. This quote is inspired by Dr. George Derfer who has been exploring the concept of deeper faith by Whitehead. 294 Confucius 1998, Book 1.12: 74. 295 Sun-tzu 1993: 62. 296 Zuo Qiuming. ZuoZhuan. http://www.artx.cn/artx/detail.asp?id=4834

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the flavor of water, and that is what is expressed in “sameness supplementing sameness,” and “sameness having no offspring” (Fung 1947: 107f). In Shi Bo’s words, “It is harmony which produces things. Sameness has no offspring” (Guoyu 1980: 8). Harmony is different from sameness. Sameness is destructive; harmony is constructive. The founders of Chinese traditions saw this healing effect in harmony. For example, Confucius said that “a nobleman values harmony but not uniformity, while a mean person values uniformity but not harmony”297 To Chinese thinkers, harmony is closely related to the openness described above. Whereas sameness is built on closing things off by pretending they are identical, Harmony (he) is built on cultivating difference or respecting otherness. In Neville’s words, “harmony is a mixture of components and patterns, requiring each and giving each equal importance” (1991:61). The harmony that respects otherness or cultivates the maximum benefit from difference is the ideal state of all personal, social and political interactions. Harmony in the religious field does not mean that different religions become one and the same. Harmony does not mean swallowing differences. Chinese harmony fully values difference. According to it, each religion is unique in itself. Willows are beautiful in their greenness and red flowers are beautiful as red flowers. It is the uniqueness that makes the religious world colorful. Harmony does not mean losing one religion’s uniqueness, but recognizing others’ uniqueness and respecting them. The red flower has red light, the yellow flower has yellow light. All of these flowers are independently beautiful. Working together harmoniously, they make the whole garden beautiful without losing the beauty of each. No one is superior to the other. Different religions include each other but still maintain their own basic stance and features. As Cobb points out, “The world is full of opposites, but these opposites are co-resident in all things or events. They require each other, inform each other, and even constitute each other”; the key point is to search for “an appropriate harmony.”298 In Chinese religious pluralism, this emphasis on an appropriate harmony includes harmony among people and between people and nature. Thus it can contribute to a constructively postmodern way of living in the West as well as the East. As John Cobb explains, in the West today “there is a deep revulsion from the results of centuries of striving for freedom, mastery, transcendence, and intensity at the expense of harmony” (1979: 424). Perhaps the theme of

|| 297 Jiang 2010: 235. 298 Cobb 1979: 421-26.

410 | Zhihe Wang creative harmony is key not only to the needs of a world torn apart by religious violence, but also to a world separated from its natural source, the earth itself. Yin-Yang thinking Another foundational concept of Chinese pluralism is the concept of Yin-Yang, which permeates all aspects of Chinese thought and culture. The Yin-Yang symbol, or Tai Chi icon, a perfect circle divided into two equal, contrasting, interpenetrating parts, has been widely used by all major Chinese religions including Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. It indicates the dynamic coincidence of opposites and “affirms the harmonious holding together of contrasts in a balanced synthesis, the integrating of divergence into a rounded whole” (Smith 1963: 70). According to Yi Jing or the Book of Changes, “Heaven and earth correlate with the vast and the profound; four seasons correlate with change and continuity; yin and yang correlate with sun and moon; the highest excellence correlates the goodness of easy and simple.”299 The relationship between yin and yang is that of a partnership. The universe would be impossible without their interaction. Yin and yang are primary constitutive principles. All things arise out of a combination of these primal cosmic principles. They are two polar forces, the interaction of which brings the whole universe into being. All its constituents, such as heaven and earth, night and day, men and women, movement and rest, are expressions of the underlying yin and yang in eternal interplay. “There is nothing in which yin and yang do not participate” (Smith 1963: 71). There are two misconceptions of yin and yang. One is to treat them as Cartesian substances. In fact, yin and yang are not mutually external entities that are already defined; they are ways in which the events of the world function in relation to one another. Another related misconception is to treat them as opposite poles in the Western sense, according to which everything in the universe is either yin or yang. In truth, yin and yang are not opposite poles, incompatible and irreconcilable with each other. Instead, they embrace each other, contain each other. Yin can be found in yang and yang in yin. Each presupposes the other. They mutually “ground each other” (Zhou 2002: 3). This is very close to Whitehead’s understanding of the relationship between one and many: “The term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one’, and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many’” (1978: 21).

|| 299 Guo 2005:44.

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Equally important, yin and yang are themselves in process. The perception of yin and yang expresses “the deepest rhythm of the universe as process” (Cobb 1979: 422). Yin and yang are not fixed categories, but together constitute a dynamic, transformative process in a complex and interactive relationship. There is a fluidity of yin and yang insofar as both are beneficiaries of and contributors to the harmony. Any static interpretation will represent a departure from yin-yang theory itself. It is in this dynamic sense, then, that Zhuang Zi proposes the concept of “Bing Sheng” which means co-existence, co-growth. George Chih-Hsin Sun prefers to translate Bing Sheng as “growing together” (1971: 158). Most important to the purpose of this work, however, is the fact that yinyang thinking helps overcome the binary thinking that has been so common in western modernity. The theme of yin and yang invites a non-dualistic way of thinking that enables the Chinese people to harmonize the conflict between different religions. As George Rowley states, “The reality of Dao resides in the fusion of opposites” (1947: 74). In typical Western either/or thinking, a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, in the same way. Truth, therefore, is essentially a matter of either/or. It is either this or not this; it cannot be both.300 Yin-yang thinking advocates a both/and thinking, a “not only but also” thinking. From the perspective of yinyang, there is no binary division between yin and yang, heaven and earth, man and nature, being and non-being, one and many, good and evil, subject and object, knowledge and action. They are partners rather than opponents. They are relational polarities. They rely on each other. Each treats the other as a necessary condition of its own existence. More important, yin-yang thinking emphasizes mutual nourishment, that is, yin and yang nurture and help complete each other. From yin-yang thinking, “neither Yin alone can be productive, nor Yang alone can be productive” (Cheng 1982: 73). According to Zhang Jingyue (1563-1640), The man who is good at nourishing Yang must seek Yang in Yin. With help from Yin, his vitality becomes unlimited. Likewise, the one who is good at nourishing Yin must turn to Yang, learning to find Yang in Yin. With help from Yang, his or her Yin becomes an endless resource for life.301

Inspired by this way of thinking, people with religious conviction and affiliations can recognize that they need people with different convictions and affiliations in order to be themselves and have their own identity. They complement || 300 Cf. Knitter 1985: 217. 301 Cf. Zhang 1959: 974.

412 | Zhihe Wang each other, enrich each other. And they recognize that even as they might internalize features of other religions, becoming pluralistic in their own hearts and minds, they always do this from a unique point of view that requires others for its completion. In China, even with its tradition of having multiple religious identities, no one is precisely Daoist-Buddhist-and-Confucian in the same way. As Lik Kuen Tong observes, “Here, real opposites are never mutually exclusive, but are, though opposed in one sense, intrinsically interdependent and complementary—indeed internally related as roots of each other” (1979: 307). For Chinese thought, the task of thinkers is to synthesize and harmonize the two seemingly opposite events based on the idea of interrelatedness and interdependence. The visual image of the yin-yang symbol is a teaching in its own right. If we look at the yin-yang symbol carefully, we will find two fishes, one black and one white, embracing within a circle. The black represents yin, the white represents yang. Each occupies half of the space. The circle symbolizes harmony, the universe as an organic whole. The equal division of the space symbolizes the equality between yin and yang. That means that everything is equal in itself and of itself and no one is superior to the other. The two embraced fishes indicate the interdependence and interrelatedness between different things. There is no pure yin. Likewise, there is no pure yang. Yin and yang are conditioned by each other; they need each other and complement each other. Yin and yang complete each other by “adding something not found in the other” (McDaniel 2005: 124). However, the most interesting thing is that each fish has an opposite color eye: the black has a white eye, the white a black one. This special eye symbolizes the mutual containment between yin and yang. There is yang in yin, there is yin in yang. The philosophy behind this symbol is that there is no absolute line between opposite things. There is something in common among different things. There is some connection between different things, even seemingly conflicting things. The mutual complementarity between yin and yang has been regarded by the Chinese as an important principle for harmonizing conflicting principles, and it can help harmonize people’s minds when faced with what seem to be irreconcilable conflicts in their religious identity. The visual image of the yinyang symbol not only deconstructs the binary either/or thinking and advocates a non-binary both/and thinking, but also promotes a thinking of mutual complementarity which makes room for co-existence and co-growth, mutual permeability, mutual learning and mutual enrichment of different religious traditions. Even as the Jew and Muslim might have their own identities, they can learn from one another. And so can the Christian and the Buddhist and the Confucian and the Daoist. In the world today, there are not two poles to yin and yang; there

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are as many poles as there are religions. Yin-yang complementarity is like that of a rainbow with many colors, each of which adds to the whole. The need on the part of members of all religions is to say: “I see something of you in me and me in you, even as you are more than me and I am more than you. Deep down, we are all equal.” It is apparent that the concept of mutual complementarity between yin and yang provides a third way—in my view a healthier way—of coping with the conflicts among different religions. Religious diversity and the organic whole The idea that the different positive religions are incomplete without the other suggests to the Chinese mind that they form a single whole or body: a single yet diversified great Way. A monistic perspective might conclude that the Chinese religions are saying the same thing. A more Chinese perspective along the lines of the Pluralism I am proposing, however, advocates a whole that is organic rather than homogenized: a one that includes many rather than a one that erases diversity. That is, human religion is regarded as an organic whole in plural forms. As an unseparated organic whole, different religions face the same fate, share the same concern, shoulder the same responsibility, develop together, grow together, like “all the Sun, the moon, the stars” are parts of the sky as whole, “share the same sky” (Lou 1989: 240). According to Wang Yangming (1472-1528), the founder of Mind School, the great man regards Heaven and Earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and the country as one person. As to those who make a cleavage between objects and distinguish between the self and others, they are small men.302

Like Wang Yangming, many scholars of Chinese history realized the disadvantage of being narrow-minded and exclusive in one’s thinking. They argued, therefore, for the compatibility of the different religions. It is traditional in China to put strong emphasis on oneness or the organic whole. In The Shaolin Temple (or Shaolin Monastery), the most famous Buddhist temple in China, established in 495 during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534), there is a painting titled “Three Religions,” in which Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Zi, the founders of the three major religions in China are shown sitting together. Confucius is talking, Lao Zi prepares to question him, and Buddha is deep in thought. A poem is also shown in the painting. Two lines of the poem are as

|| 302 Cf. Chan 1963: 659.

414 | Zhihe Wang follows: “The three religions originally are a family, just like the lotus root, lotus leaf, and lotus flower.”303 Similarly, Dao Hongjing, a famous Daoist, stressed the practice of both Buddhism and Daoism. He called himself a disciple of Buddha, and established two shrines in Map Mountain, a Daoist camp, where he worshiped in each every other day. He even asked his disciples to cover his body with a Buddhist cassock when he was dying. Bai Yuzhan emphasized that “the three religions are different in form; the same root source they share.”304 Following the same train of thought, the Whole Real School of Daoism advocated san jiao he yi, namely the integration of the three religions; that is, the integration of Confucianism, which values rationality, Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which values spiritual cultivation, and Daoism, which values the cultivation of bodily life. Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism were regarded as coming from the same fountain. Indeed, according to Wang Chongyang, the founder of the Whole Real School, Lao Zi, Confucius, and Buddha are all gods. They established three religions in their respective places that offered salvation in different ways. Therefore, “the three religions are like the three legs of the ancient cooking vessel, sharing the same body. They are also like the different branches of the same tree” (Zhang 2004: 398). Besides Dao De Jing (Dao Te Jing), the other classics Whole Real School believers studied were the Buddhist Lotus Scripture and the Confucian Filial Piety. Based on his view of three religions as equal, Wang also set up a society named Association for Equality of Three Religions. Zhang Sanfeng, another famous Daoist and the founder of the Wudang School, also expressed the idea that the three religions in China came from the same origin. Zhang maintained that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism had the same tendency to cultivate moral character and to benefit the people of the world. Buddhist thinkers also emphasized the convergence among the different religions. De Qing, a famous monk of the Ming Dynasty, said, “The saints of the three religions have the same heart, they differ in ways” (1989: 830). This emphasis on having the same heart can be misleading. It does not mean that they contain the same insight or have the same practice or even that they lead to the same end—“they differ in their ways.” It means that they all reveal something about the truth of the universe, which has many different faces, and add to what it means to live in the world in a fully human and satisfying way. They all form part of a single organic, creatively unfolding Way.

|| 303 The original of this painting is in the Collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing. 304 Daozang 1988: 677.

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This is how, in Chinese Pluralism, we can interpret the idea of Lin Chaoen, who was called by his contemporaries “master of the three religions”305 due to his advocacy of the harmonization of the three religions. For Lin, the three religions are one because their Dao (Way) is one. From his point of view, the Dao or the Way is one, and each of the three teachings embodies the Way. To Lin, the Dao is the unity before the three religions were differentiated.306 Lin Chaoen stresses that what he is doing has nothing to do with combining the three religions into one: “One is always a Buddhist, always a Daoist, and always a Confucian.”307 Seen within the perspective that I am developing, Lin means that, within a given human being, one can find the whole of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism as integrated into a single life through aspects of each tradition, which are part of that whole. Thus, in Chinese Pluralism, it is not true to say simply that each religion forms part of a larger whole that is outside the self from which a person then picks and chooses; it is also true to say that, as a person selects aspects of a religion, the whole of the religion is embodied in that person’s life through the aspect he or she chooses. In the life of a person whose self includes the three traditions, the three traditions are truly present: “There is no place it reaches that is not Confucian, no place it reaches that is not Daoist, and no place it reaches that is not Buddhist.”308 It is clear, then, that Lin tends to maintain the uniqueness of each religion while he seeks for the universality among them. He is a Confucian, but he is not an exclusive narrow-minded Confucian because he keeps his mind open to other religions. As Berling points out, “although his self-identification was still fundamentally Confucian, he was more relaxed about affirming the positive contributions of the other traditions” (1980: 199). From the vantage point of Chinese pluralism, we can identify more within one tradition than another, but we can also include the others within our lives.

Practical aspects of “following two courses at the same time” Is the idea of “following two courses at the same time” representing Chinese religious pluralism just an idea or is it workable? What are its concrete or historical manifestations? As a matter of fact, the concrete and invaluable practice of “following two courses at the same time” has been realized throughout Chinese || 305 Cf. Berling 1980: 198. 306 Lin Chao-en, Shuo Hisa, cf. Berling 1980: 217. 307 Lin Chao-en. San-chao hui-pien, ch.9, XII:5.28b-29a. Cited in Berling 1980: 201. 308 Cf. Berling 1980: 201.

416 | Zhihe Wang history. It constitutes a special landscape in Chinese religious life. Among the many manifestations, the most distinguished one is “peaceful co-existence.” To Chinese eyes, it is one of the ultimate aims of Chinese religions to exist together peacefully. As Chan puts it, historically the three major Chinese religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism) “have been going on in parallel, or harmonized, or synthesized” (1967: 114). This peaceful co-existence reached its peak during the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1260-1368), and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties, where it took the form of san jiao he yi, or the integration of three religions. One practical manifestation of Chinese religious pluralism is reflected in the ordinary arrangement of temples or shrine compounds. At times, temples dedicated to the founders of three religions can be found in many parts of China. The images of the sages of the three religions were enshrined in many temples, and halls for the three religions dot the countryside in China. Moreover, where Chinese folk traditions held dominant influence and the worship of deities was paramount, some temples or shrines lodged not only images and altars devoted to the primary deities of the locale, “but also images of and altars to a host of other deities” (Berling 1997: 103). Even the gods were not jealous. This approach of peaceful co-existence among sages and deities, and for that matter among people who revere them, is found in one of the most famous temples in China: the Flying Cloud temple, a Daoist temple in Qingyuan, Guangdong. What impresses people visiting the temple is the worship of Confucius, Lao Zi, and Buddha, the founders of the three major Chinese religions. In some temples, the three founders are seated, augustly and harmoniously, in the place of honor in the main hall. Of course, it is one thing for temples to depict peaceful co-existence, and another for people to practice such co-existence in their daily lives. This practice, too, has been part of the Chinese tradition. In the words of John Berthrong: Confucians and Christians have never managed to slaughter each other for religious reasons with the sustained gusto of Christians, Jews and Muslims in their long and unfortunate inter-religious history. While many Confucians were not well disposed towards what they saw as yet another imported heterodox tradition, there were rarely religious crusades or campaigns to eradicate the faith in spite of sporadic hostilities between the two communities (1994: 46).

At the heart of Chinese pluralism is this practice of peaceful co-existence among people of different religions, even if they have problems with those other traditions. This practice can be especially advantageous in a world now torn with religious strife, and it can be embodied by people of other religions—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs—who, while not Chinese, may have some-

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thing to learn from Chinese Pluralism, even as the Chinese have something to learn from them. In conclusion, I have no intention of drawing too rosy a picture of Chinese tradition; the Chinese, too, have had their sectarian conflicts. But on the whole there is an underlying sense in Chinese culture that harmony between religions is desirable and natural, and that conflict is an exception rather than a rule. This is the spirit of what I am calling Chinese religious pluralism. The idea of “‘following two courses at the same time’” offers an alternative to the exclusivist mentality that sometimes prevails in the modern West, perhaps especially among fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. As a non-dualism, it can assist overcoming the binary thinking behind modern religious conflicts. If the need in our time is to learn to “live with diversity” (Cobb 2002: 52), then perhaps China offers a ray of hope which, in cooperation with rich other cultural heritages, can yield a more open, more prosperous future for all people: religious and non-religious alike.

References Berling, J. (1980) The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en. New York: Columbia University Press. Berling, J. (1997) A Pilgrim in Chinese Culture. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Berthrong, J. (1994) All Under Heaven: Transforming Paradigms in Confucian-Christian Dialogue. Albany : State Univ. of New York Press . Chan, Wing-Tsit. (1967). The Historic Chinese Contribution to Religious Pluralism and World Community. In Jurji, E. Eed.) Religious Pluralism and World Community (pp. 113–130). Leiden: Brill. Cheng Hao (1982). Er Cheng Yi Shu. Cheng Hao’s Discourse, in Selected Works of Chinese Philosophy History. Beijing: China Bookstore. Chun-yuan, Chang. (1970) Creativity and Daoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry. New York: Harper & Colophon Books. Cobb, J. (1979) Post-Conference Reflections on Yin and Yang. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 6, 421-26. Cobb, J. (2002). Postmodernism and public policy: reframing religion, culture, education. Albany NY: SUNY Press. Cohen, R. (1996) Christian Exclusivism. First Things, 62, 2-4. Confucius (1994) Analects of Confucius. Beijing: Chinese Teaching Press. Confucius (1998). The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (Ames, R. &and Rosemont, H. Jr.,Trans.). New York: Ballantine Books. Confucius (2008). Analects of Confucius. Beijing: Zhonghua publishing house. Daozang (1988). Daozang. Beijing: Cultural Relics Publishing House; Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore; Tianjin: Tianjin Ancient Books Publishing House. De, Qing (1989). The Completed Work of the Dream Roaming of Great Master Hanshan. Taipei: Wenshu Press. Fung, Yulan (1947). The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy (Hughes, E., Trans.). London: Kegan Paul.

418 | Zhihe Wang Guo Qiyong (Ed.)(2005). Selected Readings of Chinese Classic. Beijing: The People Press. Guo,Yu (1980). Selected Works of Chinese Aesthetic History (Philosophy Department Peking University, Ed.). Beijing: China Publishing House. Hall, D. & Ames, R. (1989). Correlative Thinking: Classical China and the Purification of Process. Unpublished paper presented to the Society for the Study of Process Philosophy. Hartshorne, C. (1979). Process Themes in Chinese Thought. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 6, 323-336. Hick, J. (1983). An Interpretation of Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jiang, Boqian (Ed.) (2010). Sishu Reader. Beijing: New World Press. Kaltenmark, M. (1969). Lao Zi and Daoism. (Greaves, R., Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Knitter, P. (1985). No Other Names? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Lao Zi (1995). Dao De Jing. Bejing: Peking University Press. Lao Zi (1999). Dao De Jing. Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House/Foreign Language Press. Lik Kuen Tong (1979). Whitehead and Chinese Philosophy: From the Vantage Point of the I Ching. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 6, 297-321. McDaniel, J. (2005). Gandhi’s Hope: Learning from Other Religions as a Path to Peace. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Neville, R. (1991). Behind the Masks of God. Albany: SUNY. Rowley, G. (1947). Principles of Chinese Painting. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, W. (1963). The Faith of Other Men. New York :New American Library. Sun, G. (1971). Chinese Metaphysic and Whitehead. Ph.D. Thesis at Southern Illinois University. Sun-tzu (1993). Sun-tzu, the Art of Warfare (Ames, R., Trans.). New York: Ballantine Books. Wing-Tsit Chan (Ed.) (1963), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Wing-Tsit Chan, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wang Yangming. (1982). Chuanxilu—Selected Works of Chinese Philosophy History, , Vol. 2. Beiing: China Bookstore. Watts, A. (1957). The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon Books. Whitehead, A.N. (1978). Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology (Griffin, D. and Sherburne, D., Ed.). New York: Free Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1996). Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1967). Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press. Zhang, Jiebin (Ed.) (1959). Jingyue Completed Works. Shanghai: Shanghai Science and Technology Press. Zhang, Jiyu (Ed.) (2004). Zhonghua Daozang. Beijing: Huaxia Press. Zhuang, Zi (1968). The Complete Works of Zhuangzi (Watson, B., Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Zhuang, Zi (1983). The Current Note and Translation on Zhuang Zi (Chen Guying, Ed.). Beijing: China Publishing House. Zhuang, Zi (1999). Zhuang Zi. Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House/Foreign Language Press. Zhou, Dunyi (2002). A Collection of Works by Zhou Dunyi (Songlin, T., Ed.). Changsha: Yuelu Bookstore.

Augustine Shutte

CHAPTER TWENTY Conflict and religion—secularity as a standard for authentic religion Actual religion, as it is understood and practiced, has always been the cause of conflict in the world. And if we consider our contemporary world we can see that this is still true. In this article I want to argue that this need not be the case. In fact I want to go further and suggest that it is only in our contemporary world that the conditions at last exist where religion, instead of being the cause of conflict, can be the way of overcoming it. But for that to happen religious people will have to change the way they understand and practice their religion. And this will mean changing themselves. This is not such an outrageous suggestion as it may sound. As august an organization as the Parliament of the World’s Religions has as its rationale the idea that there can be no true peace in the world unless there is peace between the world’s religions. And there can be no peace between religions unless there is dialogue between them. Hence the need for a parliament. Implied in such a rationale is that religions have at least something to learn. I wonder though how many of the moving spirits in the Parliament believe that it is precisely our scientific and secular age that has something to teach them, something of transforming importance. I want to note at the beginning of this article how my conviction that this is so has been made more secure by my recent reading of Charles Taylor’s extraordinary book A Secular Age. The rest of this article will I hope reveal the depth of my indebtedness to him; its inadequacies however remain my own. The identification, indeed the condemnation, of religion as the source of all human conflict, is found in the religious text that lies at the root of European culture, namely the Book of Genesis, in the stories of the first eleven chapters. These stories are well known but usually not well understood. They were put together fairly late in the history of Israel, from at least four different oral and literary traditions, to provide an insight into the predicament from which, according to the editors, Israel (and indeed humanity) needs to be saved. The final story, that of the Tower of Babel, illustrates best the point I wish to make. Throughout the earth men spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary. As they moved eastwards they found a plain where they settled. They said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about the whole earth.” Then

420 | Augustine Shutte Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built. “So they are all a single people with a single language!” said Yahweh. “This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.” In this way they were scattered over the whole face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. And so it was named Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. From there Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of the earth. (Genesis 11, 1 – 9)

The first thing to understand about this story is that it presents us with a perfect picture of what the biblical authors believe is their god’s purpose in creating us. It is their conviction that Yahweh intends humanity to achieve its true identity in a single community of mutual understanding and love in intimate union with him. Don’t be misled by the jealous psychopath who plays the part of Yahweh in the story. This is simply the way that Yahweh appears to the eyes of sin. For this is what the story is really about: sin. And the essence of sin is idolatry, selfworship. Humanity is trying to be like its creator. Paradoxically this too is what our creator intends. The key to cracking the code of these Genesis stories is the idea that we are created to be the creator’s image. There is no space in this article for me to prove this point. But a glance at the Adam and Eve story should show I am right. The thought structure of that story is the same as the story of Babel: Adam tries to be like his god and Yahweh is jealous and prevents him. To cut a long story short, it is the way in which we try to realize the image of the creator in ourselves that is the problem. It is something that can only be done by Yahweh himself; he has created us to be like him and it is only his power that can achieve this. We attempt the same project with the powers under our control, in self-assertive separation from the only kind of power that could succeed. This is the essence of idolatry in the thought-world of the bible. The idol itself, the god, has no power but what we give it. It is under our control, but we become enslaved to it. Idolatry is really self-worship though not understood as such. And the inevitable result of that is conflict, conflict between self-centered selves, but also and more seriously, conflict within us as well. This dip into a sacred text might be considered irrelevant to dealing with the problems of a secular age. But I think not. The biblical identification of idolatry as the source of all conflict, both between and within us, has clear connections with the thought of the key figures in the secularization process in European philosophy. Kant’s criticism of what he called ‘positive’ religion (by which he meant any religion that was based on external authority), Feuerbach’s understanding of religion as ‘projection’, even Marx’s idea of religion as a form of ‘alienation’ and Sartre’s as a form of ‘bad faith’, use language very different from that of the biblical prophets. But they have this in common, and in com-

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mon with the biblical authors, that they see religion as involving a loss of freedom, that freedom that is the essence of our humanity. The only difference between these secularizing thinkers and the biblical authors is that the latter think that religion need not be like that. They believe that these idolatrous religions are mistaken answers to a real need. Before we leave the story of Babel it is worth noting how closely its identification of linguistic diversity as the prime symbol of human disunity is to the reality of prehistory. Although the earliest recorded linguistic material is only 6000 years old, some authorities assert the existence of human language of a kind as early as two and a half million years ago. Most however make a far more modest claim: 120,000 years ago, with the appearance of anatomically modern humans, or even later with the existence of deliberate burial and art. What all agree on is that when language does make its appearance on earth it is in literally thousands of different forms. Each small human grouping had its own language. And this perhaps explains why human history is uniquely one of intraspecific conflict and warfare from the start. Unlike other species humanity is bound by its nature to be not merely a genetic community but a linguistic one as well. But a linguistic community is a human creation. And the earliest human groups would find their identity in their own specific language. It would symbolize the bond between members of the group and a way of distinguishing it from its competitors, and thus enemies, in an environment of scarcity. This line of thinking is confirmed by what Herbert McCabe has shown in his profound study of our capacity for language in Law, Love and Language. The problem for the linguistic animal is that the linguistic social community, the group within which there can be established relationships of communication, is never coextensive with the genetic community. Men are not able to communicate with each other simply by virtue of being of one species, but only if they belong to one particular group. It was no doubt inevitable that this should be so. Systems of conventional signs would be developed in very local communities, and it is not at all surprising that communication should be achieved in one group at the expense of others, so that linguistic communities are not merely separate from each other but mutually hostile…Those who at one time shared your language and other customs may drift away so that separate, competing and finally hostile groups are formed.” (1968: 110) And he concludes, “Because of this the development of communication, the growth of human culture, is not a simple or single story. It consists, in fact, of a series of attempts to establish a stable human community, a stable area of communication, all of which attempts have ended in failure.” (1968: 111)

In the light of this the story of Babel gains added power as a depiction of the human predicament. And the notion of a universal language that would unite the whole of humanity in a genuine community at last is a powerful symbol for a conflict-ridden world.

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The Axial revolution To get a clearer view of religion as both the cause of conflict in the world and also the possible solution to it, one needs take a closer, and philosophical, look at religion. The historical sciences have provided abundant data on religion. All human cultures until our own are religious in the sense that they believe in and attempt to access and enact sources of power that transcend human capacities to fulfil our most important needs. These are their gods. And in spite of the huge diversity of religions and differences in their gods, two needs, and desires, stand out as universal: the need to overcome sickness and death, and the need to overcome human conflict of every sort. Whatever else they are concerned with, the historical religions have all attempted to provide solutions to these predicaments. Because the god of a particular religion is always seen as possessing power transcending human powers but still precisely suited to fulfilling the deepest needs of human nature, the conception any religion has of its god and the conception it has of human nature and its needs are always intrinsically linked. As in the book of Genesis, if humanity is the ‘image of God’, so also is God the ‘image of man’ as pointed out by Feuerbach. This is a philosophically important observation since, although knowledge of the gods is beyond the capabilities of philosophy, knowledge of human nature is not. Insight into our own humanity can thus possibly provide us with a standard for assessing both the credibility and the adequacy of a particular conception of a god. The history of religion is after all littered with the graves of the gods, gods that were unable to fulfill our needs, or gods discarded because we had learnt to fulfill our needs ourselves. But the history of religion also sees an evolution in humanity’s conception of a god that parallels the evolution of our understanding of ourselves, a deepening insight into human nature, its capacities and needs. It is generally agreed that the thousand years or so leading up to the beginning of the Common Era saw what is now called the Axial revolution in human culture and religion. The best known case of this is of course that which took place in the history of Israel. But something similar seems to have happened in the East, in India and China, and, though in a slightly different way, with the Greeks. This evolution in consciousness is exhaustively documented and analyzed in Eric Voegelin’s magisterial Order and History. As he describes it, it was a move from a cosmological to an anthropological view of the order of the world. As far as religion is concerned it was the discovery of transcendence, both in the sphere of the gods and in that of humanity as well. By speaking of transcendence in this connection I am not referring to the feature of religion I

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have already identified by that term, namely that the gods are always seen as possessing powers that transcend our own. The Axial discovery is of a transcendence of an absolute kind, a transcendence of the world itself. Yahweh, the god of Israel, unlike the gods of ‘the nations’, is not an inhabitant of the world but its transcendent creator. And humanity too, as Yahweh’s image also is possessed of a certain transcendence and creativity, though, as befits an image, one that can only be realized in total dependence on Yahweh. In the history of Israel this insight is traditionally ascribed to Moses, though it probably developed at a much later date in the prophetic tradition, possibly as late as Second Isaiah. Of course it was by no means universally accepted or understood, and the writings of the Old Testament, and even the New, document the struggle between this new conception and the primal religion of the people. We see Paul, for instance, scolding the Galatians for their inclination to ‘turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits…that by nature are no gods’ (Galatians 4. 8-9) In biblical religion this development reaches its paradoxical-appearing climax in John’s gospel’s identification of Jesus as the personal presence of the Father: “He who has seen me has seen the Father…I am in the Father and the Father in me.” (John 14. 9-10) Even then it took several centuries for Christian theology to spell out the absolute transcendence that this identification involved. Remnants of primal religion lasted well into the Middle Ages. Indeed, as we shall see, they are still with us today. The idea of the union of creator and creature in Jesus, made possible by the absolute transcendence of the creator and the dependent transcendence of the creature, had no parallel in any other religion. In Greek culture however something similar took place, though superficially it appears very different. I am thinking of the progressive disappearance of the Greek gods in favor of philosophy. Socrates I think was still a ‘believer’. Plato was not, although he used quasi-religious myths to express his deepest insights. And Aristotle, although he uses the term ‘god’ to speak of the metaphysical origin of the universe, does not think of it as a god. He has no religion. It is Plato perhaps who gives us the best expression of the Greek discovery of transcendence in his idea of the immateriality of the human soul and its eros towards the transcendent Form of the Good. Though it is Aristotle’s argument for the reality of a transcendent cause of the universe that is used by Aquinas to give what is the definitive expression of this insight in Western thought, Plato’s twin conceptions of the Form of the Good and the immateriality of the human soul represent the form in which a philosophical conception of transcendence enters the history of European thought. In spite of the Axial discovery, the conception of a genuinely transcendent reality, whether in a religious or a philosophical context, struggled to become

424 | Augustine Shutte inculturated in the pre-modern culture of Europe. All pre-modern cultures, and that includes the whole of human history, have a sacral world-view. By that I mean that the world is seen as filled with spirits, namely beings rather like us with intelligence and will but with all sorts of powers that we don’t have. They are also quite different from us, being for the most part invisible and not subject to the usual constraints that we are. But in every pre-modern culture the really important thing about these non-human spirits is that they can influence our lives for good or ill. They can for instance cause fertility in crops and livestock or in us. They can also cause drought and floods. They can kill us or save us from death; they can even control our thoughts and feelings. Because the spiritual beings of the sacral world-view have powers that go beyond human power they are usually termed supernatural by those who study pre-modern cultures. But that is not how they are thought of in sacral societies themselves. These do not make a distinction between natural and supernatural. These spirits are seen simply as part, indeed the most important part, of their world. A lot of the energy of sacral societies is spent in trying to influence the spirits, by magic or by ritual, so that they will fulfill the needs and desires that people feel to be beyond their own power to fulfill. This is the form that religion takes in sacral societies; these supernatural spirits are the gods of sacral societies. As I have already mentioned, both the Old Testament prophets and the followers of Jesus still lived in a sacral society in which the gods were seen as supernatural spirits connected with some or other thing or place. Even the prophets and the followers of Jesus believed in the existence of these supernatural spirits, as can be seen in the quotation from Paul. Their concern was that they shouldn’t be treated as gods. When people did that they did themselves terrible damage, lost their freedom, died a psychological death. The same was true of the Greek (and Roman) world. Ordinary people, including emperors but excluding philosophers, still lived within a sacral view of the world, worshipping supposedly supernatural spirits. In fact Christianity itself, in spite of Jesus’ teaching about the only god that was worthy of our faith, once it became the official religion of Europe, soon inculturated itself in the sacral worldview of medieval Europe. Jews and Christians, and now Muslims as well, continued to believe in supernatural spirits. Although they were forbidden by their religious authorities to treat these supernatural spirits as gods, there is no doubt that they did so, putting their real faith in rituals and miracles and visions and relics and shrines, and even in the religious officials themselves. In the sacral world of medieval Europe the Christian teaching was that all spiritual power came from the transcendent god of Jesus that had been defined so carefully in the councils of the early Church. In practice, however, this conception of

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a god and its relations with us came itself to be sacralized and treated in an idolatrous and superstitious way.

Absolute transcendence and the transcendence of human nature The attempt of theologians who were also philosophers to combine their philosophy with their religion in pre-modern Europe was in fact focused on the notion of transcendence, the absolute transcendence of our god and the derived transcendence of our human nature. Aquinas’ use of Aristotle on both issues represents the culmination of the pre-modern development. In his famous ‘Five Ways’ (of demonstrating the existence of God) and in all his writing on God Aquinas is concerned to convey what he calls the incommensurability of God and the universe. Note here that I am using a capital letter for the word ‘god’. I am in fact using it as a proper name to refer to the god of Jesus and Christianity. And of course this god is a certain kind of being, different in important ways from other gods. It is precisely this difference that the notion of incommensurability is designed to convey. It means that you cannot add God and the universe and get two. Not because either is unreal, or because they are one and the same, but because the reality of each is so different. There is no common measure in terms of which they could be compared or added to each other. A good example of Aquinas’ conception is that of a poet composing a poem in which he also appears. There is the poet composing, who is 'in' the poem as its creator, and the poet in the poem, who is (Christians would say) the 'incarnation' of the poet. But it makes no sense to say they are two poets. The reality of the one, though identical to the other, is wholly derivative. The reality of the other is creative. God is the creator of the universe. For Aquinas this doesn’t simply mean that God started it going, but that God causes it to be at each moment that it exists. The pair of terms ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ are used together to define this relationship between creator and creature: to say that God is transcendent is to say that God is not the universe nor any part of it; to say that God is immanent is to say that he is in the universe and every part is as what is causing it to be, as the poet is in the poem he is composing. This notion of God’s incommensurability is of the first importance, not only because it preserves and refines the Axial insight into transcendence, but also because it makes a complete and final break with a sacral world-view possible. And it is also the only possible way of accommodating a notion of a god to the insight into human transcendence that is the other side of the Axial revolution.

426 | Augustine Shutte Aquinas also uses Aristotle to elaborate his understanding of the transcendent element in human nature. Aristotle had defined human beings as rational animals, where rationality was the specific difference between us and other animals. And for Aquinas it is rationality that is the transcendent element in human nature. His theory of human nature can appear dualistic, as with Plato: an immaterial mind in a material body. But Aquinas is at pains to distinguish his view from Plato’s, and indeed from that of Augustine. In spite of his strong arguments for the immateriality of the intellect, he is equally insistent that bodiliness is an essential part of our humanity. His formula is the same as that of Aristotle: mind and body are related as form to matter in constituting the individual human being. Only the composite is real. To properly understand Aquinas’ identification of the transcendent element in human nature with our rationality one must remember that rationality had a very different meaning for him and Aristotle than it has for modern thinkers. For the moderns rationality comes to be merely our reasoning ability. It does not imply a kind of knowledge or insight that goes beyond sensation. Not so for Aquinas. Following Plato and Aristotle he saw the human mind as having a capacity for the real which, though it was bound to use the senses, was able to go beyond them to achieve a deeper kind of (metaphysical) knowledge. He was fond of using the Aristotelian tag that “through sense and intellect man is in a way all things.” We were not creators of the universe, but we could contain it in our minds! It was this lack of limitation to the human intellect that led Aquinas to identify rationality with transcendence. In spite of all his attempts the language in which he formulated his view was always open to dualistic misinterpretations, and to the preservation of an aspect of a sacral world-view in the idea of a separate spiritual soul that was the real human person.

Secularization In spite of the work of philosophical theologians like Aquinas the actual religious belief and practice of Europe remained firmly rooted in a sacral worldview. It was for this reason that the revolution in consciousness we call secularization came to be seen as, and actually had the effect of, the destruction of religion. Insofar as one’s religion was understood and expressed in terms of a sacral world-view it was precisely that. It is to an understanding of the phenomenon of secularization that we must now turn. I have already acknowledged Charles Taylor’s influence on my approach to this topic and I want to quote him at the start of this part of this article to emphasize the precise point at which my approach coincides with his. In contrasting his own view with the standard

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understanding of secularization, whereby an increased (scientific) understanding of the world leads to its ‘disenchantment’ and hence to the end of religion, he has this to say: But I don’t think this can suffice as the main story behind secularity. There is another important piece, which deals with the thrust to complete the Axial revolution; I mean Reform, which strives to end the post-Axial equilibrium, that is, the balance and complementarity between pre- and post-Axial elements in all higher civilizations. It is this process, occurring in Latin Christendom, that I have been focusing on, through the various social and cultural changes which have been generated on the way. Let’s refer to this as the Reform Master Narrative (2007: 774).

I am sure it is right to see the secularization process as a continuation and universalization of the Axial discovery of transcendence. In what follows I will try to explain why. I think I have already said enough to give a sufficient idea of a sacral worldview (and of the sacral worldview of pre-modern Europe), with which to contrast the secular worldview that began to take shape in Europe in round about the 1400s. Like any large-scale human phenomenon it didn’t happen all at once. And like any human phenomenon it involved both a change in consciousness and culture as well as a change in human life and society in every sphere. With hindsight we can now see it as part of the process of the evolution of humanity, an evolution that did not cease with the appearance of homo sapiens, but now takes a more than biological form. Secularization, because of its holistic character, has many different aspects. The development of science is just one, though a supremely important one, of these. The unbroken line from Copernicus through Galileo to Newton forms a bridge between the medieval and the modern world. The new scientific approach to gaining knowledge and the world-view that it produced must be seen as a continuation of that begun by Greek philosophy and continued through the pre-modern period by chiefly Muslim thinkers but also by Jewish and Christian ones as well. Genuine knowledge was the work of human reason discovering the true causes of things, rather than the creation of the mythopoeic imagination telling stories about the gods. It differed from these earlier forms of rationality however in being much more down to earth, insisting that knowledge must be based on experience and experiment and formulated in objective, and ideally in mathematical, terms rather than on idealistic speculation. Physics replaced metaphysics, if you like. The new worldview introduced by the pioneers of modern science involved a complete rejection of the sacral view of the world. Reality was what could be known by science; all else was simply the creation of imagination. You must not

428 | Augustine Shutte think however that the rejection of the sacral world-view involved the rejection of religion. Most of the early scientists remained religious believers; this was because they recognized that the Christian god was not a supernatural spirit in a sacral world, but the transcendent creator of it. For them the creator of the world could not be part of it, nor did the creator intervene in its workings; they had no time for miracles or revelation from on high. The world worked according to the laws its creator had built in to it and which it was the work of science to discover and to put to good use. So religion continued, but it was religion without revelation or supernatural happenings. As a result it was called by its adherents natural or rational religion, and by its opponents, who were unhappy that their god had been excluded from their world, deism. Needless to say religion of this kind had very little in common with the traditional religious beliefs and practices of ordinary folk. It is not too difficult to see that this new scientific approach to knowledge involved a rejection of authority in the name of the freedom to follow one’s own reason wherever it might lead. In the medieval period Aristotle had been enthroned as the ultimate authority in the sphere of knowledge. Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Jewish thinkers like Moses Maimonides and Islamic ones like Ibn Rushd all deferred to Aristotle. Science in the modern period was now free of this constraint. Human reason must be free if it was to gain real knowledge of the world. The scientific attitude thus was based on a faith in human powers, in this case reason, a faith that included a recognition of freedom as an absolute human value. It is in fact the notion of freedom as the most important fact about human nature and the most important value for human life that is the heart of the phenomenon of secularization. An eloquent expression of this is given by the Renaissance poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man. God is speaking to Adam: Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is yours alone nor any function peculiar to yourself have we given you Adam, to the end that according to your longing and according to your judgement you may have and possess what abode, what form, what functions you yourself shall desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. You, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand We have placed you, shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature. We have set you at the world’s centre that you may from there more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker and moulder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer (Taylor, 1989: 199-200).

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This notion of the absolute importance of an individual’s freedom of choice was not only embodied in the new status of human reason in science. It also entered the sphere of religion itself. The Protestant Reformation involved a rejection of authority in the religious sphere, in this case that of religious officialdom in the Christian Church, in the name of the freedom of the individual believer in their relationship with their god, a relationship that was not mediated by an authoritative tradition. In spite of the fact that it was essentially a religious movement Protestantism also involved a wholesale rejection of many of the sacral elements in contemporary Christian culture. Luther too, as well as Copernicus, can thus be considered as one of the founding fathers of a secular culture. Although their immediate interest and sphere of influence were different there is something in common between the religious reformers and humanist scholars like Erasmus and Melanchthon. The notion of humanism is in fact very helpful in understanding the phenomenon of secularization and the way in which a secular world-view differs from a sacral one. In a sacral worldview people experience themselves as being subject to the power of supernatural spirits. The course of their lives depends on powers other than their own. In the secular worldview all that has changed. Non-human nature is no longer the home of supernatural spiritual powers; the spirit and the power are now perceived to be in us. Nature has been laid open to our inspection and use by science and technology. Its supernatural character has evaporated and we are now in control of our own lives. This exaltation of humanity at the expense of the supernatural spirits of the sacral world can also be seen in the realm of art. Although angels and demons still appear in the work of the artists of the Renaissance, there can be no question that even the most religious art of Leonardo and Michelangelo and others is a celebration of humanity itself. It is the human figure that is seen as the best image of the divine. Human freedom of choice has given us a godlike character; self-determination is akin to self-creation, as the quotation from Pico above so eloquently shows. Secularization also had its effects in the moral and political spheres. The notion of human rights made its first appearance in moral and political theory. This idea was closely linked to that of human freedom, both as the central fact about human nature and the most important value in human life. The fundamental rights of the individual to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, together with a number of others that followed from them, were considered essential to the individual’s exercise of that freedom and in this sense ‘natural’, derived from human nature’s capacity for freedom, and so absolute, objective and universal, to be recognized by individuals and governments alike. It was also the importance now attaching to human freedom that led to the idea of the

430 | Augustine Shutte ideal form of government being a “government of the people by the people for the people”. It was only in such a society that the laws to which one was subject were the laws of one’s own making (through one’s free participation in the lawmaking process) and therefore did not represent a destruction or diminution of one’s freedom. What a far cry this is from such a notion that the political authority, the emperor, is a god, or even a belief in the divine right of kings to rule, so characteristic of a sacral culture.

Demythologization The deepest effect of secularization was perhaps that on philosophy, which was now separate from science as a form of reflection on one’s own capacity for science, one’s capacity for thought and choice. A primary focus of this new kind of philosophy was religion, as the sphere in which all the fundamental human powers of understanding, choice, and feeling were involved. And the effort of philosophy in the new secular culture to become more conscious, more consistent and more critical about one’s religious beliefs led to a transformation of the understanding of religion as a human activity. In the first place none of the distinctively sacral elements of religion could remain. There was no place for spirits, demons or angels, visions or miracles, even revelation or sacred texts, in the new approach. Kant was the first great modern philosopher to attempt to give a complete philosophical theory of religion. The title of the essay in which he sketches the outlines of this gives a good idea of the new approach. He called his book Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. He (and all the philosophers who followed him) took Christianity as the classical example of a religion. And they took it in the pre-modern sacral form in which its doctrines were formulated and in which it was still practiced. It is important to recognize that secularizing philosophers like Kant did not reject religion as merely a feature of a sacral culture that had been superseded. On the contrary they recognized religion as a central concern in human life. But they saw it as needing to be understood in a new, and they thought, more accurate way, a way different from that in which those who practiced it still understood it. So they embarked on a process of what came to be known as demythologization. They saw this as getting at the essential truth that the myths and other sacral elements were based on but which they expressed in a pre-modern way. As I have said, the religion that was focused on was Christianity. These philosophers considered Christianity to be the religion that containing the most important truths, but what they said about religion they intended to apply to all

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religions, not just Christianity. For Kant the essence of Christianity was its morality, which he saw as teaching the absolute value of human individuals as such, whatever their particular achievements or status. He expressed this moral insight by saying that one ought always to treat persons as ends in themselves, never simply as means to an end. He demythologized traditional Christian teaching about the divinity of Jesus by saying that this meant that Jesus was a perfect example of one whose life embodied this morality and who could act as an inspiration to others to do the same. Although Kant demythologized Christianity in this way he also argued that living this morality authentically implied a belief in human freedom, the immortality of the soul and the existence of a really transcendent god. Thinkers who followed him however, went even further in their attempts to thoroughly desacralize religion. Hegel, while still insisting that Christianity contained a vitally important truth in mythological form, took the final step of demythologizing the notion of a god, as a being other than humanity with power transcending human power to fulfill our human nature. What Christianity believed about our god, Hegel, argued, was true, but true of us. In an exhaustive series of lectures on the philosophy of religion he explained the essential doctrines of Christianity as revealing a profound insight into the nature of humanity itself. The central doctrine of our creator’s incarnation in Jesus he understood as expressing the deep insight into the nature of man as Spirit. I write this word with a capital letter as Hegel did to show that for him it meant something different from the notion of spirit in the sacral worldview. Hegel got the idea from the Christian notion of our god as creator, savior and sanctifier as expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity. To say that humanity is Spirit, for Hegel, meant that humanity was self-creative and capable of fulfilling its own nature as a being with a capacity for selfconsciousness and self-determination in the course of human history. He saw the whole of human history as humanity’s growth in becoming conscious of this capacity and beginning to exercise it so as to become fully human. Christianity had held this knowledge in mythological form. Now in the secular society it had emerged into full consciousness and for the first time in human history humanity could now live in its light. Of course Hegel’s ‘translation’ of Christianity out of the language of a sacral worldview into the secular language of his own philosophy was not acceptable to those who taught or practiced traditional Christianity. Whatever truth it might contain regarding humanity and its powers it certainly had no room for the Christian god. In fact Hegel’s rejection of the traditional notion of a god and of religion soon became the foundation of an ever more stringent criticism of Christianity, and indeed all religion, as incompatible with human freedom. Feuerbach, in his The Essence of Christianity (enthusiastically translated

432 | Augustine Shutte into English by the novelist George Eliot), was the first to explain religion as ‘projection,’ humanity projecting its own real but undeveloped powers onto a transcendent being in which these powers were realized. He was followed by Marx who saw religion as the expression of humanity’s alienation from its true essence by a society from which most people were excluded by the way in which the economy was controlled by a few. Religion was the projection into a heavenly realm of an ideal future of human solidarity without oppression of any kind. In the classless society at which everyone ought to aim there would be no need for the illusory consolation of religion and it would simply wither away. When one looks back on the secularization process that began with people like Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Luther and Machiavelli and ended with nineteenth-century thinkers like Kant and Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx one is presented with a transformation of consciousness and culture that must be one of the greatest humanity has ever undergone. By the time the twentieth century dawned the sacral worldview had virtually vanished from the European scene. Belief in a world dominated by supernatural spirits could not co-exist with the discoveries of science and the world- view that grew from them. At least in theory it could not. In fact it does, and even increasingly so, as the varieties of contemporary fundamentalism show. Nevertheless there is a built-in limitation to the scientific worldview because of the methods of science. It is true as far as it goes, and it would be a mistake to believe things that are incompatible with it. But it is not the whole truth. And here it is sensible to reconsider the sacral worldview, which after all is the way in which humanity saw the world for the whole of human history, except the last few hundred years, and still does—except for a small sophisticated group of people like myself (and some if not most of you) who have grown up in a scientific-technological milieu. The belief in a supernatural spiritual realm is so universal to humanity that it is difficult to believe that it is simply a mistake. And here it is well to remember that the demythologizing philosophers I have mentioned all thought that there was indeed something of supreme importance that the sacral terminology was trying to convey. And in one way or another I think that they more or less discovered what it was. What Kant and Hegel and others came to understand (though not fully as I will presently argue) was that the supernatural realm of spirits was real after all, though not in the world in the way imagined in the sacral worldview, but in us! There was something in human beings that transcended the world of nature, something real that was beyond the reach of science. Kant was so sure of this transcendent, spiritual dimension, although he shared the materialistic deterministic worldview of the science of his time, he was forced to be a dualist. Hegel went one step further, so convinced was he of the reality of this transcend-

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ent spiritual side of human beings. He saw it as underlying the whole process of evolution and history, and only surfacing fully in modern human selfconsciousness and self-determination. Everything was an incipient form of Spirit. As I have said, I think that these secularizing philosophers grasped an important truth that was implicit though misconceived in the sacral view of the world and its religion. I also think they failed to do justice to it. This was because their view of religion was still too much tied to the sacral worldview that they rejected. The increasingly radical critiques of religion of Kant and Hegel, and Feuerbach and Marx who followed them, were all directed at a thoroughly sacral view of religion, as well of course at the actual practice of religious believers. They seem ignorant of the fact that the Old Testament prophets, as well as the writers of the New Testament, had voiced very similar criticisms of the sacral idolatry of their time over a thousand years before, and done so in the name of their religion. These secularizing philosophers were attacking and defeating ‘a paper tiger’. The result was that their demythologized understanding of religion, ‘religion within the limits of reason alone,’ was a seriously inadequate one. In moving the spirits from nature into humanity they took a step in the right direction but they did not go far enough. In the last resort I think that their inadequate view of religion stems from their inadequate philosophy of humanity. Philosophy in the modern period developed in two different traditions, that of empiricism and that of rationalism. The empiricist tradition was closely allied to science, especially the physical and natural sciences. As these sciences progressed, discovering more and more lawlike connections between what happened in the world through observation and measurement by increasingly sophisticated instruments, a mechanistic worldview developed. Only what was observable and measurable was real; this was materialism. Everything was subject to the laws the sciences were progressively discovering; this was determinism. Such a worldview had no place in it for a spiritual reality or for freedom. Rationalism was in many ways a reaction to this mechanistic worldview. Its solution to the problem posed by materialism was dualism. The world of nature was as the scientist and the empiricist philosophers described, a world of matter in motion. And as bodily beings we humans too were part of that deterministic system. But as beings with minds capable of rational thought we transcended matter, were a different kind of being altogether, part of a wholly immaterial, spiritual realm. Thus a human being was a composite of matter and mind. Descartes was the first to make this dualism famous but it persisted throughout the modern period at least until the time of Kant. It received great support from

434 | Augustine Shutte religious thinkers since it made possible a belief in human freedom and accountability and in the idea of life after death. Neither materialism nor dualism is an adequate account of human nature. Materialism can't cope with human freedom; dualism with the essential unity of a human person. Nevertheless each contains a truth about humanity that a more adequate account will have to do justice to. The truth of materialism is our inextricable solidarity with non-human nature. We are bound to this by all the causal links that the sciences discover. Even the most abstract thought requires images, images imply senses, and senses imply sense organs that are parts of a body. The truth of dualism is our capacity for free choice, for self-determination. Self-determination and other-dependence; is it possible to combine these two truths in a more comprehensive view of human nature? I think it is. And if one wants to correct the secularizing philosophers’ view of religion, a view that in the last resort is based on their idea of human nature, one will have to try. One can only improve on theirs with a better one. This is what I will try to do.

The dependent transcendence of human nature Our contemporary scientific and secular culture is characterized by what Charles Taylor calls ‘the immanent frame’; the transcendent seems to have disappeared from contemporary experience. The story I have been telling is at least a partial explanation of this. And in the light of this situation two different ways of living it have emerged: fundamentalism and atheism. The various forms of religious fundamentalism are attempts to restore a pre-modern sacral consciousness to religion. These attempts must be judged mistaken; we can no longer take the sacral stories literally. If we do it is at the price of authenticity. We do violence to ourselves. And often this results in violence to others too. Atheism is another story. We are right to reject the gods of the sacral world. But too often we transfer an equally absolute faith to an equally mistaken secular god. This is usually an ideology, Marxism for instance, or the free market. But often it is science itself. Science, it is believed is the only valid form of knowledge. Reality is thus conceived of as what science is able to know. And so at a stroke our world is diminished and made more superficial. Our inner life, the depth of intersubjective relationships, and the wisdom of art and philosophy are lost to us. Faith of this kind in science is also a kind of fundamentalism. It has this in common with religious fundamentalism: its object is something that is really under our control. Hence the (illusory) security it affords. Whether the object is a sacred book or some religious authority or the authority of science, our abso-

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lute commitment to it makes it into an idol and entails our loss of freedom. This affirmation of an illusory security is thus at root a form of self-worship, and results in the inner and outer forms of conflict so well documented in the biblical literature. Atheism of the kind described above can be seen to have a natural affinity with materialism. Fundamentalism in our age is inseparable from dualism. The opposition it believes exists between science and religion is expressed in a separation of body and soul, of this world and the next. Against both atheism and fundamentalism I wish to see our scientific and secular culture, in spite of all its aberrations, among which I include materialism of both a theoretical and practical kind, as well as the individualism that Taylor documents so well in The Sources of the Self and criticizes so thoroughly in A Secular Age, the culmination of the process that began in the Axial age and whose development I have sketched above. It is a process that represents the evolution of humanity’s self-understanding, of necessity developed by a small group of thinkers and seers, but progressively permeating European culture (and now beyond). If I am right it is a progressive deepening of our understanding of a genuinely transcendent dimension in human nature, and hence of the necessity of something similar in any god worthy of our faith. Progressively we have come to realize that we have needs, and deep desires, that are natural to us, but which only an absolutely transcendent power (that is at least personal in the strict sense) could fulfill. I have said that neither materialism nor dualism, the conceptions of human nature produced by the empiricist and rationalist traditions in modern philosophy, is an adequate account of what we really are. Yet each contains a truth, but a truth twisted out of true by virtue of its separation from the complementary truth of the other. The truth of dualism is its affirmation of human transcendence, though usually reduced to mythology by the dualism. Human transcendence in a dualistic setting is usually seen as an unlimited, literally godlike quality. This is most often apparent in the dualist’s understanding of death. At death the spiritual soul, which is the real person, simply continues to exist by virtue of its own transcendent power. It is not dependent on a god for its immortality. Against this I would like to argue for our dependence as well as for our transcendence, in fact our dependence for our transcendence on a truly transcendent cause. The heart of the secularization process is the modern insight into humanity’s capacity for self-determination. This entails our freedom from complete determination by any system of natural or social causes such as the sciences discover. Not that these systems cease to operate when we act freely (when we judge or decide on something for a reason), but though they may be

436 | Augustine Shutte necessary they can never be sufficient as causes of an act that is free. I am truly self-determining and so transcendent of all other kinds of causality. But what is true of my free acts must also be true of my capacity for free action, the capacity I am born with and that is part of my nature as a human being. That too, precisely because it is a capacity for free acts, cannot be the product of the kind of causes the sciences can discover, the causes involved in the evolution of human beings from pre-human animal species, or in the growth of a human individual in the womb. Once again one has to say that though they are necessary they are not sufficient to produce a nature of this kind. I am trying to show that the existence of beings such as we are, possessed of a transcendence that is limited and dependent, that in the last resort is given us, entails the existence of a cause that is not limited in that way, an absolutely transcendent being whose causality, because of that, would be incommensurable with our own. Such a being would be in no sense an enemy of our freedom, but the necessary condition for it to be real at all. Thus if it is our capacity for self-determination that we desire to exercise, develop and fulfill, a transcendent cause of the kind I have described is well-suited to be our god. Considerations of this kind might seem ultra-abstract. Nevertheless they are necessary if I am to provide an account of religion in a secular culture that is an authentic expression of our humanity. I do not want to regress to the supernatural spirits of the sacral worldview. So I have to try and find a source of transcendence in the very heart of secularity. And I think I have. It is there in the very notion of human freedom. But once one has discerned it there one’s eyes are open to it everywhere. The transition from pre-human to human beings is perhaps the clearest case of the operation of a strictly transcendent cause, but it is certainly not the only one. The transition from pre-living to living beings is another. And so of course is that from nothing to something, from the ‘initial singularity’ (whatever that might be) to the Big Bang. None of these transitions can be explained by the kind of causes that science could discover to be already operating at the time they happened. In fact, what appears in all these transitions, and is indubitable in our case, is something that is going on all the time, a permanent feature of the evolution of the cosmos. I mean the emergence at every stage of world process of real newness. Really new forms of being that cannot in principle be explained by what preceded them are continually coming into being through a transformation of what preceded them. And still are. From the heart of the quantum vacuum, new space and time are pouring into existence, producing the expansion of the universe and, what is more to the point, new forms of consciousness, culture and community are coming to be in us.

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The idea of evolution was originally developed in the sphere of biology. Eventually it was generalized to cosmology, so that we can speak of an evolution in the physical realm from few simple formations to multiple complex ones, from particles to atoms, from molecules to cells. We need now to recognize that the process has not come to an end with the production of humanity. But of course it now happens in a different way; evolution does not take the same form in the physical sphere as in the biological, or in the human as in the biological. In our case it can only operate through our freedom. Nevertheless it is the same worldtranscendent energy that is at work. Each new kind of being comes into existence through a transformation of what has preceded it. It contains it but is ‘more’ than it. Human beings are the most complex beings in the universe we know. Thus each of us contains in oneself all the simpler levels of reality as well. So each of us is a kind of microcosm of the universe. But more than that: we are able to contain the universe in consciousness, in our minds, and to change it in our creative action upon it. Not just a microcosm, but a centre and a cause. I am emphasizing these somewhat obvious points (points that are quite consonant with contemporary cosmology) because I want to offer an alternative to the materialist myth that what is real is material. I want to say that the material is an aspect of what is real. Matter in itself (whatever that could be) or by itself could not be real. It is only real as an aspect of us. Ultimately the universe consists of human persons in a medium in which they can communicate (or not) with each other, a medium which of course contains animals and plants and less complex things as well. So when we talk about evolution in the human sphere, in human history and human lives, we are not talking about some particular process that is occurring in some small part of the universe to one kind of thing among others. We are talking about the universe as a whole. The evolution of consciousness, culture, and forms of community is the latest transformation of the universe, and the process of secularization is the form that it is taking. If one takes seriously the idea that a transformation of pre-human reality resulted in humanity, and that this was but a striking example of previous transformations that produced really new kinds of being, one should be prepared to see transformation (of various kinds) as the very mechanism by which the universe evolves, and hence to expect and be open to yet further kinds of transformation in its continuing evolution within humanity itself. It is in fact precisely a failure to recognize this possibility that Charles Taylor sees as the source of the atheistic ‘spin’ that ‘exclusive humanism’ gives to the ‘immanent frame’ of our secular age. The ‘closed world system’ of contemporary atheism is closed to “the perspective of a transformation of human beings which takes

438 | Augustine Shutte them beyond or outside of whatever is normally understood as human flourishing, even in a context of reasonable mutuality (that is where we work for each other’s flourishing). In the Christian case this means our participating in the love (agape) of God for human beings, which is by definition a love which goes way beyond any possible mutuality, a self-giving not bounded by some measure of fairness.” (2007: 430) In fact Taylor accords such importance to the notion of transformation in the sense of transcendence that he uses it to define secularization itself. He concludes his treatment of the negative aspects of this process as follows: “So we could zero in on the following proposition as the heart of ‘secularization’: modernity has led to a decline of the transformation perspective.” (2007: 431) The genuine mysteriousness that attaches to the emergence of human freedom (and hence science—and religion) in the evolution of the cosmos is a sign of a truly transcendent cause at work within the evolutionary process. But I think that there is a further step one can take that will help one to see the relevance of such transcendence for religion more clearly. In a sense the step has already been taken in the Axial age. And reached an unsurpassable climax in the teaching of Jesus. But it is only now, when the sacral worldview has been so thoroughly superseded, that one is able recognize it fully. The history of philosophy in the modern period left us with two insights into human nature that appear incompatible – our dependence on things and forces other than ourselves for all that we are and do, and a capacity for selfdetermination which is a freedom to determine what we shall become. Selfdetermination and other-dependence—I will now try to show that this is not the contradiction that it appears to be but a paradox, a paradox that expresses a most important truth about our humanity, and which also reveals the most comprehensive and intimate way in which we are able to experience the presence and activity of a truly transcendent being in a truly secular world.309 In doing so I am making an attempt to construct a conception of humanity and a god that does justice to the insights of the history I have sketched and offers a framework for understanding (and judging) religion in our contemporary scientific and secular culture.

|| 309 I have attempted this in a more rigorous and comprehensive way in Shutte1984 and 1987.

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Interpersonal causality Against the individualism that seems an intrinsic part of ‘the immanent frame’ I want to argue that persons exercise their powers, and are extended, to the fullest in their relationships with other persons. In fact we depend on other persons for the exercise, development and fulfillment of those capacities that are most central to our being persons, namely our capacities for self-consciousness and self-determination.310 Perhaps the clearest case of this dependence is that of a new-born child on its parents. A human child is the most helpless of all newborn things, virtually naked of the instincts that control and protect the lives of new-born animals. There are a few cases of so-called “wild children” that have been recorded and studied.311 These are new-borns who have been left to die at birth and have not died, but have grown to physical maturity totally outside human society. In some cases it is known they were cared for by animals. When they were found and recovered it was possible to assess their development. And in none of the cases studied had these children developed the normal human abilities that we take for granted: awareness of themselves as subjects and agents, conceptual thought, a sense of responsibility. These children clearly needed the presence of other persons in order to develop their distinctively human capacities. Another example of our total dependence on other persons for our own development as persons is that of what is called “hospitalism” in babies who, for various reasons, have been separated from their parents soon after birth and put in an institution.312 In a typical institution the ratio of the number of babies to the number of nurses is so high that the nurses are unable to do more than keep the babies clean and fed and medicated. They do not have the time to do what a normal parent would, namely to relate personally to the baby as a person, recognizing and valuing it as such. And in every case the personal devel-

|| 310 This idea, of the ontological interdependence of persons on each other, and of the ethics that flows from that, is absolutely central to traditional African thought, as such authors as the following make clear: Apostel L, Menkiti I, Mulago V, Ruch E, Anyanwu K, Senghor L, Taylor J and Tempels P. It is this characteristic of African thought that makes it such a peculiarly apt vehicle for religion, even in a secular age. 311 An excellent account of some of these cases and a discussion of the philosophical significance of the phenomenon is to be found in Langer 1951: 103-143. 312 A detailed treatment of this topic is to be found in Ver Eecke 1975 where he analyses the work of Spitz and others in orphanages and other similar institutions in the United States. His purpose in this work is to provide evidence against the plausibility of Sartre’s analysis of ‘the look” and of the intersubjective relations of persons in general.

440 | Augustine Shutte opment of the babies is drastically retarded. At the age of two or three they show the mental development of an imbecile. And they are desperately unhappy. What these examples show is that it is not the mere presence of another person that is necessary in order to develop our capacity for personhood. The attitude of the other person is all-important for the development of the self. They must recognize and value me as a person. And in order to do this they must themselves open up to me so that I can get to know that they know and value me. A positive attitude on the part of the other sets up a complex interpersonal relationship between us that enables my capacities for self-consciousness and self-determination to develop, through my coming to know and affirm the other who both knows and affirms me. It is important to recognize that in the interpersonal relationship that produces personal growth in me it is the other person who has the initiative in the process. It is the mother, the person who has already developed as a person, who must take the initiative in the interpersonal transaction with the child. And this raises a question: how did she develop as a person? Clearly in dependence on some other already developed person, her mother for instance. And how did that person develop? It seems there is a regress. If all persons depend on other persons to develop as persons how does personal development ever take place at all? The logic is the same as the cosmological argument of Aquinas, but now in the personal realm. It is a little difficult to feel the force of the question in view of the very limited example I have used, an example of the bare exercise of our capacity for personhood. And, like the cosmological argument, I am not really concerned with the beginning of personal development but of the necessary real conditions for it. If we were to continue our analysis of the necessary conditions for personal growth the problem would become clearer still. We only grow as persons, which is to grow in self-knowledge and self-affirmation, by virtue of the influence on us of persons in whom these have already been developed. And the same is true if we consider the fulfillment towards which genuine personal development tends. This is the (ideal) situation in which fully developed persons relate to one another in an interpersonal community of mutual and reciprocal knowledge and affirmation – in more concrete terms: complete understanding and love. I have set out elsewhere in much more detail an account of the necessary conditions for personal growth.313 Here I can only give a concrete example to || 313 In chapter seven of Shutte 1993. The approach I adopt is derived from the work of a number of others, and especially the following: John Macmurray’s Gifford lectures “The Form of the

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bring out their essential character. It focuses on the natural human desire to love and be loved. From what I have already said above it should be evident that I can only develop the capacity to love another for their own sake, (with giftlove rather than need-love, one could say) to the extent that I am myself loved in that way. All persons are in the same situation, desiring to be loved and only capable of loving if they are. How then is genuine unselfish love of each other even possible? Only if there is somewhere a source of love that does not need to be loved in order to love, that is capable of giving love without receiving it. Such a source would not be human, or finite in any way, but strictly transcendent, an uncaused cause in the personal sphere. Such a being would be able to be our god because able to fulfill what is arguably the deepest of our deep desires. To remove any appearance of superficiality from the bare logic of what I have just said I need to point out one feature of my analysis of the necessary conditions for personal growth that is highly significant but might well have been overlooked. If the above sketch I have given is more or less accurate then it is clear that the more I come under a certain kind of influence (a positive, affirming one) of another person the more I am enabled to develop as a person myself. But to develop as a person is to develop one’s capacity for selfdetermination. And here is the paradox: the more dependent on the other I am, the more self-determining I am. This is the paradoxical logic of what I like to call “interpersonal causality”: my freedom is developed in direct (and not inverse) proportion to my dependence on a certain kind of influence of the other. It is paradoxical because in all the causal systems discovered by the sciences, the more that is done by one cause the less another needs to do. Two oxen pulling a plough at a steady rate, for example. Or a billiard ball striking another to set it in motion. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. And in general this would be true of any system of finite causes whatsoever. The more my action is caused by the other the less it is my own. It should not be difficult to see that we have here what amounts to a more complex case of that incommensurability we noted both in the cosmological argument for a transcendent cause of the existence of the universe and in the argument for a transcendent cause of human freedom. In fact the phenomenon of interpersonal causality is to be seen precisely as a more concrete and comprehensive example of this. In the interpersonal transaction that brings about personal growth in us, and which tends towards the community described above, we experience the presence and influence of a transcendent personal || Personal” published in his 1957, see especially the volume Persons in Relation 1959; Nedoncelle 1966; Johann 1966; and of course Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

442 | Augustine Shutte power, not as something separate from the human persons involved but as mediated and expressed through their most personal attitudes and acts. And this is the fullest manifestation of a strictly transcendent power in human life. It is experienced in our sheer existence, in our capacity for freedom, and here, most fully, in our personal growth and the community with others that that brings into being. It is only the source of power of this kind that is worthy of being recognized as our god. If the above account of the necessary conditions for personal growth and community is accurate then we are forced to recognize the reality of a desire that is natural to humankind that only a strictly transcendent power could satisfy. I think that the universality and persistence of the desire for personal growth and community that I have described show it to be natural to humankind, as natural as the desire for food, and that therefore the conditions for the possibility of its fulfillment do exist. I would go further. I think there are experiences that justify our believing that personal growth as I have described it does occur and that the community it makes possible can be achieved. Such experiences have two sides to them. The first is the experience of personal growth—in oneself. We experience being empowered by another person to be ourselves. We recognize that, in certain particular respects, they know us better than we knew ourselves. We feel a freedom in their presence, able to do things we deeply wanted to but have never before dared. We feel more ourselves. This experience brings with it a conviction of their goodness and a determination to be “on their side” whatever happens. And this is the second side, the experience of communion with them. It is often fleeting but it inspires a trust in being part of something that is stronger even than death. The fear of actual death is diminished and replaced by trust, trust in the power of the life we share. Whatever particular circumstances characterize such experiences, and whether it is recognized or not, they are experiences of a transcendent power that is really operative in human life and are, therefore, a form of religious faith. In a secular world this is the form that religious faith most commonly takes, a kind of personal knowledge, of oneself in relation to another or others. It is not objective knowledge of a kind that could be verified by another, but only by oneself, since it only comes in the way that all personal knowledge of persons is gained, by a kind of opening up or “surrender” to the offer of the other. I have called it a kind of religious faith. That is not quite accurate since faith in this sense is the total attitude of a person. It is, to be precise, the cognitive element in such an attitude and is only made possible by a concomitant volitional “opening up” and brings with it an emotional element of “surrender”. It is often said, in a religious context, that faith is a gift. The complex interpersonal rela-

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tionship I have described explains this terminology. In such an interpersonal transaction it is often difficult to distinguish one agent from the other, or to decide who is at any moment the active and who the passive partner. In fact it is the presence of transcendent power and agency, in both self and other, and the consequent incommensurability of their action upon each other that accounts for this. In this article I am concerned to show that far from religion being impossible in a secular society, it is only in a secular society that a form of religion and a conception of a god adequate to a full understanding of human freedom becomes possible. It is only in such a culture, in which all aspects of the supernatural have been demythologized, that we are able to recognize the presence and activity of a genuinely transcendent power in all that happens, in nature and society, but most fully and most intimately in the drama of personal relationships. My way of understanding the phenomenology of the intersubjective relations of persons, though worked out over many years on my own, has a marked similarity to that of Taylor. He too is concerned to expose the illusory individualism of contemporary secular culture. In A Secular Age he quotes with approval Nancy Huston’s description of having and bringing up a child: “I saw the slow emergence of language, or personality, the incredible construction of a being, its way of ingesting the world, of making it its own, of entering into relation with it”314 (2007: 700) He then goes on to formulate his own account of what is happening: “This is, in fact, one side of something bigger. The child is being led by a parent along a path of growth. But this is not just a service performed by one human being for another. It only succeeds when it is other and more than this, where a bond of love arises. This is a bond where each is a gift to the other, where each gives and receives, and where the line between giving and receiving is blurred. We are quite outside the range of ‘altruistic’ unilateralism.” (2007: 702). He points out that “A Christian would say that what the parent sees in the growing child is some facet of the image of God’, (2007: 701) and then relates the whole matter to the issue of religion in a secular society: “Now one might conclude that this kind of response to the image of God in others is not really a possibility for us humans, and one might not be able to make sense of this notion of our being given to each other. I think this can be real for us, but only to

|| 314 Quoted from Huston 2004.

444 | Augustine Shutte the extent that we open ourselves to God, which means in fact, overstepping the limits set in theory by exclusive humanisms. If one does believe that, then one has something very important to say to modern times, something that addresses the fragility of what all of us, believer and unbeliever alike, most value in these times.” (2007: 702) This concludes my attempt to outline a conception of human nature, and of the necessary conditions for its fulfilment, that has a place for the transcendent, and also some account of how this can be experienced by us. It is this that I would like to offer as a foundation for dialogue between different religions and also, so it seems to me, as a standard for judging both the essential truth and value of the different traditions.

Dialogue of religions Although different religions have different conceptions of a god there is always a connection (as I have tried to show) between the conception they have of their god and the conception they have of human nature, its capacities and needs. A conception of human nature is implicit in every religion. It is for this reason that there is a basis for real dialogue between them. We all share the same human nature, and it is open to scientific investigation and philosophical reflection. Different aspects of this common nature may be emphasized in the different religions; the same aspects may be presented from different points of view. If human beings do indeed have a transcendent dimension to them it would be unrealistic to expect a simple expression or formula to contain the whole truth about us. On the contrary, the fact that different religions have developed in different regions of the earth and in different cultures can be a positive factor in our ongoing attempt to understand ourselves and the limitless possibilities of human nature. This being the case, there are two virtues that require cultivation if a creative conversation is to replace religious conflict in the contemporary world. These are genuine openness to the insights of other traditions and a candidly self-critical attitude towards our own. At the present these virtues are very rare. Yet wherever they do exist one discovers that it is not the fringe-adherents of the different religions who have most in common with each other (as one might suppose) but those most committed to the deep central insights of a tradition who are closest to each other. That must give one hope for the possibility of a genuine community rather than a forced one between the religions of the world. It is nevertheless true that religion remains the source of serious conflict in our day and one cannot avoid the responsibility of identifying it. And here the

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conception of our transcendent humanity that provided a basis for dialogue between religions can also act as standard for judging them. Although all religions have the same humanity and human nature as their foundation, they arise in very different social and cultural circumstances at different points of history. So their understanding and living out of the religious dimension of our common humanity can be very different: different religious authorities, different revelations and doctrines, different forms of worship and rules of life. What I have described above constitutes a standard for judging all these manifestations with respect to their humanity: whether they are adequate or inadequate means towards and expressions of personal growth and community. Just as some political ideologies and programs must be judged inhuman and dehumanizing, so too will be some religious beliefs and practices. An evaluation of religion will be more concerned with the religious way of life than with the doctrines or authorities. Because in the sphere of religion we are dealing with something transcendent, the language used to express it and its relationship with us is inevitably symbolic and analogical. Different symbols from different religions could well be expressing the same reality or different aspects of it. There is of course a critical study of this language to be made. But that is not my concern in this article. I am not so much concerned with which religious doctrines are true as with which religious ways of life are good. The two are closely connected of course, but one can’t do everything at once. The history of religion is a very ambiguous one. There is both humanity and inhumanity. I am not here concerned with what is actually done in the name of religion. We all suffer to a greater or lesser extent from weakness of will. We all have psychic wounds. We are all subject to social conditioning and pressure. We all fail to practice what we preach. I am concerned with what religions say we ought to do. And clearly there is a religious justification of inhumanity that we must recognize and overcome. War is the clearest sign of inhumanity in religion. There can be just wars but no one would argue that all religious wars were just. And very few religions are innocent of promoting unjust war. To this one could add a host of inhuman punishments and practices: the religious justification of torture and killing in Christian inquisitions, the Hindu caste system, Muslim punishments and mutilation, the inhuman penalties in Jewish and Muslim law, suttee—the list is endless. Indeed, because of the nature of the power that is alone capable of developing our capacity for self-determination and creating personal community, any attempt by religion to espouse force of any kind for religious purposes must be rejected. I am not only thinking of the force of arms, but any coercive power whatsoever. Any exercise of authority (especially by religious leaders) to enforce obedience by social, or even certain kinds of psychological, pressure is

446 | Augustine Shutte destructive of our humanity and the enemy of authentic faith. The force of example alone is permitted. But there is a more fundamental manifestation of inhumanity in religion. This is the denial of human freedom, the failure to treat persons as selfdetermining beings whose growth and fulfillment depends on the development of precisely this capacity. This denial shows itself in all sorts of ways, including those practices mentioned above. All of them illustrate the failure to treat persons as persons. But by far the most universal form of the failure to recognize human freedom by religion is its denial to women. In almost every religion known to history, and certainly in the major religions of the contemporary world, the full humanity of women is contradicted both by doctrines and by sanctioned practice. Until women and men have the same authority and responsibility to define doctrine and prescribe a religious way of life in the different religions, they cannot develop their common humanity to the full. Quite apart from actual laws that are inhuman, such as polygamy, the denial of authority to make the laws under which they live is most seriously dehumanzing for women. The complementarity of the different genders entails equality of participation by women and men in those spheres of life – such as health-care, education and policing – that are directly concerned with personal growth and community in society. And religion is foremost among these. The dehumanization of women promoted and sanctioned by all the major religions is a sign of a still deeper failure to achieve an authentic religious expression of our humanity. It is a sign of the religious denial of human freedom in its fundamental teaching about the relationship between us and God. And this in turn is intimately connected with different actual conceptions of their god and their god’s power. Briefly stated, the failure of most religions to recognize human freedom is connected to an idolatrous conception of a god as a less than wholly transcendent being. Our god’s activity and ours are simply contrasted and opposed, just as two finite worldly powers would be. There is another sign of the inhumanity of religion which is the opposite of this denial of human freedom. It is the denial of human community, the failure to recognize that every form of religion must serve our common humanity. And that humanity can only be fulfilled in community, a community that is inherently universal. Insofar as the different religions are determined to see themselves as competitors, fixed in exclusive structures and traditions, they deny the destination of our humanity in a universal community. Every religion should recognize the limitations of its forms of doctrine, authority and life, and be concerned that the central dynamism of its life is open to other traditions. Not that it should be uncritical, especially of itself. A critical attitude is an essential aspect

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of authentic religion. But it should be able to recognize authentic faith in whatever way it is expressed or in whatever tradition it is at home. If religion is in fact to supply the spiritual power to enable personal growth to take place and community to be created in the different spheres of life, then these two lacks in the sphere of religion must be overcome. The main impediments are a mistaken idea of God and God’s relation to us that affects our understanding of human freedom, and a moral failure to release the familiar symbols of security in our own religious traditions. Certainly there cannot be a closing of the gap between the developed and undeveloped countries without a movement towards community between the different religious traditions of the world. And they can only do this by recognizing and valuing what they have in common, namely our humanity and its fulfillment. Secularization is the acid test of the humanity of a religious tradition because it puts self-determining humanity at the center of its worldview as the source of knowledge and power. Only a religion that can recognize human freedom to the full, both as a fact about human nature and as a value for human life, can survive in a scientific age. And any religion whose gods are in any way in competition with humanity for control of the world, any set of supernatural powers whatever, is unable to do this. Only a power incommensurable with human power in the way I have explained above is compatible with the existence and enactment of human freedom. And such a power is not part of or in the world in any way, not different from or opposed to human powers in the way that supernatural powers are conceived to be. Supernatural powers are unreal but God is not. Many religions have yet to pass this test. They will have to take it. The secular worldview is here to stay, because the science and the technology on which it is based is here to stay. All religions will have to go through the “brook of fire” in which all gods incompatible with human freedom are destroyed. (This “brook of fire” is Marx’s reference to Ludwig Feuerbach, whose book The Essence of Christianity (1955) was one of the first attempts to make room for religion in a secular world-view.) Christianity, as the dominant European religion, has as a whole suffered most and also progressed furthest in its engagement with secularization. There are however Christian denominations that are, of all religious communities, among the most resistant to this process. Fundamentalism, the literal understanding of all religious language, in revelation, scripture or dogma, is a sign of this inability to come to terms with a secular world-view. It is a real threat to genuine faith as well as a denial of human freedom. It fits very well Freud’s description of religion as a neurosis, a mechanism of projection and wishfulfillment, as well as Marx’s understanding of it as an expression of alienation,

448 | Augustine Shutte or Sartre’s seeing it as a form of “bad faith.” It is ironical that Christian fundamentalists do not see that their religion would be identified as idolatry by the prophets of the Old Testament of which they claim to be the only true interpreters. Other religious traditions, such as Islam, have still a long way to go in this direction. Traditional African religions have, on the face of it, even further to go, coming as they do from an even more sacral background. But the non-dualistic character of African thought is an advantage here, and there are signs that these religions can adapt more easily to a secular world than those that have grown up in contact with and in opposition to it. To the extent that all religious traditions in South Africa absorb the spirit of the African notion of ubuntu (which means humanity as a quality of a person and is the central notion in traditional African ethics), the process of secularization will be easier. And it is certainly essential if the different religious traditions in South Africa (and the world?) are to make genuine contact with one another and so make possible a single humane society with many different cultures in one country. From what I have argued in this article it should be evident that only authentic religion can supply the kind of power that can do this. A good example of this, drawn from recent South African history, is the role played by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For all its faults the Commission was a powerful symbolic bridge, over which our minds could cross, from an apartheid state to a new democratic South Africa. And it was animated by the humane spirit, the spirit of ubuntu, of a religious leader. This spirit shines out from the pages of his book on the Commission, No Future Without Forgiveness. I conclude this overlong essay with its closing words: Our experiment is going to succeed because God wants us to succeed, not for our glory and aggrandizement but for the sake of God's world. God wants to show that there is life after conflict and repression— that because of forgiveness there is a future (1999: 223).

References Huston, N. (2004). Professeurs de desespoir. Paris: Actes Sud. Johann, R. (1955). The Meaning of Love. Charlotte, NC: Newmann Press. Langer, S. K. (1957). Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McCabe, H. (1968). Law, Love and Language. London: Sheed and Ward. MacMurray, J. (1957). The Form of the Personal in Two Volumes: The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation. London: Faber and Faber.

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Nedoncelle, M. (1966). Love and the Person. New York: Sheed and Ward. Shutte, A. (1984). What Makes Us Persons. Modern Theology, 1, 67-79. Shutte, A. (1987). A New Argument for the Existence of God. Modern Theology, 3, 157-177. Shutte, A. (1993). Philosophy for Africa. Cape Town: University of Capetown Press. Taylor, C . (1989). Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ver Eecke, W. (1975). The Look, The Body, and the Other. In Ihde,D. & Zanger, R. (Eds.), Dialogues on Phenomenology (pp. 224-246). New York: Springer. Voegelin, E. (1969). Order and History, Vol 1. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Introduction In the preceding four parts of the book we have been asking the question of how global dialogue is possible in four different ways. Part I worked out (historically) sufficient and (philosophically) necessary conditions that enable intercultural dialogue as scholarly inquiry; to this effect the chapter of this part clarified the historical context of origin of this enterprise, and explored its implications for philosophical accounts of subjectivity, knowledge, and significance. Part II focused on the more specific question of how one might use intercultural dialogue to mitigate value conflicts. In Part III, we investigated conditions and directions of a “dialogue among civilizations” as a strategy in the enactment of global politics. Part IV examined, from theological and philosophical perspectives, the conceptual foundations that create possibilities for interreligious dialogue based on a (view of) religion that includes dialogue as a central element. This final part V will now raise the question of the possibility of global dialogue in the form of a reflection on the realization conditions of intercultural dialogue as interpersonal praxis and, in particular, as scholarly inquiry. No doubt, global dialogue is de facto an ongoing process—but precisely what does it take, practically speaking, to enable it? The chapters of part V unfold this reflection on realization conditions along three different trajectories: linguistic, psychological, practical. The first trajectory takes up the issue of the diversity of human language, the second trajectory highlights that intercultural dialogue typically unearths deep-seated presuppositions, which opens up new solutions space but may be found unsettling; and the third trajectory reflects on concrete modes of research organization. The diversity of human languages is a theme that has surfaced in several places in our book, but it has remained in the background so far. To launch us into this topic, and to position the contributions of chapter 21 and 22, let us briefly consider whether the development of ‘global languages’ is something that proponents of global dialogue should welcome or object to. Taking this book as an example, we chose as our academic lingua franca the language with the widest international distribution. But is this tendency towards academic monolingualism not quite problematic? By adopting the language that currently dominates international business, politics, science, art, and culture, proponents of dialogue would seem to support, quite against their intentions, various forms of social and cognitive ascendancy carried by the reduction of linguistic diversity. To rebut such concerns about linguistic hegemony proponents of intercultural thought can insist on the possibility of ‘transcendence from within’ and

454 | Introduction Part V adopt the position of ‘weak linguistic relativism.’ Weak linguistic relativism accepts that the grammar of a language—i.e., its semantics, syntax, and pragmatics—influences what we perceive and how we think, and that these influences partly operate below the level of awareness. As recent research in cognitive linguistics has shown, the grammatical structures and conceptual resources of a language create substantive cognitive defaults—elements of a ‘mindset’ that range from the organization of temporal and spatial information to classificatory preferences to metaphysical presumptions about which kinds of entities are more basic than others.315 However, as adherents of weak linguistic relativism point out, the same research also shows that such ‘mindsets’ are not entirely insurmountable—language structures create deeply engrained cognitive habits, not impermeable barriers. In fact, linguistic typology itself, the branch of linguistics that investigates the range of variation among the world’s languages, provides evidence for both the strength of cognitive habituations and the possibility to overcome them. Even though the ‘mindset’ generated by European languages has created problematic biases in typological research on linguistic diversity, these can be critically discussed and removed.316 The paradoxical linguistic choice, then, that proponents of intercultural thought must make, is to use a shared ‘dominant’ language to confirm the significance of linguistic diversity and dismantle its cognitive dominance. They do this by practicing the difficult task of ‘transporting’—or better perhaps: reinventing—conceptual contents across linguistic boundaries. However, there are still some reasons for concern. In connection with the socio-economic complexities introduced by globalization, increase in culture contact and linguistic education, develops a dynamic that does not necessarily result in the increase of our awareness and appreciation of linguistic diversity but precisely the opposite. On this view, due to economic and social pressures, the global dynamic works to de facto reduce the value of diversity. This is the discussion context in which to place the contributions of the first two chapters of part V. In Chapter 21 linguist Timothy Reagan introduces the reader to the complex issue of language endangerment. Human languages currently ‘die’ at an alarming rate—one every 14 days. Reagan critically discusses the recent practice || 315 Cf. Gumperz/Levinson 1996, Casasanto 2004, 2010; Bergen 2012, Evans 2009, Levinson 1997, Lucy/Gaskins (2001), Seibt 2005 ch. 4. 316 For criticism of the “Euro-centric” viewpoint in linguistics, see Gil 2001. Note that IndoEuropean languages form a very small group (around 440) within the over 6000 languages of the world (cf. Gordon/Grimes 2005), even though they currently have almost 3 billion native speakers worldwide.

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in linguistics of conceptualizing language loss in terms of biological metaphors, as “language death.” Such metaphors may be partly misleading, since they falsely suggests that languages die like biological species due to inherent functional deficiencies; on the other hand, Reagan points out, if languages are taken to ‘live’ in the communicative interactions among its living native speakers, ecological metaphors can be used to link concerns about linguistic diversity to ethical concerns about the speakers of the language. We have reasons to be concerned about the causes of language loss, Reagan explains, since it is largely due to population loss, or to forced or voluntary language switching. In the foreground of these concerns are ethical considerations since the right to language is “perhaps the single most commonly abrogated human right in the world today.” In addition, we have also reasons to be concerned about language loss itself. Reagan elaborates on three of these: the loss of “specific knowledge about the natural world,” the loss of cultural knowledge in oral traditions, and the loss of an important source of insights into human cognition. The problem of language loss is exacerbated by the fact that the role of education in language preservation is quite ambiguous. As Reagan argues, based on illustrations of language preservation efforts in New Zealand and Hawaii, whether educational policy will protect or further threaten endangered languages depends crucially on a suitable interplay with cultural and economic policies. Chapter 22 suggests that one of the key factors for the appreciation of linguistic diversity and language preservation in education may also lie in an area where one would not immediately expect it—in the theory and practice of translation. The difficulties that translators regularly deal with as they try to convey the peculiar denotative and connotative dimensions of one language in the peculiar denotative and connotative structure of another conveys the reality of language diversity quite vividly and with direct implications for the role of dialogue in intercultural education. Writing from the perspective of translation studies and education science, María Arrizabalaga offers in this chapter two observations. The first observation concerns theory dynamics in translation studies. Based on a brief overview of the development of this young discipline, Arrizabalaga notes that the different theoretical accounts and models of interlinguistic translation stand in a special relationship. Unlike in the empirical sciences there is no discernible curve along which later theories better approximate the data. On the other hand, the theory landscape also does not reflect the dynamics of a dialectical movement as, say, in literary theory or architecture. Rather, the theoretical approaches in translation studies seem to display the distinctive elements of a plurality of positions under an overarching dialogical unity. How we are to understand this unity comes out more clearly in connection with Arrizabalaga’s second observation, namely, that a similar relationship

456 | Introduction Part V can be found among the considerations that drive intralinguistic paraphrasis. The different types of intralingual translation also stand in the relationship of the ‘dialogical unity of a plurality.’ Arrizabalaga explains how one can capitalize on this connection in an educational context, especially in classes with multicultural and multilingual student audience: by reflecting on the guiding considerations of paraphrasis or intralingual translation, students will at the same time acquire an understanding for the main positions in the theory of interlinguistic translation. But the fact that our perspectives on intralingual translation (paraphrasis) and on interlinguistic translations are quite similar and stand to each other in analogical relationships has more than a pedagogical interest, Arrizabalaga points out, suggesting that it offers us a theoretical view of translation as a contextually acceptable alignment of knowledge systems without our having to have absolute or unique standards of correctness. Rather, the ‘truth’ of a translation lies in the ‘dialogical unity of a plurality of perspectives,’ which—and here Arrizabalaga’s illustration and interpretation productively supplement each other—lies in a search towards a focal point that is produced in the course of, and due to, this search. Sameness of meaning is not a relationship between abstract entities but a mode of search driven by the logic of a conversation towards a goal that itself is bootstrapped in the course of that conversation and never available outside it. Chapters 21 and 22 in this way approach the question of ‘how to put global dialogue into action’ with a view to communicative modes, and the paradoxical task of communicating—across different languages—the importance of such linguistic diversity. But, beyond aspects of ‘how,’ what should be in the focus of global dialogue? Of the many possible topics for global policy making that might benefit from the input of intercultural scholarly inquiry, ‘global justice’ is arguably the most important and the most complex, engaging us in the debate about climate change and about our visions for a global economy, among other issues. These latter two topics are taken up in chapters 23 and 24, by researchers with double expertise in climate research and cultural studies, or economy and intercultural philosophy, respectively. But, as will become apparent, it is not so much that these topics illustrate what global dialogue should be focused on. Rather, the chapters illustrate the level of analysis where scholarship on the cultural premises of public discourse makes its distinctive contribution. In chapter 23 climate researcher Mike Hulme argues that the phenomenon of climate change is less an environmental event than a political and cultural construct. Dissecting the public ‘climate debate’ Hulme identifies four ways in which we “frame” climate change: “climate change as lament, fear, hubris and justice.” As Hulme shows, these four ways of framing climate change express comprehensive cultural templates. A large sector of the Western climate debate,

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Hulme suggests, operates with traditional “mythic positions”—emblemized in terms of the biblical metaphors: Eden, Apocalypse, Babel, and Jubilee—that we use to articulate “our loss of the past, our fear of the future, our desire for mastery, and our instinct for justice.” Hulme shows that what appear to be substantive issues of the climate debate are often introduced by the cultural template being applied, enlisting scientific research and more comprehensive cultural narratives. Once we realize, Hulme argues, that the issues of the debate are to a considerable extent cultural constructions, that “we are using climate change to act as a conduit for serving our deeper psychological needs” and in this way get distracted from the underlying sources of what perhaps should be our more immediate ethical concerns, such as “our infatuation with consumer-driven economic growth at the expense of health and social justice.” The benefits of a critical analysis of the cultural presuppositions of the climate debate—or, one might add, of any issue of global policy—thus lie for Hulme primarily at the epistemological level, in revealing power relationships, relations between material and cultural values, as well as the instrumentalization of scientific facts under the rubric of symbolic meanings. Instead of viewing climate change as a ‘problem’ that must be ‘stopped’ at all costs, we should consider it an opportunity that makes us aware of the “bewildering diversity of human projects” and, also or even especially in disagreement, in the plurality of cultural myths, opens up “new spaces for innovation and change.” Hulme’s cultural analysis of the climate debate is intercultural ‘in spirit’ since it is implied that the envisaged ‘engagement of disagreement for the purposes of innovation’ will benefit from a similar critical studies of cultural templates or “mythic positions” of other traditions. Chapter 24 exemplifies the combination of presuppositional analysis and cross-cultural comparison that more typically represents the method of intercultural inquiry. In this chapter Silja Graupe questions the conceptual foundations of neo-classical economic theory in a two-step procedure. She analyzes the specific assumptions that characterize the understanding of the game metaphor that informs not only game-theoretical models but even more broadly the standard conception of markets—their components, their externalities, and the basic character of their dynamics. Of the five presumptions that Graupe identifies some seem, at first blush, to belong into the category of distorting simplifications of certain theoretical models—such as the presumption that a player’s preferences are not affected by social context nor the course of the game, or that players themselves are

458 | Introduction Part V modeled as independent ‘atomic’ units without developmental features.317 But as Graupe’s analysis makes clear, the difficulties lie much deeper in the comprehensive “pre-analytic vision” of a vast competitive game driven by selfinterest according to rules that are (i) separable from the playing of the game, but which (ii) hold rigidly throughout the game, and are (iii) pre-set by a universal designer of the game, whether this be the “invisible hand” of market forces or the visible hand of the economic strategist. To shake up these core assumptions of economics—and this is argument’s second step—Graupe introduces a different conception of a game adopting ontological assumptions of Asian thought—players and preferences are now defined in terms of their relations, thus sensitive to the social and dynamic context of the game, and the virtues of playing the game are no longer taken to lie in the rigid pursuit of competitive self-interest but in the capacity to adapt to the dynamic situation of the game. The contrast between these two “pre-analytic visions” of the game metaphor becomes significant especially in the context of contemporary concerns about sustainability. As Graupe argues, relative to the conceptual foundations of standard economics, where existence is explicitly defined in terms of economic capacity, ‘sustainable economics’ is a contradiction in terms: “ whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game—and therefore does not have the capacity to endure, neither within nor without the competitive sphere. It is liquidated as inefficiency, sooner or later.” Chapters 23 and 24 are but two illustrations for a large and growing body of research in intercultural thought. This brings us to the third trajectory of reflections on the realization of intercultural dialogue, namely, on modes of practical organization. Since its first conception in the 1970s, the scholarly program outlined in Shayegan’s call for the “dialogue of civilizations” has taken off to become, especially during the last two decades, a fecund area of research—fecund not only in the sense of numbers of research publications but also in terms of a potential practical relevance that global policy makers have yet to discover. There are many ways to organize intercultural scholarly dialogue in practical regards, and there are—according to our last count—over 150 websites for networks, research institutes, societies, centers, and forums for intercultural thought. The final chapter of this book sketches the mode of operation of the currently largest and most successful scholarly network for intercultural thought worldwide, the “Council for Research in Values and Philosophy” (RVP).

|| 317 For concordant criticism with focus on the empirical inadequacy of rational choice theory see e.g., Bicchieri 2006.

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RVP has currently over 400 associated members from 65 countries; since 1998, it has organized over 150 workshops and conferences, and published 300 volumes of scholarly monographs and anthologies on values from a crossculturally comparative or intercultural perspective. The network grew out of a series of international philosophical conferences in India, Jerusalem, Kenya, New York and Bogota beginning in the 1970s. In the late 1970s and 1980s RVP began to constitute itself more formally and several colloquia series were organized together with various of the National Academies of Science in Central and Eastern Europe; these events mainly investigated cultural conceptions of human dignity in an effort to provide philosophical foundations for the ongoing social and cultural transformations around the end of the Cold War era. During the 1990s RVP further expanded its range of action, holding conferences and establishing local research teams all over the world including, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, China, Japan, East-Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world (Egypt, Iran, Central Asia and Pakistan as well as in Malaysia and Indonesia). In the beginning of the 21st century RVP established the Center for the Study of Culture and Values at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., USA. RVP was conceived in the 1960s with the explicit goal to “to articulate the new sense of the person which underlay the postwar and post-colonial changes sweeping across the world” and later reformulated its mission as an effort to “respond to the new awareness of the cultural grounds of human life and the newly global character of their interaction”; importantly, it views such a response as a matter of the larger social responsibility of academics “to build cooperation among peoples by healing deep tensions and promoting peace and cooperation on a global scale.”318 Thus the research that RVP promotes does not express any thematic and cultural bias, but rather aims to increase intercultural understanding: “to identify areas related to values and social life which are in need of research, to bring together the professional competencies in philosophy and related human sciences needed for this research, and to publish the resulting studies.”319 In 2013 RVP was awarded the Global Dialogue Prize. On behalf of the organization the award was received by George F. McLean, who founded the RVP and has been directing it for over four decades. In chapter 25, which is the text of the acceptance speech, McLean sketches the network’s characteristic mode of operation under RVP. Among other activities, the network produces the book

|| 318 Cf. http://www.crvp.org/crvp/rvp-history.htm, accessed October 20, 2013. 319 Cf. http://www.crvp.org/crvp/rvp-mission.htm, accessed October 20, 2013.

460 | Introduction Part V series “Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change” and published the series’ 300th volume in August 2013. As Mclean adumbrates, the volumes produced in this book series are the result of a multi-step process, where RVP (a) first stimulates the formation of a research team; (b) co-sponsors a conference based upon the work of the research team; (c) guides the research team through the development of the manuscript; (d) supervises quality translations into English; and (e) and assists with all aspects that ensure unbiased distribution and visibility, such as Library of Congress cataloguing and the mailing of copies to 350 university libraries across the world (e.g., 50 in Africa, 50 in East Asia, etc.). The composition of the relevant research teams is determined by their topic and flexibly organized to allow for groupings at all scales, from local to international teams. The model of organization that RVP illustrates deserves particular attention. It is a method by means of which global perspectives and local research concerns are brought into dialogue, both at the scholarly and the personal level. Local research teams in all parts of the globe are interrelated through regional and international conferences and annual seminars in Washington. The organization of these seminars reflects not only great professional expertise in producing high quality research in an interdisciplinary and intercultural setting, they also implement a methodology that ties research as close to discussion and dialogical understanding as possible.320 Chapter 25 concludes with a reminder of the “kenotic understanding and appreciation of one another,” a reminder of the possibility of emptying oneself of one’s plans and preconceptions to make room for an encounter. This theme has surfaced in many ways throughout the book—it is perhaps the shortest and best answer to the question of how global dialogue is possible. In keeping with the spirit of openness that is the hallmark of dialogue we end this book not by attempting a summary, let alone a conclusion, but offer a brief afterthought.

References Bergen, B. (2012). Louder Than Words, New York: Basic Books. Bicchieri, C. (2006). The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of social norms. Cambridge University Press.

|| 320 The seminars are topically well-focused, involve maximally 20 experienced researchers, and last for six to ten weeks; based on the discussions of the seminar the participants develop jointly a plan of papers and each participant work out one paper during the duration of the seminar.

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Casasanto, D., Borodotsky, L., Phillips, W., Green, J., Fotokopoulo, O., Pita, R., Gil, D. (2004). How deep are effects of language on thought? Time estimation in speakers of English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish. In Forbus, K., Gentner, D., Reiger , T. (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Cognitive Science Society (pp. 186-191). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Casasanto, D. & Bottini, R.(2010). Can mirror-reading reverse the flow of time? Spatial Cognition VII (pp. 335-345). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Evans, N. (2009). Trellises of the Mind: How Language Trains Thought. Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us (pp. 159-181). Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Gil, D., (2001). Escaping Eurocentrism: fieldwork as a process of unlearning. In: P. Newman and M. Ratliff (Eds.), Linguistic Fieldwork (pp. 102-133). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, R. G. & Grimes, B.F. (Eds.) (2005). Ethnologue: languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas: SIL International. Gumperz, J. & Levinson, S.C. (eds.) (1996). Rethinking linguistic relativity. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 17, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Levinson, S. C. (1997). From outer to inner space: linguistic categories and non-linguistic thinking. In Nuyts, J. & Pedersen, E. (Eds.), Language and conceptualization (pp. 13-45). Camrbidge, Cambridge University Press. Lucy, J. A., & Gaskins, S. (2001). Grammatical categories and the development of classification preferences: A comparative approach. In Bowerman, M., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (2001). Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 257-283). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seibt, J. (2005) General Processes—A Study in Ontological Category Construction, Habilitationsschrift University of Konstanz, Germany.

Timothy Reagan

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The ecology of languages and education in an intercultural perspective Much of life appears to be if not actually unreal, then beyond comprehension. A handful of strangers, whose names one hardly knows, shuts down the valves on oil wells in a desolate part of the globe, and in short order lines form at service stations, and gasoline prices skyrocket for something Americans thought was rightfully theirs. Rosa Parks, a working black woman tired from her day’s labor, refuses to stand at the back of a Birmingham bus and releases a flood of emotion, energy, and justice whose direction and eventual course no one could (and perhaps still cannot) foretell. (Brewer & de Leon, 1983, p. 1)

Much of life, indeed, does seem to be beyond comprehension much of the time. Problems that, though difficult, could be solved are ignored for the sake of short-term benefits for relatively small numbers of people. Tiny numbers of individuals live in what can only be described as obscene levels of opulence while large numbers of children (currently in excess of 140 million) are malnourished, and some 11 million a year under the age of 5 die of preventable causes (that is 30,000 children a day, see United Nations, 2008). Nearly half of the population of the world survives at present on less than $2 per day, and 1.2 billion on less than $1 per day (Annan, 2000: 19). The United Nations’ “Millennium Development Goals” seek to cut in half the number of individuals surviving on less that $1 per day by 2015, as well as to achieve universal primary education, to promote gender equality and empower women, to reduce child mortality, to improve maternal health, to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, to ensure environmental sustainability, and to develop a global partnership for development (United Nations, 2008). The very rich, though, are, in spite of recent temporary hard times, still doing tolerably well. According to Forbes, in 2014 there were 1645 billionaires in the world, worth an average of almost $ 4 billion each. Of course, it is not just individuals who are wealthy; countries, too, can be divided between the “haves” and the “have nots,” as we all know. Although there are different ways of assessing per capita income, the results do not differ all that much depending on the particular system that one employs. The Monaco and Liechtenstein are

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currently at the top, with an annual per capita income of around $150,000; the US and Denmark ranges among the first 15 with over $50,000. At the opposite end of the scale are countries such as Malawi, with an average per capita income of around $355, Burundi, with an annual per capita income of $229, or Somalia, with an average per capita income of only $128. And, of course, none of these figures takes into account the variation of wealth within particular countries. For instance, in the United States—the wealthiest society in the world today, and indeed in the history of humanity—some 13 million children are chronically hungry (see Oakes & Lipton, 2007: 11-12). All of this is to suggest that there are some fundamental ethical issues with respect to resources, both internationally and at the national and regional levels, that clearly need to be addressed. Such issues are by no means entirely educational in nature, but they all have educational implications and consequences. Issues of global justice, e.g., issues of ecojustice are increasingly of concern to critical educators (see Bowers, 1993, 2001; Gibson, 2004; Wayne & Gruenewald, 2004), and there are many interesting and promising projects taking place around the world. However, many of the very same factors that have affected, and continue to affect, ecojustice, have also impacted other aspects of our lives, not the least of which are changes in human societies and cultures. With respect to sociocultural changes, nowhere are the threats posed by such changes greater than in the realm of language and language diversity, and this is an area that should be of prime concern to educators. As K. David Harrison (2007) has recently noted, The accelerating extinction of languages on a global scale has no precedent in human history. And while it is not exactly equivalent to biological extinction of endangered species, it is happening much faster, making species extinction rates look trivial by comparison. Scientists’ best estimates show that since the year 1600 the planet lost a full 484 animal species, while 654 plant species were recorded as having gone extinct. Of course, these are underestimates. But even so, they make up less than 7 percent of the total number of identified plant and animal species. Compared to this, the estimated 40 percent of languages that are endangered is a staggering figure. Languages are far more threatened than birds (11% threatened, endangered, or extinct), mammals (18%), fish (5%), or plants (8%). (p. 7)

In this paper, I want to address three major aspects of language endangerment and language death. First, I want to explore the use of what is often called the “biological metaphor” for language endangerment. This is the metaphor upon which my paper is really based, and upon which much of the existent literature dealing with language endangerment and language death rests. To what extent is linguistic endangerment similar to biological endangerment? Are threatened

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languages really comparable to endangered species, or is the metaphor fundamentally flawed? Are there languages that are linguistic dodos, or is the comparison inappropriate? Then I want to explore the nature of language loss and language endangerment both historically and at the present time. Next, I will try to provide an answer to the frequently-asked question, “Why does this matter?” There are somewhere around 6,000 languages spoken in the world today; why does it matter if half of them disappear? We would still, after all, have some 3,000 languages left. Indeed, even if one believes that some degree of linguistic diversity is a good idea, why do we need more than, say ten or fifteen languages? What about an outer limit of 100? After all, even the most pessimistic predictions suggest that far more languages than this will continue to exist and thrive for centuries. Finally, I will explore the role of education both as a threat to endangered languages and as a potential positive force in supporting such languages. In this last section of my presentation, I will also attempt to raise the issue of language rights as a fundamental type of human right.

The biological metaphor A great deal of the contemporary discussion about language endangerment employs the powerful “biological metaphor,” in which the loss of languages in the sociocultural world is compared with the loss of species in the natural world.321 Metaphors and, more broadly, metaphorical discourse, are of course widely recognized as both pervasive and essential elements of the communicative process. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) noted in the opening of their landmark work Metaphors we live by, Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (p. 3)

|| 321 The extensive literature on the topic includes Abley 2003; Brenzinger 1992; Crystal 2000; Dalby 2002; Grenoble & Whaley 1988a, 1988b; Hagège 2000, 2009; Hale 1998; King, SchillingEstes, Fogle, Lou, Soukup 2008; Mithun 1998; Nettle & Romaine 2000.

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Metaphors are important to understand for a variety of reasons, and their use and analysis have important implications for many disciplines, not the least of which is linguistics. Theories of metaphor and metaphorical discourse have a long and distinguished history, originating with the work of Aristotle.322 Metaphors are discussed by Aristotle in both the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and Umberto Eco has gone so far as to suggest that “only a few have added anything of substance to Aristotle’s first analysis of the topic.”323 Be that as it may, clearly the study of metaphor has been deeply influenced by the initial Aristotelean framework, and even the etymology of the term (from the Greek Μεταφορά, “transfer”), which suggests “a carrying from one place to another,” is not only itself metaphorical, but also provides a recognition of the “spheres of literal and figurative meaning” (Nöth 1990: 129). Metaphorical discourse allows for the creative construction of meaning at both ends of the communicative dyad: both the speaker and the listener are engaged in active meaning construction, and both, as Max Black has pointed out, “must attend to both the old and new meanings together” (1962: 39). Thus, what is really taking place when metaphors and metaphorical discourse are being employed, is a particular kind of shared semantic construction. As Floyd Merrell has explained, “Why a metaphor? Because metaphors have a habit of saying what a thing is by saying what it is not. Thus they are among the most efficient agents of sign change” (2001: 35). In short, what metaphors do is basically what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described as providing “scaffolding” for our thoughts.324 And how does all of this relate to the issues of language endangerment? The fundamental question that we need to address here has to do with the extent to which the various “biological metaphors” for language endangerment are really valid and helpful. As Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine have argued, We have used terms such as “death” and “extinction” in relation to languages just as a biologist would in talking about species. This may sound strange or inappropriate. What justification is there for this? After all, languages are not living things which can be born and die, like butterflies and dinosaurs. They are not victims of old age and disease. They have no tangible existence like trees or people. In so far as language can be said to exist at all, its locus must be in the minds of the people who use it (2000: 5).

|| 322 See Ricoeur 1975: 13-61. 323 Quoted in Nöth 1990: 129 324 Cf. Wittgenstein 1969; see also Bereiter 2002: 13-14.

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This final point is a very important one: particular languages (such as English, French, Danish, and so on), at least in a certain sense, do not really exist at all (see Reagan, 2004, 2009, pp. 1-21). Rather, speaker communities, in which each speaker uses a unique idiolect, exist. Even when we speak of “French,” or “Danish,” or “English,” we are already in the realm of metaphorical discourse—albeit metaphorical discourse of which we are unaware most of the time. As Neil Smith has noted, There is an intuitive appeal to the notion that there is an external language that different people speak. Indeed, it is so self-evidently true that it would be pointless to deny it. However, when taken to its logical conclusion, the idea turns out to be problematic, as the notion of ‘language’ involved is different from the notion that linguists theorize about (2000: 102f).

The real challenge in discussing language and language diversity is, paradoxically enough, not that people are uninterested in language, nor that they do not have strong views about the matter, but rather, that their strong views are almost universally and inevitably wrong. As Ronald Wardhaugh has commented, Language plays an important role in the lives of all of us and is our most distinctive human possession. We might expect, therefore, to be well-informed about it. The truth is we are not. Many statements we believe to be true about language are likely as not false. Many of the questions we concern ourselves with are either unanswerable and therefore not really worth asking or betray a serious misunderstanding of the nature of language. Most of us have learned many things about language from others, but generally the wrong things (1999: viii).

An example of how easy it is to confuse the abstract notion of “language” with the reality of an almost infinite number of idiolects has been provided by Rebecca Posner, who has noted in her response to the question, “How many Romance languages are there?” that: An answer to this question that has been slightingly labeled sancta simplicitas is that there is only one: the languages are all alike enough to be deemed dialects of the same language. Another equally disingenuous answer might be ‘thousands’ of distinctive varieties—or ‘millions’ —of individual idiolects. The usual textbook answer is ‘ten, or possibly eleven’, according priority to putative chronologically early differentiation from the common stock, allegedly linked to ethnic differences among the speakers (1996: 189).

Returning to the question of the “biological metaphor” for language endangerment, this confusion about even the definitional boundaries of what might seem to be a clear-cut concept like “language” becomes even more problematic.

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Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1990, 1992) has gone so far in his critique of the biological metaphor as to suggest that: Unlike natural species, languages have no genes and thus carry no mechanism for natural selection. Their prospects for survival are determined not by any intrinsic traits, or capacity for adaptation, but by social forces alone . . . Conceiving language loss as a Darwinian process implies that some languages are fitter than others, that the ‘developed’ will survive and the ‘primitive’ will go the way of the dinosaurs . . . Some scholars of ‘language death’ have helped to perpetuate this misunderstanding by ignoring its social and historical causes. By focusing exclusively on ‘structural-linguistic’ factors, they imply ‘that a language can “kill itself” by becoming so impoverished that its function as an adequate means of communication is called into question.’ The research literature demonstrates precisely the opposite: such structural changes are the result, not the cause, of language decline. 325

The debate about whether the “biological metaphor” is valid, then, is a real one. Perhaps the best way of thinking about the biological metaphor of language endangerment is that provided by Claude Hagège, who suggests that: When we examine human societies and the relationships they maintain with their languages, a truth that seems a matter of simple good sense presents itself: living languages do not exist of themselves, but by and for groups of individuals who make use of them in everyday communication. That does not mean that languages’ only definition is social. As manifestations of the faculty of language, they are complex cognitive structures that reflect the way the mind functions when it produces and interprets utterances; and they bear the marks of the operations by which the universe of perceptions and concepts is expressed. But at the same time, languages accompany human groups. They disappear with them; or, on the contrary, if those groups are large and quick to spread beyond their original environment, the languages can be dispersed, in their wake, over vast territories. Thus, it is from those who speak them that they derive their life principles and their ability to increase their area of usage (2009: 1).

With respect to the “biological metaphor,” then, we are left with what is an exceptionally useful and powerful tool—but one that we need to be very careful in applying, precisely because of its potential to mislead.

The nature of language loss and language endangerment Language loss is nothing new; indeed, if we assume that human beings have been using languages for somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years, or || 325 Quoted in Crawford 1994.

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perhaps even longer, as seems likely,326 then the overwhelming majority of human languages are not only unknown and unknowable, but more important, long deceased.327 As John McWhorter, making use of the biological metaphor, has commented, “Like biological extinctions, language death has been a regular and unsung occurrence throughout human history” (2009: 193). For most of our history, the loss of languages was of little if any concern, except perhaps to the speakers of the languages at issue, and then primarily only when their own lives were also at stake. Of the vast majority of languages in pre- and early human history, we know little. By the time of the Roman Empire, such languages as Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian, Akkadian, and Minoan, for instance, had all long ceased to be used, and most were already long-forgotten, only to be rediscovered in the 19th and 20th centuries. As for the Roman Empire itself, the Imperium was one of the most powerful language killers in human history prior to the age of European colonization. The Imperium was not merely linguistically bilingual in Latin and Greek, but included lesser-known and lesser-status languages, including Oscan, Umbrian, Venetic, Messapic, Etruscan, Gaulish, Raetic, Punic, Libya, Berber, Aramaic, Thracian, and a host of others, nearly all of which died under the Pax Romanus.328 The current concern with language loss, though, is quite new. It dates, in large part, to an article published by Michael Krauss in 1992 in the journal Language. Krauss, using the Summer Institute of Linguistics’s Ethnologue database—the largest and most complete linguistic database in existence, with some 6,909 languages identified (although most linguists would argue that this number is almost certainly inflated)—compellingly argued that at least 20 percent—and perhaps as many as 50 percent—of the world’s 5,000 to 6,000 languages are already moribund, that is, no longer spoken by children and hence doomed within a century from now unless learning is revived. Moreover, he estimates that a century from now many more languages will be moribund. This may leave as few as 10 percent of today’s languages in genuinely safe condition (Woodbury 1998: 234).

Krauss’ call to action has resulted in considerable concern among linguists, and even a certain amount of concern among various activists working with indigenous peoples, although it would be an exaggeration to say that language endangerment is now seen as a major problem by most politicians, policy-makers, and other decision-makers.

|| 326 See Burling, 2005; Kenneally 2007; Nichols 1998. 327 See McWhorter 2001: 253-286, 2009. 328 Cf. Adams 2003; Adams, Janse & Swain 2002.

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Language loss can be conceptualized in a number of ways. Nancy Dorian (1980), in one of the earliest modern works on language death, identified three distinct elements of language loss in her case study of a Scottish Gaelic dialect: a decline in the number of speakers of the language, a decline in the domains of use of the language, and the development of structural simplification in the language. Perhaps the most important observation made by Dorian is that: There have been no startling departures to report here in terms of types of change. Dying languages, to judge by ESG [East Sutherland Gaelic], show much the same sorts of change we are familiar with from perfectly ordinary change in “healthy” languages: distinctive case structures are replaced by prepositional structures (genitive); analogical leveling reduces the number of allomorphs for some morphemes (noun plural); separate syntactic structures with a single semantic function are merged (the two passives); a native distinction not shared by the speakers’ second language is given up (grammatical gender reflected in pronoun placement) . . . . But if the types of change are not unusual, it seems possible that the amount of change is . . . Even granting that ESG [East Sutherland Gaelic] is an unwritten language and free of whatever conserving force literacy may exert, the amount of change seems high. (1980: 151-152)

For his part, Krauss (1992) initially suggested that languages fall into four groups: safe languages, endangered languages, moribund languages, and languages which are now dead. The key distinction between these four categories of languages has to do with the extent to which children are learning and using the language. Thus, the safe languages are those with significant numbers of speakers which are being passed on to the next generation, typically both informally in the home and community and formally in the school (1992: 7). Endangered languages are those that are, for the moment, still being passed on to the next generation of speakers, but where there is growing likelihood that this process will cease in the upcoming century (1992: 6). Moribund languages are those where children have ceased to be taught or to learn the language as a mother tongue (1992: 4). Finally, languages are considered to be deceased when they are no longer spoken at all. In more recent work, Krauss (2006) has suggested a slightly more nuanced view of the status of different languages. The first category are, of course, the “safe” languages, which are those which have more than 1 million native speakers, or which are the official language of a monolingual nation. Using numbers of native speakers alone is not a perfect criterion for linguistic security, of course, but it does provide us with a certain amount of useful information. At the very least, the smaller the language with respect to the number of native speakers, the more threatened it is likely to be. This point becomes especially

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important when one takes into account the geographic nature of language diversity. As Daniel Nettle has observed, The median number of speakers for all the languages of the world is just 5,000. Crude size is not the only determinant of language viability; a group of 500 could be maintained in Papua New Guinea, but not in Western Europe. None the less, we can use speaker statistics to make some ballpark projections . . . If the size required for mediumterm safety is taken as 10,000 speakers, then 59.4 per cent of all languages will be lost in the medium term. If it is taken, perhaps more realistically, as 100,000 speakers, 83.8 per cent will die out, including virtually all of those of Australia and the Pacific. Africa and Asia, which have more medium-sized languages, will sustain much more diversity. If the safety level is taken as one million speakers, 95.2 per cent of all languages will be lost, including every single language indigenous to North America, Central America, Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific, plus almost all of those of South America (1999 113-114).

Excluding the “safe” languages, Krauss also identifies the “stable” languages, which are the languages that are spoken by their entire speaker community, including children. All other human languages fall into some category of danger, ranging from unstable and eroded (in which only some children speak the language), to definitively endangered (in which the language is spoken only by the parental generation and up), to severely endangered (in which the language is spoken only by the grandparental generation and up), to critically endangered (where the language is spoken only by very, very few elderly individuals) (2006: 1). Finally, of course, comes language extinction, in which there are no speakers or hearers of the language left. The model proposed by Krauss (1992) is a useful one, but by focusing only on the role of the next generation of speakers, it may inadvertently minimize the complex nature of language endangerment. Languages, after all, are not merely cognitive structures within the mind, nor are they simply individually-owned possessions; rather, they are part of the social and cultural milieu in which groups of people live and interact. It has been argued that the common claim that a language dies when its last speaker dies is inadequate; in fact, since by its very nature language is communal, a language can be considered dead when the next to last speaker dies, since the final speaker has no one with whom he or she can communicate in the language. Although not central to our concerns here, it should be mentioned that there is a further complication with respect to the concept of language death. Languages, of course, change over time, sometimes quite dramatically. Anglo-Saxon, or Old English,329 evolved first into Mid-

|| 329 Cf. Lass 1994; Mitchell 1995; Mitchell & Robinson 1992; Smith 1999.

472 | Timothy Reagan dle English,330 and later into Modern English.331 Anglo-Saxon and Modern English are two quite different languages, and are indeed mutually unintelligible to native speakers of modern English, but they certainly share a history. AngloSaxon is thus dead in a certain (and powerful) way, but it lives on in its daughter—or, more accurately perhaps, granddaughter—language. Similarly, Latin did not simply cease to be spoken—it gradually evolved into the modern Romance languages. In a sense, it never “died” as such, it simply changed. Furthermore, cases like Latin are also problematic with respect to the concept of language death in that while they no longer have native speakers, they are languages that are extensively studied and used in particular contexts—the role of Latin in the case of the Vatican City comes to mind here. On a somewhat less serious note, if one can read such classics as Winnie the Pooh (Milne 1962) and The House at Pooh Corner (Milne 1980), as well as The Cat in the Hat (Seuss 2000), Green Eggs and Ham (Seuss 2003), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Seuss 1999), not to mention more recent contributions such as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling 1997) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling 1998), all in Latin, there is certainly a case to be made for Latin as, at the very least, a quasi-living language. Language endangerment is itself incredibly complex, and that no single factor or set of factors will be able to predict with any degree of certainty the future of a particular language. Having said this, it is also clear that certain factors are of disproportionate significance in the extent to which a language is endangered, and perhaps most important, beyond merely the number of native speakers of the language, are such concerns as the extent to which the language is passed on to the next generation, the degree to which the language is used in educational settings, and the recognition of specific language rights of the speaker community by the relevant governmental authorities. There is an underlying question about language endangerment and language loss which needs to be raised here, and that has to do with what actually causes such loss. The answer to this question is a complex one, just as is the process of language endangerment itself. Both human prehistory and history provide us with a generous supply of potential answers to the question of the cause of language loss, though it is important to note that what has taken place historically is no longer necessarily what is occurring in the context of the twenty-first century. Dixon (1997: 107-115) has identified several distinctive contexts in which language loss can take place: population loss, forced language loss,

|| 330 In part as a response to the Norman Invasion of 1066; see Burrow & Turville-Petre 1996. 331 Cf. Barber 1993; Freeborn 1998; Leith 1997.

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and involuntary and voluntary language switching (Dixon separates these last two kinds of language switching, but the difference seems more semantic than real). Although the end result is basically the same, the processes differ dramatically socially, culturally, economically and of course educationally, and are worth briefly considering here. Dixon begins by discussing what he labels “population loss” (1997: 107f). “Population loss” is the most extreme kind of situation in which language loss takes place, and I would argue that the phrase “population loss” is at the very least a misnomer; rather, it is in fact a phrase subject to deliberate construal for propagandistic reasons to be less horrific than it is in fact. Norbert Finzsch has recently suggested that “settler imperialism” actually falls along a continuum, from direct genocide to a phenomenon of daily practices that fall under the radar of traditional conceptions of imperialism and oppression (2008: 215-232), and this continuum is fairly reflective of what also takes place with respect to language loss. Basically, “population loss” can mean one of two things: either the elimination of a people by war or related means, or the achievement of the same result by the introduction of new diseases (see Kunitz, 1994)—or, perhaps most commonly, a mixture of these two methods. In whatever case, language loss is the outcome of the elimination of the speaker population as a living human community. Unlike in other senses of “language loss,” in which language functions as a metaphor for the speaker community, in this first instance it is actual living, breathing people who die. Although common throughout the course of human history, the areas in which such “population loss” has been most obviously, and effectively practiced in recent historical memory are Australia, North America, and Latin America.332 These are the neo-European settler societies, of course, in which the goal of the settlers (albeit not always expressly articulated) was to replace the “native” peoples, (and, needless to say, their languages), either literally or via assimilation and domination. “Population loss,” as we have been discussing thus far, is only one of a number of ways in which language loss can occur. A second, albeit commonly related, kind of language loss is forced language loss, typically characterized by situations in which children of an indigenous population are removed from the homes of their parents and either fostered out or sent to special schools (either maintained by religious institutions or by governmental bodies). The goals of such a process are clear: to civilize the children, and thus eliminate over a generation a problematic population. In the United States, the establishment of Indian schools in the Western states in the late nineteenth century had as its

|| 332 See Dixon 1997; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000.

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principal objective the transformation of Native American children into individuals who would be able to function in white society.333 As Joel Spring has argued, Replacing the use of native languages with English, destroying Indian customs, and teaching allegiance to the U.S. government became the major educational policies of the U.S. government toward Indians during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The boarding school was an important part of these educational policies. It was designed to remove children from their families at an early age and thereby isolate them from the language and customs of their parents and tribes (2008: 193).

Nor was the replacement of the child’s native language a mere afterthought; as the Indian Peace Commission Report of 1868 had observed, “Through sameness of language is produced sameness of sentiment and thought; customs and habits are moulded [sic] and assimilated in the same way, and thus in process of time the differences producing trouble [between Native Americans and whites will be] gradually obliterated” (Prucha 1990:107). The process of assimilation, needless to say, was profoundly successful linguistically if in no other way, although to be sure there were also a host of other pressures working toward transition to English. The result is that today some 80% of the indigenous languages in North America are no longer being learned by children. In the United States, “only five of the native languages . . . have as many as 10,000 to 20,000 speakers, and only two have as many as 40,000 to 50,000. The Navajo language is the only Native language with more than 100,000 speakers.”334 Voluntary and involuntary language shift, on Dixon’s account, are understandable more in social and economic terms than in any other way. As he explains the phenomenon of involuntary language shifting, In any equilibrium situation, bilingualism would generally have been a two-way process —many speakers of language X would also have competence in Y, and many speakers of Y would know a good deal of X. Modern societies are not egalitarian, and when one language has a prestige status (through being spoken by the largest number of people, or being used by the dominant group), bilingualism is likely to be one-way . . . . This type of language loss has happened—or is happening—with the languages of small minority groups (those with less than 10,000 speakers) in every country (1997: 110).

Voluntary language shift similarly depends on decisions made by speakers of the language in question. In essence, voluntary language shift occurs as speakers of a language, typically in an already bilingual setting, select to make use of || 333 See e.g. Wiley 2002. 334 Quoted in Nettle & Romaine 2000: 8.

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the language other than their native language, initially in particular domains (e.g., commerce, education, interaction with agents of the government, and so on), and then gradually in all domains. There are normally variations in the role of generational identity in this process, as children begin using increasing amounts of the socially dominant and therefore more useful language (though this can be delayed by sending children to home-language schools, as is sometimes done). This process of voluntary language shift describes a number of cases with which virtually everyone here will be familiar: the decline of Irish in the nineteenth century as English became increasingly the de facto dominant language in Ireland, is certainly one clear example,335 but the process by which immigrants generally abandon their language within approximately three generations of settlement in a new society is well-documented in a wide array of settings. In the latter cases, it is interesting that even the relative international status of the original language seems, for the most part, to have little if any significant impact its retention in the new setting. For instance, despite is international dominance, the Anglo-Argentine descendents of English colonists (who number roughly 300,000) and the anglochilenos in Chile (who number roughly 350,000 to 420,000), although still rarely using English as a home language, have almost entirely shifted to Spanish. In short, language loss takes place in a variety of quite distinct ways, for various reasons, and at differing rates. Not all language loss is the result of illintentions; often, groups, for reasons that seem to them to be compelling over time, abandon one language in favor of another. Although certainly sad from the perspective of a linguist, such a shift is radically different, both practically and morally, from those cases in which the process of language shift is imposed, all too often with other social and individual costs as well.

Why does language loss matter? This brings us to the question of why language loss really matters. As we have already noted, it is in fact a natural process, and most languages that have been spoken by human beings are already long dead. As Hans-Jürgen Sasse has argued, The extinction of a language is in fact a distressing matter, since the cultural tradition connected to it and the socio-cultural or even ethnic independence of the group that speaks it very often perish together with it. Yet it is a very common phenomenon. In the || 335 See Hindley 1990; Ó Riagáin 1997,

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last five hundred years about half the known languages of the world have disappeared; hundreds of languages are in danger of becoming extinct by the end of the century. (1992: 7)

Language loss does matter, though, from the perspective of virtually all linguists. Typical, although hardly detailed, defenses of language diversity include such claims as: Language represents the most creative, pervasive aspect of culture, the most intimate side of the mind. The loss of language diversity will mean that we will never even have the opportunity to appreciate the full creative capacities of the human mind. (Mithun, 1998: 189)

Our experience tells us that every language adds something to the general program of the scientific study of grammar. The loss of a language is a loss indeed, and the loss of many is a disaster. (Hale 1998: 193) Such arguments are profoundly linguistic in nature. By this I mean that they are, ultimately, intended to focus on the particular linguistic value of language diversity, and that they are most likely to appeal to professional linguists. It is just such an argument that Paul Newman, in an intriguing essay entitled, “The endangered languages issue as a hopeless cause,” accepts as perhaps the primary compelling case to be made for linguists to care about language loss by stressing such concerns: My intention . . . is not to raise the question of why languages disappear . . . Nor do I want to get into the sensitive question of whether it makes any sense philosophically or practically to try to renew or revive dying languages . . . Once one leaves the realm of emotional hand twisting by sentimental scholars, the question is much more debatable than appears at first sight . . . . However, I think that professional linguists can agree that the disappearance of a language without documentation is a huge scientific loss. Our linguistic scientific enterprise depends on the multiplicity of languages and the knowledge of linguistic diversity. It is only through knowledge of diverse languages with different structures and belonging to different language families that we can truly begin to gain an understanding of universal grammar, i.e., the nature of the human language capacity. Similarly, our understanding of linguistic typology and our ability to classify languages accurately and reconstruct proto-forms depends on the availability of a wide array of languages (2003: 2).

Although I would not deny the value of languages and language diversity from a purely linguistic perspective, I would argue that such a perspective is perhaps inadequate to make the case for language loss really matter very much, at least insofar as the more general public is concerned. There are, though, other argu-

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ably far more important justifications for being concerned about the disappearance of languages, as Harrison has noted: We have seen at least three compelling reasons to safeguard and document vanishing languages. First is the fact that our human knowledge base is rapidly eroding. Most of what humans have learned over the millennia about how to thrive on this planet is encapsulated in threatened languages. If we let them slip away, we may compromise our very ability to survive as our ballooning human population strains earth’s ecosystems. A second reason is our rich patrimony of human cultural heritage, including myth and belief systems, wisdom, poetry, songs, and epic tales. Allowing our own history to be erased, we condemn ourselves to a cultural amnesia that may undermine our sense of purpose and our ability to live in peace with diverse peoples. A third reason is the great puzzle of human cognition, and our ability to understand how the mind organizes and processes information. Much of the human mind is still a black box. We cannot discern its inner workings—and we can often only know its thoughts by what comes out of it in the form of speech. Obscure languages hold at least some of the keys to unlocking the mind. For all these reasons, and with the possibility of dire consequences for failure, documenting endangered languages while they may still be heard, and revitalizing tongues that still may be viable, must be viewed as the greatest conservation challenge of our generation (2007: 19-20).

Thus, we stand to lose specific knowledge about the natural world around us, cultural knowledge about our shared human patrimony, and finally, what amounts to a special kind of linguistic knowledge about human cognition. To be sure, one could argue that such knowledge is not embedded in the language per se, but rather in its speakers, and thus could well be passed on in the new language. This is obviously true to a certain extent, but it is also problematic in that if the new language does not have an appropriate lexical item, it is certainly questionable whether it will develop one. This is especially true insofar as the process of language shift almost always occurs in the broader context of a cultural shift. I think that in a setting such as this one, it is worth sharing a small number of examples of each sort of loss. Knowledge about the natural world It has become something of a cliché among those concerned with language endangerment that various plants with healing powers for illnesses (say, a cure for cancer) are out there and known only to speakers of small languages on the verge of death. Such an idea is not altogether far-fetched; pharmaceutical companies make an estimated $85 billion dollars a year on “medicines derived from

478 | Timothy Reagan plants first known to indigenous peoples for their healing properties.”336 There are, without a doubt, a huge number of species in our world about which only tiny numbers of human beings are familiar, and it is hard to believe that at least some of them would not have healing powers that would be of considerable use. Even more than simply the medicinal value of the world’s generally unknown flora and fauna, though, is simply the amount about our own world, and the different ways in which it can be classified, that we do not know. Hawksworth and Kalin-Arroyo (1995), for instance, have suggested that some 87% of the existing plant and animal species in the world remain unidentified, named, described, or classified by contemporary Western science.337 A huge amount of such unknown knowledge is contained in small, relatively obscure languages spoken by the indigenous people who have been most in touch with the natural world around them. Sometimes, these languages provide completely new insights about hitherto unknown species, while other times they provide us with new and challenging ways of classifying and thinking about species with which we were already familiar. To be sure, any language can add lexical terminology if its speakers believe that there is a need to do so. If speakers of English came be believe that we had need for the kind of reindeer-classification system found in Todzhu (a Siberian language spoken by nomadic herders), we could certainly create one. The point is that we would not create the system that is already in place, and might well miss important elements in the new system because of our own limited world-view. A classification system, after all, is designed to meet the needs of its users, not to represent the totality of the natural world. (I leave aside here those classification systems from the natural sciences which are so intended, but which nevertheless are also flawed by the individuals who construct then and the societies in which they are conducted. The Linnaean taxonomic system that many of us learned in our basic science courses was largely replaced in practice in the 1960s with a Cladistic taxonomy, based on evolutionary relationships, and this in turn is now being modified into the “International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature,” or “PhyloCode,” which will, at least as I understand it, allow the two systems to co-exist.)

|| 336 Quoted in Harrison, 2007: 15. 337 Quoted in Harrison, 1997: 15.

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Knowledge about our shared patrimony Not only our knowledge of our physical environment, but also of our history, legends, stories, poetry and literature are of course stored in our languages. Languages, from the perspective of linguists, are fundamentally oral in nature, and, more to the point, almost all languages remain oral in practice. To be sure, any language can be written down, but very few have been, and even fewer have had the opportunity to develop a written literature. Written traditions have many advantages, but so do oral ones — advantages that literate technological societies, for the most part, lost long ago. In his landmark work, Oral Tradition as History, Jan Vansina argued that: The marvel of oral tradition, some will say its curse, is this: messages from the past exist, are real, and yet are not continuously accessible to the senses. Oral traditions make an appearance only when they are told. For fleeting moments they can be heard, but most of the time they dwell only in the minds of people. The utterance is transitory, but the memories are not. No one in oral societies doubts that memories can be faithful repositories which contain the sum total of past human experience and explain the how and why of present day conditions. Tete are ne nne: “Ancient things are today” or “History repeats itself”. . . . How it is possible for a mind to remember and out of nothing to spin complex ideas, messages, and instructions for living, which manifest continuity over time, is one of the greatest wonders one can study, comparable only to human intelligence and thought itself. Because the wonder is so great, it is also very complex. Oral tradition should be central to students of culture, of ideology, of society, of psychology, of art, and, finally, of history (1985: xi).

It is important to understand that oral and written traditions are different, and that each is useful and valuable in its own right. Neither is intrinsically superior to the other in all ways; each has its own strengths and each has its own limitations.338 It is also important for us to bear in mind that much of the Western tradition has its origins in oral traditions — the epic poetry of Homer, AngloSaxon heroic, the Irish epics, even the synoptic Gospels all have their origins in oral, rather than written, traditions.339 Finally, the fact that we attempt to discuss oral traditions in a written text is itself something of a paradox. As Karl Kroeber commented about the study of American Indian tales, “one must ask if any written text can accurately produce an oral recitation” (1981: 2). The problem is that oral literature is, by its very || 338 See Calvet, 1984; Goody, 1987; Kaschula, 1993, 2001; Okoewgim 1992; Rampal, 1992. 339 On Homer see Horrocks 1997: 17-23; on Anglo-Saxon poetry see Hulbert 1935: cvi-cxv; Diamond, 1970; Hamer, 1970; Mitchell, 1995; Mitchell & Robinson, 1992; on Irish epics see Graham 1998.

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nature, dependent on performance. As Ruth Finnegan explained in her discussion of oral literature in Africa: Oral literature is by definition dependent on a performer who formulates it in words on a specific occasion — there is no other way in which it can be realized as a literary product . . . without its oral realization and direct rendition by singer or speaker, an unwritten literary piece cannot easily be said to have any continued or independent existence at all. In this respect the parallel is less to written literature than to music and dance; for these too are art forms which in the last analysis are actualized in and through their performance and, furthermore, in a sense depend on repeated performances for their continued existence. (1970: 2)

Thus, when we discuss oral traditions, especially as part of our shared human patrimony, we are at best dealing with a mere shadow of the true reality of the oral text. The risks of such an undertaking are made clear in the following story, an example of dissident humor in the former Soviet Union: Standing on Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, Stalin was acknowledging the acclamation of the masses. Suddenly he raised his hands to silence the crowd. “Comrades,” he cried. “A most historic event! A telegram of congratulations from Leon Trotsky!” The crowd could hardly believe its ears. It waited in hushed anticipation. “Joseph Stalin,” read Stalin. “The Kremlin. Moscow. You were right and I was wrong. You are the true heir of Lenin. I must apologize. Trotsky.” A roar erupted from the crowd. But in the front row a little Jewish tailor gestured frantically to Stalin. “Psst!” he cried. “Comrade Stalin.” Stalin leaned over to hear what he had to say. “Such a message! But you read it without the right feeling.” Stalin once again raised his hands to the still excited crowd. “Comrades!” he announced. “Here is a simple worker, a Communist, who says I did not read Trotsky’s message with the right feeling. I ask that worker to come up on the podium himself to read Trotsky’s telegram.” The tailor jumped up on the podium and took the telegram into his hands. He read: “Joseph Stalin. The Kremlin. Moscow.” Then he cleared his throat and sang out: “You were right and I was wrong? You are the true heir of Lenin? I must apologize?” (Telushkin, 1992, pp. 121-122)

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Needless to say, the tailor’s rendition of the telegram conveyed a radically different meaning to the text—a meaning disguised by the written text, and best made clear in an oral rendition. Thus, each time a human language dies, the social, historical, and cultural knowledge that was kept in that language also dies. In an address in 1960 to UNESCO, Amadou Hampaté Bâ commented that, “Un vieillard qui meurt est une bibliothèque qui brûle [An old person dying is a library burning],340 and this is far more true with the loss of a language. Linguistic knowledge about how human beings construct reality Finally, and certainly overlapping the concerns of contemporary linguistics, is the fact that while extreme linguistic relativism, which suggests that one’s language essentially determines one’s world-view, is not defensible, there is in fact a growing acceptance among linguists that, at least in a weak form, “human perceptions of reality are structured and constrained—not controlled, but structured and constrained—by human languages, in interesting and significant ways.” 341 There is an old Czech proverb that says that, “For each language you know, you are a new person,” and there is at the very least an element of truth in this. 342 In other words, different languages provide us with valuable insights into cognitive science, as well as into the nature of Chomskian universal grammar. Furthermore, it is the very languages which are most endangered that have the most to teach us in this regard. And, as Nicholas Evans (2010) has noted with respect to claims about universal grammar, It’s easy to keep a little posse of universals alive provided you only take a few languages into account, but at some point the 51st or 2018th language you examine fails to conform. Of course it is also interesting to see what is common rather than universal, so finding an odd exception—say a language like Kayardild that marks tense on nouns as well as verbs—does not stop you saying “typically languages don’t do this.” (2010: 46)

The point, of course, is that it only takes a single exception to rule out a linguistic universal, and to thereby change (albeit in perhaps a tiny way) the way that we view the human mind. As we lose languages, we lose an immense of information about ourselves, our linguistic instincts, and the ways in which our brains are organized.

|| 340 Quoted in Evans, 2010: p. xv. 341 Cf. Elgin 2000: 52; see also Lee 1996. 342 Quoted in Evans 2010: 69.

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Education and language endangerment So, where does this leave us? To quote Lenin a bit out of context, “What is to be done?” Educational policy, together with social, cultural and economic policy, can play a key role in either protecting or in further threatening endangered languages. The problem is fundamentally an educational one, but it is also one grounded, not surprisingly, in poverty (see Harbert, McConnell-Ginet, Miller & Whitman 2009). As the nineteenth century American humorist Mark Twain once observed, “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.” This has often been the case in the history of threatened languages, but it need not be. Suzanne Romaine (2008: 8) has suggested that there are three different ways that the loss of language diversity can be met: we can do nothing, we can document endangered languages while they still exist, and/or we can attempt to sustain and revitalize at least some threatened languages. For many languages, we have already made the decision by default: nothing is being done, and given the number of threatened languages, our societies are almost certainly not going to invest in documenting them, let alone in trying to revitalize them. For others, professional linguists are working even as we speak to save what information is still salvageable, though far too few are doing so. Of course, there is also the more optimistic view offered by William Mackey in this regard: “If one looks at what happened to . . . past predictions one wonders if our present ones will fare any better. Could they go wrong, and, if so, how and why? They could, indeed, go wrong in many ways and for different reasons . . . ” (2003: 64). Mackey may well be correct that the situation is not as dire as many of us believe it to be, but to be honest, I have to say that I find the wisdom of another American humorist, Will Cuppy, to be more likely. Cuppy noted, “Most of us feel that we could never become extinct. The Dodo felt that way, too” (1941: 165). This leaves us with revitalization efforts, of which there are many that are certainly noteworthy. Threatened languages can be saved, but to do so requires immense effort and commitment. I have tried to argue here that that effort and commitment is worthwhile and valuable. I think that the NGO ActionAid International’s motto, with a focus on language as well as poverty, may be relevant here: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.” Human beings have rights, and among these rights is the right to preserve and maintain their language—perhaps the single most commonly abrogated human

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right in the world today.343 In spite of the widespread violation of language rights, though, around the world there are ongoing, and very promising, language revival and revitalization efforts taking place.344 Indeed, a whole new field of sociolinguistics—reversing language shift—has emerged in recent years.345 Such efforts involve support in a variety of social, cultural and economic domains, but none is as important as the educational domain. Although the two best-known examples of language revitalization—Hebrew in Israel and Irish in Ireland—vary dramatically with respect to the extent to which one can see them as successful (with Hebrew a clear success, and Irish as a far more marginal and debatable one), language revival and revitalization can and is continuing to occur in a variety of settings, often with quite promising results. There are a significant number of excellent examples of language revival and revitalization taking place even as we speak. In New Zealand, the Maori language, whose history had paralleled that of other indigenous languages in Anglophone settler societies, is an impressive example of what can be accomplished. By 1975, only 5% of Maori children could still speak Maori. As a result of a strong revitalization movement, though, in December 1982 the first fifty “Kohanga Reo” (“language nest”) Maori-medium pre-schools opened, and by 1993, there were 809 of these centers serving some 14,514 students.346 As of July 2009, the New Zealand Ministry of Education reports a total of more than 25,000 students enrolled in Maori-medium educational programs at a range of educational levels. Maori has become, once again, more than merely a ceremonial language; it is a living language whose future appears to be strong. As we have seen, the situation for all but a few of the Native American languages in the United States is incredibly grim. And yet, there are a small number of quite promising cases, including the revitalization of the Hawai’ian language in recent decades, though not without considerable debate.347 Although Hawai’ian language and culture had been mandated as a consequence of the 1978 state constitution, it was not until 1983 that a total immersion pre-school for Hawai’ian was established. Hawai’ian-medium immersion programs were then developed in the public schools, and as students moved from one grade to the next, the programs expanded. Finally, in the Spring of 1999, the first group || 343 See Guillorel & Koubi 1999; Kontra, Phillipson, Skutnabb-Kangags, & Váradt 1999; May 2005; Patrick 2005; Phillipson 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1995. 344 Cf. Tsunoda 2006. 345 See Fishman 1991, 2006; Tollefson & Tsui 2004. 346 Cf. Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 603f. 347 Cf. Wong 1999.

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of students who had had their entire PK-12 schooling in the medium of Hawai’ian graduated from secondary school.348 Both the cases of Maori and Hawai’ian are, by most accounts, successes, and yet they do serve to remind us of the very real limits of language revitalization. As Robert Kaplan and Richard Baldauf have specifically noted about Maori, Under the present circumstances, given the fact that there are virtually no monolingual speakers of Maori language left, the intergenerational gap has increased; that is, a whole generation has been skipped in language transmission—the best that can now be hoped for is a third generation . . . of more-or-less fluent second-language speakers of Maori. While such individuals may be able to use Maori in some limited or reduced number of registers, it is likely that the things to be discussed in Maori will be, at least in part, and perhaps to a significant degree, non-Maori. Even for these proficient second-language speakers of Maori, many important registers will function largely in English, not in Maori (or Maori will constitute a second, weaker, option for the discussion of some registers) (1997: 278).

In short, the dominance of a language of wider communication, such as English, in bilingual societies is a permanent threat to effective and truly meaningful language revitalization. At the same time, as Joshua Fishman has reminded us, As researchers in an area of specialization that is essentially outside of and broader than education, we tend to be surprisingly mesmerized by schools and by schooling . . . All of this would be understandable and harmless enough, were it not for the fact that we tend to make societal extrapolations on this basis—favoring education as the cure-all for sociolinguistic ills—as well. I have noticed this repeatedly. When I was studying reversing language shift, most sociolinguists with whom I discussed my work were convinced that ‘the schools could turn any language around,’ oblivious of the fact that exactly this has proven to be impossible in almost every well-documented case (2006: 137).

In short, education is a necessary but not sufficient condition for language revival and revitalization. There is, then, both a great deal of bad news and some good news, at least for a small number of languages that are being saved with respect to language revival and revitalization. Nevertheless, looking at the whole picture, I am afraid that Newman’s closing comments are every bit as relevant today as they were half a decade ago. Newman argued that, I am afraid that I have to close on a somber note. Despite the best intentions of many well-meaning and dedicated linguists, the rapid disappearance of languages throughout

|| 348 McCarty 2002: 297f.

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the world is likely to continue unabated. Those of us who are concerned about the endangered languages questions and the problem of language extinction are up against a formidable enemy—and that enemy is our own discipline of linguistics and the individuals who make it up. We can continue to talk about the matter, as surely as will be done ad nauseam at one international meeting or workshop after another; but given the odds against us, the chances of concrete results are pitifully small (2003: 11)

I wish that I could end on a happier note, but a key part of our common humanity is dying around us, and little is happening to change it in all too many places.

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Hulbert, J. (1935). Bright’s Anglo-Saxon reader. New York: Henry Holt. Kaplan, R., & Baldauf, R. (1997). Language planning, from practice to theory. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters. Kaschula, R. (Ed.). (1993). Foundations in southern African oral literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaschula, R. (Ed.). (2001). African oral literature: Functions in contemporary contexts. Cape Town: New Africa Books. Kenneally, C. (2007). The first word: The search for the origins of language. London: Penguin Books. King, K., Schilling-Estes, N., Fogle, L., Lou, J., & Soukup, B. (Eds.). (2008). Sustaining linguistic diversity: Endangered and minority languages and language varieties. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Kontra, M., Phillipson, R., Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Várady, T. (Eds.). (1999). Language: A right and a resource. Budapest: Central European University Press. Krauss, M. (1992). The world’s languages in crisis. Language, 68, 4-10. Krauss, M. (2006). Classification and terminology for degrees of language endangerment. In Brenzinger, M. (Ed.), Language diversity endangered (pp. 1-18). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kroeber, K. (1981). The art of traditional American Indian narration. In Kroeber, K. (Ed.), Traditional literatures of the American Indian: Texts and interpretations (pp. 1-24). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kunitz, S. (1994). Disease and social diversity: The European impact on the health of nonEuropeans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lass, R. 1994). Old English: A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, P. (1996). The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Leith, D. (1997). A social history of English (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Mackey, W. (2003). Forecasting the fate of languages. In Maurais, J. & Morris, M. (Eds.), Languages in a globalising world (pp. 64-81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. May, S.(2005). Language rights: Moving the debate forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9, 319347. McCarty, T. (2002). Between possibility and constraint: Indigenous language education, planning, and policy in the United States. In Tollefson, J. (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 285-307). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McWhorter, J. (2001). The power of Babel: A natural history of languages, New York: Times Books. McWhorter, J. (2009). Most of the world’s languages went extinct. In Blum, S. (Ed.), Making sense of language (pp. 192-206).New York: Oxford University Press. Milne, A. (1962). Winnie ille pu [Winnie the Pooh] (Lenard, A., Trans.).New York: E. P. Dutton. Milne, A. (1980). Winnie ille pu: Semper ludet [Winnie the Pooh: Always playing; in English, entitled The House at Poor Corner] (Staples, B., Trans.). New York: Dutton. Mitchell, B. (1995). An invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, B., & Robinson, F. (1992). A guide to Old English (5th ed.). Oxford: Blackwell,. Mithun, M. (1998). The significance of diversity in language endangerment and preservation. In Grenoble, L., & Whaley, L. (Eds.), Endangered languages: Current issues and future prospects (pp. 163-191) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Phillipson, R. (Eds.). (1995). Linguistic human rights: Overcoming linguistic discrimination. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Smith, J. (1999). Essentials of early English. London: Routledge. Smith, N. (2002). Language, bananas and bonobos: Linguistic problems, puzzles and polemics. Oxford: Blackwell. Spring, J. (2008). The American school: From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind (7th ed.). Boston: McGraw Hill. Telushkin, J. (1992). Jewish humor. New York: Morrow. Tollefson, J., & Tsui, A. (Eds.). (2004). Medium of instruction policies: Which agenda? Whose agenda? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tsunoda, T. (2006). Language endangerment and language revitalization: An introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. United Nations. (2008). The Millennium Development Goals Report: 2008. New York: United Nations. Vansina, J. (1985). Oral tradition as history (rev. ed.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Wayne, K., & Gruenewald, D. (Eds.). (2004). Ecojustice and education: A special issue of Educational Studies (Volume 36, Number 1). Wiley, T. (2002). Accessing language rights in education: A brief history of the U.S. context. In Tollefson, J. (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 39-64). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wong, L. (1999). Authenticity and the revitalization of Hawaiian. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30, 94-115. Woodbury, A. (1998). Documenting rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive loss in language shift, In Grenoble, L. & Whalely, L. (Eds.), Endangered languages: Current issues and future prospects (pp. 234-258), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

María Inés Arrizabalaga

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Translation as a lesson in dialogue Translators and translation scholars must necessarily engage in dialogue so that the former have access to technical explanations of their everyday labor, and the latter can anchor their reflections in the practice of translation.349 But in this chapter I will suggest that there is another, more profound, relationship between dialogue and Translation Studies [TS]. The chapter has three aims. First, I seek to provide a definition of dialogue in Translation Studies [TS] that reflects the periodization of the discipline; as I will show, the notion of “dialogue” can help explain the succession of the main translation schools and models of the 20th century. Second, after having used the notion of dialogue to reconstruct the dialectics in the theoretical discussion of interlinguistic translation, I will illustrate another possible use of the term ‘dialogue’ in TS, in connection with an epistemic shift from interlinguistic to intralinguistic translation. I do this by way of illustration, by describing the implementation of this shift in my courses “Introduction to Translation Studies” [ITS] at the School of Languages [SL] at National University of Córdoba [NUC] in Argentina.350 In order to understand the practice of translation, it is productive to begin with a look at intralingual translation— properly speaking: mainly interlectal translation—where the dialogical relationship of meanings can be grasped most easily. The first and the second use of the term ‘dialogue’ are well connected, I argue. If we consider the interaction in the theoretical arena of TS as a dialogue among schools and models, we also receive a useful conception of the relationship of different translation types, including those that resort to intralectal reference, creating a paraphrastic turn within TS.351 More concretely speaking, I suggest that the adjustments achieved during the evolvement of different theoretical approaches to translation are best explained by postulating a dialogical relationship between these theoretical models, and that one can apply the same explanatory schema for interlectal translation. While it is difficult to define a ‘dialogical relationship’ in exact terms, the crucial hallmark of this relationship seems to be that it is a truth-seeking procedure that has no fixed data to match || 349 Cf. Arrizabalaga 2012a, 2013. 350 Cf. Arrizabalaga 2010. 351 Cf. Arrizabalaga 2012b.

492 | María Inés Arrizabalaga but circles around a ‘truth’ that it generates by a movement of approximation from different perspectives. Third, I want to suggest that this analogy between, on the one hand, the dialogical relationship among intralingual translation types or style of paraphrasis, and, on the other hand, the dialogical relationship of proposals at the level of the methodological discourse of TS, i.e., dialogue as a model of theory dynamics in TS, is not merely a useful pedagogical tool but amounts to a methodological or metatheoretical insight. In accordance with these three steps of my argument the chapter is divided into three parts. The first part describes a selection of ‘schools’ in translation theory, together with the main arguments against the respective models of translation. Here I will rely on Anthony Pym’s Exploring Translation Theories (2012). The second part introduces the curriculum of ITS in order to illustrate how interlectal translation can be used to teach about the main theoretical models of interlinguistic translation in TS. In the final part I link my observations from the first and second part, respectively. To anchor the analogy I resort to Helle Dam and Jan Engberg’s concept of a “knowledge system.” Knowledge systems, I argue, refer to the sets of beliefs, habitus, norms of action, and action patterns that we can show to be at work in the ‘theory dynamics’ within TS; but we can also describe the differences in paraphrasis or intralingual translation types in terms of a dialogical relationship of knowledge systems.

Overview of Translation Studies—a dialogue of theories Translation Studies—or as it is also called after the French tradition, “Traductology”—is a relatively young field of knowledge. Historiographic studies in TS claim that the earliest evidence for a reconstruction of the history of the discipline dates back to Marcus Tullius Cicero. TS as we know it today is taken to begin in the middle of the 20th century. Among TS historiographers, it is a widespread notion that looking at past practices of translation only allows us to recreate—or even merely speculate—about tendencies in conceptions of translation. TS historiographers normally investigate the assumptions about translation procedures as described in prologues, prefaces, or notes to the editors or readers.352 By grouping such views of translations procedures historiographers of TS have been able to reconstruct the evolution of translation through the history of most of the Western world.

|| 352 Vega 1994.

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As an academic discipline, however, TS appears only in the 20th century. Most authors confirm that the field was institutionalized around the 1960’s and 1970’s, when translation stopped being a tool for teaching classical languages or drawing contrastive analyses in the Departments of Applied Linguistics and Comparative Literature in Western European and North American universities. The term ‘institutionalized’ is used in connection to moving from serving as a mere didactic or methodological tool to acquiring independence and being taught in separate academic programs, leading to a degree in Translation. The first theoretical models of translation models were developed by Bible scholars, linguists, and literary critics. Curiously enough, it is only in 1973 that a literary critic, James Holmes, firstly gave the discipline its present name, Translation Studies. This took place in Copenhagen in the III World Conference on Applied Linguistics, and is documented in the proceedings under the title “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies.”353 In the decade of the 1960s Eugene Nida and Charles Taber produced one of the first and most widely quoted handbooks on translation. Already a prominent figure in the American Bible Society, Nida published in 1964 Toward a Science of Translating (Nida, 2004 [1964]), and then in 1969 The Theory and Practice of Translation (Nida & Taber, 2004 [1969]), co-authored with his colleague Charles Taber, another Bible scholar. Their main theoretical contribution consists in a translation model that views translation as a process with three phases, analysis, transference and restructuring, in the course of which a message is moved from a source language to a target language. Due to this division, Nida & Taber’s model has also been called triphasic or transit model, and it was influential for a whole tradition of conceptions of translations as linguistic transition. The model also made it possible to develop systematic solutions for prototypical cases of interlinguistic transference. Since Nida & Taber intended to include all representative possibilities of transference possibilities and offered guidelines for other Bible translators, their books are classified as prescriptive manuals. Based on a review of various accounts of meaning, Nida & Taber recommend either formal or content transference solutions. Translation practice is analyzed and evaluated in terms of a search for formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence. The former refers to formal counterpart in language pairs, as in word-classes, active-passive voice, tense shifts, etc.; whereas the latter names token words which are chosen in cases of realemes failing to match a similar reality in the target language culture. After all cases are considered, Nida &

|| 353 Gentzler, 2004 [2001]; Hermans, 2004 [2001]).

494 | María Inés Arrizabalaga Taber list a number of adjustment techniques, such as addition, subtraction, alteration, and footnotes. Over a decade later, Peter Newmark, also American, published two other handbooks, Approaches to Translation in 1981 (Newmark, 2004 [1981]), and A Textbook of Translation in 1988 (Newmark, 2001 [1988]). He proposes a twodirectional translation scheme, as semantic translation and communicative translation. Mirroring Nida & Taber’s binomial formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence, Newmark states that semantic solutions settle on problems of form, and a communicative perspective rather attends to the expectations and needs of receivers. His Textbook provides a rich list of translation procedures. For this reason his contributions to TS are usually considered as a direct descendant of Nida & Taber’s approach and the works of the three authors have been grouped together as representatives of prescriptive, formalist, and linguistic views of translation. Reviewing the theory dynamics in TS, Pym (2010) has collected a list of “frequently had arguments” that schools on the rise typically level against dominating schools. His Exploring Translation Theories traces in many ways what I think are best considered dialogical relationships not only within what he calls the “plurality of paradigms”, but also between theory and practice in the didactics of TS: Unfortunately our educational institutions tend to separate theory from practice, often demanding a separate course in “translation theory.” If necessary, that can be done. However, the theories and their implications should still be drawn out from a series of practical tasks, structures as discovery processes. This book has been designed to allow such use. Towards the end of each chapter we list some “frequently had arguments,” most of which do not have any clear resolution, and many of which are not really as frequent as we would like them to be (Pym 2010: 5).

On the premises of formal-oriented analyses of the translation process and of linguistic transcodification, such models as Nida & Taber’s and Newmark’s have been critically weighed from many angles. Pym has chosen to introduce and discuss such arguments from the point of view of “natural equivalence” and “directional equivalence.” 354 The typical critical objections against Nida & Taber and Newmark can be listed as follows: • •

“Natural equivalence presupposes a non-existent symmetry.” “The tests of equivalence have no psychological basis.”

|| 354 Cf. Pym 2010 ch.2 and ch.3, respectively.

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• • • • • • •

“New information cannot be ‘natural’.” “Naturalness hides imperialism.” “Naturalness promotes parochialism.” “Equivalence presupposes symmetry between languages.” “Theories of directional equivalence are unnecessarily binary.” “Theories of equivalence make the source text superior.” “Equivalence is not efficient; similarity is enough.”355

Related to Nida & Taber’ and Newmark’s approach is a view of translation that became known as the ‘Leipzig School’ of TS. In the 1960’s a tendency spread from central Europe to the West to view translation as mainly a transcodification of messages, i.e. messages passing from one verbal code to another. The main protagonists of this view were at Leipzig University in Germany, and the school proved highly influential in this geographic area.356 Also the most seminal model of Functionalist School, namely, Christiane Nord’s, has its roots in the type of analysis championed by the Leipzig School.357 In Nord’s approach the primary concern should be with language use; thus she describes translation with reference to linguistic functions as analyzed by Roman Jakobson and Karl Bühler. Revising Jakobson’s and Bühler’s classifications, Nord distinguishes between referential, expressive, appelative and phatic linguistic functions.358 She groups texts according to their prevailing functions into informative, expressive and operative, and explains that translation consists in a pairing of texts and text functions. Consequently, translation can be considered as equifunctional, heterofunctional and homologous. The first type is the most popular one as there is no change in text functions; whereas the second type involves a partial modification of some sort, generally applied to localized or revised translations. The last type refers to whole adaptations typical of audiovisual texts such as TV serials in which linguistic functions remain the same but the texts are adjusted to different systems of values and beliefs in the target language culture. Developing this approach in a dense series of publications, from Text Analysis in Translation, first published in German in 1988, to Translating as a Purposeful Activity in 1997, Nord argued that translation is not the transposition of codes but an alignment of texts that is determined by the ‘consumption’ of the text within its respective context. Texts are seen as ‘offers

|| 355 Cf. Pym 2010: 20f and 38-40. 356 Cf. Wilss, 1988 [1977]; Wotjak, 2002-2003. 357 Cf. Nord 1991 [1988]. 358 Cf. Nord 2001 [1997].

496 | María Inés Arrizabalaga of information’ and can be the result of two types of translation, either instrumental translation or documentary translation. For instrumental texts—e.g., reference works or manuals—translations could be commissioned and evaluated relative to criteria of functional adequacy. Expressive texts, on the other hand, literary texts, appear to fall out of the earliest Functionalist understanding of the translation industry. Literature could not be commissioned; its higher use of language, the exploitation of meaning could not adapt to the constraints of client satisfaction, thus translation of literature was not instrumental but documentary of creative procedures.359 Pym (2010) again collects the typical objections against Functionalism from the perspectives of linguistics, philosophy of language, sociology, marketing, and didactics. The wide spread of disciplinary perspectives is not surprising given that TS in the 1980’s was branching off from Linguistics and Comparative Literature and, in order to develop independent theoretical standing, itself sought contact to these disciplines to gain new tools of analysis and theoretical frameworks. Here is the list of objections collected in Pym: • • • • • • •

“We translate words, not functions.” “Purposes are identified in the source text.” “The concept of purpose (or Skopos) is an idealism.” “The Skopos theory is unfalsifiable.” “The theory does not address equivalence as an underlying default norm.” “Purpose analysis is mostly not cost-effective.” “The well-trained translator is a self-serving notion.”

|| 359 To add a few words about translation and the beginnings of the information technology era, with the aid of satellite communication, huge bulks of information can travel in next to no time, which has been especially helpful in the promotion of scientific knowledge. In the so called Hard Sciences, knowledge is updated continuously, thus translation of specialized science texts is short-lived and in order to see the public light much of it has to be ready overnight. Digital channels for the circulation of knowledge and texts, such as the Internet, have turned translation into a giant industry. In tandem, consumption of translated texts, along with the localization of information as a reactive gesture to the globalization process, is gradually extending (Arrizabalaga, 2011). In this scenario, the idea of fidelity in translation moves away from the transcodification of a message in its original language to a—formally corresponding—version in another language. A present-day understanding of the demands of translation industry indicates that the adequacy of a version has to be judged not in terms of corresponding use of codes, but considering the new version in the light of a translation commission. Roughly speaking, the criterion for adequacy moves from language correspondence to client satisfaction.

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• •

“The theory cannot resolve cases of conflicting purposes.” “The theory contradicts ethics of truth and accuracy.”360

Polysystem Theory enters the scene to shed light on the “behavior” of the cultural industry in general, with translation—including the translation of literature—becoming a consumer good. In the early 1970’s a group of doctoral students in the Department of Comparative Literature at Leuven Catholic University, in Belgium, focused their research on the role of translation under censorship regimes, or in diglossic states, and also about translated versions as an “independent genre.”361 In their view, translation was no longer relative to the conditions of an original counterpart but to the conditions of production, circulation and consumption in the target language context. Presenting a general proposal for the interpretation of cultural objects, Itamar Even-Zohar suggested that the generation of a translated version should be understood as a product of a conglomerate of systems, which he called a polysystem. The terms of acceptability in the circulation of translated products are accounted for by the interaction of such a group of systems. 362 The behavior of systems is regulated by rules, which are to be conceived not in the way of prescriptive forms of action—as it is the case with Nida & Taber’s model—but as patterns that condition further actions. After finishing his studies, Even-Zohar settled at the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics in Tel Aviv, Israel. One of his colleagues at Tel Aviv, Gideon Toury, contributed to the Polysystem Theory by formulating a set of norms for habitual actions. Toury proposed to describe translations as guided by norms to group habits of action; he aimed to explain the behavior of translated products as guided by (i) initial norms, i.e. the habits pertaining to particular courses of actions in translators; (ii) operative norms, typical enunciative (i.e., generic) schemes; and (iii) preliminary norms, namely the policies of editorial houses and all other institutions connected with the production and consume of translations.363 In addition, there is another body of premises to go with Even-Zohar’s contributions, another alternative theory that sorts translation changes into obligatory shifts and non-obligatory shifts. The former refer to all modifications concerning the transition from a language into another; and the latter, to the

|| 360 Cf. Pym 2010: 56-59. 361 Cf. Gentzler 2004 [2001]; Hermans 2004 [2001]. 362 Cf. “Factors and dependencies in culture”, at http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/works, 1233. 363 Cf. Toury 2004 [1995]. On Toury’s theory of norms see also De Felipe Boto 2004.

498 | María Inés Arrizabalaga influence that social policies, agencies and aesthetics have on the production of a translated version. Within the framework of a polysystem there is not much room for “erratic behavior” then, and the combination of systemic regulations seems to rule out innovative decisions. For this reason the polysystemic view of production, circulation and consumption of translated texts has been criticized as reductionist and deterministic. Be that as it may, the polysystemic perspective in TS introduced a whole new perspective onto translated texts. Traditional ideas on the notions of fidelity and translation criticism evolved from prescriptions linked to code to target context-bound interpretations.364 As Polysystem Theory dominated the theoretical arena of TS, a retrospective look on the evolution of the discipline revealed: (i) the limits of a relatively new field of studies, (ii) the need to resort to metalanguage from other areas of knowledge, (iii) the interdisciplinary nature of projects in TS. Pym’s arguments (2010) to counterbalance the binary logics of Polysystem Theory show that over the past decades TS has been in constant and cross-fertilizing contact with areas of knowledge such as didactics, sociology, semiotics, and history. In Pym’s opinion, the criticism that Polysystem Theory has received can be summarized as follows: • • • • • •

“Descriptions do not help train translators.” “The target side cannot explain all relations.” “The models all concern texts and systems, not people.” “The focus on norms promotes conservative positions.” “The definition of ‘assumed translations’ is circular.” “Descriptivist theory is unaware of its own historical position.”365

Concluding this overview over the theoretical landscape in TS let us note that the relationships between the different schools and models of translation display a curious developmental paradigm. Unlike in the empirical sciences there is no discernible curve along which later theories better approximate the data. On the other hand, the theory landscape also does not reflect the dynamics of a dialectical movement as, say, in literary theory or architecture. Rather, the theoretical approaches in TS seem to display the distinctive elements of a dialogical unity of a plurality of positions—they center around a focal point, the ‘truth’ of translation, that is produced in the course of, and due to, a joint search that is

|| 364 Cf. Lefevere 2004 [1992]. 365 Cf. Pym 2010: 83-85.

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driven by the logic of a conversation where partners criticize each other for onesidedness or overstatement, always with a view to the focal point. Let us now turn to a closer look at what I argue will be another instance of this dialogical unity, namely, the intralingual movement in TS which I take to be effected by the paraphrastic turn in interlinguistic translation.

The paraphrastic turn: the multicultural and multilingual school of languages In the course ‘Introduction to Translation Studies ‘ (ITS), which I teach periodically at the School of Languages at National University of Córdoba (NUC), I have made the observation that when linguistic diversity becomes an obstacle and a threat to fully grasping translation models, resorting to intralingual reference and analysis is a proven tool among students mastering different language pairs. To make this observation systematically productive, I will first need to introduce some of the details of the context and the course. At NUC there are more than 20 graduate and postgraduate programs, including four Translation Degrees to become certified legal translators. This means that such translators can deal with legal documents and act as interpreters in a Court of Law, although they also receive training for handling texts in technical and scientific fields, and doing literary translations. It can be deduced that their training is remarkably comprehensive but, as it is the case with all specialized practice, extra specific education is becoming more and more necessary after they graduate. All four degrees in translation involve different language pairs, namely Spanish > English; Spanish > French; Spanish > German and Spanish > Italian.366 “Introduction to Translation Studies” is a subject that belongs to a Common Educational Area for the four language pairs. This means that the teaching staff has every year over 600 hundred students. Classes are split into six groups of about 100 students. The staff meets students only once weekly in a one-hourand-twenty-minute class. The pedagogical challenges of this setting are considerable. The syllabus of ITS is divided into units. The introductory Unit 1 is devoted to defining “translation” and “Traductology”, to presenting the roots of diverse translation definitions, different translation perspectives and a classification of translation types (Hurtado Albir, 2004 [2001]).

|| 366 Arrizabalaga, 2012a, 2013.

500 | María Inés Arrizabalaga In Unit 2 the teaching staff gives Nida & Taber’s categories of formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence an interlectal turn. Spanish is one of the largest spoken languages worldwide, and the map of dialects is highly diversified. Already the 23 Argentinean provinces can be split into at least seven dialectal areas; Southern America, Central America and Mexico have their own equally diversified dialectal maps; then there is American Spanish as opposed to Peninsular Spanish, and these in turn from Spanish provinces where multilingualism is common; finally, there are characteristic differences between Spanish spoken as a second or foreign language in opposition to Spanish as a mother-tongue.367 So we present students with fragments in one dialect and ask them to paraphrase—provide an intralingual translation or version of—the text into a different dialect. The reflective exercises used at a stage prior to production help students to identify the phases of especially transference and restructuring.368 Afterwards students are alternatively asked to either recognize techniques used in the paraphrased fragment or to apply techniques themselves. Unit 3 deals with German Functionalism, and assignments vary from manipulation of functions to reorganizing information whenever no generic changes are involved. In the selection of texts for this unit we usually choose strong dialectally-marked texts and texts in what is questionably called PanHispanic Spanish, or texts belonging to genres in which a specialized language is used, and others containing informal language. Guidelines for work have to do with rewriting fragments giving relevance to different functions, or with changing the genre of a text, or even adjusting the specifics of one genre to areas or countries where generic variance is perspicuous. By contrast, in Unit 4 generic changes is moved into the background. We mostly pick classics and work on the production of translated versions for varied groups of systems; we take, for instance, children literature and travel literature, and ask students to reflect on the type of shifts and the restrictions of norms which influenced different versions of a classic. Alternatively, we use 19th century world classics, and also 19th century Argentinean classics that have ‘made history’ in order to confront texts and films based on or presented as adaptations of such previous works. We also work with comics and texts for mass media, e.g., TV advertisements, in order to prod students into recognizing which systems are called on for a polysystemic interpretation the meaning of a text. In ITS, the paraphrastic method thus operates at many levels—epistemic (conceptual), written (practical), and instrumental (specific material design).

|| 367 Fontanella de Weinberg 2004. 368 Cuéllar Lázaro 2004.

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Paraphrasis it is meant to bridge the gap created by diverse linguistic frames of reference in large student audiences. Paraphrasis, i.e., the strategy of resorting to intralingual reference and analysis in different language-pair student groups, is a dialogic solution to communicate the dialogical relationship between theoretical models of translation, or so I will argue in the following section.

Dialogue in translation, translation as dialogue The paraphrastic method is a valuable tool to turn an obstacle, namely, the cultural diversity of in large student audiences, into an advantage. Our students have received linguistic training in at least one second-language, I can presume that along with it they have acquired a holistic idea of a the social and historic dimensions of the foreign language (English, Italian, French, German) native speaking communities. In addition, in the context of various exchange programs we also have students with Spanish as a second language. In this setting intralingual translation or paraphrasis has a sufficiently wide scope and yields sufficiently diversified results so that the rationale of the main theoretical models of translation and their relationship can be illustrated. Students understand by means of a hands-on experience, in dialogical settings with their fellow students and their teachers (though here dialogue is mediated by an electronic learning platform) that dialogue is a method of truth-seeking among different “knowledge systems.” The notion of a “knowledge system,” which was introduced into TS in 2003 by Helle Dam and Jan Engberg,369 is to highlight that translation involves the meeting of, and transference from and to, frameworks with relational logic, i.e., systematic structure, that combine declarative and procedural knowledge, i.e., represent both content and abilities. In the context of ITS, where dialogue is involved in the learning process at a variety of levels, the notion of a knowledge system is a particularly useful analytical tool—it helps students to understand who or what is actually engaged in dialogue. Students can conceive of the theory dynamics in TS as a dialogue among knowledge systems that in turn draw on knowledge systems outside TS. But they are can conceive of their own situation, as students in ITS with different cultural backgrounds striving to understand translation, as a dialogue of knowledge systems which they each represent, with partial overlaps.

|| 369 At the conference Text and Translation 2003, held at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark.

502 | María Inés Arrizabalaga In this way students can appreciate that the concept of translation goes beyond linguistic techniques that can help to account for interlinguistic transcodification. Translation, they begin to understand, is a movement that connects cultural, social, and linguistic frameworks.370 Especially in classrooms that are multicultural, multilingual, and multisocial, translation can be taught and practiced by paraphrasis, by putting one language into dialogue with itself, as a dialogue of knowledge systems sharing a language. Interlinguistic translation is then more easily recognized as a dialogue between knowledge systems using different languages. However, there is a larger ‘lesson’ here that goes beyond the classroom and points towards a systematic or metatheoretic insight. Knowledge systems relate to each other when people relate whose thoughts and actions are guided by these knowledge systems. When we experience the dialogue of knowledge systems in our efforts of paraphrasis we experience a search guided by various ideas about what such intralingual translations are to accomplish. In combination with the insight that these ideas are reflected in theoretical models of interlinguistic translations, one might claim that translation cannot be captured by a single theoretical model. Rather, translation seems to live in a curious and specific interplay of models and perspectives, which the hermeneutic faculties of translators, in their concrete historical context, bring about as a dialogical relationship.

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|| 370 Cf. Tymoczko 2002.

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504 | María Inés Arrizabalaga Newmark, P. (2004 [1981]). Approaches to Translation. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Newmark, P. (2001 [1988]). A textbook of Translation. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Nord, C. (1991 [1988]). Text Analysis in Translation (Nord, C. & Sparrow, P., Trans.). Amsterdam, Holland: Rodopi. Nord, C. (2001 [1997]). Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. O’Donnell, P. (1998). El águila guerrera [The Warrior Eagle]. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. O’Donnell, P. (1999). El rey blanco [The White King]. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Prieto, A. (2003 [1996]). Los viajeros ingleses y la emergencia de la literatura argentina. 18201850 [The English Travellers and the Emergence of Argentinean Literature. 1820-1850]. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Pym, A. (2010). Exploring Translation Theories. London: Routledge. Snell-Hornby, M. (1999 [1988]). Estudios de traducción. Hacia una perspectiva integradora [Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach] (Ramírez, A.-S., Trans.). Salamanca, Spain: Almar. Toury, G. (2004 [1995]). Los estudios descriptivos de la traducción y más allá [Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond] (Rabadán, R. & Merino, R., Trans.). Madrid, Spain: Cátedra. Tymoczko, M. (2002). Connecting the Two Infinite Orders: Research Methods in Translation Studies. In Hermans, T. (Ed.). Crosscultural Transgressions. Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues (pp. 13-25). Manchester, England: St. Jerome. Vega, M. A. (1994). Textos clásicos de teoría de la traducción [Classical Texts on the Theory of Translation]. Madrid, Spain: Cátedra. Vidal Claramonte, M. C. A. (1995). Traducción, manipulación, desconstrucción [Translation, Manipulation, Deconstruction]. Salamanca, Spain: Colegio de España. Wilss, W. (1988 [1977]). La ciencia de la traducción [The Science of Translation] (Oberkirchner, G. & Franco, S.). Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de México. Wotjak, G. (2002-2003). La Escuela de Traductología de Leipzig. In Hieronymus Complutensis 9-10, http://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/hieronymus [accessed in May 2013].

Mike Hulme

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Four meanings of climate change371 Throughout human history and pre-history the relationships between societies and their climates have been dynamic (Boia, 2005). They have been simultaneously material and imaginative and variously elemental, creative and fearful. These changing relationships have now taken a more intimate turn. The cumulative impact of the aggregation of an almost infinite number of individual human actions across the world taken over the last 200 years is changing the gaseous composition of the global atmosphere. And as scientists Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius knew in the nineteenth century (Fleming, 2005), changing the composition of the atmosphere alters the performance of weather—or what scientists today would call ‘the functioning of the climate system.’ We thus have good grounds for believing that future climates will not be like past climates. Our ancestors have often worried about this possibility and now the knowledge claims of science have offered new reasons for this current generation to be concerned. Humanity is firmly embedded within the physical climate system, straining further the artificially constructed boundaries between the natural and the human. But at the same time as physical climates are changing, the imaginative idea of anthropogenic climate change372 is penetrating and changing political discourse and social organization in novel ways. The past (through historic emissions of greenhouse gases) and the future (through lurid descriptions of the effects of predicted climates to come373) are interacting in || 371 Reprinted with permission from: S. Skirmshire (ed.), Future Ethics, Climate Change, and Apocalyptic Imagination, Continuum Press (2010), 37-58. 372 Strictly speaking, the term ‘climate change’ refers to a change in climate brought about for any reason, whether natural or human. The great ice ages are therefore a result of (natural) climate change. However, in popular usage ‘climate change’ has come to imply a change in climate brought about by human actions (anthropogenic climate change), most notably the changing composition of the global atmosphere. The erasure of this distinction between natural and anthropogenic climate change is of some significance for communications between the worlds of science, society and politics. The term ‘global warming’ also has the connotation of human causation. 373 The film Age of Stupid released in March 2009 in the United Kingdom is one example of such vivid imagination at work, with the world of 2055 inundated under a flood of biblical proportions.

506 | Mike Hulme new ways to provide a novel motor for cultural change. And this is all happening under the symbolism of global warming. Yet the proliferating narratives around climate change remain strongly rooted in the knowledge claims of the natural sciences and aligned to a policy framing in which climate change is a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ (Hulme 2009). The universalizing authority of science, and its expectations of progressive ‘improvements’ in its predictions of the future, is invoked in this dominant framing of climate change. It is a framing which both demands and claims global assent. So for example, the goal of restricting global warming to no more than 2ºC above the mid-nineteenth century global temperature—a policy position originating with the European Union in 1996 and recently adopted by the G20 in 2009 as an aspirational target—is seemingly powerful, yet fundamentally fragile. This goal appears powerful because it traces its lineage to the positivist and predictive sciences. It remains fragile, however, because it is largely a construction of elite scientists and of neo-liberal Western politics. This constructed policy goal is unlikely to be one around which the world will easily be reengineered. In the turbulent geo-politics and social transformations of the twenty-first century, neither positivist science nor Western neo-liberalism seems likely to retain global hegemony. For these reasons the emergent global phenomenon of climate change needs a new examination. And this re-examination should have a different starting point from that adopted in the late decades of the twentieth century. Those origins—notably in the 1980s—were to be found in the disciplines of the physical sciences and in the institutional processes which led in 1988 to the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (see Agrawala 1998). This is an institution whose pronouncements rapidly came to dominate climate change framing and discourse. They still do, as evidenced by the kudos conferred on the Panel by the 2007 award of the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, the re-examination of climate change I propose here starts with contributions from the interpretative humanities and social sciences, married to a critical reading of the natural sciences, and informed by a spatially and historically contingent view of knowledge. In this chapter I offer one way in which we may begin to embed culture and myth in our understanding of climate change.374 Why is such a re-examination necessary? It is necessary I believe because the dominating construction of climate change as an overly physical phenomenon (what we might designate as lower case ‘climate change’) readily allows the

|| 374 I first outlined this approach in chapter 10 of Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Hulme, 2009), an approach that is here somewhat elaborated.

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idea of climate change to be appropriated uncritically in support of an expanding range of ideologies . . . the ideologies, for example, of green colonialism, of the commodification of Nature, of national security, of celebrity culture, of localism and many others (let us designate these latter interpretations as upper case ‘Climate Change’). I am not arguing here whether or not any of these creeds are desirable. My central point is that the existing framing of climate change— with its dominating material, global and universal properties and its consequential exclusion of situated and heterogeneous cultural anchors—endows the idea of climate change with a convenient plasticity. ‘Climate Change’ is therefore used to justify, inter alia, emissions trading, large-scale solar radiation engineering, vegetarianism, nuclear power, national identity cards, flight rationing, carbon offsetting and so on. Rather than leading to a convergence in thinking, the idea of climate change acts as a proxy for, and a revealer of, conflict in the human world. ‘Climate Change’ thus becomes a malleable envoy enlisted in support of too many princes and principalities. We need to understand the roles played by the idea of climate change in the contemporary world. This chapter makes a small contribution to the re-examination I call for by suggesting four ways in which climate change gets loaded with deeper sets of assumptions about the natural world and our relationship with it—in other words how ‘climate change’ becomes ‘Climate Change’. I am not suggesting that these are the only myths or ideologies,375 nor even claiming that they are the four most important ones. But they are four that have struck me repeatedly over recent years as I have observed the language and rhetoric of climate change discourse. Because of the religious tradition with which I am most familiar, I have given Biblical metaphors to these four myths: lamenting Eden, presaging Apocalypse, constructing Babel and celebrating Jubilee. By approaching climate change in this way, by seeking to reveal the underlying myths and cultural narratives which shape and inflect the idea of climate change, I am hoping to make easier the task of thinking ethically about the future. Narrating climate change as an idea situated in cultural spaces rather than as one correlating solely with a physical reality, makes it easier to understand the diverse and diverging calls for action we hear circulating through the networks of advocates and echoing in the corridors of power.376 || 375 By ideology I mean the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class or large group. And I mean ‘myth’ in the anthropological sense of ‘embodying fundamental truths underlying our assumptions about everyday life and scientific realities’ (Thompson and Rayner 1998). Myths transcend scientific categories of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood.’ 376 These voices and their ideological correlates have been explored in Malone 2009.

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Lamenting Eden The lament for Eden views climate as a symbol of what is natural, something that is pure and pristine and (should be) beyond the reach of humans. In this mythical position, climate therefore becomes something that is fragile and needs to be protected or ‘saved,’ just as much as do ‘wild’ landscapes or animal species. These are goals which have fuelled the Romantic, wilderness and environmental movements of the Western Enlightenment over two centuries and more. To characterize this myth I adopt the image of a lost Eden, the idea of loss, lament and a yearning for restoration: So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3/23–4)

This idea in relation to climate change has been developed in part by the sociologist Steve Yearley. He proposes that rather than being concerned about climate change for its substantive diminution of human welfare, there is a strong element of symbolism involved (Yearley, 2006). We are so concerned about anthropogenic climate change because our climate has come to symbolize the last stronghold of Nature, untainted by Man. Bill McKibben in The End of Nature (1989) adopted this position with respect to reasoning why we are concerned about climate change. His powerful lament for the end of Nature finds its highest expression in the transition from a natural climate to a climate which is being modified through human interference with the global atmosphere. That “a child will now never know a natural summer” is for McKibben a cause of deep sadness and of loss. That global climate is no longer safe from the contaminating influences of the human species speaks symbolically of just how deeply humans have penetrated and changed the natural world. Now, of course, when and why Nature first became a separate category in the human imagination can be endlessly disputed, as indeed can whether an independent category of ‘wildness’ exists in any substantive sense. Many anthropologists and environmental historians (such as Julie Cruikshank, Michael Thompson, Bill Cronon) have argued that the idea of Nature as a separate category, distinct from our interior worlds and therefore something that can be objectively studied and hence physically ‘damaged’ by us, is an idea—an ideolo-

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gy—originating only in the Western Enlightenment. It is an interpretation of the world that finds rarer expression in traditional or non-Western societies where Nature and Culture are consistently viewed as mutually embedded categories: there is no Nature unless interpreted by Culture and no Culture disembodied from Nature. There is no denying, however, that the idea of wildness—Nature as separate—has been a persistent mode of discourse in Western rationalist cultures over recent centuries ever since that proto-Romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a project to reclaim a pure Nature freed from human oppression (see Grove 1998). This mythical position—what I call the lament for Eden—contends that by changing the climate, by losing wildness in one of the last ‘untouched’ places, humans are diminishing not just themselves, but also something beyond themselves. And that we are the poorer for it . . . as too maybe are the gods. This mythic position emphasizes the symbolic over the substantive. It is a lament which underpins the deep ecology movement and which surfaces in some forms of eco-theology. Variants of this thinking in relation to climate change permeate, subliminally perhaps, mainstream environmentalism. And they lie hidden in even broader climate change discourses across neo-liberal Western societies. Thus we find ecological economist Paul Baer challenging the World Bank economists by rhetorically asking what an ice-sheet is worth (Baer, 2007), and the polar bear—that hackneyed icon of climate change—ends up not just worrying about its own survival, but has also to carry a huge additional weight on its shoulders, the weight of human nostalgia. Camille Seaman’s recent haunting photographic exhibition The Last Iceberg377 also plays to this lament. The Last Iceberg chronicles just a handful of the many thousands of icebergs that are currently headed to their end. “I approach the images of icebergs as portraits of individuals, much like family photos of my ancestors. I seek a moment in their life in which they convey their unique personality, some connection to our own experience and a glimpse of their soul which endures.”378 But if we approach climate change through this myth we have to ask exactly what is it that is being lost as climates change? Climate is not like biodiversity—an absolute decline in species numbers or a loss of ecosystem function—or even like ozone, a direct physiological health hazard. As climates change the various categories of weather are re-arranged to occur in different places and in different sequences. We are not losing clouds, abandoning rainfall, denying the

|| 377 Cf. www.camilleseaman.com. 378 Camille Seaman quoted at http://www.soulcatcherstdio.com/exhibitions/seaman/ index.htm, accessed 24 March 2010.

510 | Mike Hulme sun. We are changing climate, not depleting it. Certain climates may become extinct in one place, but only for new climates to emerge somewhere else. There is no such thing as a ‘good’ climate or a ‘bad’ climate, only ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways of imagining and living with climate. There is a parallel here with the emerging deliberations among ecologists about ‘novel ecosystems’: how to define, categorize and manage them (see Hobbs et al. 2006). And if this position is merely lamenting the loss of ‘the natural’ as McKibben suggests, then climate change is simply one more staging post on the long human journey starting half a million years ago with the domestication of fire as an agent of manipulation and control. Climate change then is no new category; and lamenting Eden really is romantic idealism.

Presaging apocalypse Environmental discourses have long been clothed in the language of apocalypse.379 Over ten years ago, Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacquie Palmer (1996) traced part of this genealogy from the appearance of Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring in 1962 to what they identified then as the new apocalypse of global warming, passing along the way through Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s 1972 The Limits to Growth. Since Killingsworth and Palmer wrote this in 1996, and especially over the last few years in Western Europe and North America, I suggest that this apocalyptic narrative of climate change has become even more dominant. The linguistic repertoire of this apocalyptic myth deploys categories such as ‘irreversible tipping points,’ ‘billions of humans at risk of devastation, if not death,’ ‘climate genocide’. There is an endless supply of headlines in print and on screen that are so phrased. ‘Global warming: be worried; be very worried’ said Time Magazine in April 2006; ‘Ten years to avoid catastrophic tipping points’ wrote Tony Blair to European leaders in 2006. A separate category of climate change is invented—‘catastrophic climate change’ as distinct from climate change. It’s as though there are now two distinct sub-species of the phenomenon. A Green Party politician from the United Kingdom puts it clearly:

|| 379 I use the word apocalypse in its popular sense, meaning impending large-scale disaster or destruction, rather than in its original Greek—and Biblical—usage, meaning simply disclosure or revelation.

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‘Climate change’ is a criminally-vague and anodyne term that is dangerous for us to use. Let’s not fool ourselves by using warm words such as ‘climate change’. Talking instead about averting ‘climate catastrophe’ is not alarmism. It is simply calling things by their true names.380

We see evidence of this linguistic trope not just in the places we would expect it—in the media, from environmental campaigners—but also in the words of civil servants such as the former chief scientific advisor in the United Kingdom Sir David King (2004), “I believe that change is a bigger threat than global terrorism,” and from some scientists such as Jim Lovelock (2006): “ . . . we [humans] are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago and if it does, most of us and our descendants will die.” These tones contrast, for example, with the less passionate and loaded language used by the IPCC (2007: 123): “Abrupt climate changes, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the rapid loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet or large-scale changes in ocean circulation systems, are not considered likely to occur in the twenty-first century.” In the Synthesis Report of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC in 2007, the word catastrophe does not appear. Visual imagery too becomes deployed in support of this myth of Apocalypse, the calving of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet, cities drowned under imaginary floods of water, doomsday movies such as The Day After Tomorrow being some of the more evocative. What does this framing of climate change do to audiences around the world? It undoubtedly lends a sense of danger, fear and urgency to discourses around climate change. Thus The Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom asked the startling question in two-inch bold print on its front page on 28 April 2007: “Will this be the summer when Britain reaches 40 degrees?” In fact it wasn’t, as maximum temperatures during the subsequent, rather uneventful, summer barely made 30ºC. Such stark language and urgent tones certainly deny audiences the choice to ignore the phenomenon of climate change. We hear the claim that we only have ten (or maybe it is eight or fifteen) years to ‘save the planet’ (e.g. The Times newspaper, January 2007) and the New Economics Foundation and others have established an internet clock, ticking second-bysecond to climate meltdown predicted for 1 December 2016 if “emissions are not

|| 380 Rupert Read, private correspondence, 2008.

512 | Mike Hulme reduced.”381 Campaigning movements in the United Kingdom such as Rising Tide and Stop Climate Chaos have become expert in deploying such urgency in their lobbying of Parliament and in their public protestations (e.g. against expansion of Heathrow Airport or the building of a coal power station at Kingsnorth). Yet heightening saliency and awareness of climate change is rather too easy a goal. The counter-intuitive outcome of such language is that it leads to disempowerment, apathy and scepticism among its intended audience. Several studies—not only in relation to climate change—have shown that promoting fear is an ineffective, even counterproductive, way of inducing attitudinal and behavioural change.382 In recent years, although the proportion of the British public being concerned about climate change has remained steady, there were in 2009 twice as many as before (2004) who believe that media representations of climate change are too alarmist (Whitmarsh, 2009). If pro-environmental behaviour change is what the myth of apocalypse really is seeking, then it may in the end be self-defeating. So why should climate change be framed this way? How does it so easily lend itself to the trope of apocalypse? Anthropogenic climate change has not always been talked about in this way. I suggest here three dimensions to the consolidation of climatic apocalypse that we have seen in recent years. First, drawing from the myth of a fragile Earth and a disappearing climate—as in the Lament for Eden above—the enduring human fear of the future has fuelled these descriptions of a climate system on the point of collapse. It resonates with a particular view of Nature as fragile or ephemeral, as originally proposed by Buzz Holling (1986). Second, the rhetoric has also been fuelled by the new paradigm now driving Earth system science: the ideas of complexity, thresholds and non-linearity. Working within this paradigm, Earth system models are able to find an increasing number of ‘tipping elements’ in their model worlds where non-linear changes in climate function can occur (Lenton et al., 2008). And third, I suggest that the myth of apocalypse has been partly a response of frustration to the apparent failures of international negotiations to establish agreements and policies which are effective in slowing the growth of global carbon emissions. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at the rate of about 2.5 per cent per

|| 381 Cf. www.onehundredmonths.org, accessed 20 October 2009. The reduction of about 2.5 per cent in global emissions during 2008 was caused by the global economic recession and most commentators expect the decadal growth trend to resume after 2010. 382 Cf. Moser 2007; O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009.

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year, and indeed have accelerated in recent years.10 The instinctive reaction to such perceived failure in international climate diplomacy is to turn the dial on the rhetorical amplifier a notch higher and proclaim that the risks of climate change are even greater than first thought. Of course the primary purpose of environmental rhetoric has always been to change the future rather than merely to predict it. Paul Ehrlich, for example, now claims that by painting in the late 1960s a scenario of a dysfunctional and Malthusian world owing to unfettered population growth he in fact contributed to a slowing down of population growth thereby averting the very scenario he foresaw. A similar normative goal may now be being served by portrayals of climatic Apocalypse. But I sense there is a new literalism pervading this mythic position on climate change. This normative role for myth-making enlists powerful scientific predictions in its cause. Spokes-persons such as Jim Lovelock and Jim Hansen claim to be basing their claims of impending disaster on the science of the IPCC, a body not acting in an advocacy role. I think these spokes-persons believe they are being literal rather than rhetorical. Climate change as Apocalypse is essentially a call to action but now, rather than a call based on ideological conviction and rhetoric, it is a call that invokes ‘sound science’ as its legitimizer. In the summer of 2007 the protestors against the third runway at London Heathrow Airport proudly marched chanting ‘armed only with the weapons of peer-reviewed science,’ holding aloft their scientific reports. In at least this sense then the myth of climate Apocalypse is different from 1960s environmental radicalism which was deeply suspicious of establishment science. This is demonstrated by the fact that this apocalyptic tone can easily bifurcate into a number of quite different policy discourses: radical ecology, ecological modernization, social activism, neo-liberal conservatism are all projects which can claim ascendency from the promotion of climate change as fear. The one thing these discourses all share, however, is the need for some form of control: whether controlling the impulse to consume, the levers of state power, the networks of communication, or the operation of the market.

Constructing Babel This brings us to a third mythical position on climate change, the one I call ‘constructing Babel’. This is an ideology not necessarily orthogonal to either of the previous two and indeed gains some of its legitimacy from narrating climate change as catastrophe. As the Genesis myth of Babel relates, a confident and independent humanity, re-populated after the traumas of the Flood, claimed:

514 | Mike Hulme “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we might make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the Earth” (Genesis, 11/4). This aspiration towards god-like status, acclaim and personal glory exemplifies the idea of hubris. I want to suggest that this confident belief in the human ability to control and to plan is a dominant characteristic of the modern state. It is a view developed at length in James Scott’s book Seeing Like a State (1999). This ideological position sees the challenges of climate change in essentially modernist terms. As with acidified air, tobacco-stained lungs and depleted ozone, once a risk is identified then the apparatus of the State—or in the case of climate change the apparatus of many states—needs to be mobilized to mitigate the risk. Sociologist John Lie captures this mindset: Even if God-like control is unattainable—and the very idea of conquest of nature is unattainable—a deeply optimistic strain in the scientific mindset envisions nature as increasingly colonised and controlled by human conceptual inventions and technological interventions (Lie, 2007: 234).

Perhaps drawing emotional power from the overwhelming language of climate change as Apocalypse, the management of climate change becomes the latest project over which human governance, control and mastery is demanded. Thus Jim Hansen’s recent appeal to the ‘loss’ of control as a reason for concern: “An important point is that the nonlinear response could easily run out of control, because of positive feedbacks and system inertias” (Hansen, 2007: 4). This instinct for control can explain the optimism which greeted the Kyoto Protocol on its signing in 1997 and again on its ratification in 2005. It was an agreement which mimicked the Montreal Protocol for the Control of Ozone Depleting Substances and bolstered claims that we were on the way to full climate control. This instinct can also explain the urgent tones to the Stern Review (2006) which laid out, using the tools of economics, a rational argument as to why stabilization of carbon dioxide concentrations at between 450 ppm and 550 ppm should and could be achieved. It explains, too, a range of advocacy positions, from biofuels, to emissions trading, to green taxes. This myth claims, ‘The climate needs saving and we can do it,’ prompting for example the green gold rush for carbon offsetting: The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a ‘green gold rush,’ which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go ‘carbon neutral,’ offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming. (Financial Times, 25 April 2007)

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This myth of political control and climatic mastery also has an interesting variant, the sub-myth of geo-engineering. This narrative—drawing power from the new modelling claims of the Earth system scientists—argues that exactly because we are unlikely to realize our Tower of Babel using the conventional instruments of diplomacy, trade and fiscal regulation, we need a new form of intervention to bring a runaway climate under human management. Jim Lovelock and Chris Rapley capture this mood perfectly: “. . . [amplifying] feedbacks, the inertia of the Earth System—and that of our response—make it doubtful that any of the well-intentioned technical or social schemes for carbon dieting will restore the status quo” (Lovelock and Rapley, 2007: 403). They then propose a large-scale scheme for sucking up cold, nutrient rich waters from the deep ocean to the surface where they can fertilize algae who will feed on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: “If we can’t heal the planet directly, we may be able to help the planet heal itself” (Lovelock and Rapley, 2007: 403). More recently, the Royal Society has reviewed the feasibility of a number of such technologies, divided between large-scale solar radiation management and large-scale carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere (Royal Society, 2009). There is a deep irony displayed in this sub-myth. The inadvertent sideeffects of carbon-fuelled economic growth—the ‘great geophysical experiment’ with the planet first described by Roger Revelle in 1957—are charged with destabilizing our naturally controlled climate. All efforts to reign in the damage using conventional human control systems of politics, diplomacy and economics are deemed to be failing (witness the outcome of COP15 at Copenhagen in December 2009). What is therefore proposed is a new and now deliberate great geophysical experiment with the planet. The only difference between this new purposeful experiment and our ongoing inadvertent one is that we now have the ‘wisdom’ of Earth system models to guide us. Whether one believes in the finance offices of the World Bank, the efficacy of the traditional nation state, or the scientific high priests of Gaia, believing that we can ‘make a name for ourselves’ by stabilizing global climate requires an inordinate degree of faith.

Celebrating Jubilee The fourth mythic position on climate change I suggest here relates to the ways in which we think and talk about climate change using the language of morality and ethics. I have examined elsewhere (chapter 5 of Hulme, 2009) the inescapability of adopting ethical positions when we diagnose responsibility for climate

516 | Mike Hulme change and propose responses; also the ways in which the language of popular discourse about climate change and responsibility echoes the theological language of sin, repentance and atonement. The human instinct for justice fuels this fourth powerful myth about climate change. For some, the desire for justice is synonymous with the entire meaning of climate change. I attach to this myth the metaphor of Jubilee—the idea of justice, freedom and celebration, an idea embedded in the Jewish Torah that every 50 years soil, slaves and debtors should be liberated from their oppression. “In this way you shall set the fiftieth year apart and proclaim freedom to all the inhabitants of the land” (Leviticus 25/10). The occasion was to be marked by a year-long celebration. For those in social and/or environmental justice movements, climate change is not primarily a substantive, material problem, nor simply—as in the lament for Eden—a symbolic one. Rather, climate change is an idea around which concerns for social and environmental justice can be mobilized. Indeed, a new category of justice—climate justice—is demanded. It is one that attaches itself easily to other long-standing global justice concerns: “By and large, the framing of “climate justice” reflects the same social and economic rights perspectives voiced by global movements on debt, trade and globalization” (Pettit, 2004: 102). A former environment minister in Canada’s Liberal Government of the late 1990s clearly revealed the underlying commitment to this mythic position: “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony . . . climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world” (Stewart, 1998). This instinct for justice, and the recognition that climate change demands an engagement with this instinct, is not just to be found within radical social movements. Ideas of justice and equity are threaded through political debates and international negotiations about climate change policies, whether in the context of procedural decision-making, of emissions reduction burden-sharing or of vulnerability, adaptation and compensation. For example, the principle that justice demands that those responsible for altering climate and causing any subsequent damage should be held liable for that damage underpins part of the framing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Other avenues along which justice might be pursued are those which emphasize procedural or distributive justice—the former making sure decisions made about climate change are fair and the latter making sure that actions taken compensate and benefit those who are most disadvantaged by climate change. One widely discussed and advocated framework for tackling climate change which claims a strong foundation in this mythic position of climate change as social justice is that of ‘contraction-and-convergence’ (Meyer, 2001). Contraction-and-convergence has been widely endorsed by organizations rang-

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ing from the international negotiating bloc of the Africa Group to the Church of England, and to individuals such as Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The Indian Prime Minister has repeatedly stressed this principle when articulating the negotiating position of his country in international negotiations: “Longterm convergence of per capita emissions is . . . the only equitable basis for a global compact on climate change” (Singh, 2008). Some would argue that with respect to ordinary citizens, this mythic position of climate change as social justice has instinctive, mobilizing power. It appeals to certain intrinsic values held by many—values of fairness and justice around which popular (Western) campaigns such as Make Poverty History have been able to mobilize. Climate justice may seem to have much going for it, but whether it is a sufficiently crisp and unambiguous concept around which agreed courses of action will emerge is more doubtful. “It is not surprising that climate justice is contested and means different things for different actors, from parties to the [UN Framework] Convention to national policy constituents and other stakeholders” (Adger et al., 2006: 9). It leaves much room for debates about the precise apportionment of that liability between present and past generations, and whether it should be individuals, corporations, or nation states which are held liable. And despite its alluring logic and appeal to foundational principles of equity and justice, the principle of contraction-and-convergence has thus far failed to gain sufficient purchase on the proposed architectures for an international climate change protocol. By framing climate change as a celebration of Jubilee—at least as an opportunity to create a new potency behind movements for social and environmental justice—this myth offers hope as an antidote to the fear of an impending Apocalypse. Thus campaigner Alastair McIntosh—in his 2008 book Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition—elaborates the presence of hope within this mythic position on climate change, while ethicist James Garvey concludes The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World with the observation: ‘Many . . . say something remarkable, something uplifting and hopeful. They say that climate change offers humanity the chance to do the right thing’ (Garvey, 2008: 155).

Conclusion I have suggested four underlying ideologies—or myths—that shape and inflect contemporary narratives about climate change. They are ways of talking about upper-case ‘Climate Change’—climate change as lament, fear, hubris and justice—rather than about lower-case ‘climate change,’ climate change purified by

518 | Mike Hulme science and stripped of cultural tone and meaning. These four myths do not offer exclusive narratives. Indeed, one very likely finds threads of all four myths entangling themselves in the beliefs about climate change held by many of us and in our expressed claims of what must be done. And they are of course not the only ideological lenses through which climate change can be viewed. But I do think it is very important that we analyze the phenomenon of climate change at this deeper level, at the level at which science and culture interact. It is simplistic and trite to suggest that there are those who believe in the science of climate change and those who are sceptical of it. Science requires scepticism and thrives on it. This really tells us nothing, certainly nothing about the upper-case phenomenon of ‘Climate Change.’ Equally, it gets us nowhere to castigate American neo-conservative Republicans and the ‘religious right,’ or the Governments of China and India, as being the real obstacles to progress on tackling climate change. What science can tell us about climate change—whether through IPCC reports, National Science Foundation reviews, academic papers in the journals Nature or Science—does not present us with a script from which any of the four myths of ‘Climate Change’ can be read. As an idealized form of inquiry, science endorses no ideology other than itself. We are allowing ourselves to get into a muddle by confusing the lower-case and upper-case variants of the phenomenon, as if we were talking about ‘Climate change’ or ‘climate Change’. I believe it is only through this deeper level of analysis—revealing the beliefs, values and ethical commitments that drive our various myths about climate change—that we can begin to understand what really is at stake in the politics of climate change. Should our real focus of concern with climate change lie with the diminution of the invented category called Nature? If we believe the myth of Eden, climate change really is about symbolic loss, a loss to our imaginative capacities rather than a loss of something material and substantive. If this is so, it would certainly help explain why the reaction to climate change around the world is so heterogeneous and disputed; the imaginative symbolism of climate has a wide diversity of meanings and interpretations across different cultures and traditions. Or maybe anthropogenic climate change really has introduced a new and non-negotiable absolute planetary limit to human reproductive fecundity and profligate resource consumption (cf. Rockström et al., 2009). If we believe the myth of Apocalypse, the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet really might signal the end of civilization as we know it. Perhaps we do only have until 1 December 2016 to save the world. And maybe science, once and for all, has replaced the

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prophets of religion and astrology by revealing the chronology of ‘the end times.’ Or does climate change demand the enlargement and enforcement of global governance—Earth system governance in Biermann’s (2007) terminology— offering new institutions for a new millennium delivering the means for new social, economic and environmental control? If we believe the myth of Babel, climate change demands that we deliver on the hubristic goal of re-stabilizing world climate at some new safe level, first by inventing new institutions of global governance and then by allowing our behavior to be engineered globally towards achieving this long-term goal. In the history of humanity we certainly have never before got close to designing, let alone delivering, such a global project. Stalin’s Five Year Plans and Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China are not perhaps the best models to emulate. Or is the power of climate change to be found in its demands that we attend to the enduring questions of injustice and inequity in the world? If we believe the myth of Jubilee, then climate change will not be ‘solved’ by an abandonment of modernization, not by the roll-out of clean green technology nor by the colonization of space with heat-reflecting mirrors. Instead, climate change is the latest reason why the project we must put above all others is the global redistribution of wealth and the reparation for environmental and social damage caused by an unequal appropriation of ecological space. Now these are of course rhetorical questions I am asking. So let me end with an alternative proposition. Notwithstanding the myth of Jubilee, I suggest that we are using climate change to distract ourselves from the really rather uncomfortable perversions that exist in our world—so many of them a result of our infatuation with consumer-driven economic growth at the expense of human health and social justice. We have become blinded by the prospect of a dysfunctional future climate, at worst a dysfunctionality of apocalyptic proportions, and lost sight of our contemporary crisis. Why, for example, do we not see the same political energy and diplomatic capital being invested in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as we see daily being invested in the drive to establish an international climate regime with its sights half a century hence? Delivering the MDGs—the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the reduction of child mortality, the achievement of universal primary education—is now only five years away. Has climate change allowed a convenient transference of ethical concern away from the immediate and tractable to the distant and unachievable? Is climate change, rather than being an ‘inconvenient truth,’ in fact being used as a very ‘convenient truth’ because it offers us a psychological focus for our loss of the past, our fear of the future, our desire for mastery and

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our instinct for justice? We are using climate change to act as a conduit for serving our deeper psychological needs. The function of climate change I suggest then is not as a lower-case physical phenomenon to be ‘solved’. It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Our reach as humans is too limited, our ability to manage ourselves too feeble, our voices on what to do too plural. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change—the asymmetric matrix of power relationships, social discourses and symbolic meanings that climate change reveals—to re-think how we take forward our various political, social and economic projects over the decades to come, whatever they may be. We should use the idea of climate change as a magnifying glass in more forensic and honest examinations than we have been used to of each of these projects—whether they be projects of human development, free trade, poverty reduction, community-building, demographic management, social health and so on. As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claimed recently: Instead of a desperate search to find the one great idea that will save us from ecological disaster, we are being invited [by climate change] to a transformation of individual and social goals that will bring us closer to the reality of an interdependent life in a variegated world—whether or not we find we can ‘save the planet’. (Williams, 2009)

Climate change has great magnifying power, the things that ‘Climate Change’ in its socio-cultural manifestation reveals to us: its focus on the long-term implications of short-term choices, its global reach, its narrative of crisis, its revelation of new centers of power, its attention to both material and cultural values. We can therefore use this magnifying power, this mobilizing idea of climate change, to attend more closely to what we really want to achieve for humanity: whether this be social justice and human well-being or even whether, as it seems for some, to be material affluence and survival at any cost.

References Adger, W. N., Paavola, J., Huq, S. and Mace, R. J. (2006). Equity and Justice in Adaptation to Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Agrawala, S. (1998). Context and Early Origins of the IPCC. Climatic Change, 39, 605–20. Alliance of Religions and Conservation (2007). ARC/UNDP Programme Statement on Climate Change ARC, Bath. Available at: www.arcworld.org/about_ARC.htm Baer, P. (2007). The Worth of an Ice-Sheet. A Critique of the Treatment of Catastrophic Impacts in the Stern Review. An EcoEquity discussion paper. Available at: www.ecoequity.org Biermann, F. (2007). “Earth system governance” as a Crosscutting Theme of Global Change Research. Global Environmental Change, 17, 326–37.

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Boia, L. (2005). The Weather in the Imagination. London: Reaktion Books. Carson, R. (2000). Silent Spring (2nd ed.). London: Penguin Classics. Ehrlich, P. R. (1968). The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantyne Books. Fleming, J. R. (2005). Historical Perspectives on Climate Change ( 2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garvey, J. (2008). The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World. London/New York: Continuum International Publishing. Grove, R. H. (1998). Ecology, Climate and Empire: The Indian Legacy in Global Environmental History, 1400–1940. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Hansen, J. E. (2007). Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise. Environmental Research Letters 2, doi:10.1088/1748–9326/2/2/024002. Hobbs, R. J., Arico, S., Aronson, J. et al. (2006). Novel Ecosystems:Theoretical and Management Aspects of the New Ecological World Order. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 15, 1–7. Holling, C. S. (1986). The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystems: Local Surprise and Global Change. In Clark, W. C. & Mann, R. E., (Eds.) Sustainable Development of the Biosphere (pp. 217–32). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hulme, M. (2009). Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. IPCC (2007). Climate Change 2007—the Physical Science Basis, Working Group I contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Killingsworth, M. J. and Palmer, J. S. (1996). Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming. In Herndl, C. G. & Brown, S. C., (Eds.), Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America (pp. 21-45). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. King, D. A. (2004). Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate or Ignore? Science 303, 176–177. Lenton, T. M., Held, H., Krieglar, E. et al. (2008). Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 1786–1793. Lie, J. (2007). Global Climate Change and the Politics of Disaster. Sustainability Science, 2, 233–6. Lovelock, J. (2006). The Revenge of Gaia: Why The Earth is Fighting Back—and How We Can Still Save Humanity. London: Penguin. Lovelock, J. and Rapley, C. (2007). Ocean Pipes Could Help the Ocean to Cure Itself. Nature, 449, 403. Malone, E. L. (2009). Debating Climate Change: Pathways Through Argument to Agreement. London: Earthscan. McIntosh, A. (2008). Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition. Edinburgh: Birlinn. McKibben, B. (1989). The End of Nature. London: Random House. Meadows, D. H. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome. New York: Universe Books. Meyer, A. (2001). Contraction and Convergence. Totnes, UK: Green Books. Moser, S. (2007). ‘More Bad News: The Risk of Neglecting Emotional Responses to Climate Change Information. In Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (pp. 64–81).Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, S. J. & Nicholson-Cole, S. (2009). “Fear won’t do it”: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change Through Imagery and Icons. Science Communication, 30, 355–379.

522 | Mike Hulme Pettit, J. (2004). Climate Justice: A New Social Movement for Atmospheric Rights. IDS Bulletin, 35, 102–106. Rockström, J. et al. (2009). A Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Nature, 461, 472–474. Royal Society (2009). Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty. London: Royal Society Report. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Singh, M. (2008). PM’s speech on release of climate change action plan New Delhi, 30 June. Available at: www.pmindia.nic.in/speech/ Stern Review (2006). The Economics of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, C. (1998). Speaking in 1998. Quoted in Canada Free Press, 5 February 2007. Thompson, M. & Rayner, S. (1998). Cultural Discourses. In Rayner, S. & Malone, E. L., (Eds.) Human Choice and Climate Change, vol. 1: The Societal Framework (pp. 265–344). Columbus, OH: Battelle Press. Whitmarsh, L. (2009). UK climate scepticism more common. BBC News On-line http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8249668.stm, 10. September 2009. Williams, R. (2009). The climate crisis: fashioning a Christian response Speech delivered at Southwark Cathedral, London, 13 October. Available at: www.archbishopofcanterbury.org Yearley, S. (2006). How many “ends” of nature: making sociological and phenomenological sense of the end of nature. Nature and Culture, 1, 10–21.

Silja Graupe

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Standing on Mount Lu: how economics has come to dominate our view of culture and sustainability; and why it shouldn’t383 The study of economics has changed since the era since the Berlin Wall fell and a triumphal neo-liberalism, summed up by Francis Fukuyama in 1992 as “the end of history,” dominated the political discourse. In 1992, the „end of history“ named the global tendency to free market policies, the shrinking of government economic intervention, and Western style democracy. Things have not, however, gone as planned. 2008-2009, for instance, witnessed the most massive state intervention in the economy since the Depression, as governments around the world massively backed up a collapsing global financial system. Meanwhile, the incipient transformation in the way the study of economics is conceived has evolved in tandem with the global system. Traditionally, economics systematically reflected in various methodological ways upon a specific sphere of our lives: the world of trade and markets. The unity of economics was thus secured by means of a common object of research, which could sustain a plurality of explanatory approaches. But contemporary mainstream economics has come to be monopolized by a certain subjective mode of looking upon the entire world. In this single conceptual framework, it proposes to give us a certain and permanent control over every aspect of our lives as long as we accept the precepts of “rationality.” What clearly distinguishes economics as a discipline, thus, is no longer its subject matter but its approach (cf. Becker 1976: 5). By means of a disciplinary “mission creep” the methodological tools of a certain kind of economics, such as “rational choice,” “utility” or “profit maximization,” are presented as tools to analyze all human behavior: …be it behavior involving money prices or imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions, large or minor decisions, emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, brilliant or stupid persons, patients or therapists, businessmen or politicians, teachers or students (Becker 1976, p. 8).

|| 383 Reprinted with permission from: Banse, G., Nelson, G., Parodi, O. (eds.): Sustainable Development—The Cultural Perspective. Concepts—Aspects—Examples. Berlin: edition sigma 2011, 251-277.

524 | Silja Graupe In short economics has become imperialistic (cf. Lazear 1999). And as this imperialism continually expands so as to include “fertility, education, the uses of crime, marriage, social interactions, and other ‘sociological’, ‘legal’, and ‘political problems’” (Becker 1976: 8f.), it seems only natural to incorporate both culture and sustainability also. Because of the power of the economic model, the latter two invasions of an intellectual territory that was previously deemed to be outside the realm of economics are well worth examining. In the definition of economics that served as the standard model up until the 1970s, economic objects and processes were seen as embedded within culture, with the latter term denoting the sphere of those practices involving affects, beliefs and institutions that evolve according to norms that are independent of, and ethically superior to, those of economic activity. As such, culture was considered a prerequisite of the economy, but not as an object that could be reduced to the utilitarian paradigm of economic reflection. The classic sociologists, in fact, conceptualized culture specifically to distinguish our noneconomic activities from our economic ones. On the one hand ‘cultural parameters’ are brought in—especially in the case of international comparative studies—whenever functional or otherwise ‘rational’ explanations do not suffice to explain certain phenomena. On the other hand, the cultural sphere is hypothesized as the social locus eluding the rational constraints of both economy and public authorities (Lackner/Werner 1999: 41).

Today, mainstream economists are intent on weakening this sharp demarcation line by applying to culture the same tools of subjective preference (with the assumption that preferences are invariant over time, ordinal and transitive), and the same utility maximizing calculations, as are used when applied to rational choice in the marketplace. In this way, creative and performing arts, our world’s cultural heritage, ethical norms, family life and friendships, are all subsumed under the models of economics (cf. Towse 2005). Though a lot of questions have arisen from the mismatch between the predictions of rational choice theory and psychological experiments on choice making behavior even within the economic sphere itself (cf. Tversky/Kahneman 1981), the economic model that reduces the study of culture to another set of utility maximizing behaviors has been extremely successful in penetrating all spheres of cultural study and policymaking. How are we to define and measure the utility of cultural phenomena? How are creative and performing artists really motivated? On what scale do we measure the value, not to speak of the ‘efficiency’, of customs and traditions? Economics, especially its sub-discipline cultural economics, does not simply answer this kind of questions, but it generates the paradigm in

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which asking these questions comes naturally. At the same time, cultural economics’ idea of cultural management goes a long way: it has made us to perceive culture, or any part of it, as a predictable and orderly resource that should be planned, budgeted, and controlled (cf. Klein 2008). In certain ways, the concept of sustainability, especially in its ecological dimension has met a very similar fate. Until recently this was not a topic that swam into the ken of the economist as a reasonable object of research, for many reasons. If anything, nature was considered a container from which we could draw resources without any limit, and dispose of our waste without any social cost (cf. Daly 1999). As such, the ecosystem was at best considered a mere appendage to the economy. This appendage did not constitute an object of economic investigation in itself, however, as the latter only dealt with marketable goods and resources that could be priced. And as long as nature’s elements remained unpriced, that is, outside of any market, they were not considered part of the economic sphere. Coined in modern terms, they were treated as positive and negative externalities, conditioning economic activity in as much as it took place within the living environment but forming by itself no object for economic analysis. Like culture, it was logically outside of that analysis, just as economic activity was embedded within it. This mindset, however, has considerably changed as the economic approach is now being applied to any kind of object no matter if it involves money prices or just imputed prices. While formerly nature’s parts needed to be actually traded on real markets prior to becoming an object of economic analysis proper, now they are a priori treated as if they had a price and as if they were marketable. “Prices, be they the money prices of the market sector or the ‘shadow’ imputed prices of the nonmarket sector, measure the opportunity cost of using scarce resources, and the economic approach predicts the same kind of response to shadow prices as to market prices” (Becker 1976: 6). Nature is thus embedded within economics. As such, it is turned into a totality of ecosystem services that are calculated and predicted by an economic analysis that begins by assigning them current and future prices, and thus incorporates them into the system of costs and benefits. The reduction to pure quantitative units of utility makes everything from the weather system to the migration of butterflies subject to their assigned utility or wealth functions, which are then used to design policy. Given the dominance of economic thinking over any other value system, the issue of environmental sustainability now becomes a simple object of investigation, like the inflation rate, which is first to be measured by means of indicators, benchmarks, audits, and other reporting systems, and then to be efficiently managed and controlled. Ultimately it is thus tantamount to sustainable exploi-

526 | Silja Graupe tation: getting the most out of natural assets for the sake of those who can and in fact do make the calculations. It might be objected that economics has done nothing here to change the goals of either sustainable development or cultural formation, but simply crystallized both into quantitative units amenable to calculation as a means to implement social policy concerning the underlying reality of the environment. For on a more general plane, mainstream economics places emphasis on the fact that it “does not deal with ends as such” (Robbins 1935: 4). “The ends and purposes themselves lie beyond the action and the reason; they are for our theory […] merely data, which we cannot further analyze by means of our science. […] They themselves stand outside our explanation” (Mises 2007: 15). However, we contend that this mindset amounts to a deep seated problem rather than its solution, for if culture and sustainability are subordinated to the instrumental logic of economics, their true meanings become inevitably blurred by a contradiction: economists are treating them both as instruments and as ends in themselves while simultaneously claiming that there exists no kind of reasonable language by which to express the value of the latter. Thus, culture and sustainability are likely to be reinterpreted as mere means towards an ultimately unjustifiable end. In addition, all of human activity gets invariably preconceived not only as maximizing behavior but also as being coordinated through the market (cf. Becker 1976: 5). All people are thought of as unconsciously acting under the order of prices telling them what to do and what to leave undone (cf. Hayek 1996). Thus, what at first appears as a mere change of heuristics in actuality points to a shift in the value accorded to extra-economic value: culture and sustainability have been processed so as to seamlessly correspond to the spirit of anonymous market transactions. The market, then, penetrates into the realm of every social activity, and essentially replaces the human and the natural as the highest term of reference. What becomes visible here is an isomorphism between culture on the one hand and sustainability on the other. Metaphorically speaking, their identity stems from the credo that all aspects of our lives need to be looked through the same colored glasses, or in other words, that everything is susceptible to being analyzed in terms of rational choices once we make everything a market. But this identity is simply due to a certain fixed mindset, to the rigidity of a pregiven epistemology. This important insight, however, mostly remains hidden from view in that it is presupposed. For the more the economic approach is taken to be universally valid, the less do we dare to question its own premises. Eventually, we even come to consider such questioning process as both trivial and ultimately unfeasible. As a consequence, we begin to uncritically conflate its way at looking at the world—the color of its lenses—with the colorfulness of

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reality itself. In order to overcome this epistemological and conceptual bottleneck, I consider it necessary to carefully reconsider the relationship between economics, culture and sustainability. Let us first attend to the relationship between the former two. As we have seen, mainstream economists consider their own discipline—at least implicitly—as being analytically prior to and, thus, ultimately independent of culture. As such, they favor a universalistic approach: the methodological procedures underlying their research projects are not considered to derive from a given culture’s way of life, but are elaborated a priori. This is used as an excuse for the lack of empirical acquaintance with a particular culture, since what is important is that one can quantify over any behaviors within it and find maximizing strategies and indifference curves. In this way, however, economists turn a blind eye to one of the most important insights of the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences: today, we cannot consider cultures a mere object of research. For the researcher herself is always going to be entangled in deep cultural assumptions that will tacitly inform as well as shape her underlying research strategies prior to any particular act of observation or theory formation (cf. Lackner/Werner 1999). To put it differently, cultures inform the presuppositions researchers have implicitly inherited not only from their disciplinary traditions but also from the pool of assumptions that over generations have sunk into the sediment of the language, customs, and the life forms of the society they live in. Bringing “culture” back into economics thus cannot amount to studying the former by means of a set of analytical tools preset by the latter. It means first and foremost uncovering the hidden background assumptions of economic analysis itself. This in turn requires that economists heighten or actually develop the faculty of self-reflexivity. “The cultural turn is invariably associated with a critical revision of what has been formerly considered as self-evident truth” (Lackner/Werner 1999: 44). Living in a globalized world as we do today, this is not idle criticism, nor the expression of some fashion for postmodernism. Rather, we have become aware that the simplifying procedures by which Western social scientists have operated for centuries in order to reduce cultures to intellectually manipulatable unities have resulted in an overemphasis on the homogeneity of cultures, as though marginal groups, the oppressed and poor, and the structures of privilege that advantage certain classes, ethnicities, and genders were minor cultural features. Since the movements of the sixties and their reflection in the social sciences, it is generally granted that the existence of a single organizing framework cannot be taken for granted even within a given culture. Even in Western cultures, the assumptions about the structure of preferences made by mainstream economists like Becker have failed, along with the idea that the price

528 | Silja Graupe system reveals something “deep” about some universal tendency to maximize. But when we move these assumptions across an even more diverse cultural context, rather spectacular misunderstandings arise. Here, a tertium comparationis, from which to bring important differences and commonalities into perspective, has first to be generated (cf. Yousefi/Mall 2005). It cannot be determined by the methodological procedures of any scientific approach a priori. To the contrary, these methods instead need to be turned into an object of reflection in the light of the world’s different epistemologies and ontologies (cf. Graupe 2007). Revising in this way the relationship between culture and economics also opens up possibilities critically to rethink the relationship between economics and sustainability. More concretely speaking, it allows us to first rediscover the unspoken background assumptions and implicit presuppositions hidden in economics’ dealing with nature and even the world in general, and then critically to question and even transcend them by means of intercultural dialogue. Thus it becomes possible to systematically free sustainability from its status as another object of economic analysis and to fathom the rich scope of its possible meanings by means of a multi-perspective approach. In what follows, I will sketch an example of the explanatory power of such a multi-perspective approach. For this purpose I begin by focusing on one of the most powerful pre-analytic visions in mainstream economics, namely, the game metaphor. Then we will further immerse ourselves in this metaphor in order to demystify the pre-analytic vision of mainstream environmental economics vis-àvis the central role played by competition, nature, and responsibility. Here, my approach will be implicitly informed by Chinese and Japanese intellectual traditions. In the second part, I shift to making explicit my reliance on East Asian philosophical sources in order to point to another ludic tradition, which I will contrast with the European to introduce another understanding of competition, nature and responsibility. In this part of my paper, my goal is not to prove that the Japanese and Chinese conception of play is unique or superior; rather, my detour through Asian intellectual traditions should be construed, as Francois Jullien once put it, as “an attempt to deepen our own comprehension of the state of things, to renew the impulse to question, to rediscover the joys of inquiry” (Jullien & Lloyd 1995: 18). In Chinese there is an expression, “We cannot see the true face of Mount Lu because we are standing on top of it” (Sun Tzu 1993: 45). My paper is, so to speak, designed to attain an external perspective so as to see with greater clarity at least some aspects of the “true face of Mount Lu” upon which economists all too naively stand. In my concluding section I summarize the findings of the preceding sections in an attempt to systematically rethink the core idea of sustainability.

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Uncovering economics’ pre-analytic vision Ever since Adam Smith, economists have likened free market competition to a game played for the purpose of winning, in which the responsibility of the players is limited to obeying the rules of fair play. In the race for wealth, and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of (Smith 1790, part II.II.11; emphasis supplied).

This is not only an explicit statement of the case as in Smith but also, and even more importantly so, an implicit assumption of economic models. The game metaphor has become so deeply embedded in economic theory and model building that it constitutes the common basis of understanding in the field; a basis that is all the more solid since, being so integral, it often seems unnecessary to comment on it. If you take away the game metaphor, economics as a discipline would almost collapse. For this reason it is justified, I think, to take this metaphor as the determining factor of what economists consider relevant in understanding and addressing the environmental problem or any other aspect of sustainable development. Moreover, it has a prescriptive aspect, meaning that any policy to overcome environmental problems cannot violate the game metaphor. We must have competition, there must be “players”, there must be “prizes,” or “incentives,” and the “rules” must be limited to allowing fair competition. So when economists speak of the “tragedy of the commons” or the “prisoner’s dilemma” or, on a more practical plane, try to weigh the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming, they concern themselves largely with devising changes to the rules of the international economic game, while uncritically assuming the game structure itself as pre-given and unalterable. In doing so, they derive their arguments from a pre-analytic vision that serves as the basis of investigation but is never turned into an object of critical reflection. It is precisely this latter gap that this subsection is designed to fill in by presenting five propositions that implicitly govern the vision of environmental economics. According to mainstream economics, competitors exist prior to the process of competition. We can take this as a sort of economic axiom. Uncritically affirming this pre-analytic vision, the first proposition we find is that environmental economics considers economic agents as logically prior to their market envi-

530 | Silja Graupe ronments and as ultimately independent from them. More generally, this reflects a culturally biased ontological assumption of context independent agency. The methodological fiction of an entirely isolated person has a long history in political economic analysis. It was under the sign of this fiction that relations between persons and property were loosened from all social entanglements in the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, when classical economics, in coordination with the lineaments of the capitalist order, came of age. The privileged metaphor for the isolated person in economics is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: a man systematically cut off from the rest of humanity, whose individual desires and experiences are expressed in primitive accumulation, the production of tools for home use, and the systematic exploitation of the resources of his island for his pleasure and utility (cf. Defoe 1938). Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Laureate in economics in 1974, was right to claim that economic theory has advanced from the classical economists’ use of such extreme forms of methodological individualism, with their stagnant consideration of isolated and selfcontained individuals (cf. Hayek 1980: 6). Yet, if each man is not an island in neo-classical economics, each man is a player. My point is not that economics mistakenly supposes a world of singleplayer games, but that it analyzes competition as if it consisted “of a number of independent households, a number of Robinson Crusoes, as it were” (Friedman 1982: 13). Most games we cannot play alone, and economists have rarely interested themselves in solitaire. But by focusing exclusively on competitive play, economics presupposes that competitors somehow all fit the same mould and are only located on opposite sides at the same time. Strangely, however, competition neither defines nor shapes the competitors’ identities according to the economic tradition.384 While players make decisions in social situations, those decisions are made on the ground of preferences and intentions that are intrinsically defined, that is, without reference to the context. Players are taken to determine themselves the character and extent of their social relationships (cf. Nawroth 1961: 55). More specifically, players are taken to compete neither because they enjoy playing with others nor because they wish to cast themselves into the roles implied by the competition, but only because they seek to achieve a certain goal they have set for themselves. In line with Smith’s vision of play, we run as hard as we can, and strain every nerve and every muscle in order to outstrip all our competitors. In this pursuit of ours, we depend on fellow men only as means to ends that we have determined for ourselves beforehand. Thus, “the first principle of economics is that every agent is actuated only by self|| 384 I have shown this in more detail in Graupe 2007, pp. 146-150.

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interest” (Edgeworth 1881: 16)—each player is an independent entity whose interactions with others are determined by given motives, goals, and intentions (cf. Becker 1976: 5-13). The “unconditioned striving for personal advancement— even at the cost of the ruin of one’s competitor” (Homann/Blome-Drees 1992: 26) becomes the great and singular cause of social interaction while cooperation, altruism, love, and the mere enjoyment of playing are all excluded by economic models. Mainstream economics preconceives this cause not only as independent from any alteration by the players, but also from the process of competition as such. We are not socialized into being competitive; rather, individuals’ goals, intentions and strategies logically precede their social interaction. Self-interest, defined solely in terms of winning and gain, is unalterable among human beings by any conceivable course of events. Within game theory, for instance, economists conceive of games as given matrices of payoffs by means of which actors rank the desirability of expected outcomes—measured in terms of profits, quantities, or utilities—prior to entering the game as such. From the standpoint of the logic of competition, market environments thus must be premised as a kind of pre-existing stage upon which all economic games are performed. This means, among other things, that the commons, or the environmental assets that nobody owns, can never serve as objects of intentional strategies, but instead only function as the pre-given, unquestioned background against which these strategies play out. Simply put, competitors do not do battle upon the battle field to conserve or preserve it, but instead, adapt their tactics to its preconceived contours in order to pursue their individual goals. The battlefield—in this context, the environment—serves as the premise but not the result of selfinterested intentional action. As game theory tellingly demonstrates, such cognitive blindness even persists if environments happen to be damaged in the process of competition in such a way that they cannot be renewed. Only if we invent a new game in which the overhaul of these damages could be turned into a goal benefiting some player do we approach any rational for sustainability. But any game targeting the environment would depend upon not changing the rationale of players as such—as the possibility of changing the rationale of players would, by a chain reaction, put into question the whole of the game metaphor. This is, at least, the lesson we are supposed to draw from the tragedy of commons and other game theoretical images of social interaction. Here players pursue their individual self-interest even as they diminish the capacity of the commons to renew themselves, thus damaging it to the ultimate cost of all (cf. Hardin 1968). The dynamics of deterioration is conceived of as an accident that affects neither the pregiven preference structure of the players nor their frenetic will to win. This is

532 | Silja Graupe because the latter two are considered essential properties of the agents in the process, irrespective of the specific situation in which the activity of competing goes on (cf. Becker 1978).385 This fundamental idea also determines the logic of rational choice theory, the standard economic framework for understanding and formally modeling social and economic interaction. Here individuals are always weighing the costs and benefits of outcomes (with an eye to their own profit) prior to taking action. As Philip Mirowski has remarked, this makes preferences independent of both space and time: outcomes of interaction are not allowed to depend on how agents go about consuming or producing in the here and now of social interaction (cf. Mirowski 1989). The very activity of trading, for instance, is believed not to socialize either consumers or producers. As John Maynard Keynes critically remarked, “it does not count the cost of the struggle but looks only to the benefits of the final result which are assumed to be permanent” (Keynes 1926, part III). Taken to the extreme, economic agents are thought to remain wholly unaffected by nature’s destruction. For them, environments, as the etymology of the word suggests, are taken for granted as the circumstances within which they live. Even in the face of severe environmental crises they think of themselves as maintaining their integrity as unaffected wholes. Their identity corresponds to the fixed boundaries of the Ego or I, which is considered “the unity of the acting person. It is given without question and cannot be dissolved through any thought” (Mises 1940: 34). After mainstream economics has established the irreducibility of the individual to its own satisfaction, it next establishes the irreducibility of the market. Our second proposition is: the relationships between players are externally defined by the pre-existing rules of the Smithian game. Thus, there exists a given, omnipotent framework that determines the range of possibilities for the outcome of competition, but is itself unaffected by any competitive game in particular. Fundamentally, this further reflects a cultural bias towards a metaphysics of atomism. Even though mainstream economics preconceives agents as entities pregiven to the process of competition, it does not think of them as being entirely socially independent. As noted before, its object of study is not Robinson Crusoe, but the interplay of many Robinson Crusoes. It remains, then, to say what connects them all. Figure 1 illustrates the fundamental economic situation, in

|| 385 This is because, as Becker states, economics must proceed upon the presupposition of stable preferences, which do not change in time.

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which a series of external relations (R1, R2) connects the discrete individuals A with other individuals B, and C.

Figure 1: Agents as Externally Related. Source: Kasulis 2002.

Here, the relations do not themselves constitute A but instead are something that associates A’s entity with B’s and C’s entity. A enters into her relationships in such a way that she remains essentially unchanged: if the connections were broken or dissolved, A would still be A. This does not mean, of course, that the relationships have nothing at all to do with A’s character. If A chooses to be in the relation R1 and R2 with B and C respectively, this indeed reflects something about A’s own nature. That is: A has made the positional choice to get connected to the other entities B and C by means of external relationships. But the latter are not considered part of what A is; rather, all retain their autonomy in their independent choices to be connected. In short, an atomistic metaphysics obtains where primary existents bond together externally to form the parts of a larger whole. Implicitly grounding itself in such metaphysics, mainstream economics understands the economy to be constructed from entities in external relations with each other. Put in the words of Smith, social cooperation in free market economies is thought to arise purely “from a sense of utility, without any mutual love or affection” (Smith 1790, part II.II.16). Economic man is believed to voluntarily agree to the social relationships upon which he depends, which are in turn independent of his agreement. Mainstream economics, however, does not grant individuals the freedom to creatively devise other social relationships. The latter are, rather, conceived as the preset menu of choices, which individuals may either fully accept or reject. Their freedom consists in entering the game and accepting its rules—or not entering the game at all. And just as a menu is unchanged by those who select items from it, the rules of the game, which define the relationships between self-interested players, are unchanged by anything that happens in the course of the play: once one chooses to compete, one must invariably follow them. This is to say that there is no freedom to alter the form of one’s relationship whilst playing. One might try to choose where to

534 | Silja Graupe position oneself on the playing field, but the positions are already given in the same way that the squares of the chessboard are already given.386 Even upon defeat, the player cannot alter the rules of the games—else a different game would be played. In short, economics invokes the metaphor of games “as a form or spell of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck” in order to model and analyze free market competition (Hayek 1996: 184). More specifically, it seeks to distinguish “the day-to-day activities of people from the general and customary framework within which these take place. The day-to-day activities are like the actions of the participants in a game when they are playing it; the framework, like the rules of the game they play” (Friedman 1982: 25): In discussing ordinary games, we have little or no difficulty in distinguishing between the rules of the game as such and plays of the game within these rules […] Rules provide the framework of the playing of the game, and many different patterns of play may take place within given rules […] In a socio-political context, the same distinction apply between rules of social interaction and the patterns of behavior that take place within these rules. The distinction here is often more difficult to make than in ordinary games, and the discussion of the latter is helpful precisely in this respect. The validity of the distinction between rules and behavior within rules is general, however, over all interaction settings (Brennan/Buchanan 1985, pp. 5f.).

One of the most crucial characteristics of economic analysis here becomes the necessity “to separate the process through which rules are determined from the process through which particular actions within those rules are chosen” (Brennan/Buchanan 1985: 6). Individual self-interest expresses itself in tactics that play out solely in the context of a nexus of pre-established, external, and independent relationships. Coining another important metaphor of economics, Smith expresses this insight most famously by likening the economy to a machine: The wheels of the watch are all admirably adjusted to the end for which it was made, the pointing of the hour. All their various motions conspire in the nicest manner to produce this effect. If they were endowed with a desire and intention to produce it, they could not do it better. Yet we never ascribe any such desire or intention to them, but to the watchmaker, and we know that they are put into motion by a spring, which intends the effect it produces as little as they do” (Smith 1790, part II.II.19).

|| 386 Adam Smith mentions the metaphor of the chess game explicitly in Smith 1790, part VI.II.42.

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The mechanical image encoded in the pre-analytic vision of economics is that of agents who must bow to forces and obey principles the they cannot hope to understand, on the one side; and on the other side stand forces and principles such that they are shaped by a transcendent creative power standing sovereign, and even absolute over both economic agents and their activity. In as much as the mechanism of the machine is ultimately designed by an engineer standing outside and over above the machine and its parts, the rules of competition are thought to be designed by an outside force working behind the back of individuals. From any perspective within the game, this process of creation and construction remains utterly inexplicable. Rules are, so to speak, created ex nihilo: neither the players nor their playing do share in their making.387 “Play takes place within the rule, but play does not constitute part of the rules” (Brennan/Buchanan 1985: 5f.). Thus the Smithian metaphor postulates that “a good game requires acceptance by the players both of the rules and of the umpire to interpret and enforce them” (Friedman 1982: 25). For the players, the dynamics of relating freely are systematically excluded by the rules of the game (cf. Hershock 2006: 27). Our third economic proposition is as follows: mainstream economics implicitly preconceives the competitive struggle of the few to take place within certain spatial and temporal boundaries. Competition is thought to take place inside some ‘playing-field’ so that the competitors tacitly position themselves against everything outside that playing field—culture, nature, and all agents not playing on the field. Given this framework externalities, the key concept of environmental economics, must arise not only regularly but also systematically. On a foundational plane, this reflects a cultural bias toward dualistic thinking expressed in terms of inner and outer. Once the economy is considered as a form or a spell of competitive play played according to rules, it follows that these rules are tacitly assumed to delimit a playing space. We can see this with Smith’s metaphor of the race, for instance, which premises a pre-assigned racing track of definite length, a definite starting signal, and a destination. Additionally, it filters the number of competitors, creating another boundary between the outside non-competitor and the inside competitor. More generally speaking, competitive games need to be thought of as spatially and temporally constrained, with a limited population of players, because one can only seek to outrun certain competitors on a given

|| 387 For the concept of creatio ex nihilo, its strong influence on Western tradition and its marked absence in Chinese thought compare cf. Ames/Hall 2003: 16f.

536 | Silja Graupe playing field in this moment. This is the meaning of the economist’s phrase, bar to entry. What takes place at another setting, or at the same setting at another time, is without avail. Inevitably, it remains external to the race for wealth, honors and preferments. Competitive games designed for winning are thus implicitly exclusive. Only the foot racers race against the foot racers. The various forms of game theory, for example, take competitors to be competing only against their own kind, thus presupposing certain limits to the population of competitors. Also they assume that competitors must interact within certain known spatial and temporal boundaries because otherwise the possible payoffs could not be known a priori. The prisoner’s dilemma for instance only conceives of two players entering the game, which automatically ends upon conviction. Also, the game is thought to remain confined to the spatial boundaries of two isolated prison cells. These temporal and spatial limitations of play and limitations of the population of competitors are not the objects of strategic reflections, but rather are unquestioningly accepted at the competition’s start. We can reframe this issue in this way: mainstream economics simplifies competition into a series of discrete finite games whose boundaries remain, from the perspective of the competitors, both inexplicable and not negotiable.388 This is the only way it can model these games. This strategy hides the problems inherent in the very conception of such boundaries, which is closely connected to environmental economics’ notion of externalities. This problem arises because in finite games, there exist no meaningful ways for agents to relate to the natural and cultural environments placed outside competition’s boundaries. Standard economic theory emphasizes the fact that there is a bound on the number of possible voluntary participants in a competition. This however only serves as one face of the fact that any finite game must necessarily exclude some agents who could potentially play, and that their exclusion is not voluntary. This does not mean that the excluded are thus not affected by the game’s process. However, their concerns don’t count for those playing within the defined boundaries, as indeed all players are concerned with their own selfinterest. In their will to win, competitors concentrate on those who are defined as opponents within the game, but remain entirely indifferent to the needs and aspirations of the bystanders. The well-being of non-players invariably remains external to inner logic of the game. It so happens that these games do affect the non-players, however. For instance, the competition among steel makers uses energy from coal and materials from iron mines and disposes of wastes so that it leaves a large environ|| 388 I borrow the notion of finite games from Carse 1986.

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mental footprint—but the steel makers themselves are only concerned with their own profits. The external effects of commerce—from sicknesses born of polluted rivers to global warming—do not only occur regularly, they are built into the system. For it lies in the very nature of finite games to exclude not only bystanders, but also entire geographical regions as well as future generations. The very logic of finite games keeps outsider’s needs below the radar of those who are happy enough to be in the game at present. Put into economic terms, Pareto efficient situations usually only hold for a given set of individuals, the selected players, so as to cast into the dark the fate of those “third parties” unhappy enough not to have been included in that set right from the start. It is worth noting here that the possession of money either explicitly or implicitly provides the ticket to entry for economists. “The market process includes and excludes. The boundary is demarcated by money. If one has money, one has the ticket to the play of the market” (Brodbeck 1996: 229). This is to say that “solely the binary code of paying or not paying counts: whoever pays, receives, what he wants; whoever fails to pay, because he can’t or won’t, becomes a bystander” (Schramm 1997: 150). “Any persons who are not acquainted at every moment with the prevailing ratio of exchange, or whose stocks are no available for the want of communication, must not be considered part of the market” (Jevons 1970: 133). Because they can get no access to the market game, their powers are reduced to zero, and in a competitive society they cease to exist (cf. MacPherson 1962: 56). Men who have no possessions to which others can ascribe a positive value find their existences within the boundaries of economic competition annihilated and, consequently, are pushed to its margin. This, of course, also holds true for all cultural and social phenomena that elude monetary expression. In as much as competitors turn a blind eye against the possible degeneration of their playing field, i.e. their immediate competitive environments, the conditions of their wider cultural and natural environments also remain below their radar. My fourth proposition concerns the regulatory premises derived from our above-analyzed notion of externalities. While mainstream economics has traditionally neglected the subject of externalities altogether, due to its insistence on analyzing competition in terms of finite games, environmental economics seeks to internalize external effects into the market framework. To do this, it tries to devise ways in which the rules of the game can be manipulated from the outside while preserving competitive behavior within game. Fundamentally, what is at stake here is the belief in a transcendent creative power standing sovereign and even absolute over both agents and their activity. Consider, for instance, global warming. Over the last several decades as temperatures have trended upwards, an increasing number of environmental

538 | Silja Graupe economists have agreed that it can be considered an external effect of competition, whose elimination systematically eludes the inner logic of the game. The question, then, is not if the field of economics is aware of the problem at all, but rather how it poses a solution to the problem. Oversimplifying complicated matters somewhat here, the allocation of carbon emission certificates appears a good example of how the system of exchange, or market, must be preserved at all costs. Some central authority, deployed by nations or the entire international community, first sets a specific goal, say reducing carbon dioxide by an amount said to be sufficient to limit global warming to 2°C by 2050. Subsequently, the central authority caps the amount of carbon dioxide every economic agent is allowed to emit, limiting total emission to a certain level. Companies or other groups pay for emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances representing the right to emit a specific amount. Because I assume my audience is well aware of the emission trading scenarios currently in circulation, let me skip the details and get straight to the underlying structure of argument here, which has a long tradition both in economic and political theory. Modern environmental economics confidently turns to the unquestioned presupposition that some external agency can design, alter and enforce the rules of the game independent of the inner logic that prevails within the competitive framework, so as not to impinge upon the principle of competition. More concretely speaking, the state here assumes its customary role “to provide a means whereby we can modify the rules, to mediate differences among us on the meaning of rules, and to enforce compliance with the rules on the part of those few who would otherwise not play the game” (Friedman 1982: 25). Here, the state is considered a transcendent agency standing sovereign, and even absolute over the interplay of self-interested individuals: What the state does […] is to alter some of the terms of the equations each man makes when he is calculating his most profitable course of action. But this need not affect the mainspring of the system, which is that men do calculate their most profitable course and do employ their labour, skill, and resources as that calculation dictates. […] The state may, so to speak, move the hurdles in advantage of some kinds of competitors, or may change the handicaps, without discouraging racing (Macpherson 1962: 58).

Bluntly put: due to their pre-analytic vision, mainstream economics, including the sub-genre of environmental economics, models the world, literally, on a board game where the players compete with each other under rules set by a higher power until they achieve optimum performance. Put in the words of Hayek, “as individuals we must bow to forces and obey principles that we cannot hope to understand, while still progress and even the survival of civilizations depends on them” (Hayek 1959: 127). In the liberal traditions of the 18th

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and 19th century, the supreme force was ascribed to God—now it is ascribed to the market mechanism (cf. Büscher 1991). Although the old God dies, an old sin lives: God’s erstwhile children often try to take his place. The independent existence (the aseity) traditionally ascribed to an omnipotent personal being called God can be vainly arrogated by human beings themselves (Stenson 1989: 122f.).

One might consider, at this point, where the economist herself fits in all this. Is the economist in the market? On the side of the umpire? According to their own theory, (monetary) incentives chiefly motivate the players in the game to obey the game’s pre-given rules; but somehow the economic scientist has the power to step outside the game so as to design the rules. For “it is the economists who design the rules of the game” (Kyrer 2001: 7). Economists, in their theory, are proxies for the God’s eye perspective that sees the totality of the games and the externals of the games. They not only contemplate the spectacle, but also have a divine-like power to predict and control the performance of the economy. They only need to find the switches, apparently, for the mechanism. Thus, they think of themselves, or at least the body of knowledge they possess, as allowing them to transcend the self-interested behavior and rationality of homo oeconomicus, albeit not—as we have seen with their little examined pre-suppositions—selfreflectingly so. This has led to the economic triumphalism which we saw all too much of in the so-called “Great Moderation” of the past two decades—although less so since the beginning of the slump. Interestingly, economists seemingly don’t notice the performative contradiction in saying that the players can only attend to their strategies for maximizing their self interest in competitive games, but that they, the economists, can possess both knowledge of these strategies and yet transcend them in their models, which are not self-interested. Therefore, the logic according to which they have the possibility to devise and enforce the rules of the game remains altogether inscrutable from their own premises. The ultimate question of who is to design the rule of the game, and how he or she is to accomplish this task, remains unaccounted for. Another point worth mentioning here refers to the role of nature within competitive markets. As Herman Daly and others have pointed out, economics has traditionally referred to ecosystems not as the site within which the economy operates, i.e. what surrounds it, but as a subsystem of the economy that includes extractive sectors as well as dumps (cf. Daly 1999). This inverses the real relationship between nature and the economy. In conformity with the preanalytic vision of mainstream economics, nature is defined for all intents and purposes as an aggregation of resources subordinated to economic agents.

540 | Silja Graupe Mainstream economics considers nature’s ecological web only as discrete objects or elements upon which economic man directs the force of his rational calculations and behavior. The river that passes by a power plant, for instance, is just an immediate resource for disposing of waste, and not a flow operating within the total global water economy. As such, these elements are not taken as the essential environs of competitive games—literally the physical material of the playing field and the players—but only as elements to be calculated upon within the game’s pre-given matrices of possible in- and outputs. Contemporary environmental economics, inasmuch as it sticks to the mainstream paradigm, is prone to adopt this understanding of nature insofar that it seeks to internalize economy’s externalities by making them, too, subject to a market game. This field of economics thus reframes strictly environmental issues in the language of rules and incentives that will be accepted by economic agents as mere obstacles or handicaps in their unimpeded race for wealth, or as incentives to be used by these players to best each other in their competitions and as bars to entry. Said differently, environmental economics does its best to reframe environmental issues in a language of abdication, restraint, and obstruction that, if viewed from the viewpoint of the competitors, holds no positive meaning. Economic man may be coerced to irrevocably bow to the rules of the game designed to protect the environment, but only due to an elaborate scheme of incentives and punishments, not to deeper insight into the planetary community of man and nature on the part of the individual. The fifth economic proposition deals with the theme of responsibility: Both mainstream economics in general and environmental economics as a sub-genre posits responsibility against all forms of creative and spontaneous responsiveness. Thus, responsibility is confined to a negative notion, namely, that of strictly obeying pre-given rules within certain temporal, spatial and population boundaries. As such, it reflects a cultural bias towards an ethics that is primarily a morality of principles. “There is”, Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman famously wrote, “only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”389 Here we can see, from what we said above about finite games, that Friedman’s statement is in full conformity with the pre-analytic vision of mainstream economics. The systematic locality of moral responsibility, following a long-standing tradition in the history of economic thought, is disconnected from the whole of the economic and ecological system. This locality does not lie || 389 Milton Friedman in: New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970.

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within the process of competition but is pushed to the latter’s margin. “The systematic location of morality for a free market economy consists in its framework of regulations” (Homann/Blome-Drees 1992: 35). Moral responsibility is thought to be fully embodied by the rules of the game, which then permits each move within the game to follow the logic of profit seeking. Morality, then, becomes a question of fairness of the competition—as in our original quotation from Smith. As the rules of the game are thought to be exhaustively determined by an outer force, moral duty within the competitive process becomes wholly identified with the profit motive, and is adjusted only with that goal in mind. Economic agents are obliged to strive for their own personal advantage; their unconditional will to win is turned into a moral imperative itself. Each competitor needs to outrun the others without fail, because otherwise the social benefit accruing from the ‘invisible hand’, which from an absolute standpoint is believed to guide competition as a whole, will not be optimized. What I would like to point out here specifically is the fact that such a vision of responsibility runs the risk not only of downplaying our spontaneously responses to the immediate needs of our fellow human beings and our natural environs—it even precludes it. Because unstinting obedience to rules governing competition combined with the profit seeking goal are considered necessary preconditions of competitive play, they can never be abrogated, not even on behalf of compassion in the face of emergencies, such as famine, or ocean acidification. As the German ethicist Karl Homann unapologetically states, spontaneous help must be considered a “mortal help” and spontaneous sympathy for one’s neighbor as unethical. We must not yield to the intention, in the face of hungry children of the poorest of the poor, to give unedited ‘spontaneous’ help, because such conduct not only doesn’t solve the problem but makes it worse. […] The conduct of a Saint Martin will only sharpen the poverty problem in developing countries and would be in that respect unethical, perhaps even a crime” (Homann 2003: 20f.).

The other is best helped, then, by strictly adhering “with the most obstinate steadfastness to the general rules” (Smith 1790, part III.I.122). As the Japanese ethicist Watsuji critically remarks: “every form of solidarity here can only finds its expression in a law, and responsibility and duty can only be enacted through coercion” (Watsuji 1996: 25). The five propositions common to mainstream economics and mainstream environmental economics come down to this: interhuman relationships are seen as subordinate to a universal framework of laws and regulations, elaborately enforced by incentives and punishments, with the result that equality

542 | Silja Graupe (before the law) and freedom (to strive for one’s own personal advantage) are thought to complement each other and form the complete principle of civility upon which the social whole depends (cf. Gallu 1989: 91). More bluntly put, it is believed that the negative impacts of competition, inflicting immeasurable suffering upon millions, can be thrust aside by appeal to some outside force, be it an “invisible” or “visible hand.”390 The problem to be solved remains merely to decide on the best possible framework, be it “natural”, “public” or “divine.” But what if the process of competition as such happens to determine, in our complex societies, what the rules of the game are supposed to mean? What if the paradigmatic distinction between the rules of the game and playing the game is an illusion? As long as economists, bounded by the pre-analytic vision of finite games, paradigmatically presuppose this separation, such questions do not even swim to their view. They will, in as much as politicians, not only in the face of climate change and environmental degradation, but also in relation to continuing financial and economic crises, continue their knee-jerk call for “new rules of the game.” It is precisely this conceptual deadlock that, to my opinion, we need to overcome by engaging in intercultural dialogue with those Asian traditions that expressly do not share the pre-analytic vision of a universal that is capable of dictating rigid rules of the game, but instead urge us to explore an entirely different vision of play.

An alternate vision As early as 1705 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote in regard to the Chinese: “Their language, their character, their way of life, their craftsmanship, and even their games are so different from ours as if they were people from another globe; it seems possible that even a very simple, but precise account of what they practice could give us a more useful opening than to study the rites and motives of the Greek and the Romans to which so many scholars attach” (quoted in Jullien 2005, p. 16). While I am far from advocating Leibniz’ insight in its entirety here, I do share its basic vision that the Chinese and Japanese visions of games can in fact give us an opening to think beyond the pre-analytic vision and the privileged game metaphor we have been discussing. Again, my argument here is far from universalizing some best game metaphor. I am not saying, for instance, that the || 390 The Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, for example, strongly opposes this belief (cf. Nishitani 1990).

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contemporary Chinese and Japanese are all in disagreement with the foundational premises of mainstream economics if the latter is explicitly uncovered. However, clearly the other extreme, taking all cultural differences to be minor variants on the same premises, is ethnographically suspect, and tends to hide the acculturation processes by which the global market system came about. Cultures do disagree, most often below the radar of awareness, about their foundational premises. This is actually a creative affordance given to us by the plurality of cultures. Thus, in this section of my paper, I want to touch briefly on the very possibility of an alternative view of games, rules, environments and players. In doing so, I think I am contributing in my own way to the development of both critical and creative tools to expand the range of common solutions—and possible frameworks in which these problems and solutions can be articulated—to the environmental crises that all cultures today jointly face. Summarizing the problem discussed in the preceding sections, we could say that environmental economics’ concept of responsibility hinges on the presupposition of an external power or agency, standing sovereign, and even absolute over competing, autonomous individuals. As the risk of oversimplifying matters here, it seems to me that East Asian philosophy would regard the failure to examine this presupposition as more than the bad luck that we don’t have more curious economists—it amounts, instead, to a systematic failure. This is because for them “there is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are all in the soup” (Ames/Hall 2003: 18). Overcoming environmental crises cannot be a question of discovering another or better idea of an absolute ruler, designing independently an ever more efficient framework of continued competition. Rather, the hope of limiting the struggle of egoists through an exterior force, a prime mover, becomes regarded in itself as illusionary. This is to say that the infinite terror of egotistic action— which, in the West, finds form in the Hobbesian image of the primitive jungle— cannot simply be thrust aside by “the renunciation of the opposing sides being imposed by something from the outside” (Nishitani 1990: 259)—that is, the Hobbesian solution. Every effort aiming at releasing the suffering of people, which lies in the reality of their absolute opposition as competitors, through reference to a pre-given universal “seems like trying to scratch your feet through the soles of your shoes” (Nishitani 1990: 260). More concretely speaking, in the Chinese and Japanese traditions we find a pre-analytic vision that does not hinge on the notion of some originative and independent source of order or, expressed differently, on a “two-world” theory that categorically separates some independent source of order from what is orders (cf. Sun Tzu 1993: 46-50). Speaking in terms of our game metaphor, this vision supposes something radical: that instead of redefining the role of the

544 | Silja Graupe umpire vis-à-vis the constitution of the rules, we simply abandon the notion of an independent umpire. Said differently, we do not seek to externally change or redefine some of the individual rules of the present game but to undertake an entirely different kind of play; a play, in which playing and ordering are so enmeshed that any rules are continually and attentively shaped and redefined in the very process of play itself. However, abandoning the notion of the umpire is only the first step—or rather, is dependent upon other steps. Most notably, the core assumptions of economics’ methodological individualism must be re-analyzed. In his fascinating book on philosophy and cultural difference, Thomas Kasulis argues that the basic cultural orientation for the Japanese is not one of context independent agency but the intimacy of “belonging-with” (cf. Kasulis 2002). As stated earlier, the pre-analytic vision of economics makes us to think that economic actors exist autonomously, and so independently from one another. Their relationships, defined by the rules of the game, are additive, not integral, to their individuality (refer back to Figure 1). If the basic cultural orientation is one of intimacy, however, then agents are thought to be internally connected: “It is part of the essential nature of the relatents that they are connected as they are; they are interdependent, not independent, entities” (Kasulis 2002, p. 36). In game terms, relations are now seen as integral to the players: how they interact with others defines their very identity as players. In a strong sense, they only exist in the “in-between-ness” of playing with others.391 What A is depends, in a fundamental way, on the relations he maintains with B and C. To dissolve A’s internal relationships with others would not merely disconnect him from the other two; it would actually transform himself (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Agents as internally connected. Source: Kasulis 2002.

|| 391 Cf. for example the work of the Japanese scholar Kimura Bin, who states: “The ‘betweenness of person and person’ (hito to hito to no aida) and ‘betweenness’ (aida) do not signify merely a relationship between two individuals. The ‘betweenness of person and person is the ‘locus’ (basho) functioning as the source from out of which both I and others arise” (quoted in Odin 1996: 70).

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Such vision of agency surely “amounts to an ontological gestalt shift from taking independent and dependent actors to be first order realities and relations among them as second order, to seeing relationality as first order (or ultimate) reality and all individual actors as (conventionally) abstracted or derived from them” (Hershock 2006: 147). Such a shift does not only reject the assumption of context independent agency; it simultaneously alters the notion both of competitors and competition. On the surface, this means that we have to abandon Robinson Crusoe to his place in our childhood—as an economic idol, he is misleading at best. Players don’t choose to connect to others according to their predetermined preferences. On a deeper level, we should no longer conceive of the game as a pre-given matrix of payoffs determined by external rules, but rather see the very dynamics of the process of playing as primary, shaping both players and play in an ongoing, evolving and ever changing process. Playing, here, becomes a subjectless, processual event, a “determination without a determining agent who could govern events from a superordinated level” (Nishida 1999: 166). Accordingly, setting its rules from any position outside the play would not only be a useless attempt but also an ultimately distractive and destructive one (cf. Hershock 2006: 138).

Rethinking the core idea of sustainability In the confines of a chapter I don’t have the space to discuss in detail the rich meaning of this alternate vision. But in this last section I would like to suggest that it might offer us a suitable starting point for carefully rethinking sustainability. Summarizing our findings, we might say that our vision has broadened from one that can only countenance finite games to one that intuits infinite plays, which, as they have no predetermined form or content, do not exhibit any fixed entanglements (cf. Shimomura 1990).392 As we have tried to show above, the pre-analytic vision of games behind mainstream economics makes players prone to consider their environments as simply pre-given settings, upon which they can play out their individual interests. Consequently, the latter attempt to follow a menu of set strategies derived from previously modeled situations (cf. Jullien 2005). As such, they remain incapable of reacting within the game to the concrete and site-specific circumstances of the game, even in the face of irreparable damage. According to the East-Asian pre-analytic vision as I sketched out above, however, economic activity comes to be considered an infinite game, in || 392 Shimomura uses the Japanese term kukan.

546 | Silja Graupe which skillfulness depends on adequately responding to the potentiality of situations, adapting oneself skillfully to the changing events while shaping these events in turn. One acts relationally, not by distancing oneself theoretically from the situation, but by means of active improvisation (cf. Hershock 2006: 150). Such improvisation includes not only the fact that in some games the common rules of the game are altered even as the plays are being made, but, as importantly, the potential of the player being changed in the midst of play, as part of the game: protest against the economic conditions of our days becomes ultimately self-referential—“a criticism of an order in which one’s self is a constitutive factor” (Sun Tzu 1993: 69). But does this really encourage us to understand the concept of sustainability in radically different ways? I would suggest here that our two pre-analytic visions might possibly agree upon a very broad definition of sustainability as the capacity to endure; yet they will differ in fact upon what can, and in fact should endure. Let us have a look again at the imperialistic efforts to redefine sustainability in truly economic terms. If we were to truly take seriously its preanalytic visions, then we would need to attribute the capacity to endure first and foremost to economic agents. This is because their pre-given motives, goals, and intentions are presupposed to outlast the course of events. More specifically, their self-interest is thought to persist both in time and space, including their irrevocable will to win. Yet, we don’t mean that true human beings outlast the Smithian race for wealth, honors, and preferments. For any specific person always runs the risk of being barred from playing. The Smithian race unfolds within a border, and only those who are inside this border can be meaningfully defined. Moving outside the competitive sphere, thus, is tantamount to ceasing one’s economic existence. To requote, as William S. Jevons, one of the founding fathers of the modern economic approach, formulates it: “Any persons who are not acquainted at every moment with the prevailing ratio of exchange, or whose stocks are no available for the want of communication, must not be considered part of the market” (Jevons 1970: 133). “If he can get no access [to the market— S.G.], his powers are reduced to zero, and in a competitive society he ceases to exist” (MacPherson 1962: 56). Thus, “paying or not paying—that is, literally, the ontological question in commerce” (Luhmann 1990: 104). Said differently, it is only a general trait of human behavior—the will to win according to one’s own self-interest—that can always prevail according to the pre-analytic vision of mainstream economics. This in turn means that whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game—and therefore does not have the capacity to endure, neither within nor without the competitive sphere. It is liquidated as inefficiency, sooner or later.

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If we consider competition to exist solely for the purpose of winning like Smith does, then we must presuppose its definite ending. Otherwise we could choose no winner. Though we might consider free market competition as a series of games, it is nevertheless true that none of these games itself is designed to subsist. Instead it has fixed temporal, spatial, and numerical boundaries: a finite game has a definite ending, a circumscribed playing field as well as a selection process for continually expelling players, although, exogenously, new ones continually appear and enter the game. And as we have seen, nothing within these boundaries works to prevent the players from inflicting damage and suffering on the social and ecological environs outside these boundaries, even if, in the long term, such damage and suffering might eventually come to threaten their very own existence. Taking account of that long term while competing in the short term is hazardous, allowing other players in the game a competitive advantage. Thus, the pre-analytic vision of mainstream economics makes it for instance almost impossible to understand sustainable development as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (cf. the Brundland definition of sustainability). In the Smithian game the umpire can at best punish violations of fair play among a given number of competitors. But he systematically remains incapable of attending to the needs of, say, the next generations of players or spectators. The needs of the social, ecological and temporal environs could thus only be factored in by bringing the specific game to an end, changing both its rules and matrix of its payoffs and then starting off a new round of games. As we have seen, this is precisely the logic underlying current political endeavors of combating climate change. As we have also seen, however, the difficult task of amending rules is nothing to be possibly mastered by anyone competing within the boundaries of free market competition. It rather needs to be imposed by some outside force. Mainstream economists, however, still owe us an explanation to how this force itself could potentially outlive the economic struggle of all against all itself, especially considering its ‘neutrality’ is itself caught up in the web of maximizing behaviors. Neither does it tell us how to change ourselves so as to become a source of paradigmatic innovations from within the field of economic interaction. I would argue here that we do not only need to continue altering some of the individual rules of economic competition despite economics’ distorted view of sustainability but to start undertaking a very different kind of play. We need to change the economic understanding of sustainability as such. It seems that cross-cultural comparison along the line that I have been sketching out above can set us on the right track here. For what in fact endures in an indefinite game is the very process of playing as such. And this process in turn depends on ade-

548 | Silja Graupe quately responding to the potentiality of situations, adapting oneself skillfully to the changing events while shaping these events in turn. One acts relationally, not by distancing oneself theoretically from the situation, but by means of active improvisation (cf. Hershock 2006: 150). Here I think it might be important, however briefly, to ask about the self itself—the implication that self-interest implies self-identity, under the aegis of individualism. If the self really doesn’t identify with itself, but with its family, its institution, its nation, its environment, whatever, perhaps this is because the self can’t identify with self, as it is vacuous as an identifying term. Thus, the whole idea that we are ultimately basing our economics on individualism faces the problem that the self is anything but an individual-identifier. In this sense, the play could make the player. To adequately respond to the tragedy of the commons, for instance, one does not passively await the removal of obstacles to the game by an external agency but begins to act so as to change one’s own character. One needs to grow responsive to the present situation—beyond both the morality of fixed principle and economics’ deeply ingrained presupposition that we can and should not to alter our egotistic natures, but rather hedge it about with rules so as to mitigate its most disastrous effects by taming it from the outside. While homo oeconomicus thus becomes unmasked as truly unlivable figure, sustainability becomes a function of enriching relationships that are, necessarily, irreducibly shared; relationships that are not only expressed by contracts and communicated through price signals within the market sphere but also by other forms of communication (cf. Ostrom 1990: 1-28). As such, sustainability comes to be linked to the quality of a suite of variations in which the theme can change, not with gaining a definite victory (cf. Sun Tzu 1993: 62). My hope is that upon this alternate vision of sustainability adumbrated here we might eventually grow capable of conceiving our growing interrelatedness not as a threat to our individuality but as a heightened potential for developing and nourishing our personalities in a net of relationships expanding beyond any spatial, temporal, or numerical boundaries. My more humble hope, however, is that the ambulant, existential dissatisfaction we feel with economics hidden pretense to define any aspect of our life according to its pre-given set of analytical tools crystallizes in a program of rigorous intercultural critique— including, but not limited to, culture and sustainability—so as to make the Mount Lu upon which economists uncritically stand a continuous part of our field of attention.

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George F. McLean

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy: a brief review393 It is an honor and a great pleasure to receive the 2013 Global Dialogue Prize on behalf of the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) and the joint efforts of the many scholars from all parts of the world who have joined together in that effort. Moreover, this short period of reflection, if not even of celebration, must serve as preface to the hundreds of philosophical dialogues of this 23rd World Congress of Philosophy which are about to begin here in Athens, literally within the hour. This imposes a threefold burden of brief explanation on: why dialogue, how this has been pursued by the RVP, and the challenges presented by these global times.

Why dialogue? It is significant that in the 17th century René Descartes, "the Father of Modern Philosophy," would begin his prescription for the method of philosophizing precisely by excluding dialogue in favor of the solitary thinker. He did this in order to realize most perfectly the internal rigor of his deductive rational system, a goal which guided and characterized the efforts of philosophers for the next two centuries. As a result modern philosophy can be broadly characterized as objective and universal in orientation, individual in outlook, abstractive in content and deductive in method. As such it begins with leaving aside, or abstracting from, all else. There were important accomplishments here for the human mind, such that the term "progress" has become a virtual synonym for the term "modern." As the pendulum of the history of philosophy swings, not only its strengths but its weakness are beginning to be acknowledged in our day. Eventually, rationality as an exclusive and self-sufficient ideal began to fray. René Descartes himself appears to have abandoned his original search for a universal mathesis or || 393 In 2013 the Global Dialogue Prize was awarded to the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) during the Opening Session of the 23rd World Congress of Philosophy in Athens. George F. McLean, the director of RVP, received the award on behalf of the organization; this is the text of the acceptance speech as delivered on August 5, 2013.

552 | George McLean mathematical clarity in all matters as internally inconsistent, before even reaching Holland to begin his major systematic works. But was it ever possible for there to be neutral unprejudiced subjects to make judgments that were purely objective and independent of their personal and cultural backgrounds and interests? If one takes account of the historical and cumulative character of life across multiple generations, if the content of a cultural tradition is ever being reevaluated and adjusted for its life-giving qualities in new circumstances before being passed on to the next generation, and if what is received and assimilated shapes perceptions by this next generation, then the content of experience is not a neutral or static reality. Rather it bears the distinctive and hence discrete heritage of a people such that their culture not only differs from that of other peoples, but over time comes to differ progressively even within itself. Hans-Georg Gadamer would rightly remark that since this process of inculturation is simply inescapable then rather than trying to avoid it we need to recognize it, perfect it and direct it. That is, we need to take advantage of it and make it serve us. Hence, if modern thought had tended to ignore the human subject and cultures in a single-minded pursuit of objectivity, and if this is a vain pursuit, then we need now to explore these ever new cultural dimensions of our humanity and their implications for our mutual understanding and our cultures understood as our ways of life. How this can be done is the key to the work of the RVP. By what structures has RVP accomplished this? What methods are being honored by this Global Dialogue Prize?

Building structures of dialogue The life of the human subject is not a solitary affair, but is "lived with" and in relation to others. Here, "dia" as "through" "across" or "with" the “other” is the key to "dia-logue" as speaking with an other or multiple others. This calls not only for solitary reflection, but especially for human interchange or dialogue. And if dialogue is the key to human self- and mutual understanding then it is essential that it be perfected and done well. This will not be without such accomplishments of the modern period as objective reference and careful reasoning. But beyond this, dialogue consists in the interaction of two or more. Like the two arms of a tuning fork, or better like conversation between best friends, each stimulates the imagination of the other to go more broadly and deeply into new dimensions of their lived human dignity and meaning. Over time this comes to constitute a way of life or culture of a people.

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In order to counter the depersonalization that has characterized knowledge and action in our scientific and technological age and to implement this interactive process the RVP has developed a number of structures, of which I would cite four: 1. Teams. The first is the development of teams for corporate dialogical reflection. Rather than collecting papers written separately by scholars working in isolation, emphasis is upon forming local teams which can come together on a regular basis in order to think together and interchange ideas and to exchange premonitions and sensibilities which go more deeply than what can be conceptualized or even imagined. These conversations are interspersed with periods of personal assimilation, research and writing. The teams consist of more mature as well as younger scholars in order to train up new generations of philosophers. Being locally based the teams are also culturally specific and hence able to draw upon the richness of their culture and respond to its needs or vital concerns. Finally, the RVP has identified regional coordinators with the task of developing dialogue between teams which share the same or related cultures. 2. Conferences. A second structural element is conferences of three or four day’s duration. These enable the work of the teams to be shared with, and critiqued by, a broader body of regional scholars. Series of these conferences span major regions: for instance, in the last year there have been six in East Africa, three in North India, four in East Asia, and three in Eastern Europe. 3. Seminars: Extended and International. Over the years a set of 30 annual or semiannual international seminars have been developed. These are more extended in length, reaching from five to ten weeks, and also more varied in participants who come generally from some 10 different countries or cultural regions. This enables a progressive enrichment which deepens the creative understanding of a single challenging issue, as well as the formation of deep bonds of professional and personal friendship and understanding across boundaries. This has proven to be of great import for the cohesion of this overall effort as well as the professional promotion of the participants who return to their tasks as professors, deans, national academic leaders or indeed, as in one instance, the Vice President of their nation. 4. Publications. A fourth structural element has been the publication and distribution in print, as well as on the web, of some 300 books resulting from this research. (See www.crvp.org under “publications” for complete texts for free download.) But structures can be fairly stagnant if left without corresponding existential stimuli arising both from the urgency of the issue and from an openness of heart. Hence one of the first things to note is that the flow of this work is not random, but is directed in terms of the questions asked, inasmuch as it is to

554 | George McLean these that the answers correspond. This is noted by Collingwood and Gadamer, who in turn trace it back to Plato as the very inner structure of dialogue. This took on special meaning for the RVP as concerned not only with abstract or theoretical understanding, but with responding to pressing needs and the rich cultural opportunities of our times. Hence in the report of the RVP activities it can be noted that the thematic invitations to annual seminars or regional conferences are structured in terms of "challenge and response." These take up an existential issue of the life of a people as the matter to be treated, call urgently for action, and review in that light the many cultures for deeply humane ways to direct this action. This has evoked not only random curiosity or even exact investigation, but also a more passionate generosity of spirit and the related creativity required for real progress.

Three Examples Thus, for example, during the Cold War before the fateful year of 1989 the RVP engaged the academies of science of all the Central and Eastern European countries in 10 dialogues on issues of crucial importance for recalibrating human interchange. And whereas it might have been supposed that these would be principally occasions of paralyzing debate, the opposite proved to be true. For instance, the first such dialogue was held in Munich in 1976 with members of the Polish Academy. Professor George Kline of Bryn Mawr University introduced his paper by saying that he had given it at a couple of conferences but had never been able to complete it. Then he appealed to one and all: "help me finish my paper!" Barriers began to melt away, replaced by a sense of creative cooperation. A bit later on the same session Professor Janus Kuczinsky, the founding editor of Dialogue and Humanism, referred to a text of Marx to justify his point but said he did not know where it was in the body of Marx's writings. At coffee time Louis Dupré, Richard De George and Kenneth Schmitz drifted over to a long shelf holding a complete set of the writings of Marx and began to discuss the point at which Marx could have written that text. Before the coffee break was finished they came over with a smile: "Here's our text" they said to Janusz. When we returned to the conference table we found that we were not two teams, but had melded into one embarked upon an urgent common search. The atmosphere had become one of mutual cooperation: exciting, productive and highly gratifying. That spirit would mark the many conferences to follow in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Romania and Moscow during the following years leading

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up to the end of the Iron Curtain. Indeed it could be a principle here today as we begin the dialogues of this 23rd World congress of Philosophy. Or in China beginning in the 1990s each annual conference ended with the selection of a theme for the year to follow. Each was a step in an adventure whose future steps had never previously been experienced. The themes began with "Chinese Cultural Tradition and Modernization," followed by "The Humanization of Technology," "The Economic Ethics," "Civil Society," "The Basis of Values" and "The Cultural Impact on International Relations,"—all in relation to Chinese Culture. In retrospect what appeared was an integral sequence, a process of "nation building" as each of these issues gradually emerged into view and called for their successor. The process was neither arbitrary nor ideologically or analytically imposed. Rather it was the very being or reality of the Chinese people emerging into the light, as a phenomenologist would put it. And in each dialogue the Chinese were joined serially by scholars from the cultural areas along the Pacific rim. Yet the prize being awarded today has an additional character for it is denominated specifically as the "global" dialogue prize. Just as the Eastern European and the Chinese were, so to speak, catapulted into their dialogue series, the same seems true today, but now in a much more comprehensive and holistic manner. Whether we look inward into the immigrant makeup of our societies or outward to other nations we find ourselves challenged to live together with all the world’s peoples. We are challenged to search for a harmony which enriches all as each culture contributes to the whole its own set of values and virtues. For in these global times cultural dialogue is no longer simply with the other, but the shaping thereby of our very selves.

Epilogue For life in these global times we need a new paradigm. My suggestion would be that of Isaias and his prophetic imagery of all peoples tending toward and climbing the Holy Mountain. We may have stayed too long in the Exodus paradigm from the cold war and liberation, and thus have sunk too deeply and opportunistically into ‘freedom’ misread ideologically in terms of ‘individuals’, ‘rights’ and ‘competition.’ Thus we miss its kenotic contemporary global imagery which could enable broad appreciation of the deepest themes and aspirations of cultures as ways of life, our own and other peoples – East and West, North and South – as a unity in diversity.

556 | George McLean As all peoples climb the mountain, each from their own direction, we converge not in strengths, but through our varied struggles and sufferings. Gradually we find ourselves able to hear and appreciate the deeper beauty of the diverse efforts of the many cultures as ways of life. Dialogue then becomes joining with others in their deepest aspirations or hymns for justice, peace and love. And as we come closer to one another the higher we struggle up the mountain and approach the summit the more life takes on a meaning that is properly sacred. In this deep kenotic understanding and appreciation of one another, dialogue finds the hope and inspiration to face the new global challenges of our secular times.

Afterthought—The problem of the many In the course of the preceding twenty-five inquiries into how global dialogue is possible it also has become clear, we trust, why global dialogue is necessary— especially global dialogue in the form of scholarly inquiry that has been in focus throughout. Instead of offering any conclusions we want to leave an afterthought. It is addressed to the philosophers among our readers, but consciously formulated in non-technical terms. Globalization creates new opportunities and new challenges. One particular challenge of globalization consists in the diversity of our cultural norms and moral values. In fact, this diversity is arguably the most significant problem for current global policy making. As illustrated by the debate about the mitigation of climate change, for example, many global tasks require concerted action but cannot be motivated by the increase of material well-being for everyone involved; rather, they must be motivated as acts of humanity. But what is ‘humanity’? Each culture—if this complex term may be used here as a collective denominator for a normative environment of significances and practices—includes a normatively universal conception of humanity, of those moral capacities and associated values that we all should consider as distinctly human. Notoriously, these conceptions of humanity diverge from each other. We have different views about human flourishing, about what we owe to each other, about what we hold intrinsically valuable, and even about human rights. In metaphysical terms, globalization has saddled us with the ‘problem of the Many.’ While the search for universal principles in particular phenomena, the “problem of the One and the Many,” as Plato called it, is often taken to define the beginnings of Western philosophy, the cultural, political, and intellectual history of humankind has left philosophers everywhere with the ‘problem of the Many’. The problem of the Many is the problem of how to react to the fact that the many are radically many, without a unifying One in Plato’s sense, and even without the Whiteheadian well-known process-philosophical promise that “the many become one and are increased by one.” Unlike Plato’s problem of the One and the Many, the problem of the many cannot be addressed by Socratic dialogue that relies on a shared background of epistemic practices. Rather, in order to address it we must put philosophy into yet another new key that centers on exploring the relationship between intercultural dialogue, existential orientation, and philosophical method. In the age of globalization philosophers everywhere must have the ambition to come to terms with the problem of the Many, including the diversity of philosophy itself. The direct and explicit philosophical recognition of diverse traditions of thought is an area of inquiry of its own—intercultural thought—which

558 | Jesper Garsdal differs methodologically from world philosophy and comparative philosophy. Intercultural thought, which centers on the method of dialogical engagements, spans out and operates in a space in-between cultures including philosophical cultures, a terra nullis, as Raimundo Panikkar called it, a “no man’s land” between cultural and philosophical commitments. Intercultural dialogue is a special type of hermeneutics where thinkers give other worldviews space within themselves, letting other views resonate within their own horizon of understanding. Intercultural thinkers—such as Panikkar, Nishida, Izutsu, Borges, Corbin, and Shayegan—let themselves consciously become an arena in which different forms of existential cultural values are given voice and play out their role, thereby leading to new creative polyphonic expressions of spirit. There are large sections of philosophy that do not yet, in full earnest, approach the problem of the Many but still abide by the universalist optimism— often inspired by the Western Enlightenment period—according to which we can ‘work out our differences’ on the basis of an allegedly universal understanding of discursive rationality. To be sure, Western ideas have had an immense influence globally for several reasons, from colonialism to economic globalization, and there are many insights, especially in political philosophy, that have been attractive elsewhere. But philosophers of all traditions need to acknowledge that there is a multiplicity of traditions and each tradition encounters philosophical ideas, their own and others, from their own perspective. And this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Not only can we benefit from Heidegger’s encounter with the East, but also from Ibn Sina’s and Suhrawardi’s encounter with the West. Dialogical plurality arises when intra-subjective and intersubjective dialogical engagements are combined. Only by intersubjective intercultural dialogue can we find out whether there is hope for temporary communality, for temporary consensus on a solution that only came into view in the course of this dialogue among these voices. In short, then, there is no easy route to ‘global ethics.’ While the ubiquitous call for a positive valuation of difference, for the “celebration of diversity,” is surely a good first step, the particular hermeneutic and communicative competences of researchers and scholars in intercultural thought can help us when such diversity shows its negative side in value conflicts. The problem of the Many is the problem of our times, within philosophy and beyond, our defining moment—by realizing dialogical pluralities we can begin to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to “be the change you want to see in this world.”

Name index A’la Maududi, A.; 327 Aarhus; xv; xvi; xxiv; 1f; 11; 501 Abley, M.; 465; 485 Abu El-Haj, N.; 191; 202 Ab-Wahhâb, M.; 327 Adams, J.; 469; 485 Adger, W. N.,; 517; 520 Africa; xvi; 17; 184ff; 200; 233; 448f; 459; 460; 471; 479; 485-488; 517; 553 Agrawala, S.; 506; 520 Ahmadinejad, M.; 315ff Aiello, L.; 488 Al-Ashmawy, M. S.; 328; 335 Al-Ashmawy, S.; 327 Al-Banna, H.; 327 Albin, C.; 35; 159; 167; 173; 336 Allen Nan, S.; 155f; 171; 173 Allen, M.; 115; 155f; 171; 173 Ames, R.; 406; 417f; 535; 543; 549 Anderson, R.; 67; 88; 93; 107; 112f; 115 Andrews, B.; 115; 550 Angelus Silesius; 46 Annan, K.; 257; 463; 485 Antilla, L.; 79; 81 Apel, K.O.; 126 Apel, K.-O.; 126 Apel, K.-O.; 127 Apperly, I.; 115 Appleby, R.; 350; 360; 363 Aquinas, T.; 423; 425f; 428; 440 Arendt, H.; xiii; 329; 336; 390; 394; 398 Arico, S.; 521 Aristotle; 88; 330; 389; 423; 425f; 428; 466 Arkoun, M.; 331 Aronson, J.; 521 Arrizabalaga, M. I.; xi; 455; 491; 496; 499; 502f Asal, V.; 176 Ashford, E.; 137; 140 Assmann, J.; 352; 363; 364 Atweh, B.; 174

Aufderheide, D.; 550 Auschwitz; 395; 398 Auvray, M.; 107; 112 Avenhaus, R; 148; 149; 171; 174 Avruch, K.; 202 Axelrod, R.; 148; 171; 304; 306 Aydin, M.; 361; 364 Baer, P.; 509; 520 Bahrami, B.; 114 Bakhtin, M.; 87 Baldauf, R.; 484; 486 Bales, R.F.; 171 Balibar, E.; 246 Baltes, P.; 113 Barber, C.; 472; 485 Bardi, A.; 228; 246 Bargh, J. A.; 113 Barnett, A.; 231; 248 Barsalou, L. W.; 99; 100; 112 Bartos, O.J.; 149; 171 Bassey, M.; 165; 171 Bates, R. H.; 193; 202 Baugh, A.; 485 Bausch, K. C.; 226; 246 Baxter, L.A.; 112; 115 Beck, U.; 350; 355; 364 Becker, G.; 523; 524; 525ff; 531; 532; 549 Beek, M.v.; 122; 127 Béguin, A.; 23f Bellamy, A. J.; 231; 246 Benford, R. D.; 179; 202 Benhabib, S.; 236; 246 Benvenisti, M.; 191; 202 Bercovitch, J.; 157; 167; 172; 176 Berdiaev, N.; 24; 26; 34 Berg, K. M.; 111f; 114; 203 Bergen, B.; 112; 454; 460 Berger, B. M.; 187; 202 Beriker, N.; 146; 161; 168f; 172 Berlin, I.; 21; 26; 34; 112-115; 171; 174; 223; 247; 309; 364f; 378; 461; 485; 487ff; 523; 549f

560 | Name index Berling, J.; 407; 415ff Bernasconi, R.; 389f Bernhardt, R.; xi; 133; 341; 349; 363f; 370; 377; 378 Berthrong, J.; 416f Bicchieri, C.; 233; 246f; 458; 460 Bicchieri, M. G.; 246f Bickhard, M.; 96; 112 Biermann, F.; 520 Birkhoff, J.E.; 172 Black, P.; 25; 121; 127; 184; 188; 202; 466 Blok, A.; 25 Blome-Drees, F.; 531; 541; 549 Boehm, C.; 233; 246 Bohm, D.; 87; 89; 112; 345 Bohman, J.; 231; 246; 249 Boia, L.; 505; 521 Bongard, J.; 114 Bonham, M.M.; 160; 162; 172 Bonta, B. D.; 227; 229; 246f Borodotsky, L.; 113; 461 Bottini, R.; 113; 461 Bowen, J. R.; 182; 183; 184; 193; 197; 202 Bowers, C. A.; 464; 485 Bowles, S.; 227; 246 Boykoff, J. M.; 79; 81 Boykoff, M. T.; 81 Braithwaite, J.; 115 Brennan, G. F; 534f; 549 Brenzinger, M.; 465; 485; 487f Brewer, G.,; 180; 202; 463; 485 Brewer, P. R.; 202 Brockner, J.; 212; 223 Brodbeck, K.-H.; 537; 549 Brown, B.R.; 145; 147; 172; 175; 306; 521 Brown, R.; 172 Brown, S. C.,; 521 Bryan, D.; 197; 199; 202 Buber, M.; xiv; xxiv; 87; 91f; 112f; 265; 344; 345; 381-399; 441 Buchanan, J.; 534; 535; 549 Burggraeve, R.; 398 Burling, R.; 469; 485 Burn, M.; 150f; 172 Büscher, M.; 539; 549 Cable, T.; 485 Cairns, E.; 194; 202f

Callahan, W. A.; 291; 306 Calvet, L-J.; 479; 485 Calvo, P.; 96; 99; 113 Cameron L. D.; 152; 172; 248 Cameron, M.; 152; 172; 248 Campbell, D.T.; 169; 172; 220 Carbonell i Cortés, O.; 503 Carneiro, R. L; 227; 229; 246 Carnevale, P.; 145; 172 Carse, J. P.; 536; 549 Carson, R.; 521 Carstarphen, N.; 172 Casasanto, D.; 86; 113; 454; 461 Cassirer, E.; 330; 336 Castro, A.; 502; 503 Catalonia; 180 Catholic Church; 183 Central Asia; 12; 459 Chan, Wing-tsit; 81 Chan, Wing-Tsit; 74; 81; 402f; 405; 413f; 416ff Chartrand, T. L.; 113 Cheldelin, S.; 89; 113; 127; 143; 172 Cheng Hao; 411; 417 Chernyshevsky, N.; 26 Child, I.L.; 176; 489 Chirac, J.; 184 Chong, D.; 81; 179; 202 Chong, Kim-Chong; 81 Christakis, A. N.; 246 Chun-yuan, Chang; 403; 417 Cicero, M.T.; 492 Cioran, E.; 26 Cissna, K.N.; 93; 107; 112f; 115 Clark, A.; 96; 113; 277; 280; 521 Clark, B.; 280 Clark, W. C.; 521 Clarke, J. J.; 119; 127 Cobb, J.; 409; 411; 417 Cohen, R.; 152; 172; 175; 187; 202; 401; 417 Cohn, A.; 396; 398 Coleman, J.S.; 149; 172 Coleman, P.T.; 149; 172 Colzato L. S.; 113 Confucius; 299; 304; 402; 406; 408f; 413f; 416f

Name index | 561 Connerton, P.; 194; 198; 202 Cook, S.; 78; 81f; 169; 172 Cook, T.D.; 172 Coombes, A. E.; 186; 191; 202 Corbin, H.; 41; 57; 66; 143; 176; 558 Corbin, J.; 176 Coser, L.; 213; 223 Cosgrove, D. E.; 190; 202 Council of Research in Values and Philosophy; xiv; xxv; xxiv; 458ff; 551f; 553f Cousens. E.; 173 Craighero, L.; 115 Crawford, J.; 468; 485 Crisp, R.; 111; 113; 115 Critchley, S.; 387; 398 Crystal, D; 465; 485 Cuéllar Lázaro, C.; 500; 503 Cuppy, W.; 482; 485 Curran; xx Curtius, E.; 34 Curtius, E. R.; 34 Dalby, A.; 465; 485 Dallmayr, F.; 1; xi; 259; 261; 283; 286; 287 Daly, H.; 233; 248; 525; 539; 549 Daly, R.; 248 Danz, C.; 343; 369; 370; 371; 378 Dao Hongjing; 414 Dârâ Shokûh; 12 Davis, R.; 191; 202 De Dreu C.K.W.; 145; 172 De Felipe Boto, M. d. R.; 497; 503 De Figueiredo, R. J.; 193; 202 De George, R.; 554 De Jaegher, H.; 107; 113 De Klerk, F. W.; 185 De La Vega, C.; 503 De, Qing; 14; 414; 417 Defoe, D.; 530; 549 Deganawidah; 228; 231; 235; 242; 244 Della Mirandola, P.; 428 Dennis, M.; 206; 228; 230; 235; 239; 242; 244; 246 Evans, N.; 454; 461; 481; 485 Even-Zohar, I.; 497; 503 Even-Zohar, Itamar; 503 Ewing Y. Chinn; 74; 81

Falk, R.; 231; 247 Fase, W.; 485 Fast, L.; 113; 127; 172 Faure, A.M.; 156; 157; 174; 175 Ferguson, R. B.; 232; 247 Feuerbach, L.; 326; 422; 431ff; 447 Figes, O.; 24; 25; 34 Finnegan, R.; 479; 486 Finzsch, N.; 473; 486 Fisk, R.; 280 Fiske, D.W.; 169; 172 Fitzduff,M.; 246 Fleming, J. R.; 505; 521 Fogle, L.; 465; 487; 488 Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B.; 500; 503 Forbus, K.,; 113; 461 Foster, J. B.; 277; 280 Fotokopoulo, O.; 113; 461 Foucault, M.; 15; 32; 323 Fouraker, L.E.; 145; 176 Fowler, J. W.; 375; 378 Fox, A.; 76; 78; 81 France; 21; 34; 123; 161; 181-184; 191; 193; 195; 197f; 200; 203; 324; 398; 485 Franek M.; 248 Frankfurt, H.; 115; 127; 134ff; 140; 364; 365; 378f; 549 Freeborn, D.; 472; 486 Freeman, M.; 79; 82 Frei, D.; 154; 174 French Revolution; 183; 323 Friedman, M.; 112; 530-535; 538; 540; 549 Frigg, R.; 97; 113 Frith, C. D.; 103; 113 Fry, D. P.; xii; 124; 125- 241; 246; 247 Fukuyama, F.; 339; 347; 523 Fuller, G.; 367; 378 Fung, Yulan; 403; 409; 417 Furnkranz, J.; 173 Gabbay, M.; 150; 174 Gabel, J.; 329; 330; 336 Gadamer, H.-G.; 270; 552 Gallagher, S.; 113 Gallu, E.; 542; 549 Galtung, J.; 156; 174 Gandhi, M.; 286; 313; 314; 320 García Álvarez, M.; 503

562 | Name index Gardner, P.; 229; 233; 247 Garsdal; xxv Garsdal, J; 2; xii; xxv; 7; 37; 39; 41; 50; 66; 67; 108 Garvey, J.; 517; 521 Gaskins, S.; 454; 461 Gastrow, P.; 185; 202 Gauchet, M.; 232; 236; 247 Gauthier, D.; 261; 265 Geertz, C.; 187; 202 Gentner, D.; 113; 461 Gentzler, E.; 493; 497; 503 Gephart, W.; 372; 378 Gerner, D.J.; 153; 175 Gibson, J. J.; 95 Gibson, J. L.; 113; 195; 203; 464; 486 Gibson, J.J.; 113 Gibson, W.; 113; 195; 203; 464; 486 Giesen, B.; 140 Gil, D.; 113; 454; 461 Gintis, H.; 227; 246 Glanz, D.; 395; 398 Global Dialogue Prize; xxv Gochal, J.R.; 152; 174 Goethe, J. W. v.; 22; 34; 37; 45; 48f; 56f; 64 Goffman, E.; 179; 203 Gomila A.; 113 Goody, J.; 479; 486 Gouveia V. V.; 248 Graf, J.; 180; 202 Graham, A.; xii; 69-81; 367; 479; 486 Graham, C.; 486 Graupe, S.; xii; 457; 523; 528; 530; 549 Green, J.; 113; 153; 173; 315; 316; 320; 461; 472; 488; 510; 521 Grenoble, L.; 465; 486; 487; 489 Grimmitt, M.; 375; 378 Grin, F.; 486 Grinevald. C.; 486 Grousset, R.; 11 Grove, R. H.; 247; 509; 521 Gruenewald, D.; 464; 489 Grünschloß, A.; 376; 378 Guetzkow, H.; 146; 175 Guillorel, H.; 482; 486 Gumperz, J.J.; 86; 113; 454; 461

Guner, S.; 148; 174 Guo Qiyong; 71; 73; 81; 410; 418 Guo Qingfan; 81 GuoYu; 418 Gurr, T.R.; 158; 174 Haas, J.; 232; 247 Habermas, J.; 125; 232; 236ff; 243; 247; 249; 293f; 306 Hagège, C.; 465; 468; 486 Hakli, R.; 261; 265 Halbwachs, M.; 193; 195; 203 Hale, K.; 465; 476; 486 Hall, D.; 11; 190; 246; 248; 406; 418; 535; 543; 549 Hamann, J. G.; 21 Hamas; 219 Hamer, R.; 479; 486 Hansen, C.; 71; 72; 77; 82; 513; 514; 521 Hansen, J. E.; 521 Harbert, W.; 482; 486 Hardin, G.; 531; 549 Hargreaves, A. G.; 183; 203 Harré, R.; 114 Harris, L.; 161; 173; 247 Harris, R.; 173 Harrison, K.; 464; 477f; 486 Hartmann, S.; 97; 113 Hartshorne, C.; 404; 418 Harvey, O.J.; 176 Hashmi, S.; 263; 265 Haskel, B.; 174 Hassner, R. E.; 191; 203 Havel, V.; 312 Hawaii; 81; 82; 281; 455; 549 Hayek, F. A. .; 297; 526; 530; 534; 538; 549 Hegel, G.W.; xii; 7; 37; 38; 44; 48-60; 63; 66; 261; 323; 325; 339; 431ff Heidegger, M.; 39; 47; 59; 91; 558 Held, D.; 231; 247; 248; 521 Held, H.; 521 Hempelmann, R.; 350; 364 Henderson, C.; 231; 248 Hendriks-Jansen, H.; 113 Herder, J. G.; 21 Hermans, T.; 493; 497; 503; 504 Herndl, C. G.; 521

Name index | 563 Hershock, P.; 535; 545; 546; 548; 549 Hick, J.; 404; 418 Higgins, E.T.; 176 Hindley, R.; 475; 486 Hobbes, T.; 125; 227; 233; 258; 284; 291; 298; 318; 543 Hobbs, R. J.; 510; 521 Hogg, M.; 127 Holling, C. S.; 512; 521 Homann, K.; 531; 541; 549; 550 Hommel B.; 102; 113 Hood, W.R.; 176 Hopf, T.; 367; 378 Hopmann, P.T.; 146; 161; 168; 173; 174 Hopmann, T.P.; 173 Horkheimer, M.; 330; 331; 336 Hornberger, N.; 486 Horowitz, A.; 388; 398 Horowitz, G.; 398 Horrocks, G.; 479; 486 Houlgate, S.; 51; 67 Howell, S.; 227; 248 Hrdy, S. B.; 233; 248 Hulbert, J.; 479; 486 Hulme, M.; xiii; 456; 505; 506; 515; 521 Hungary; 554 Huntington, S.; 129; 140; 199; 203; 254; 268; 280; 284; 291; 293; 294; 349; 364; 367; 378 Huq, S.; 520 Hurtado Albir, A.; 499; 503 Husbands, J.L.; 173 Huston, N.; 443; 448 Hutchins, E.; 96; 113; 114 Hyde, M.; 91; 113 Ibn al’Arabi; 17; 41; 65f Ibn Hanbal; 327 Ibn Sina; 558 Ibn Taymiyya; 327 Iklé, F.C.; 158; 174 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); 506; 511; 513; 518; 520; 521 IRA (Irish Republican Army); 206; 219 Irmer, C.; 156; 162; 167; 168; 174 Ivanhoe, P.; 74; 78; 82 Iyengar, S.; 179; 203 Izutsu, T.; 17

Jablonski, N.; 488 Jacobsen Gaarsmand, S.; 90; 114 Jacques, P.; 27; 79; 82; 184; 393; 509 Janse, M.; 469; 485; 488 Jarman, N.; 198; 199; 203 Jegstrup, E.; xiii; 8; 344; 381; 390; 398 Jensen, L.; 160; 174 Jerusalem; 180; 191; 194; 459 Jervis, R.; 192; 203 Jesus Christ; 43; 352; 353; 354; 355ff; 361; 369 Jevons, W. S.; 537; 546; 549 Jiang Boqian; 409; 418 Johann, R.; 21; 441; 448 Johnson, D.W.; 147; 174; 465 Johnston, K.; 173 Jones, E.; 207; 223 Julian, J.W.; 160; 175 Jullien, F.; 78; 82; 528; 542; 545; 549 Kahneman, D.; 207; 223; 524; 550 Kaltenmark, M.; 403; 418 Kandel, J.; 350; 364 Kant, I.; 23; 95; 114; 115; 269; 285; 287; 291f; 297; 306; 368; 430; 431; 432; 433 Kaplan, A.; 93; 114; 199; 203; 484; 486 Karenina, A.; 24 Kaschula, R.; 479; 486; 487 Kasulis, T. P.; 533; 544; 549 Keast, J.; 372; 375; 376; 378 Keck, M. E.; 231; 248 Kelly, R. C.; 232; 233; 248 Kelman, H.; 175; 189; 203; 223 Kelman, H.C.; 175; 189; 203; 223 Kemmis, S.; 165; 174 Kenneally, C.; 469; 487 Kepel, G.; 367; 378 Keynes, J. M.; 532; 549 Keyserling, H.; 33; 34 Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; 313 Khatami, M.; 17; 255ff; 265; 316; 319 Kheraskov, M.; 25 Khomeini, S.; 316 Kiechle, J.; 376; 378 Kierkegaard, S.; xiii; 56ff; 62; 67; 388; 389; 390; 394; 398 Killingsworth, M. J.; 510; 521

564 | Name index King, D. A.; 82; 174; 465; 487f; 504; 511; 521 King, K.; 487f King, T.D.; 174 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B.; 198; 203 Kissinger, H.; 284 Kjellberg, P.; 74; 78; 82 Klein, A.; 525; 550 Kline, G.; 554 Knauft, B.; 233; 248 Kniaznine, M.; 25 Knitter, P.; 127; 364; 411; 418 Kniveton, B.F.; 176 Köchler, H.; 1; xiv; 253; 254; 258f; 261; 266; 267; 268; 269; 270f; 273ff; 278; 280f Koefoed, O.; 67 Kompridis, N.; 237; 246; 248 Kontra, M.; 482; 487 Koubi, G.; 482; 486 Kraft, F.; 374; 378 Krause, R.M.; 148; 174 Krauss, M.; 145; 172; 469; 470; 471; 487 Krauss, R.M.; 172 Kreitler, H.; 9; 86; 98-102; 114 Kreitler, S.; 114 Kremenyuk, V.; 172; 173 Krieglar, E.; 521 Kriesberg, L.; 205; 223 Kroeber, K.; 479; 487 Krog, A.; 195; 203 Kroman, J.; 67 Kroon, S.; 485 Krötke, W.; 352; 360; 364 Kruglanski, A. W.; 176 Kuczinsky, J.; 554 Küng, H.; 305; 306; 379 Kunitz, S.; 473; 487 Kupchan, C.; 227; 228; 240; 248 Kuschel, K.-J.; 306 Kyrer, A.; 539; 550 Lackner, M.; 524; 527; 550 Lafitau, J.-F.; 235 Lähnemann, J.; 374; 378 Lai, K.; xiv; 8; 9; 69; 72; 73; 82 Laitin, D. D.; 188; 203 Landsberger, H.A.; 160; 174

Langer, S. K.; 439; 448 Lao Zi; 405; 407; 413f; 416; 418 Lass, R.; 471; 487 Lazear, E. P.; 524; 550 Le Baron, M.; 129; 141 Le Carre, J.; 221; 223 Lee, N.; 75; 83; 114; 207; 233; 248; 481; 487 Lee, P.; 487 Legge, J.; 71; 82 Leibniz, G. W.; 23; 542 Leibowitz. Y.; 396 Leipzig; 378; 495; 504 Leith, D.; 472; 487 Lenay, C.; 112 Lenton, T. M.; 512; 521 Leuven; 497 Levinas; xxiv Levinas, E.; xiii; xxiv; 344; 381; 386-395; 398 LeVine, R. A.; 187; 203; 204 Levinson, S.; 86; 113; 114; 191; 203; 246; 247; 248; 454; 461 Levinson, S.C.; 113; 461 Levy, J.; 152; 174; 207; 223 Levy, J.S.; 174 Lewicki, R.; 147; 174 Lewis, B.; 12; 18; 109; 114; 161; 175; 213; 268; 281; 349; 367 Lewis, D.; 114 Lewis, S.A.; 175 Lie, J.; 514; 521 Lik Kuen Tong; 412; 418 Linenthal, E. T.; 191; 203 Linklater, A.; 231; 248 Lipton, M.; 464; 488 Llácer Llorca, E.; 503 Lloyd, J.; 82; 528; 549 Lo, Yuet-Keung; 82 Locke, J.; 291; 390 Lorenzoni, I.; 79; 82 Lou, J.; 413; 465; 487f Lovelock, J.; 511; 513; 515; 521 Lucy, J. A.; 454; 461 Luhmann, N.; 546; 550 Lyons, T.; 156; 173 Mace, R. J.; 520

Name index | 565 Mackey, W.; 482; 487 MacMurray, J.; 448 MacPherson, C. B.; 537; 546; 550 Mahoney, R.; 174 Makeham, J.; 71; 82 Mall, R. A.; 528; 550 Malone, E. L.; 507; 521; 522 Mandela, N.; 185 Manemann, J.; 352; 364 Mann, H.; 22 Mann, K.; 22; 34; 521 Mann, T.; 22 Maoz, Z.; 143; 166; 170; 172; 174; 176 Marlow, F.; 248 Marshall, M.G.; 67; 174 Martin, J.; xiv; 39; 87; 91; 173; 344; 345; 381; 386; 390; 396; 441; 541 Maulana Abul Kalam Azad; 313 May, S.; xix; 119; 199; 280; 482; 487; 503; 504 McCabe, H.; 421; 448 McCarty, T.; 483; 487 McClelland, C.A.; 174 McConnell-Ginet, S.; 482; 486 McDaniel, J.; 412; 418 McGillicuddy, N.B.; 147; 174 McGrath, J.E.; 160; 175 McIntosh, A.; 517; 521 McKibben, B.; 508; 510; 521 McLean, G.; xxv McWhorter, J.; 469; 487 Mead, G.H.; 31; 371; 378 Meadows, D. H.; 521 Mendes-Flohr, P.; 398 Merritt, R.; 214; 223 Mesopotamia; 283 Meteyard, L.; 114 Meyer, A.; 349; 364; 367; 378; 516; 521; 549 Meyer, T.; 364; 378 Meyer-Faje, A.; 549 Mezö, F.; 278; 281 Miedema, S.; 374; 378 Miller, A.; 67; 265; 482; 486 Miller, K.; 265 Milne, A.; 472; 487 Mintz, A.; 172; 174; 176

Mires, C.; 190; 203 Mirowski, P.; 532; 550 Mises, L. von; 526; 532; 550 Mitchell, B.; xv; 123; 205; 209; 212; 223; 471; 479; 487 Mitchell, C.; 223 Mithun, M.; 465; 476; 487 Mogghadam, F.; 111; 114 Mollâ Sadrâ Shîrâzî (Mulla Sadra); 14; 45; 280 Monk, G.; 143; 176 Monteserin, A.; 503 Mooradian, M.; 153; 156; 175 Morgan, T.C.; 172; 174; 176 Morgenthau, H.; 284 Morley, I.E.; 176 Morris, B.; 104; 114; 247; 487 Morris, P.; 114 Moscow; xi; 24; 25; 26; 318; 480; 554 Moser, S.; 512; 521 Mouffe, C.; 237; 248 Mousavi, M.; 315; 319 Moyn, C.; 396; 398 Mühling, M.; 358; 364 Müller, H.; 82; 349; 364 Munday, J.; 503 Murdock, G.P.; 175 Murphy, R. F.; 227; 230; 248 Nagarjuna; 65 Nagorno Karabakh; 156; 173 Naroll, R.; 157; 175 Nawroth, E. E.; 530; 550 Nedoncelle, M.; 441; 449 Netchayev, B.; 26 Nettle, D.; 465; 466; 471; 474; 487 Neville, R.; 418 Newman, P.; 461; 476; 484; 488 Ngoc, L.B.; 172 Nichols, J.; 469; 488 Nicholson-Cole, S.; 79; 82; 512; 521 Nida, E.; 493; 494; 495; 497; 500; 503 Nisbett, R.; 207; 223 Nishitani, K.; 542f; 549f Nora, P.; 193; 203 Nord, C.; 495; 504 Nowak, A.; 149; 172; 176 Ó Riagáin, P.; 475; 488

566 | Name index O’Donnell, P.; 504 O’Neill, S. J.; 512; 521 Oakes, J.; 464; 488 Oaks, P.; 112; 113; 115; 127; 172; 173 Oberdorfer, B.; 350; 364 Odin, S.; 544; 550 Olson, M.; 304; 306 Osborne, M.J.; 148; 175 Osgood, C.; 223 Ostrom, E.; 548; 550 Ozcelik, S.; 162; 168; 175 Paavola, J.; 520 Pakistan; 12; 459 Palmer, G.; 172; 174; 176; 510; 521 Palmer, J. S.; 521 Panikkar, R.; 57; 67; 108; 114; 558 Parson, E.; 79; 81 Patrick, D.; 482; 488 Patterson-Black, G.; 119; 127 Paulsen, M.; 67 Paz, O.; 16; 18; 33; 34 Pearse, G.; 79; 82 Pecher, D.; 115 Peirce, C. S.; 39 Persia; 326 Pettigrew, T.; 111; 114 Pettit, J.; 516; 522 Pfau, T.; 48; 49; 67 Pfeifer, R.; 114 Phillips, W.; 113; 461 Phillipson, R.; 482; 487; 488 Pillay, V.; 141 Pinker, S.; 227; 248 Piscitelli, M.; 232; 247 Pita, R.; 113; 461 Plato; 12; 105; 330; 388; 394; 423; 426; 554; 557 Plotinus; 47 Port, R.; 96; 115 Posner, D. N.; 188; 203; 467 Prieto, A.; 504 Prinz, J.; 110; 115 Prosalendis, S.; 186; 191; 203 Prucha, F.; 474; 488 Pruitt, D.G.; 147; 161; 174; 175; 210; 223 Pulvermüller, F.; 114 Pushkin, A.; 25

Putnam, R.; 155; 175 Pütz, M.; 486 Pym, A.; 494; 495; 496; 497; 498; 504 Qotbi, R.; 13 Quain, B.; 227; 230; 248 Québec; 180; 488 Quinn, D.; 176 Qutb, S.; 327 Radhakrishnan, S.; 14 Radice, T.; 73; 77; 82 Rafsanjani, A.; 316; 319 Ramo, J. C.; 289; 306 Rampal, A.; 479; 488 Raphals, L.; 74; 82 Rapley, C.; 515; 521 Rassool, C.; 186; 191; 203 Ratliff, M.; 461 Ratzinger, J.; 243; 247; 362; 364 Rauschning, H.; 330; 336 Rawls, J.; 125; 298 Rayner, S.; 507; 522 Raz, J.; 140; 141 Reagan, T.; xv; 454; 463; 467; 488 Reddy, V.; 104; 107; 114 Regan, P.M.; 172 Reicher, S.; 127 Reiger , T.; 113; 461 Reinking, V.; 119; 127 Rescher, N.; 109; 115 Riessman, C.K.; 162; 175 Riker, W.H.; 148; 175 Rittberger, V.; 349; 364 Rivière, P.; 229; 248 Rizzolatti, G.; 100; 115 Robbins, L.; 526; 550 Roberto, A.J.; 173 Roberts, C.W.; 175 Robinson, F.; 471; 479; 487; 530; 532; 545; 549 Robson, C.; 165; 175 Rockström, J.; 518; 522 Rodogno, R.; xv; 90; 110; 120;ff; 129; 136; 141 Rodriguez Cuardrado, S.; 114 Roe, M. D.; 194; 202f Rogers, C.; 87; 112 Romaine, S.; 465; 466; 474; 482; 487f

Name index | 567 Ross, J.; xv; 122; 129; 140; 165; 175; 179188; 193; 195f; 202; 203f; 207; 217; 218; 219-223 Ross, L.; 223 Ross, M. H.; 202ff Roth, H.; 75; 78; 81f Rothchild, D.; 173 Rothman, J.; 165; 175 Rouhana, N.N.; 165; 175 Rowley, G.; 411; 418 Rowling, J.; 472; 488 Rozelle, R.; 174 Rubenstein, R.; 395; 398f Rubin, J.; 145; 152; 175; 212; 223 Ruloff, D.; 154; 174 RVP (Council for Research in Values and Philosophy); xiv; xxv; 458ff; 551f; 553f Sachs, S. M.; 247 Sacks, J.; 349; 364 Said, E.; 255; 266; 271f; 281; 312; 540; 544; 546 Salter, M.; 277; 281 Samson, D.; 103; 115 Sandole, D.; 202; 206; 223 Sarasvati, S.D.; 357; 364 Sasse, H. J.; 468; 475; 488 Sawyer, J.; 146; 175 Scanlon, T.; 131ff; 137; 139; 141 Schilling-Estes, N.; 465; 487f Schleiermacher, F.; 342; 369; 378 Schlenke, D.; xvi; 342; 367; 369; 378 Schmidtke, O.; 140 Schmidt-Leukel, P.; 351; 364 Schmitt, C.; 286; 287; 302; 306 Schmitz, K.; 554 Schmuck P.; 248 Schramm, M.; 537; 550 Schreiner, P.; 374; 378; 379 Schrodt, P.A.; 153; 175 Schultz P. W.; 228; 248 Schwab, R.,; 119; 127; 287 Schwartz, B.; 71; 82; 228; 246; 352; 364 Schwartz, R.; 364 Schweder, R. A.; 187; 204 Schweitzer,F.; 365; 372; 379 Scott, J. C.; 115; 188; 204; 522

Scott, S.; 115 Second World War; 26; 214; 230; 241; 243; 381; 395 Seibt, J.; 2; xvi; xxv; 9f; 85; 108; 454; 461 Sellars, W.; 97; 104; 115 Senehi, J.; 175 Senghaas, D.; 349; 365; 367; 379 Senghor, L.; 30; 439 Service, E. R.; 175; 233; 248; 398 Seuss, Dr.; 472; 488 Shaolin Monastery; 413 Sharî´atî, A.; 264; 332; 333 Sharma, A.; 50; 67 Shayegan; xxiii; xxv Shayegan, D.; xvi; xxv; 4ff; 11; 18f; 29; 32; 35; 90; 254; 255; 257; 264f; 323; 328; 336; 558 Sherif, C.W.; 147; 176 Sherif, M.; 147; 176 Shimomura, T.; 545; 550 Shutte, A.; xvi; 346; 419; 440; 449 Sieg, U.; 378; 379 Siegel, S.; 145; 176 Sikkink, K.; 231; 248 Singh, M.; 517; 522 Skutnabb-Kangas, T.; 473; 482; 483; 487; 488 Slingerland, E.; 78; 82 Smelser, N.; 113 Smith, A.; 112; 193; 204; 257; 266; 398; 410; 418; 467; 471; 488; 489; 529; 533f; 541; 547; 549; 550 Smith, A. D.; 204 Smith, C.; 266 Smith, J.; 488 Smith, N.; 489 Smith, W.; 418 Snell-Hornby, M.; 504 Snider, L.W.; 367; 379 Snow, D. A.; 179; 202 Sohravardi; 11 Soles, D.; 74; 77; 82 Soudien, C.; 191; 204 Souillac, G.; xvii; 124ff; 225; 237f; 241; 244; 248f Soukup, B.; 465; 487f South Ossetia; 155f; 171

568 | Name index Sparks, A.; 185; 204 Spinoza; 34 Spiro, M. E.; 229; 249 Spring, J.; 309; 398; 474; 483; 489; 510; 521 Sprinz, D.F.; 148; 157; 169; 170; 176 St. Petersburg; 24f Stalin, J.; 184; 318; 480 Stanley, J.C.; 169; 172 Staw, B.; 217; 218f; 220f Stedman, S.J.; 159; 173 Stegmaier, W.; 95; 115 Steinacker, P.; 371; 379 Steiner, G; 27; 35; 227 Stenson, S. H.; 539; 550 Stephenson, G.M.; 160; 176 Stern, P.C.; 170; 175ff; 514; 520; 522 Stevenson, C.; 197; 202 Stewart, J.; 112; 516; 522 Stewart, C.; 522 Stillinger, C.; 207; 223 Stoll, R.J.; 167; 172; 174; 176 Stout, C.E.; 246 Strauss, A.; 143; 176 Suagee, D. B.; 226; 249 Suhrawardi; 558 Sun, G.; 402; 408; 411; 413; 418; 528; 543; 546; 548; 550 Sun Tzu; 408; 418; 528; 543; 546; 548; 550 Swain, S.; 469; 485 Swami Dayananda Sarasvati; 356 Swanson, P. L.; 119; 127 Taber, C.; 493; 494; 495; 503 Tajfel, H.; 121; 127 Tambini, D.; 140 Tamil Tigers; 219 Tanabe, H.; 55; 58-62; 67 Tankha G.; 248 Tarrow, S.; 155; 176 Taylor, C.; 31; 35; 137; 141; 390; 399; 428; 434f; 437; 439; 443; 449; 549 Taylor, G.; 141 Taylor, M.; 399 Tchakev, P.; 26 Telhami, S.; 160; 176 Telushkin, J.; 480; 489

Thomas of Erfurt; 39 Thomassen, L.; 236; 249 Thompson, L.; 194; 204; 507; 508; 522 Thompson, M.; 522 Thonhauser, J.; 352; 365 Thornhill, C.; 43; 67 Tibi, B.; 367; 379 Tishkov, V.; 367; 379 Tol, S.; 488 Tollefson, J.; 483; 487; 489 Tolstoy, L.; 21; 25; 35 Tomlin, B.; 152; 172 Toury, G.; 497; 504 Towse, R.; 524; 550 Transdniestria; 155; 171 Trappl, R.; 150; 157; 173; 176 Trautwein, H.-M.; 114 Treblinka; xiv; 396; 398 Troeltsch, E.; 21 Trowbridge, J.; 74; 82 Tsui, A.; 483; 489 Tsunoda, T.; 483; 489 Tuomela R.; 102; 115; 265 Turner, J.; 111; 113; 115; 121; 127; 196 Turner, R.; 111; 113; 115 Turville-Petre, T.; 472; 485 Tutu, D.; 448 Tversky, A.; 207; 223; 524; 550 Tylén, K.; 107; 115 Tymoczko, M.; 502; 504 Ulrich, P.; 549 United Nations; xiii; xiv; xvii; xix; 230; 249; 256; 267; 276ff; 280f; 356; 463; 485; 489 Unno, T.; 549f Vallacher, R.; 149; 172; 176 van den Wildenberg W. P.; 113 van der Merwe, H.; 202 Van Gelder, T. J.; 115 Vansina, J.; 479; 489 Várady, T.; 487 Varela, F.J.; 107; 115 Vega, M. A.; 492; 504 Ver Eecke, W.; 439; 449 Verba, S.; 199; 204 Vidal Claramonte, M. C. A.; 504 Vigliocco, G.; 114

Name index | 569 Voegelin, E.; 449 Volkan, V. D.; 192; 204 Vulliamy, E.; 222f Wackernagel, W.; 45ff; 64; 67 Wade, G.; 147; 172 Walcott, C.; 146; 174 Waldenfels, H.; 372; 378 Waldmann, P.; 350; 364 Wales; xiv; 374 Walker, S.G.; 152; 176 Wall, J.; xvii; 26; 172; 523 Wallace, P.; 208; 228; 231; 235; 240; 242; 244; 249 Wang Yangming; 2; xvii; 81; 345; 401; 402; 413; 414; 418 Watsuji, T.; 541; 550 Watts, A.; 405; 418 Wayne, K.; 464; 485; 489 Wedeen, L.; 187; 204 Weeks, P.; 174 Weingardt, M. A.; 34f; 367; 379 Weingart, M.; 365 Weingast, B. R.; 193; 202 Weiss, J.N.; 156; 176 Weisse, W.; 374; 378 Welton, G.L.; 174 Wendt, A.; 291; 306 Werner, M.; 524; 527; 550 Westbrook, R.; 152; 172 Wetherell, S.; 127 Whaley, L.; 465; 486; 487 White, B. J.; 176; 186; 207; 223; 249; 384; 385; 504 White, R.; 223 Whitehead, A. N.; xvii; 6; 402; 404; 406; 408; 418 Whiting, J. W. M.; 157; 176 Whitman, J.; 482; 486 Whitmarsh L.; 79; 82; 512; 522 Whorf, B. L.; 27 Wieland, W.; 106; 115 Wilbert, J.; 246; 248 Wilders, G.; 274; 281 Wiley, T.; 461; 474; 485; 489 Wilkenfeld, J.; 168; 170; 176 Wilkinson, M.; 165; 174 Willaime, J.; 374; 378

Williams, B.; 136f; 141; 520; 522 Williams, R.; 522 Willnat, L.; 180; 202 Wilss, W.; 495; 504 Winham, G.R.; 176 Winslade, J.; 143; 176 Wolinsky-Nahmias, Y.; 148; 169; 176 Wong, D.; 71; 83; 483; 489 Wong, L.; 489 Wood, J.; 115 Woodbury, A.; 469; 489 Woodward, M.; 174 Wotjak, G.; 495; 504 Wright, A.; 374; 378 Wrogemann, H.; 356; 365 Wu, Kuang-ming; 9; 76f; 82f Xun-tzu; 298 Yagcioglu, D.; 173 Yahya, O.; 17 Ydesen, C.; 67 Yearley, Lee H.; 75; 77; 83; 508; 522 Yearley, S.; 522 Yeliabov; 26 Ying M.; 114; 408 Young, I. M.; 140; 176; 236; 249 Young, K.; 176 Yousefi, H. R.; 528; 550 Zarathustra; 12 Zartman, I.W.; 148f; 152f; 164; 171; 173177 Zechmeister, K.; 161; 177 Zhang, Jiebin; 411; 414; 418 Zhao, T.; xvii; 260ff; 289; 291; 295; 303; 305ff Zhou Dunyi; 418 Zhu Xi; 402 Zhuangzi; 8f; 69; 70-83; 418; 402f; 406f; 411; 418 Ziai, H.; 13 Ziebertz, H.-G.; 376; 378 Zola, E.; 23 Zwaan, R.; 115

Subject index Achaemenid empire; 11 aesthetics; 67; 230; 498 affordance; 95; 96; 101; 103; 104; 105 Africa; xvi; 17; 184ff; 200; 233; 448f; 459; 460; 471; 479; 485-488; 517; 553 Alliance of Civilizations; 259; 276; 277; 278; 281 all-under-heaven (Tian-xia); 290 An-atman; 43 anthropology, anthropological; xii; xvi; xxii; xxiii; 6; 15; 67; 121; 127; 124; 125; 157; 175; 246ff; 325ff; 340; 344; 373; 389; 394; 422; 489; 507 anthropology of peace; xxiii; 124 anxiety; 56; 57; 111; 123; 192; 376 apartheid; 123; 181; 184; 185; 186; 189; 190; 191; 195; 448 Arabia, Arab; 13; 15; 26; 30; 309; 310; 311; 312; 314; 384 Armenia; 156 art; 51; 269; 398; 417; 418; 448 Assyria; 283 atheism; 434; 435; 437 attachment; 90; 110; 120; 122; 133; 134; 135; 136; 137; 138; 139; 140; 150; 340 Austria; xiv; 270; 374 autonomy; 6; 232; 238; 258; 263; 284; 285 avidya; 61 Azerbaijan; 156 Babylon, Babylonean; 11; 39; 283 Basij militia; 318 Being; 45; 52; 53; 57; 66; 67; 83; 113; 385; 398 Belgium; 374; 497 Berlin Wall; 26 Bildung; 22; 37; 44; 45; 46; 48; 49; 50; 51; 52; 55; 56; 57; 61; 63; 64; 65; 66; 67; 378 Bing Sheng (’growing together’); 411 Bodhisattva; 58 Bolshevik; 26; 324 Buber; xxiv

Buddha Amida; 59 Buddhism, Buddhist; 11; 12; 14; 17; 41; 43; 58; 61; 65; 108; 127; 346; 401; 402; 410; 412-416 Mahayana; 58; 65 Shin; 58; 59 Caliphate; 26 Cartesian; 6; 13; 106; 410 Czechoslovakia; 55 China, Chinese; xiii; xiv; xvi; xvii; 8; 11; 12; 14; 15; 16; 34; 39; 50; 69ff; 79; 81f; 90; 114; 127; 254; 260ff; 283; 290f; 300-303; 306; 324; 342; 345; 401418; 422; 459; 518f; 535 history; 14; 413; 416 Chinese philosophy Confucianism; 69; 71; 73; 80; 295; 346; 367; 402f; 410; 414; 415; 416 Daoism; 70; 73 Mohism; 69; 71ff; 80 Zhuangzi; 8; 9; 69; 70-83; 407; 418 Christianity anti-exclusivist, anti-universalist, antifinalist claims; 361f claims of exclusiveness, universality, finality; 352-358 Christianity, Christian; xvi; xvii; 29; 43; 45; 54; 57; 59; 61; 64; 65; 67; 272; 283; 302; 327; 341; 342; 352-358; 361-364; 367; 369; 371; 402; 412; 417f; 423-431; 438; 443; 445; 447 ciphers ontological-grammatical; 7; 38; 42; 43; 44; 51ff; 55; 64f citizenship; xxiii; 125f; 225; 231; 238f; 241; 245 cosmopolitan; xxiii; 260ff; 292 global; 240 civic virtue; 286 civil society; 183; 232; 237; 245; 263; 264; 285; 309f; 312; 314-321

572 | Subject index civilization; ixf; xxiii¸xvf; xix; 3; 5; 11ff; 14f;19-23; 28; 31ff; 200; 234; 245; 253-259; 267-280; 285; 291f;295; 297; 302; 328; 427: 518 global; 19; 20; 32; 272 self-comprehension; 259; 270 United Nations Alliance of Civilizations; 267 versus culture; 3; 22f Western; 15; 16; 22; 25; 262; 270; 277 clash of civilizations; 140; 203; 280; 349; 378 climate change; xiii; xxivf; 79; 81; 82; 290; 293; 456; 505- 520 climate debate; xiii; xxiv; 79; 81; 82; 290; 293; 456; 505-520 apocalyptic narrative; 24; 457; 507; 510518 control narrative; 419; 420; 421; 457; 487; 507; 513- 519 cultural notion of climate; 32; 505; 508; 509; 518 cultural templates of; 456; 457 ethical narrative; 457; 507; 515-519 image of lost Eden; 457; 507- 510; 512; 516; 518 climate justice; 516f four myths; 507; 517f Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; 506 Nature; xiv; 52; 53; 54; 81; 114; 115; 247; 248; 429; 493; 507; 508; 512; 518; 521 politics of climate change; 518 symbolism of global warming; 505; 506; 510; 514; 516 coexistence ontology; 301; 303 co-existence; 259; 260; 261; 262; 275; 277; 279; 346; 397; 407; 411f; 416 cognition; xii; 9; 10; 53; 54; 63; 65f; 78; 85- 114; 120; 122; 134- 138; 187; 193; 238; 243; 245; 344; 368; 369; 374; 375; 381; 384; 385; 387; 389;442; 453; 454; 455; 468; 471; 477; 481 and dialogue; 106 as classification and inference; 107

as learning; 107 cognitive science; 9; 65; 85; 86; 87; 102; 105; 112; 113; 481 cognitive significance; 85; 86 computationalism; 96 embodied cognition; 9; 85f; 96-99; 102; 104; 107; 108; 111 heuristic; 10; 87; 104- 107; 110; 112 heuristic cognition; 107 individual vs. social mode; 103 process account; 96 social; 10; 87; 102; 106-113 theory of cognitive orientation; 9; 86; 96; 98-110 cognitive orientation; 9; 43; 66; 76; 77; 85-110; 225; 229; 232; 302; 375 co (cognitive orientation); 9; 86; 96; 98110 complementarity; 6; 33; 148; 155; 167; 412; 427; 446 concept Begriff; 54; 58; 62 conditions prerequisites versus occasioning conditions; 4 conflict; xii; xv; xvi; xix; xxii; xxiii; xxiv; 8; 10; 89-; 111; 114; 119-123; 125; 127; 129; 130; 132f; 137- 140; 143; 144; 145-246; 253; 257; 260; 273; 283; 286; 294ff; 298; 303; 315; 339-342; 349ff; 353; 359; 362; 367; 377; 383; 384; 386; 388; 390; 401; 403f; 411; 417; 419; 420ff; 435; 444; 448; 507 aggregate case analysis; 159 arbitration; 89; 90; 147 as means versus ends; 222 binary thinking; 345; 401; 403; 404; 411; 417 content analysis; 122; 144; 157, 160-162 continuation; xv; 123; 143; 149; 172; 176; 205; 206-219; 221; 225 mobilization; 196; 197; 200; 209f; 312 cultural; xxiii; 20; 111; 119; 122; 182; 196; 253; 256 cultural contestation; 122; 179; 180; 181; 187; 188; 193; 197 dynamics; 149; 153; 210

Subject index | 573 entrapment; 124; 211-216 ethnic; xvi; 121; 158; 179; 180f; 187; 195; 199; 201 experiment; 146 explanations of religious conflicts: primordialist, instrumentalist, constructivist; 143; 349; 350; 351; 360; 367 group conflict; xii; xv; xvi; xix; xxii; xxiii; xxiv; 8; 10; 89; 90; 110f; 114; 119234; 237; 239; 241; 244ff; 253; 257; 260; 273; 283; 286; 294ff; 298; 303; 315; 339-342; 349ff; 353; 359; 362; 367; 377; 383f; 386; 388; 390; 401; 403f; 411; 417; 419-422; 435; 444; 448; 507 honor and revenge; 31; 124; 221ff; 240f; 396; 416 mediation; 11; 145; 147; 153; 156; 157; 169; 320 multi-method design; 143; 144; 152; 166169 modeling conflict processes; 144; 145; 148; 149; 150; 160; 171 negotiation; xii; 3; 89; 113; 144; 145; 146; 148- 176; 192; 217; 229; 255; 314 peace systems; 124; 125; 225ff; 230f; 233f; 239; 241 psychocultural dramas; 123; 181; 195 religious conflicts; xxiii; 339-346; 350; 368; 376; 401; 417 statistical analysis; 144; 152; 157 Staw-Ross model; 218; 220; 221 transformation by constructive storytelling; 165 transformation: role of intercultural dialogue as scholarly inquiry; 119; 122f turning points; 122; 123; 144; 150; 152; 154; 158; 168; 173; 213 value conflicts; 120; 126; 129; 130; 133; 140; 453 cooperation; xx; xxii; 147; 149; 153; 159; 161; 174; 229; 232f3; 254; 256; 260f; 266; 290ff; 295; 298; 300; 303; 305; 370; 375; 376; 417; 459 compatibility; 300; 303f; 306; 408; 413

coordination problem; xx cosmology; 437 cosmopolitanism; 124; 292; 293 Council of Research in Values and Philosophy; xiv; xxivf; xxiv; 458ff; 551f; 553f creativity Dao; 407 cultural identity; 13; 188; 270; 273 cultural schizophrenia; 5; 13; 32; 254 culture; xii; xiii; xiv; xvi; xvii; xix; xxi; xxii; 3; 5; 6; 10; 15f; 18; 20-33; 37; 40; 44; 67; 82; 112; 114; 119; 122; 124; 140; 141; 144; 155; 157; 180; 181; 183; 187; 188; 192f; 195; 197; 199-204; 219; 221f; 227ff; 236; 239; 246-249; 253; 254f; 258; 262; 265; 267; 269; 270274; 280; 285; 287; 289; 291-296; 302; 305-; 310; 313; 317; 321; 326; 327; 332-; 349; 362; 396; 403; 410; 417; 419-424; 427; 429; 430; 432; 434-438; 443f-; 448; 453f; 459; 464; 476; 479; 483; 493; 495; 497; 503; 506; 507; 509; 518; 521 conflict; 122 cultural contestation; 122; 179; 180; 181; 187; 188; 193; 197 cultural self-realization; 254; 262; 269 cultural subjectivity; 6; 255 diversity; xix; 19; 21; 29; 30; 31; 34; 119; 236; 259ff; 274; 279; 305; 313; 501 frames; 79; 80; 111; 122; 124; 179ff; 184; 187; 188; 189; 191ff; 195; 197; 199ff; 214; 377; 501 framing; 122; 145; 179ff; 186; 189; 199ff; 238; 456; 506f; 511; 516f German; 21ff; 25 Russian; 24 hybrid cultures; 18 identity; 13; 188; 270; 273 international; 291 multiculturalism; 18 psychocultural narrative; 123; 140; 180; 181; 193; 199 relativism; 27 Russian; 25

574 | Subject index self-comprehension; 262; 269 self-realization; 254; 262; 269 self-understanding; 6; 254; 255; 262 symbolic landscape; 123; 179-184; 186191; 201 traditional cultures; 28; 30 Curran; xx Dao as infinite creatity; 407 Daoism; xiii; 9; 75-78; 82; 83; 401f; 412; 414; 415f decision-making consensus; 86; 125; 188; 192; 225; 232; 233-239; 241; 243; 245; 268; 293; 371; 377 decolonisation; 331 democracy; 17; 23; 26; 125; 151; 159; 225; 226; 229; 233f; 236; 237f; 243; 245; 249; 262ff; 271; 286; 309; 310; 312ff; 320; 339 contestation; 237 dialectics; 7; 8; 19; 38; 44; 46; 48; 51- 55; 57; 59f; 63; 66; 73; 125; 247; 254; 256; 259; 261; 269f; 328f; 333; 334; 345; 455; 491; 498 dialogue acknowledgement; 91 and cognition; 106 and conflict transformation; 119; 122 and conflict transformation; 90; 110 and existential encounter; 63; 109; 126; 344 and human thought; 31; 37; 38; 41; 42; 43; 44; 50; 52; 54; 55; 61; 62; 64; 65 and political economy; 66 as datum for a theory of cognition; 85; 93; 94; 103; 104; 106; 111 as strategy concept in international politics; xx; xxi; xxiii; 5; 11; 17; 127; 253; 255; 258; 259; 260; 268; 283; 285; 286; 458 between traditional and modern knowledge; 226 civilizational hermeneutics; 268; 277 civilizational hermeneutics , principles of; 268 conditions of; 4; 6; 7

conditions of, metaphilosophical; 37 definition of; xx; 90; 92; 106 dialogical constitution of religious consciousness; 370 dialogue model; xxiii; 253; 255; 258; 259; 262; 263; 265; 283; 284; 286 dialogue model in global politics; xxiii; 253; 255; 258; 259; 262; 263; 265; 283; 284; 286 dialogue of civilizations; xi; xix; xx; xxi; xxiii; xxiv; 4; 5; 11; 17; 127; 253; 254; 255; 257; 258; 259; 260; 265; 268; 283; 285; 286; 453; 458 dynamics; 10; 40; 42; 49; 52; 62; 63; 88; 92; 97; 98; 99; 100; 101; 102; 103; 104; 105; 106; 107; 108; 109; 110; 122; 123; 149; 153; 155; 160; 164; 179; 180; 206; 207; 209; 210; 214; 318; 345; 455; 457; 460; 492; 494; 498; 501 forms of; xxi from a particular cultural perspective; 31 global; xix; xx; xxi; xxii; xxiv; xxv; 3; 4; 5; 253; 257; 279; 9; 453; 456; 460 global, definition of; xx hypothesis concerning dialogue as scholarly inquiry; xxii intercultural; 1; xix; xx; xxi; xxii; xxiii; xxiv; xxv; 3; 4; 5; 7; 8; 9; 10; 66; 85; 86; 87; 90; 91; 93; 94; 96; 105; 106; 108; 110; 112; 119; 120; 122; 253; 256; 261; 262; 453; 458 intercultural, as policy; xxi; xxii; xxiv intercultural, as praxis; xxi; xxii intercultural, as scholarly inquiry; xxi; xxii; xxiv; 3; 112; 119; 253; 258; 265; 453; 456 intercultural, as strategy; xxi; xxii; xxiv intercultural, definition; xxi intercultural, scholarly inquiry; 3 interfaith; 340; 343; 370; 371 interpersonal; xxii interreligious; xvi; xxiii; xxiv; 67; 342; 344; 367; 370; 371; 374; 377; 453 kenotic understanding and appreciation; 460 levels of; xx

Subject index | 575 paradigm of; 255; 256 phenomenology; 9; 85; 86; 87; 88; 91; 92; 106 philosophy of; 258; 268; 273; 344 political instrumentalization of; 258 politics of; 258; 259; 267; 268; 271; 275; 276; 278 presence; 91 dialogue of civilizations; xxi;xix; xxiii definition of; xx Iranian centre of; 11 disagreement reconciliation; 77 diversity; 371 dream; 37; 45; 48; 49; 50; 52; 54; 55ff; 60 dualism; 404 Eastern; xiii; xvi; 5; 11; 18; 47; 69; 81; 82; 108; 127; 175; 188; 232; 256; 271; 272; 276; 280; 283; 289; 293; 309; 310; 311; 312; 313; 315; 320; 323; 367; 374; 392; 401; 409; 422; 459; 460; 470; 485; 488 economics; xxiv; 19; 28; 66; 189; 238; 272; 273; 339; 432; 456 conceptual foundations; 458 fiction of finiteness; 536 game metaphor; 457 game theory; 457 global; 456 neo-liberalism; 506 Ecuador; 168 education¸148; 181f; 343; 367-389; 456; 463-489; 497; 499; 500; 501; 502 religious; 342; 367-377 interreligious learning; 367; 368; 370; 374; 375 Egypt, Egyptian; 13; 17; 39; 152; 283; 309; 311; 312; 314; 320; 327; 459 emergence; 436 emotions; xv; 24; 99; 110ff; 134ff; 188; 193; 197; 201; 235; 463 empathy; 207 England, English; xi; xvi; xix; 12; 22; 35; 58; 113; 171; 175; 185; 374; 375; 405; 408; 432; 460f; 467; 471; 474f; 478; 484; 485-488; 499; 501; 504; 517 enlightened person; 12; 75; 77f; 371f; 377

enlightenment second enlightenment; 301 Enlightenment (period of Western philosophy); 13; 19; 21; 23; 25; 28; 29; 44; 59; 60; 62; 63; 127; 256; 311; 323; 404; 508; 509 environment; 3; 9; 10; 42; 85; 87; 94ff; 99; 100f; 103; 104; 106; 107; 110; 112; 130f; 137; 138; 139; 159; 164; 167; 207; 382; 384; 421; 468; 479; 516 environmental; xiv; 79; 80; 81; 82; 100; 101; 103; 109; 146; 154; 158; 168; 248; 256; 456; 463; 508; 511-519 epistemology epistemological attitudes; 8; 9; 16; 33; 71; 72; 79; 80; 81; 85; 111; 120; 134; 152; 165; 172; 253; 255; 269; 326; 351; 353; 354; 359; 360; 362; 367; 371; 442 epistemological humility; 9; 69; 70 knowledge system; 456; 492; 501; 502 equality; 44; 119; 125; 159; 184; 226; 229; 230; 233; 234; 259; 269; 278; 283; 305; 385; 392; 412; 446; 463; 516 civilizational; 258 egalitarianism; 229; 232; 234 ethics and the Other; 388 civic virtue; 284; 286 ethical interdependence; 284 global; 259; 262; 283; 284 process ethics; 260 ethnic; xvi; 26; 27; 28; 29; 90; 121; 151; 158; 174; 179ff; 184; 186; 193; 195; 199ff; 274; 276; 284; 310; 349; 354; 467; 475 ethnocentrism; 28 Eurocentrism; 27; 262; 270; 279; 461 Europe, European; xii; xvi; xvii; xix; xxi; 5; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 46; 90; 111; 114; 119; 152; 161; 172; 174; 184; 232; 240; 246; 249; 256; 262; 272; 273; 274; 279; 281; 284; 292; 301; 309; 310; 311; 313; 374; 378; 390; 419; 420; 423; 424; 425; 426; 427; 432; 435; 447; 454; 459; 469; 471; 473; 487; 493; 495; 506; 510

576 | Subject index evolution; 30; 232; 248; 298; 306; 312; 315; 324; 422; 427; 433; 435; 436; 437; 438; 492; 498 exclusivism; xxiii; 37; 184; 265; 341; 343; 344; 346; 352; 354; 355; 357; 370; 401; 417 existence, existential; 29; 30; 41; 43; 47; 51f; 56; 57; 59; 61; 63; 64; 66f; 159; 189; 205; 219; 227; 237; 261; 262; 275; 281; 301; 303; 330; 344; 368; 381ff; 386; 388; 390; 393; 394; 397; 408; 411; 416; 421; 424; 425; 431; 436; 437; 441; 447; 449; 458; 466; 469; 480 existentialism; xxii; 4; 5; 7; 37; 38; 42; 43; 44; 45; 50; 52; 53; 55-58; 59; 60; 62; 64; 65; 66; 105; 119; 126; 189; 241; 244; 260; 274; 344; 347; 363; 367; 385; 388 France, French; 2; xvi; xvii; 11; 12; 17; 19; 21; 23; 24; 25; 34; 41; 123; 161; 179; 180; 181; 182; 183; 184; 191; 193; 194; 195; 197; 198; 200; 202; 203; 284; 323; 324; 329; 335; 398; 467; 485; 492; 499; 501 fraternity; 44; 226 freedom; 44; 51; 65; 119; 219; 226; 232; 243; 263; 284; 285; 309; 315; 320; 339; 343; 346; 360; 371; 376; 387; 407; 409; 421; 424; 428; 429; 431; 433; 434; 435; 436; 437; 438; 441f; 443; 446f; 516 liberty; 22; 26; 234; 257; 305; 309; 334; 429 free-riders; 297; 304 game theory; xii; 166; 260; 295; 296; 304 compatibility; 300; 303f; 306; 408; 413 Confucian Improvement; 304 Geist (Spirit); 44; 65; 378 German Idealism; 44; 330; 332 Germany, German; xi; xvi; 5; 12; 20; 21; 22; 23; 26; 27; 34; 44; 45; 46; 58; 67; 214; 227; 243; 286; 330; 332; 353; 374; 375; 379; 392; 461; 495; 499; 500; 501 global citizenship; 240

government; 260; 283; 284; 285 interdependence; 259; 272; 274; 275; 279; 283; 284; 285; 412; 439 justice; 5; 256; 283; 456; 464; 516 politics; xxiii; xxiv; 124; 253; 259; 262; 265; 283; 453 society; 225; 231; 241; 245 Global Dialogue Conference; xxiv Global Dialogue Prize; 1; xii; xxv; 5; 11; 257; 459; 551 globalization; xiv; xxi; 18; 19; 28; 140; 248; 253; 260; 271; 273; 279; 280; 289; 454; 496; 516 paradox; 106; 249; 272; 289; 296; 297; 423; 438; 441; 454; 456; 479 God; xiv; 25; 29; 43; 45ff; 49; 56; 64; 290; 324; 326; 328; 333; 334; 341; 349; 352-363; 373; 381ff; 386; 395; 398; 405f; 418; 422; 425; 428; 438; 443; 446-449; 508; 514 incommensurability; 425 gods; 352; 414; 416; 422; 423f; 425; 427; 434; 447; 509 grammar linguistic; 40 ‘speculative’; 37; 38; 40ff; 53 Greece, Greek; 11; 39; 46; 113; 162; 278; 294; 301; 327; 362; 405; 423; 424; 427; 461; 466; 469; 486; 510 greed; 229; 296; 298; 300 harmony; 228; 235; 239; 300; 305; 345; 394; 402; 408; 409; 411f; 417 Hawai’ian; 483; 484 headscarf; 123;179; 182f; 195; 197f; 201 Hebrew; 357; 483 Hegel's philosophy; 48; 51ff; 67; 113; 333; 335; 449 Hinduism; 12; 14; 65 history of ideas; 90; 119; 311; 346; 423f; 427; 430 Holocaust; xiv; 190; 203; 243; 395; 398; 399 human rights; 465; 472; 483; 489 right to language; 455 humanism; 22; 429 humanity

Subject index | 577 as combination of self-determination and other-dependence; 434; 438 idea; 51-54; 59f; 82; 398 idealism; 362; 496; 510 identity belonging; 124; 125; 183; 225; 228; 238245; 326; 357; 476; 500 cultural; 13; 188; 270; 273 dialectics of; 60 discourse of; 30 dynamic; 42 exclusive; 30 existential; 42 hybridization of; 32 identification; 44 modern; 29 multiple; 20; 32; 192; 240; 371 personal; 59; 138 social; 225; 240; 371 ideology; 19; 148; 183; 264; 277f; 323; 327f; 329; 330; 331; 333; 384f; 434; 479; 507; 513; 518 as mythical consciousness; 330 I-It relationship; 91; 383ff imagination; 33; 41; 46f; 67; 111; 147; 427; 465; 505; 508 inclusivism; 37; 52; 53; 55; 63; 119; 352; 370 India, Indian; xiii; xvi; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 33; 50; 127; 188; 227; 229; 247; 249; 284; 313; 329; 356; 422; 459; 473; 474; 479; 487; 488; 517; 518; 521 philosophy; 14; 404 individualism; 23; 93; 290; 296f; 300f; 393; 435; 439; 443 Indo-European; 11; 40; 454 integration of opposites; 402 intercultural thought; xiv-xxv; 3ff; 7; 9; 10; 37; 119; 253; 453-458 understanding; xxii; 3f; 6; 9; 86f; 93; 94; 96; 103; 105; 459 intercultural dialogue; xix; xxi; xxiv as strategy; xx; xxi; xxiii; 5; 11; 17; 127; 253; 255; 258; 259; 260; 268; 283; 285; 286; 458

as policy; xxi as scholarly inquiry; xxi international relations; 267-281; 283-287; 289-307 internet; xix; xx interpretation¸7; 8; 37; 42; 44; 47; 50; 52; 58; 64; 75; 77; 78; 105; 169; 188; 207; 243; 256; 298; 304; 324; 326; 327; 339; 342; 354; 358; 359; 373; 375; 376; 411; 456; 497; 500; 509 as deciphering; 6; 7; 33; 37-53; 55; 60-65 interreligious dialogue; xxiii; 349-365; 367-389; intolerance; 70; 71; 80; 184; 327 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); 506; 511; 513; 518; 520; 521 Iran, Iranian; xiii; 4; 11; 13; 14; 15; 17; 21; 25; 30; 254; 255; 257; 264; 309; 311; 312; 314; 315; 316; 317; 318; 319; 320; 323; 326; 328; 330; 331; 332; 459 Green Movement; 315; 316; 320 Islamic Republic; 315; 316; 323; 325; 326 Iranian Centre for the Study of Civilizations; 254 Ireland; 155; 475; 483; 488 Iroquois; 225; 228; 230-235; 239; 241f; 244; 246; 249 Iroquois Confederacy; 225; 228; Islam, Islamic; xii; xvi; xxi; xxiii; 5; 11; 12; 13; 14; 17; 20; 21; 23; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 35; 41; 43; 57; 65; 67; 179; 181f; 184; 191; 197; 202; 262; 263; 264; 265; 267; 268; 274; 277; 280; 309-341; 349-379; 428; 448; 459 anti-exclusivist, anti-universalist, antifinalist claims; 361 claims of exclusiveness, universality, finality; 355; 356; 358 fundamentalism; 327 mysticism; 17; 333 Israel; 155; 182; 188; 199; 219; 293; 354; 357; 386; 395; 419; 422; 423; 483; 497 I-Thou relationship; 91; 92; 344; 382ff

578 | Subject index Japan, Japanese; xii; xiii; xvi; xvii; 12; 13; 15; 17; 34; 39; 58; 200; 214; 268; 292; 459; 542; 544; 545 Jihad (Holy War); 327 Judaism, Jewish; 11; 65; 341; 352; 354; 354;357; 361; 395 anti-exclusivist, anti-universalist, antifinalist claims; 361f claims of exclusiveness, finality; 354 justice ecojustice; 464 global; 5; 256; 283; 456; 464; 516 global distribution of wealth; 464 Kashmir; 182 kenotic; 460 knowledge non-propositional; 94f practical; 9; 86; 94; 297 propositional; 9; 78; 86; 94; 96; 100; 101; 106; 107; 295 language; xiv; xv; xxiii; xxiv; 11; 12; 21; 24; 27; 28; 31; 33; 38; 39; 40; 46; 47; 71f; 86; 91; 92; 104; 106; 113f; 161; 180; 182; 184; 188; 192; 195; 198; 208; 210; 227; 236; 239; 276; 284; 291; 363; 372; 373; 376; 384; 387; 388; 389; 392; 394; 405; 419-515 death; 455; 464; 468; 469; 470f; 488 definition of; 467 diversity; 455; 464; 467; 471; 476; 482 ecology; 463 endangererment; 455; 465-488 global; 453 loss; 455- 481 metaphor; 9; 47; 65; 77; 96; 107; 253; 255; 403; 407; 458; 464-473; 516; 534 revitalization; 483ff; 489 relativity; 40; 85; 113; 454; 461 shift; 474-486; 489 Leninism; 311; 331 linguistics; xv; xxii; 27; 40; 454; 455; 466; 481; 484; 488; 496 sociolinguistics; 483 logos; 39; 56; 287 Malaysia; 246; 247; 268; 459 Maori; 483; 484

Marxism, Marxist; 60; 264; 311; 327; 331; 332; 434 meaning; xxiii; 3; 4; 7; 34; 38f; 43; 48; 64; 65; 87-106; 162; 170; 186ff; 195; 236; 243; 255; 267; 287; 301; 368; 376; 381-394; 396; 408; 426; 466; 480; 484; 493; 496; 500; 510; 516; 518 as dynamic (see also interpretation as deciphering); 91; 92; 94; 100; 101 non-propositional content; 94; 95 process account;91f; 101 sameness; 456 social; 92 media; 1; xiii; xxi; 65; 81; 179-201; 211; 232; 263; 268; 313; 500; 511; 512 megalothymia; 339 memory; 14; 19; 20; 32; 33; 104; 181; 191; 193; 198; 225-228; 241; 242; 326; 473 Mesopotamia; 11 metaphysics; 37-67 Chinese; 345 dualism; 94; 359; 402; 403; 417; 433; 434; 435 Japanese; 545-550 materialism; 386; 433; 434; 435 Middle East; xiii; 18; 175; 188; 271; 276; 280; 289; 310-315; 320 minaret controversy; 272 minorities; 158; 237; 276; 279; 381 modern; xiii; 13; 15; 16; 17; 29; 32; 33; 39; 81; 103; 124; 225-302; 323; 328-345; 383; 403; 417- 444; 470; 472; 514 modernity; xxiii; 6; 13; 16; 19; 20; 27; 28; 29; 125; 237; 238; 260; 289f; 296; 301; 393; 411; 438 and traditional knowlededge; 226 modes of being; 19; 39; 368 modistae; 37; 38; 40 Mozambique; 156; 173 multiculturalism Europe; 273 multiversal; 305 Muslim; xvi; 44; 67; 127; 158; 174; 180; 182; 184; 191; 193; 194; 197; 264; 267; 272; 274; 277; 281; 284; 309; 310-314; 320; 321; 326; 331; 333;

Subject index | 579 349; 355; 356; 364; 371; 412; 427; 445 mysticism; 46; 47; 326 Jewish; 344 narratives as collective memory; 193; 194; 198 nation; xxi; 24; 125; 126; 158; 184; 192; 197; 200; 240-244; 254; 260; 271290; 316; 470; 515; 517 Native American; 474; 483; 485 New Zealand; 455; 483 NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations); 155; 231; 257 non-world; 289 norms; xx; 3f; 24; 78; 81; 86; 101; 104; 120; 129; 130ff; 139; 140; 145; 148; 196; 230-269; 303; 311; 314; 340346; 353; 403; 460; 492; 496ff; 500; 503 religious; 133; 340-343; 349-365 North America; xiii; 16; 19; 173; 180; 202; 215; 227; 240; 249; 273; 313; 439; 464; 473f; 483; 487f Northern Ireland; 155; 173; 180; 188; 189; 194; 197; 199; 202; 206 Norway, Norwegian; 229 Occident, see also Western Thought; 20; 21; 25; 35 ontology, ontological; 16; 18; 34; 37; 38; 40; 41; 42; 43; 45; 50; 51; 52; 53; 54; 63; 64; 97; 98; 108; 120; 261; 262; 272; 290; 301; 303; 386; 388; 389; 390; 394; 439; 458 of co-existence; 261; 262 onto-dialogical perspective; 37; 38; 41; 42; 43; 44; 50; 52; 54; 55; 61; 62; 64; 65 organicism; 48; 345; 381f; 402; 404; 412ff Orientalism; 270; 281 otherness; 7; 13; 37; 38; 45; 49-66; 92; 302; 305; 344; 388; 390; 393; 409 dialogical other; 49; 60; 87-115; 381-399 Pareto-optimality; 304 Parliament of the World’s Religions; 419 particularism; 236 particularity; 26; 58; 92; 357; 361; 362 Palestine; 182; 293; 386

peace; xii; xv; xvii; xxiii; 123; 124; 125; 126; 146; 153-175; 189; 201; 210; 220; 225-247; 256; 265-268; 275306; 339; 340; 350; 359; 383-389; 392-396; 419; 459; 477 Great Peace; 228; 231 Great Tree of Peace; 244 Kantian peace; 291 norms; 242 pacifism; 353; 395; 397 peace systems; 124; 125; 225-241 positive; 125f; 225f; 229-233; 238; 241; 245 and nomadic forager values; 233 world peace; 261; 279; 291; 293; 296; 302; 306 peace ethics; 235; 245 Persia, Persian; xvi; 11f; 15; 30; 284; 310; 324; 326 person; 29; 32; 33; 45; 48; 50; 52-57; 64; 72-78; 80-85; 101f; 120; 132; 133-139; 148; 160; 192; 257; 294; 317; 344; 361; 382; 385; 387; 394; 402ff; 409; 413; 415; 426; 434f; 439; 440ff; 448; 459; 481; 544 personal growth; 347; 440-447 Peru; 168 phenomenology; 6; 9; 41; 42; 85-108; 120; 143; 271; 344; 368; 385; 443 of dialogue; 9; 85-106 philosophy; 1; xi- xxv; 4-9; 13f; 17; 23; 27; 34; 37- 67; 70-115; 124; 127; 140ff; 170; 253-313; 323; 326-329; 330; 335; 340; 344; 368; 374; 388-398; 404; 412; 417-459; 496; 551 philosophy of dialogue; 258; 268; 273; 344 pietism; 21; 22 pluralism, pluralistic; xi; xvii; xxiii; 8; 40; 44; 45; 52; 79; 170; 229; 231; 253; 256; 264; 265; 287; 309-314; 317; 321; 342; 343; 345; 368; 370-374; 401-417 Chinese Religious Pluralism; 401 civic; 311 inclusive; xxiii; 345 politics, political theory

580 | Subject index and radical disagreement; 69 comparative; 262 global; xxiii; xxiv; 124; 253; 259; 262; 265; 283; 453 dialogue model; xxiii; 253; 255; 258; 259; 262; 263; 265; 283; 284; 286 empire model; 12; 70; 283; 284; 285; 486 inter-state rivalry model; 283; 284 of dialogue; 258; 259; 267; 268; 271; 275; 276; 278 political instrumentalization; 91; 264; 267; 268; 271; 276; 330; 332; 349; 350; 367; 371; 457 ’realism’; 284 Westphalian system; 284 world politics; 257; 290; 302 Pratītyasamutpāda; 43 prisoner’s dilemma; 297 process as spirit; 406 Chinese thought; 404; 405 cognition; 87-113 creativity; 406 integration of perspectical truths; 345; 403 meaning as process; 37-67; 85-115 organicism; 48; 345; 381; 382; 402; 404; 412ff process ethics; 260 process metaphysics; xxiii, 405ff process philosophy; xvi; xvii; 406 Protestant Reformation; 429 psychological dynamics attribution theory; 207 prospect theory; 207 reactive devaluation; 207 Qur’an; 43; 311; 323-333; 352-362; 404 ratio, reason; 6; 44; 65; 109; 125; 158; 215; 236; 238; 255; 260ff; 293-299; 300; 301; 303; 304; 414; 426ff; 439 instrumentalization; 59; 325; 330; 335 objective; 330 subjective; 330 rationality; 6; 109; 125; 215; 236; 238; 255; 260ff; 293; 294-304; 414; 426; 427 as transcendence; 426

communicative; 293; 301 modern; 261; 262; 293 rational choice theory; 260; 458 relational; 260; 299; 300; 301; 304 reality transcendent; 423; 427 recognition; 31; 37-67; 72; 91; 96; 123; 126; 189; 200; 226; 230; 239; 241; 257; 258; 267-281; 339; 361-389; 428; 466; 472; 516 Reformation; 13; 16; 23 relationalism; 291; 297; 299; 300; 301; 303; 305; 382 interpersonal causality; 441 I-Thou; 91; 92; 344; 382-385 new golden rule; 305 original encounter; 344; 381-385; 386; 388; 393 ubuntu; 347f; 447ff relativism; 40; 44; 78; 79; 86; 140; 287; 360; 454; 481 religion, religious; xii; xvi; xvii; xxii; xxiii; xxiv; xxv; 17; 20; 22-29; 37-67; 83; 90; 121; 133-136; 140; 160; 182f; 188191; 195; 232; 236; 247; 256; 262265; 277; 279;281; 284; 286; 287; 294; 311; 313; 314f; 319; 321-325; 328-335; 339-473; 507; 518; 519 absolute validity; 341 and human freedom; 447 and human nature; 444 and inhumanity; 445 and self-relativization; 360 authentic; 258; 346; 361; 374; 376; 388; 392; 393; 408; 419; 436; 446; 447; 448 authentic only in a secular society; 419; 427; 436 authentic only in secular society; 443 certainty; 369; 370; 371; 372; 377 Chinese; 342; 408; 410; 413; 416 Christian; xvi; xvii; 29; 44-67; 272; 283; 302; 342; 352-358; 362; 363; 371; 412; 417f; 423-429; 431; 438; 443; 445; 447 claims of exclusive, universal, and final validity; xxiii; 184; 265; 341; 343;

Subject index | 581 344; 346; 352; 354; 355; 357; 359; 362; 370; 401; 417 dialogical self-conception of religion; 347 history; 422f; 427; 430; 445 internal vs. external perspective; 372 interreligious competence; 376 interreligious learning; 367; 368; 370; 374; 375 pluralism; xi; xvii; 265; 287; 370; 401; 413; 415; 417 religious competence; 373-377 religious consciousness; 342; 368; 370377 religious education; 342; 367; 372-377 religious experience; 27; 342-347; 373 revelation; 326; 341; 352-363; 404; 428; 430; 447; 510; 520 Renaissance; 13; 14; 23; 127; 428; 429 revolution Axial; 422-427 French Revolution; 183; 323; 329; 335 Islamic Revolution; 323f nonviolent; 321 rights human; 6; 125; 226; 229; 230; 231; 236; 238; 241; 243; 245; 281; 304; 305; 320; 354; 386; 429; 486; 488 ritual; 180; 181; 187ff; 195; 196; 198; 200f; 225; 229; 239; 242; 372f; 408; 424 Romania; 161; 554 Russia, Russian; xv; 5; 13; 20; 21; 23-27; 34; 64; 151; 324; 459 Salafids; 23; 26 samsara (realm of desires); 58 Sanskrit; 12; 39 satyagraha (’truth-force’); 286 Scotland; 374 Scythes, Scythian; 25 Second World War; 26; 214; 230; 241; 243; 331; 381; 395 security; 5; 28; 154; 158; 161; 174; 185; 205; 215; 228ff; 239; 241; 284; 299f; 316; 318; 434; 447; 470; 507 self; xiv; xvii; xxiii; 6; 7; 8; 20; 22f; 27; 29; 31; 37; 38; 45; 48-60; 66; 80; 82; 88; 90; 92; 93; 97; 106; 110; 114; 121ff; 127; 136; 137; 141; 145; 157; 198;

200; 202-208; 226; 229f; 235; 243; 247; 249; 254; 259-276; 277-301; 306; 309; 313; 319; 327; 339; 343; 344; 346; 350; 357; 360-415; 420; 429; 431-449; 458; 467; 496; 512 self-experience; 339; 369 self-interpretation; 351; 362; 368; 369; 371 self-realization; 7; 56; 60; 262; 267; 269; 273 self-understanding; 51; 56; 90; 110; 229; 350; 357; 360; 369; 371f; 376; 377; 435 self-interest; 62; 200; 260; 296; 299ff; 340; 387; 403; 458 transcendence; 436 semiotics, semiotic; 40; 187; 498 Sharî´a (Islamic jurisprudence); 264; 328; 332-335 Shiism; 264; 323-334 sin; 59; 61; 353; 420; 516 Slavophiles; 21-25 social cognition; 10; 87; 102; 106; 107; 110-113 drama; 196 groups; 1; xx; xxi; 38; 41; 70; 72; 103; 120ff; 127; 140; 144; 145; 150ff; 160; 163; 172; 174; 179; 180-201; 228f; 233f; 257; 261; 281; 317; 329; 339342; 350; 395; 421; 432; 435; 454; 471; 474f 483; 497; 507 hierarchy; 70; 190; 229; 232-234 memory; 194 reality; 16; 123; 187 society global; 225; 231; 241; 245; 290 inclusion and exclusion; 179; 183; 188; 190 Islamic; xxiii; 264; 321 modernization; 5; 312; 313; 314; 513; 519 nomadic; 25; 125; 227; 232; 233; 234; 478 planetary; 241 sacral; 424 sociology; 22; 121; 140; 153; 179; 202; 254; 295; 317; 331; 335; 340; 496; 498

582 | Subject index solidarity; 125f; 197; 206; 232; 236; 238; 239; 242ff; 319; 320; 350; 432; 434 South Africa; xv; xvii; 123; 180ff; 184ff; 189ff; 194f; 197; 200-204; 214; 448 South America; xi; xvi; 16; 33; 229; 233; 246; 248; 318; 459; 471; 473; 486 South Asia; 188 spirit; xiii; 44; 51; 52; 53; 54; 55; 57; 62; 63; 67; 356; 406; 417; 431; 433 absolute spirit; 51ff as process; 406 humanity as spirit; 431 objective spirit; 60 sleeping spirit; 58 subjective spirit; 52 spontaneity; 4; 78; 392 state nation-state; 244; 271-279; 284-289; 290 world state; 260; 283; 285 stereotypes; 206; 207; 208; 313 subject; 7; 16; 30; 50-63; 103; 105; 109; 110; 144; 147; 171; 238; 254; 269; 286; 295; 314; 339; 353; 362; 372; 374; 376; 383; 388f; 392; 411; 424; 429; 430; 433; 445; 473; 499 subjectivity; xxiii; 6; 7; 22; 37; 44; 45; 51; 53; 54; 56- 66; 293; 368; 369; 370377; 453 cultural; 6; 255 Sunnism; 334 sunyata (emptiness); 58 sustainability; 229; 230; 237; 458; 463; 488 Tawhid; 43 Te-shuvah (turning point); 386 theology xi; xvi; xxii; 47; 64; 295; 316; 340; 343; 361; 370; 371; 423; 509 theology of the religions; 343; 370; 371 Theory of cognitive orientation; 86; 99110 thymos; 339 time existential; 56f; 60 tolerance; 12; 28; 151; 184; 229; 249; 256; 267; 275; 279; 292; 310; 320; 321; 327; 359; 376 tragedy of the commons; 297

transcendence; 8; 43; 262; 344; 346; 361; 369; 371; 382; 387; 388; 389; 394; 409; 422f; 425; 427; 434-436; 432446; 453 and self-determination; 436 Axial discovery; 423; 427 transcendental ideas; 43 translation studies, translation; 491-501 directional equivalence; 494; 495 Functionalist School; 495 interlectal; 491; 492 intralingual movement; 456; 491; 492; 499; 500; 501; 502 learning by dialogue; 501; 502 Polysystem theory; 497; 498; 500 Skopos theory; 496 transference; 493; 500; 501; 519 Trinity; 43; 46; 327; 431 truth as correspondence; 72 contextual; 75 discourse theory; 260 perspectival; 74f; 342ff; 369; 371; 403 Truth and Reconciliation Commission; 195; 197; 448 ubuntu (relational conception of humanbeing); 347; 448 UN (United Nations); 161; 162; 257; 259; 265; 266; 276; 277; 278; 516; 517 understanding cross-cultural hermeneutics; 119 intercultural; xxii; 3; 4; 6; 9; 86; 87; 93; 94; 96; 103; 105; 459 United Nations Alliance of Civilizations; 267 United Nations Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations; 256 unity of opposites; 73 universalism; 7; 19; 21; 25; 236; 292f; 362 dialogical; 293 Upper Xingu River basin tribes; 225; 227; 228; 230; 231; 233; 239; 241; 244 value; 1; xiv; xxii-xxv; 4; 5; 8; 10; 19f; 2429; 69; 87; 90; 101f; 109f; 115; 120141; 145; 148-153; 188; 196; 215; 216; 219-332; 350f; 378; 396; 398; 402;

Subject index | 583 409; 414; 428ff; 440; 444; 447; 457ff; 476ff; 495; 517; 518; 520; 551 and conflict; 120; 126; 129; 133; 140; 453 attachements; 138 moral; 110; 120; 126; 132; 396 ontological accounts of; 109 positive peace value constellation; 125f; 232 psychological realization of; 120; 133; 139f universal; 23; 26; 29; 256; 305; 320 virtualization; 19; 34 volitions; 100; 120; 134; 135; 136 Western; xvi; xvii; xxi; xxiii; 3; 5; 7; 11f; 15f; 21-29; 35; 45ff; 57; 69; 77; 81f; 90; 95; 102; 108; 127; 139; 238; 254; 256; 260; 262; 268; 270f; 274; 277; 283; 284; 293; 310-313; 323f; 331ff; 344ff; 349; 367f; 386; 390; 401; 403406; 409f; 417; 423; 456; 471; 473; 478f; 492f; 495; 506; 508-511; 517; 535 Western Thought; 12; 127; 404; 423 analysis of; 20; 29

 

will; 53; 56; 61f; 159; 277; 292; 306; 318; 326; 353; 359 world; 11; 13; 15; 30; 33; 41f; 57; 189; 201; 271;-275; 333; 505; 508; 512 all-under-heaven (Tianxia); 261; 290f; 2 301-305 creationological problem of the humanized world; 295; 303 incompatible; 293 non-world; 289 world citizenship; xxiii; 124; 126; 245-279; 292; 295-307 worldness; 290 worlds; world of all peoples; 292 worldview; 7; 8; 16; 32-49; 123; 184; 187; 192; 200; 225f; 267; 269; 270; 279; 332; 350; 353; 408; 427; 429; 432f; 447 ethnocentric; 354 sacral; 424; 427; 429; 431ff; 436; 438 Yahweh; 420; 423 Yihud (unity); 385 yin and yang; 410; 411; 412