The Many Faces of Relativism

Maria Baghramian, Maria Baghramian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317701644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

This book is a study of relativism as a dominant intellectual preoccupation of our time. Relativism asks how we are to find a way out of intractable differences of perspectives and disagreements in various domains. Standards of truth, rationality, and ethical right and wrong vary greatly and there are no universal criteria for adjudicating between them. In considering this problem, relativism suggests that what is true or right can only be determined within variable contexts of assessment.

This book brings together articles published in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies over a period of 17 years, as well as in a Special Issue of the journal published in 2004. The chapters in Section I discuss some of the main forms of relativism. Section II sheds light on the different motivations for relativism, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Section III provides a detailed examination of the vexed question of whether Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his later work, supported relativism. The varied responses to this important question shed light on the issues discussed in Sections I and II. This collection is a lively and engaging resource for scholars interested in the crucial impact relativism has had on the way we think about the meaning of truth, and what is right and wrong.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Cross-cultural Understanding: its Philosophical and Anthropological Problems

Christoph Jamme

Abstract

I wish to discuss the constitutive conditions - and aporias - of the representations of the other in philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. In so doing, I show that crucial to the problem of ‘tolerance’ is the answer to such questions as: How do we represent the stranger and the other? How does this representation come into being? How can it - in given instances - be changed? I shall suggest that the arts may play a decisive role in this process.

In this paper I shall attempt to outline a double thesis: (a) the philosophical theory of the experience of something other requires the challenge of ethnology as the science of the stranger; and (b) conversely, however, ethnology itself requires a theory of cultural strangeness, which although always presupposed is never developed. I shall pursue this thesis in three stages. In the first section, I shall say something about the philosophical study of the other and its latent affinity with ethnology. In the second section, I shall take some key terms from the current dispute within ethnology over methodology, and attempt to show that the experience of something other (alien) requires a medium to express, or rather to describe, this experience. This problem of ethnographic depiction and description, lying between science and art; and the suggested solutions to this problem, developed particularly by postmodern American cultural-anthropology, namely an aesthetisization without art, leads to the third section of this paper. This provokes the following question: what does art - that moment which remains hidden within the contemporary ethnological discussion - have to offer to our understanding of the (cultural) other? Further, we may ask, as paradoxical as it may at first sound, whether it is precisely from art, perhaps indeed only from art, that the way is to be found leading towards that which hasn’t yet been problematized in all these contemporary intercultural debates: an ethic of intercultural understanding as the most important precondition for intercultural tolerance or toleration.

Cultural integration is a fundamental problem of our times, as the pressures of migration increase worldwide and the problems of under-developed countries are beginning to transform our lifeworld. Against this background, the problem of European integration becomes almost marginal. Furthermore, the world is rapidly contracting through communication and technology, a process which is not as one-sided as it might first appear. The ethnologist and literary theorist, James Clifford, has advanced the thought-provoking thesis (Clifford, 1988) that, since the 1920s, world culture has been characterized not only by a movement of homogenization- a tendency to conform with the model of Western culture - but also by a tendency towards pluralization. According to this thesis, the cultures of the Third World were forced to ‘invent’ their own identities only following the confrontation with the hegemonic violence of Western culture. Conversely, Clifford states, the resistance of other cultures to this hegemony forced Western culture to revise its own claim to universality. Even though there is a clear and unavoidable imperative to work out a position or attitude - frequently described today as ‘intercultural competence’ - the effective debate concerning interculturality does not inspire confidence that it has the wherewithal to contribute to this position. At the root of the contemporary discussion of alterity is a ‘specifically aesthetic concept of the other’ (Koch, 1992, p. 24). This aesthetic fascination stands in a rather grotesque relation to the social problem of inflamed hatred for foreigners which has broken out all over Europe.

What remains mostly hidden in the discussion concerning interculturality - a discussion which is fast descending into mere fashion - is the problematic nature of the categories of ‘ownness’ and ‘otherness’. The ‘other’ in our own culture, encountered in the ‘stranger’, poses us a challenge which transcends the horizon of our own way of life and opens up other possibilities of existence - possibilities which, in turn, call our own way of life into question. While the self defines itself in relation to the other, at the same time it keeps the other at a distance, warding it off. The colonial and post-colonial constellation gives this relationship a particularly controversial hue. In this context, the confrontation of language games and lifeworlds alien to one another, is covered up by the opposition between tradition and modernity. Modernity makes use of other lifeforms as mirrors and opponents in order to examine itself globally from different perspectives. These others serve as the background against which modernity stands out, and are at once both the objects and the victims of modernity’s pretension to subsumption and appropriation.

In ethnology, the modern discourse concerning the other (the strange) has been differentiated into a science. The paradox of a science of the other is, however, only now being the matized to its fullest extent. The precarious status of the thematic field of ethnology, as witnessed by its history, is a manifestation of the fact that ethnology acts as trustee precisely for that from which modernity marks itself off, and which receives its definition through this separation. Ethnology is the attempt to make articulate the discourse of the other in one’s own discourse - an attempt to capture difference in the language of identity - a language which arises from the claim to universal validity. Positive knowledge is supposed to proceed from an act of negation. Ethnology speaks about and for the other, with whom, however, in order to do so, it must first have engaged in a dialogue (Berg and Fuchs, 1993, p. 7).

Within the circle of ethnology and cultural anthropology in the 1980s, the debate, which dealt fundamentally with the question of representation, with the - textual - objectification of the other, has been characterized by this inner tension of distance-dialogue. With ethnography, the depiction of the other - a long-neglected and underestimated aspect of the cognitive appropriation of ‘non-Western’ societies - forces itself on our attention. Discussion regarding this question of representation has been concentrated in the English-speaking countries, particularly the United States. Until now there have been very few contributions to this debate from the German-speaking world. I would like, then, in this contribution, to introduce the discussion of the constitutive conditions - and aporias - of the representations of the other in philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. In so doing, I wish to show that crucial to the problem of ‘tolerance’ is the answer to such questions as: How do we represent the stranger and the other? How does this representation come into being? How can it - in given instances - be changed? In what follows, I shall suggest that the arts may play a decisive role in this process.

I

According to Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘every order allows an excess of otherness to arise within its inescapable restrictiveness, which otherness, while finding no place in the respective order, at the same time obstructs this order from achieving stability’ (Waldenfels, 1991, p. 95). Every encounter with otherness arising in this way, whether it is inner or outer otherness, poses risks: we shield ourselves from the other (through weapons, ideologies, defence complexes). Different forms of otherness must, however, be distinguished. Besides historical-temporal, geographical, physical, social and ethnic cultural otherness, there is also the otherness between the sexes and, finally, intra- and inter-subjective otherness within language and feeling. In any case, the other is more than the unknown, more also than the mere other. The other is that which, with regard to one’s own, is inaccessible and does not belong. Thus an other arises, who cannot be integrated into my horizon of possibilities. We are concerned here exclusively with cultural or ethnic otherness (strangeness), the overcoming of which has formed part of European culture since antiquity.

The encounter with the lifeworlds of alien cultures became, with varying intensity, part of the everyday life of the inhabitants of Western Europe around 1900, in the wake of the flowering of European colonization. At that time there came into being not only ethnology, which with its evolutionism, founded by Frazer, was created to justify colonialism, but also, soon after, as a contrasting phenomenon, a seeking out on the part of philosophy, of cultural otherness - and hence the transcending of European experience. Efforts to develop a theory of the experience of something other formed a central issue in early hermeneutics and phenomenology. On the one hand, Dilthey’s hermeneutics of understanding and Lipp’s theory of empathy both inquire into how it is possible for me to know the other (this comes under the problem of the horizon). Husserl, on the other hand, asked more radically: what is the other as other?; how is the other? His transcendental theory was directed less towards understanding than towards the constitution of the other. Husserl’s question was: how is the act of experiencing the other constituted? In this way, he gave the question of the other an unusual radicality. But to the extent to which Husserl used as his model for interculturality the conception of intersubjective experience, he was unable to escape, given that starting point, the transcendental ego. His theory of the experience of something other remains an egology. It is impossible to ‘construct the other with the means of the own’, as Husserl wished to. The other remains for him only a relative moment within a general logos. Dilthey argues in a similar manner to Husserl: one leads the other back to that which is familiar to one. When today Gadamer speaks of an overcoming of otherness through understanding, it must be asked whether this does not amount to a form of appropriation of the other which deprives the other of his or her rights. If there is a universal logos - as there is for the Hegelian Gadamer - there can be no radical otherness. How, though, are we to conceive of gaining an access to the other who remains inaccessible? (In the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations Husserl terms the way of access to the other a ‘bewährbare Zugänglichkeit des original Unzugänglichen’.) It is now quite clear that the hermeneutical theory of understanding, which made paradigmatic that move of adjusting and leading the alien back to that which is already familiar (a move which happens quite easily when one is exposed to something other), is not the only way of dealing with other - alien - people (Holenstein, 1985; Waldenfels, 1993).

II

In this search for a xenology - a ‘science of the other’ - philosophy today looks increasingly towards ethnology - the science of the other par excellence (Därmann, 1996). However philosophy’s inquiry - as will become clear in this second section - encounters ethnology in a state of deep methodological crisis. Indeed, ethnology itself looks to philosophy to cover its own theoretical deficit. What is the basis of philosophy’s fascination for ethnology as the theory of the experience of the something other? A further question might be: has ethnology anything to offer to the debate philosophers initiated concerning the experience of something other?

The dialogue between philosophy and ethnology has (at least in Germany) only just begun. (In France the debate began around 1960, and in England and the USA there have always been, and still are, numerous connections between the two disciplines.) So far it has mainly been concerned with the special role of ethnology among the empirical sciences, due to it having to overcome experiences of otherness. The task of ethnology is to understand the reality of alien lifeworlds. As Schmied- Kowarzik puts it: ‘“Understanding” means in this case the seizing of the alien culture out of its own life-context’ (in Schmied-Kowarzik and Stagl, 1981, p. 366) and interpreting that culture from a scientific standpoint. Both of these steps - the move into the foreign reality, and the return to the familiar - pose particular epistemological problems for ethnology. Marc Aug6 (1989) suggests that one shouldn’t speak of ethnology in the singular, but rather of a plurality of ethnologies. Ethnology can be divided into auto-ethnology - which investigates the other amongst us - and allo- ethnology - which investigates the other amongst the others. Along with the ethnology which we (Europeans) carry out on ourselves and on others, there is also the ethnology of the other on the other, and finally ethnology of ourselves by the other - specifically, the ethnology of Europe by non- Europeans. In this way interculturality loses its characteristic of being a one-way street.

Within allo-ethnology, ethnology is concerned with otherness, and in turn appears itself as other. In any case ethnology is here ‘interpretation not so much within the context of a tradition, but rather between traditions, thus an intercultural hermeneutics’ (Stagl, in Schmied-Kowarzik and Stagl, 1981, p. 22). Phenomenological and hermeneutical procedures were developed in ethnological and intercultural interpretation and were made useful for the study of archaic cultures (cf. Masson, 1993, pp. 125ff.). Ethnological experience appears, then, to be a specific form of phenomenological or hermeneutical experience. But it is precisely for this reason that it can be especially challenging for every hermeneutically orientated theory of understanding, due to the fact that the process of reciprocal understanding between human beings from different lifeworlds is so fundamentally problematic. Thus arises the paradox that although ethnology understands itself (referring here to Rousseau) as the ‘communicative science of cultural otherness’ (Bargatzky, in Sundermeier, 1992, pp. 13-29), it lacks a precise concept of (cultural) otherness. This paradox has sources which affect the very status of ethnology as a science. The more successful the science of the other becomes, the more it dissolves itself: but if it were to have no success, then it would be obliged to give up at the very least its claims to be a science.

Ethnology stands in an uneasy relationship with our nomological sciences, which only occasionally need to concern themselves w...