Pergamon History of European Ideas, Vol. 18, No. I, pp. 1-9, 1994

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THE DIALOGUE OF CULTURES AND LIVING IN TRUTH*

ROYDEN Hum-f

INTRODUCTION

At the ‘end of philosophy’ all philosophies have taken the ‘linguistic turn’ and none escapes the problematic nature of language. Equally, persons are ‘decentred’ or are ‘socially constructed’.’ What sense then remains of dialogue? Since ‘truth’ too seems a casualty of the demise of wisdom, what is the truth about dialogue? Against this background the nature of culture and of the current demanding, pressing relationships between cultures (such as Czech and Slovak, Republican and Unionist or even highbrow and lowbrow, male and female) sets up the urgent question-who or what dialogues and what is taking place? The answer to the question involves facing the dilemma of the relationship between individual and society because the traits or characteristics known as ‘cultural define societies and their meaning.2

In this paper I want firstly to look at some critical aspects of the relation between our understanding of culture(s) and the histories of philosophy and sociology: this will further define the problem of dialogue between cultures since it emphasises the tension, in our post-modern period, between contrary beliefs in cultural hegemony on the one hand, and freedom from ideologies, structures and discourses on the other. Secondly, I want to consider some aspects of post- Enlightenment philosophies of truth, particularly existentialist and hermeneutic ideas from Kierkegaard to Gadamer, since here I can find an escape from the post-modern dilemma and give a meaning to the dialogue of cultures.

SOCIOLOGIES OF CULTURE

In a recent collection of papers on ‘Global Culture’ Immanuel Wallerstein distinguishes two senses in which ‘culture’ is used:3 ‘Culture I’, in which characteristics within given societies are used to identify and distinguish them (examples of these differences would obviously be language, dialect, political system, dress, diet, etc.); ‘Culture II’, in which characteristics are recognised which span all societies required to interpret them, such as a system of law, custom, education, use of the arts, etc. Wallerstein points out that neither usage is consistent or unsatisfactory. For either model the role of the individual will

*A shorter version of this paper was given at the workshop ‘The End of Philosophy and the Dialogue of Cultures’ (Chair, Professor J.R. Watson), at the ISSEI Conference ‘European Integration and the European Mind’, Aalborg, Denmark, 24-29 August, 1992.

TDepartment of Continuing Education, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, Cardiff CFI 3BB, U.K.

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always frustrate the generalisations of theory (e.g. what cultural trait is common to all?). Equally, the challenge for global cultural theories is that the particular expertise required of the modern academic proves inadequate to span the variables involved.

With this reservation in mind one can see that the idea of societies must involve a collection of individuals who interact and relate to form some distinguishing whole. Culture(s) are then aspects of particular societies, or sometimes all societies, which characterise them, identifying their holistic nature. Within the various trends in sociology, in that which can best be understood as ‘social science’, containing the influence ofcomte, Durkheim and Parsons for example, culture is seen as functionally necessary for the integration and continuance of societies. For Talcott Parsons social integration is achieved by the cultural system in supplying the norms and values accepted by individuaIs, so producing a consensus. Further stratification (i.e. recognisable structure) within society is produced by the power of reward and supply of facilities and commodities to those who merit them by performance within the cultural norms. The obvious advantage of such a ‘scientific’ model is that it allows understanding and predictability of the effects of change within a stable but dynamic system.

In contrast to Durkheim, Max Weber saw sociology as a ‘cultural science’ concerned with the values and meanings, concepts and interpretations of the individuals within the society they formed. Hence the link between culture and sociology was much stronger, coming from a nineteenth-century tradition in which culture and society could be used almost synonymously as in Taylor’s definition of culture-‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’.4 Not surprisingly, since this tradition drew from writing on all these subjects, the question of language and Ferdinand Saussure’s account of language in particular, became more influential.s Since for Saussure language was semiotic, i.e. a system of word-signifiers or signs, the nature of which set up the meanings (the signified) available to society as the differences between the signs, then escape outside the system to any global or holistic sense of meaning was impossible. Perhaps Clifford Geertz in his Interpretation of Cultures of 1973 summarises well this tradition in sociology: ‘the concept of culture. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of signi~~ance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those

webs. . .‘.6 For Geertz, understanding culture could never be in terms of a social science with its generalised laws, but only a search for meaning, interpreting the pattern of the web. Here the reff exive problem for sociologies of culture returns: any theory of culture cannot but step outside the ‘webs of significance’ in order to express the theory as meaningful. In the conclusion to their well-known text book, Cashmore and Mullen put it thus: ‘The question the whole (subject) begs is: is there any kind of knowledge that is either true or false, or are all kinds of knowledge derived from a particular way of looking at the world?7

PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE

It would seem then that the realms of knowledge and understanding cannot be

excluded from considerations of culture, and these are the province of philosophy. Though the characteristics of the ‘end of philosophy’ would seem to leave us equally empty-handed before the problem of the dialogue of cultures, it is worthwhile examining how philosophy reaches this position. Habermas correctly identifies the chief philosophical players in the Continental scene,* but for aN modern Western societies (typically the Nation States) emerging or developing after the French Revolution, the dominating web has been the belief in ‘Progress’. This is common to the scientific, technological, industrial and economic aspects of these societies, as well as the reaction of the varieties of Romanticism in the nineteenth century and the global environmental and ecological concerns of the twentieth.

Hegel’s idealism was a vision in which all individuals and societies were caught up in the power of the movement to the reality of absolute mind. Here was an embracing plan of Progress for all cultures. It held out the prospect of bridging the gap between Kant’s denial of the possibility of knowledge of our real selves and the historical realities of social change, even in the upheavals of revolutions and war. Hegel forms the background for the increasing suspicions and challenges of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud which have dominated our century. Marx’s social determination of consciousness led to the ideology of the totalitarian societies of Eastern Europe. Nietzsche’s individualism, on the other hand led to the destruction of everything social or historical and the suspicion of finding repression in every authority of tradition or reason. When Freud placed the controlling human drives deep in the unconscious nature of the id, the progress of cultures seemed fatally undermined.

Marx, Nietzsche and Freud however stand behind the developments in French philosophy from the 1960s onwards, i.e. the structuralism and post- structuralism which have particular relevance to the dialogue of cultures. Others have dealt thoroughly with the history and controversies of these philosophical and literary movements, and their relationship with modernism and post- modernism.9 Here I want to emphasise some critical aspects of these for this paper.

Structuralism, as Piaget showed’* is a way to understand many aspects of natural collections and assemblies, from molecular structures to societies, in which the reZa?jo~s bef~ee~ the units is seen to be the crucial factor rather than the units themselves. It then forms part of the natural process of generalisation, unification and simplification which the mind’s analysis of reality performs. Thus Marx’s analysis of society was framed in terms of a superstructure of law, institutions, literature, ideas and morality-all determined by an infrastructure of the economic means of production. For Freud, human conscious behaviour is explicable in terms of a psychic structure in the unconscious. In Paris the most seminal structuralist was Claud Levi-Strauss whose cultural anthropology analysed custom, art, kinship and myth to show ‘progress’ to be the illusion of rationalists and instead that the human mind, however ‘primitive’, had always been structured and systematised in semiotic fashion. For the younger structuralist Roland Barthes all cultural ‘indicators’ as he called them, i.e. clothes, diet, habitation, are means of ~ommuni~tion but ‘they are signitiers only in the measure in which they are bound into an ensemble of collective

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nom&. This semiotic stance is relaxed in his view of literature and a post- structuralist separation of signifier from the signified becomes apparent: literary works become objects created from signs (words) alone-the message is only in the medium, so that realism or mimesis, the significance of the life and times of the author, all historical reference, fades from view. Literature therefore is no longer concerned with the signified, i.e. with cultural communication. The reader alone can make play with the words, freed from any restriction of context, since Barthes can assert that ‘discourse’, i.e. communication, ‘has no responsibility towards the real’. Here the paradox, which will haunt all post-structuralism, becomes visible. Barthes claims that society can only be transformed, i.e. the structures and restrictions of cultural difference removed, if language as communication is radically destroyed! Dialogue between cultures? What can it then mean?

In perhaps the two most influential figures of post-structuralism, Derrida and Foucault, the reflexive paradox becomes clearer. How to change a system that one is inextricably caught up in? As Bannet makes abundantly clear, the chief source of their protest was the restrictive and autocratic academic atmosphere in the institutes of higher education in which they found themselves.” Beyond this existential situation lay the tradition nowhere more entrenched than in France, of the Cartesian model of consciousness and reason, behind which in turn was the Western Platonic ‘logocentrism’ of a system of ideas (the signifieds) which was structurally determining for all human minds. Where was the escape to freedom? In search for escape from logocentrism, elements of Nietzsche’s Dionysian freedom and Sartre’s absolute self-created freedom were invoked. But Nietzsche’s suspicion of the tyranny of prejudiced authority and Sartre’s rejection of the objectifying ‘gaze of the other’ made impossible a social context for this escape. Derrida’s reference to the uporias (no exits) of the human situation is not surprising. Effective dialogue with a culture one wishes to change has endlessly to be deferred. Recognition of only differences between signifiers not signifieds leads only to deference of real engagement and dialogue.

With Foucault, as is well known, the influence of Nietzsche was even stronger and human communication became a ‘discourse’ in which all knowledge and understanding was linked to power. In the earlier Foucault the existence of the autonomous subject and of the truth are put in question, as power structures are seen to take over both. Foucault’s histories are genealogies and fictions, delineating and illustrating the subtleties of power/knowledge, in which those societies and regimes are most successful when the effects of power are taken as ‘natural’ or hidden behind facades of propaganda and so unquestioned. But for a philosophy such as Nietzsche’s, the power of the individual cannot be far away. So at the end, Foucault returns to the question of the human subject and its ability to escape the power of the system:

Thought.. . is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions and its goals. Thought is freedom.. .I*

In seeing that what is signified, i.e. what is thought, is also a questioning, Foucault also has to restore the truth as an answering to this question: ‘The task

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of telling the truth is an endless labour: to represent it . . . is an obligation which no power can do without.‘13 In returning the human subject and its truth to the context of discourse, Foucault frees the dialogue of cultures from the threat of power and thus restores the essential element of trust, without which no meaningful dialogue can take place.

TRUTH AND THE DIALOGUE OF CULTURES

In the history of ideas, Truth has been variously considered as correspondence, coherence or disclosure.” For the scholastics and rationalists, truth was the correspondence between ideas (or language) and reality. The limitations of such an approach is seen in Descartes’ criterion of clarity of ideas to overcome doubt about the truth-this is a quest for conscious certainty, revealed by the ideas or language, for example of mathematical equations themselves. This fatally leads to an identification of the model of reality obtained in the ideas with reality itself. Typically in modern Western societies the only truth accepted is that supposedly revealed by science. The specialisations and techniques required to clarify models in the particular sciences led to an alienation between experts and the general public and in particular between the cultural background of scientific ‘progress’ and that forming a wider understanding of human capacities and occupations in the arts, humanities, law and politics. A correspondence theory of truth has led to a breakdown in this dialogue of cultures.

The fragmentation and scepticism produced by rationalism and empiricism fed to Hegel’s requirement for coherence in any account of Truth. The tendency for coherence to lead to ideologies and fundamentalisms, of which communism, capitalism and scientism are examples, led to reactions such as Habermas.15 In his ‘communicative action’, Habermas sees the coherence of agreement in cultures as a guarantee of reason’s arrival at the truth and with it freedom from ideological hegemony. This clearly is not the case, since consensus in itselfdoes not guarantee truth or freedom. Neither, conversely, does an incoherence of deferral ever do so. As Edward Said has pointed out,16 Derrida’s critique of deconstrnction turns out to be ‘just as insistent, as monotonous and as inadvertently systematising as logocentrism itself. So caught between the prospect of the Iogocentrism of correspondence and the systematisation of coherence, Derrida is forced to avoid assertions about the nature of truth-to do so would be to become caught in the reflexive paradox of saying‘there is no such thing as truth’.

Heidegger’s human being ‘Dasein’ escapes the above aporia by having two sources of objectivity-an intuition of Being and a thrownness into the world. Together these constitute a vital additional aspect to truth, that of dis-closure. Here the English word exactly indicates the sense of ‘breaking out’ of logocentrism and of system in the disclosure of reality (existence) which is Dasein’s access to the truth. Heidegger sees in Dasein’s intuition of Being the context of thought which enables the human being to ‘stand back’ as Foucault indicated, to transcend the systemisation of any cultural environment and to be reflectively both critical and appreciative. Perhaps the most dramatic witnesses to this disclosive nature of truth have been Vaclav Have1 and Alexander

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Solzhenitsyn. Havel’s commentaries on the human ability to overcome the totalitarian system are summed up in ‘Living in Truth’.” He remarks:

Under the orderly surface of the totalitarian life of lies, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in.. . its hidden openness to the truth.

The.. . incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in this hidden sphere.

In similar vein, Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize speech was entitled ‘One Word of

Truth.. .‘, where he explains that the most popular Russian proverbs are about truth and he has chosen in his title the one which says: ‘One word of truth outweighs the whole world’.

Behind Havel’s words and heroic stance lies the philosophy of his compatriot and martyr Jan PatoEka and beyond him the influence of the philosophy of Heidegger and truth as disclosure. For Patocka, that which forms our European Mind is an awareness of our openness to the transcendent (yet imminent and therefore ethically authoritative) presence of the truth.

For the European Russians like Solzhenitsyn and Ratushinskaya, freedom and truth are ineradicably linked to art, literature and especially poetry. But for Beauty to save the world it must be seen as linked with its transcendental fellows, Good and Truth, and it is still the problematic nature of this transcendental ability of humans that troubles us. The well-known debates between Derrida and Gadamer in Europe’* and between Richard Rorty and Thomas McCarthy in the IJ.S.A.19 both revolve around truth, the objectivity ofthought and the possibility of a critical freedom. The post-structuralist forms of escape from absolutes and systems all lead back, via Heidegger’s attempt to solve the problem of truth, to Husserl, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It was from Husserl that Heidegger drew the connection between all thought and the character of possibility-that ideas always contain the element of what is possible, what can be.20 So, for Heidegger, that which ‘informs’ the human mind, the intuition of Being, has a characteristic of possibility such that on the plane of human understanding all the possibilities of existence are implicitly accessible. Any attempt at thought has unconsciously to return to this reference plane to produce, as a consequence of real experience, any idea. This is Havel’s inner sphere of openness to the truth. And so as language and experience of our cultural and historical experience shape our dialogue we always return necessarily to the plane of Being which gives an opportunity for other possible interpretations of our experience and we can struggle with language to express a truly creative awareness.

Ratushinskaya can say that ‘poetry is the greatest and highest expression of freedom’ only because poetry is the greatest and highest expression of the transcending truth of human experience. Of course, the lie, the denial ofthis truth of experience is also possible and real. But it is the lie which serves repressive power structures, not the truth. Truth is always liberating and part of what Heidegger’s disciple, Gadamer, has recalled under the name ‘bildung’.

It is Gadamer who has insisted on the role of dialogue as a basis for this ‘bildung’. Reaching back to Kierkegaard’s ‘truth’ as a search to be truthful, requiring the commitment of goodwill, Godamer has shown how different ‘horizons of experience’, i.e. cultures, can be bridged and expanded. The

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challenge of the ‘other culture’ both reveals and expands our own. We only see the limitations of our own horizons when confronted by other possibilities-but this process is possible only because that context of truth (Heidegger’s intuition of Being) informs us all as thinking human beings.

In this same exchange of ideas whether by the dialogue of speech or the reading of texts, Gadamer emphasises the way the topic of the dialogue presents itself objectively between the parties -again showing the openness to the dimension of truth which is the only reference for a dialogue of ‘bildung’. The awareness of our cultural heritage, on a personal and social level, is an openness to history and an ability to question the history of our culture-for example, our environmental crisis or our racial or gender-based prejudices. Our experience of these problems gives us an ‘awareness’- what Gadamer calls an ‘effective historical conscious- ness’-but this reflective awareness is only possible because of Dasein’s openness to the truth. As a feminist perspective of sociology was recently expressed, ‘sociology is about understanding the relationship between our own experiences (of sexual prejudice) and the social structures we inhabit’.2’ This ‘understanding’ or ability to ‘stand back’, this objectivity, is the effectiveness of our historical consciousness given by our intuition of Being as the plane of truth, to which all questions of experience are referred. Gadamer’s claim that ‘Being which can be understood is language’ seems to place us inextricably within the hermeneutic circle. But Heidegger’s ‘Language is the house of Being’ is meant to reveal that the human use of language, as participating in Being’s infinite possibility, can always escape in its (infinite) malleability and its metaphor to confront experience with freedom.

Heidegger’s equally important human thrownness into real existence expresses the other side of Dasein and includes the experience of bodily feeling, mood, imagination and the flux of change. Thrownness, combined with ‘the possible’ of Dasein’s intuition of Being then gives rise to all our concepts and our language. He never solves the difficulty of the stability and necessity which provides the objective nature of truth, and so the connection with reason and responsibility. For Heidegger ‘questioning is the piety of thought’ but questioning can continue for ever, like Rorty’s conversations and Derrida’s deferrals. It is to another European philosopher, Rosmml ’ ‘22 that we should turn for a clearer and fuller exposition of those characteristics of Being which informs our reason and ethics. Among these characteristics are not only possibility and infinity, but necessity, number and stability or objectivity. When we reason wefindourselves having to use principles of reason such as non-contradiction and causality, because our informing concept of Being necessitates these. The use of Rosmini as a ‘commentary’ on Heidegger will be found to remove many of the obscurities and difficulties in Heidegger pointed to by critics such as Adorno, and equally the unsatisfactory aspects of disclosure found by, Dicenso in Gadamer’s hermenutics.23 Truth then is always reasonable as weNasfree, and we dialogue, as Habermas and Gadamer both insist, on the basis of rational argument not merely free preference. A further vitally important distinction implicit in Heidegger but explicitly distinguished by Rosmini is between unreflective and reflective thought. Our ‘idea’ of Being is constitutive of all thought, most of which is habitual and unreflective, but when our experience confronts us with the

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requirement to question and dialogue, we are able to reflect and judge our ideas, formed in the reference plane of Being, and come to a considered position. It is always possible for us to be in error in our reflective mode of thought-and this is why the challenge of dialogue and communication is so crucial, as Gadamer and Habermas abundantly demonstrate. But the transcendental and objective nature of the foundation of thought and reason alone provides a goal of truth for our dialogues. Without this we could have little faith in the ‘common sense’ of mankind which fortunately provides the basis for much of our cultural exchange and for deciding questions such as the composition of the canon of literature, taste in the matter of art, good design and even tact.

To approach successfully a dialogue of cultures in Europe and across the world, better understanding will be required of the nature of reason, freedom and truth. With the qualifications outlined above, it would seem that Dasein’s intuition of Being can provide a basis for the resolution of the paradoxical requirement in Western philosophy for both meaningful structures (without loss of freedom) and the freedom of deconstruction without loss of criticai evaluation.

University of Wales, Cardiff Royden Hunt

NOTES

1. K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy feds), Philosophy, End or Trunsformatjon? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

2. R. Billington, S. Strawbridge, L. Greensides and A. Fitzsimons, CultureandSociety (London: Macmillan Education, 1991).

3. Emmanuel Wallerstein, Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990) No. 1 (Global Culture), pp. 31-35.

4. E. Taylor, Culture Defined (1891), in: Sociological Theory, ed. L.A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 18.

5. Jonathan Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana Press, 1988). 6. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Basic Books, 1973). 7. Ellis Cashmore and Bob Mullan, Approaching Social Theory (London: Heinemann,

1983). 8. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (London: Polity Press,

1987). 9. Ibid. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuruiism andPost-Modernism

(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988). Eve Tavor Bannet, Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent (London: Macmillan, 1989). Peter Dews, The Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987). Theory, Culture and Society (special issue on Post-Modernism) 5 (1988), Nos 2-3.

10. Jean Piaget, Structurulism (London: Basic Books, 1970). 11. Bannet, op. cit. 12. Michael Foucault, in: The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Pantheon

Books, 1984), p. 338. 13. Michael Foucault, in: Politics, PhiZosophy, Culture: Inte~iews and other Writings,

1977-1984, ed. L.D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988). p. 267.

Diofogue of Cultures 9

14. James Dicenso, ~er~e~e~r~~~ and the Disclosure of Truth {Charlottsvilie: University of Virginia Press, 1990).

15. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, 1972). Theory of Communicative Action, Vols I and II (London: Polity Press, 1984 and 1987).

16. Edward W. Said, in: Postmodem Culture, ed. H. Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 143.

17. VBclav Havel, Living in Truth (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). 18. D.P. Michelfelder and R.E. Palmer (eds), Dialogue and Deconstruction (New York:

State University of New York Press, 1989). 19. Thomas McCarthy, Critic& Inquiry, Vol. 16 (1990), pp. 355-371 and 644-655; and

Richard Rorty, op. cit., pp. 633-643. 20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 62-63. 21. Pamela Abbott and Clare Wallace, An Zntroduction to Sociology-a Feminist

Perspective (London: Routledge, 1990). 22. Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855), The Origin of Thought (Leominster: Fowler Wright

Books, 1987). 23. Dicenso, op. cit.