Contents

Dialogue within an Intercultural Context :

Requirements, Expectations and Perspectives

Dr. Cheikh Mbacké Gueye(*)

Introduction

When we speak about dialogue between civilizations and cultures we presuppose that there are differences stemming from cultural settings and identities and we anticipate a potential clash that may occur between agents moving within the intercultural arena. If we are gathering here today, it is surely to deliver our contribution to the question as to how to avoid the rupture of the dialogue, and how to establish, at the end, a peaceful cohabitation between people from different cultures and civilizations. These challenges take on an utmost importance today, when we witness so many clashes and bloodshed that result in an unfathomable suffering.

In our effort to foster dialogue among civilizations, we have to be aware of the various levels and kinds of approaches and methodologies. One may tackle the issue by stressing the broader picture which involves for example international law, settings, and politics. One may also address it by emphasizing the contents of the basic communicational sequences and the attitudes of their agents in order to derive some general rules about civilizational and cultural dialogue. In this short presentation, I propose to look into what I call the tripartite programme of dialogue within an intercultural context : requirements, expectations, and perspectives.

I- Requirements

Entering into any dialogue, particularly within an intercultural context, calls for some efforts from the main interlocutors. If we are indeed to avoid any clash and to give the dialogue a chance to reach peace and harmony, we necessarily need to bridge the cultural differences that set in during the dialogue. In our effort to bridge cultural differences, however, we must be careful as to distinguish what a cultural difference is and what it is not.

For if it is true that there are differences in the manner people relate to their respective environment, to spatial and temporal categories, and the manners in which they use and develop their epistemological capacities, it is equally true that often what we regard as unbridgeable cultural differences are in fact differences of another kind that are only accidentally linked to a given civilization. Therefore, the first step in our attempt to bridge cultural differences is to avoid all kinds of cultural reductionism.

A- First step : Avoiding cultural reductionism

Before talking about various ways to bridge cultural differences, we may ask ourselves two fundamental questions as to what a real cultural difference is and whether a cultural difference is a bridgeable one or not. These two questions are both linked not just to factual occurrences, but also to our respective personal attitudes. In fact, not every problem occurring between two people of various cultures is a cultural problem, and we must prevent ourselves from seeing everything through the cultural filter. That is, a perspicacious eye is needed to discriminate between what is a cultural difference and what is not, on the one hand, and what is a profound cultural difference and what is a peripheral one, on the other hand. Here we stand against any reductionist attitude consisting in explaining and justifying every clash as emanating from a cultural difference.

Cultural differences have often been used as a cover-all concept. People, either in their inaptitude of understanding or because of some subjective and personal reasons, have been explaining everthing by evoking cultural differences. How often do we hear : “I can no longer stand him because he is so different from me”, when in fact what we mean by he is nothing else than a culture-endowed unit, a kind of unbreakable ivory tower ? Laziness as well as bad consciousness could be causes of this kind of attitude.

A- Second step : Adopting a “cultural epoché” attitude

Besides the effort to avoid cultural reductionism, we should aim, once we enter the dialogical sphere, at adopting what I would call here the “cultural epoché” attitude. Of a Greek origin, epoché means literally a “suspension of judgement”. In Greek scepticism, epoché refers to a “refusal to adopt a judgement or belief, when the necessary knowledge is not attainable”. The phenomenologist philosophers use epoché to designate the procedure through which one “brackets” all assumptions about the existence of an external world in order to gain a knowledge of pure essences.

A “cultural epoché” can often be associated with, and related to, either utopian and relativistic trends. However, what we understand here by an attitutde of “cultural epoché” is an attitude that in no way implies or results in any relativistic stance. A “cultural epoché” - attitude is limited in time and calls for a particular moment in which “we” as observers adopt a neutral attitude consisting in getting - for a moment - rid of all preconceived ideas and preconceptions in order to concentrate only on what we see and observe in the other (the observed); it calls for a “bracketing”, as much as possible, of all the prejudgements, stereotypes, and frequently unfounded value-judgements that we have gathered through our various life-experiences and within our respective life-worlds. A “cultural epoché” attitude is based on these steps : observing, listening,(1) questioning.

In fact, it is by entering the dialogue with a “cultural epoché” attitude that we could claim a kind of objectivity by getting rid of ill-founded prejudices that we happen to gather within our educational settings. At the “cultural epoché” stage, we reaffirm our ignorance, our uncertainties, as well as our limitations of perspectives. And as in Socratic dialogues, we humbly approach the interlocutor, and without any complex of superiority, we try to grasp and perceive certain objectivity in the other’s speech.(2) Along these same lines, we shall also stress the importance of the two “stances” - from the interlocutors - enunciated by David Bohm, namely that “participants must suspend their assumptions”, and “view each other as colleagues or peers”.(3)

In fact the theory of John Rawls regarding the “veil of ignorance”, in which the parties “do not know the various alternatives”, and “are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations”, is itself an insightful method to “nullify the effects of specific contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage”.4 To really do justice to the other person, there is a need of un-imagining oneself(5). Naturally un-imagining oneself can prove to be utopian and nonsensical when we attach to it a literal and basic connotation. But we must understand it as an opportunity to set ourselves free from cultural conditioning, stereotyped projections, and rash generalizations.(6) It is these very forms of prejudices which lead to certain exaggerations, to intolerance and various forms of ostracism, often encountered in the domain of religion. And yet, there must be a certain freedom of worship in any religion. In Islam, for example, this freedom of worship finds its expression in this injunction : “There is no compulsion in matters of faith”.(7)

Adopting a “cultural epoché” attitude also has another dimension : it not only suspends our prejudices about other cultures but prescinds in a certain sense from cultural differences in order to center our mind on the common elements, values, and the common nature and dignity of human persons of any gender or culture. This attitude helps eliminating the attributes and all contingent features that are attached to human beings.

In fact, for the sake of equality and equity that stem from the humanity of persons of all cultures, intercultural encountering, when viewed from the perspective of an “I” as an observer coming into communication with a “He” as an observed, has to be performed with as much objectivity as possible if we are really motivated by the search for knowledge and truth. It is only then that some epistemological categories such as interpreting, comparing, value-judging, could come into play.

II- Expectations

At this particular point, one has to stress that some of the attitudes like closed-mindedness, exacerbated chauvinism, pride, can hinder our way to dialogue and render the breakthrough impossible. In order for this breakthrough to take place, there is a need to exercise a will to approaching, apprehending, and comprehending not just the apparent or real cultural difference, but also to try as much as possible to “familiarize” oneself with that difference. It is in this process that such attitudes are called for as active listening, which is “a communication skill which is developed when we move from hearing only words to hearing the emotions, feelings, and experiences behind words and ideas”.(8)

In addition, an emphasis might right away be put on our understanding of bridging cultural differences. For what we mean here is not a movement from a culture A to a culture B, in which A has necessarily to adopt the culture of B and vice-versa. Nor is it any kind of “deculturation” that would deprive, either by force or by indoctrination, one particular set of people from their cultural beliefs and customs solely under the pretext of cultural superiority and for the sake of satisfying some imperialistic thirst. This kind of procedure is rather destructive and history is full of examples in which cultural colonialism has proved pernicious and self-defeating. Identities must not be sacrificed for the benefit of exacerbated universalism, strong hegemony, and blind imperialism.

What we mean by bridging cultural differences essentially entails as well an effort to reach a hyphenation point that would constitute a platform of some foundational and fundamental elements shared by both cultures; it is a moment in which two cultures come together to find a common ground from which a genuine and fair dialogue could start, leading to an alliance. However, to move from dialogue to alliance would require from us a correct attitude and stance towards truth, an openness to other civilizations and nations, without loosing our own cultural landmarks. Alliance should obey to the dialectics of which Leopold Sédar Senghor spoke, namely “enracinement” and “ouverture” which provides to every culture the possibility to participate actively to what he calls elsewhere the “Civilization of the Universal”.

There are very many aspects of different civilizations in which it is in no way a question of truth or of the good versus untruth and evil. There are very many perfectly compatible and complementary aspects of civilizations : for example, art styles and forms of works of art, the ways to greet, to clothe oneself, to take meals, to celebrate feasts, different idioms and languages, ways and traditions to express oneself on important events such as love, marriage, etc., dances, contents of historical memory, etc. Here, to keep one’s own identity and roots without condemning other ways of doing these things, and remaining open to their value and legitimate role in other civilizations, and abstaining from condemning everything distinct from our culture as barbarous or low, remains crucial. However, as soon as we encounter disvalues or conflicts of opinion in which not both positions defended by different individuals or societies can be true or good, the search for truth and for the good must set in. These differences (for example human rights violations prevailing in a country or in its history and political tradition) can in no way be treated as a legitimate variety and richness of civilizations. On the contrary, we must try to overcome all errors, prejudices, and evils prevailing in our civilization or in our familiar upbringing or personal life-style, or in other civilizations and the world at large. But also in facing these genuine and irreconcilable conflicts between true and false, good and evil, etc., we must keep the respect for the other persons and civilizations and for the legitimate range of their freedom, that forbid us to perform unjust acts or to slander others or to oppress their freedom. Not to listen to the arguments of others, or to confuse a rightful indignation over injustice and prejudice with a disrespect and bad treatment of persons, violence, terrorism, oppression, or any other evil in our confrontation with these contents of genuine conflict must be shunned. Furthermore, in order to avoid disrupting the dialogue between cultures, we would need to think of various ways to narrow the distance between persons. One of the opportunities that is offered to mankind is to cultivate a cosmopolitan perspective.

II- Perspectives

If we issue here a call for a cosmopolitan perspective to help in bridging cultural differences, it is precisely because we find in the concept of cosmopolitanism appropriate elements that could help us “reducing the distance” between the categories of “I”, and “They”.

But bridging cultural differences requires a further moment of social commitment and deeds of good will, a solidarity of humanity. Reaching out to distant people with whom we may not have anything except our shared humanity, requires human capacities and emotions among which we could name here compassion.

Human compassion, according to Aristotle, implies and necessitates three things : “that a seriously bad thing has happened to someone else; that this bad event was not (or not entirely) the person’s own fault; and what we ourselves are vulnerable in similar ways”(9). Compassion, as a human emotion, when positivized, could help reduce the distance between humans by making them aware of their intrinsic human condition. Once we start thinking that what happened to the distant “he” or “they” might well befall us, we slowly start moving from our own subjective and parochial circle to embrace that of the distant “they”. Compassion, in addition, enables what could be called an awareness of the human destiny or human fate. Compassion, coupled with empathy, solidarity, might be good tools to not superposing our respective beings - beyond that our respective cultures - but to actively experiencing our humanity which is the ultimate station where all the roads of cultural differences join. Experiencing our common humanity in the context of social interrelations requires also from us some efforts to concentrate primarily on unitive and unifying principles. Cosmopolitanism, as an attitude, not just is deeply anchored in the concept of a single human family, but also is articulated around cardinal values and unifying principles on which may rest any intercultural dialogue that aims at a success.

As we have said earlier, any dialogue presupposes a platform. And dialogue between individual rational human beings hailing from different cultures and backgrounds has to search for referents and references that gravitate around what it means to be human person. It is, indeed, after acknowledging what it is to be a person, with all obligations and duties that are implied, that we give ourselves an opportunity of bridging cultural differences.

Within the cosmopolitan perspective, the coming into contact with the other has strong ethical complications. Not only are we objects, but also subjects of ethical concerns. That is, we have to claim some rights, but some duties are also incumbent on us. Our being fully ethical agents puts us sometimes in the middle, sometimes at one of the edges of the ethical arena. But wherever we might be situated, the goal is to perform moral acts, for as the allegory of life as a play refers to it, the most important is to “act well the part that is assigned to us”.(10) On the ultimate level, the effort must be put on the search for the truth in all cultures. But such an enterprise cannot be successful if one adopts highly ethnocentric attitudes (that is the values of my own cultures have to be divulgated because they only are moral and just). It is not just the case that no one has the monopoly of truth, but also that there is often a spark of truth in every culture.

As we can see, cosmopolitanism, as an attitude or disposition of an individual human person, focuses not just on the respective values in different cultures but also on what unites humankind. For a cosmoplitan, not only the allegiance should be given to both the particular and the universal(11), the local and the communal, but also a stronger accent is to be put on the shared universal values that persons qua persons ought to experience, live and express in their daily lives. We are not yet at the level of a political cosmopolitanism which advocates either a single world-state, or a federation of states, or a limited political entity that would take care of some global issues such as war crimes, etc. We are rather on the level of moral cosmoplitanism that strives for restoring to man his place within the social structure and as an agent, a moral agent who, after all, possesses free will or a volitional aptitude to choose what is good and avoid what is bad. The kind of cosmopolitanism that has a healing power is to be understood here as a state of mind, exhibited in a rejection of xenophobia, a commitment to tolerance, and a concern for the fate of humans in distant lands and of different cultures.(12)

Conclusion

The dialogue among civilizations and cultures has taken much importance and interest mostly because of the geopolitics of the twenty-first century which is stamped by the vague and controversial notion of globalization. That it is a process or a ready-made phenomenon, globalization not just annihilates barriers, but also, by the same token, brings people closer to each other, “sowing” then the seeds for a dialogue.

In order to make profit of this context, we may stick with preliminary and basic conditions for dialogue within an intercultural context if we are to achieve peace and harmony. The search for common values and principles, common search for truth, search for references and referents that are contained in our respective traditions, and respect for the other and his alterity, are some of the conditions to build a genuine and strong alliance between cultures and civilizations. To achieve this alliance, personal efforts are needed, but also the support of organizations such as UN, ISESCO, Francophony, UNESCO, ALECSO, etc., that have the power not just to constitute fora to divulgate positive and constructive ideas, but also to provide means to implement them.

(*) Professor at the Research Centre for Peace and Human Dignity, International Academy in Liechtenstein .

(1) It is not by hazard if Paul Wolfowitz, a candidate for the presidency of the World Bank, declared : “Before I have my own vision, I need to do a lot of listening”. He was by no means aware of the whole sensitivity of the case when it comes to entering intercutlural dialogue.

(2) This is one of the main purpose of a conversation that Gadamer puts in the following way : A conversation is a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on the subject [...] where a person is concerned with the other as individuality, e.g. in a therapeutical conversation or the examination of a man accused of a crime, this is not really a situation in which two people are trying to understand one another. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York : The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 347.

(3) See Davis Bohm, Unfolding Meaning : A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm (London : Ark, 1987) (Republished 1996 by Routeldge). See also David Bohm, On Dialogue edited by Lee Nichol, London : Routledge, 1997).

(4) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, second edition (New York : Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 118.

(5) See the interesting discussion on the two alternatives consisting in the acts of imagining others and unimagining oneself by Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People”, in : Martha Nussbaum (author), and Joshua Cohen (editor), For Love of Country ? (Boston : Bacon Press, reedited 2002), pp. 98-110.

(6) All these are related to the huge issue of prejudices that I have developed in details in : Cheikh Mbacké Gueye, “Overcoming Prejudices as a Condition of Peace”, pp. 83-103, in : Prince Nikolaus von und zu Liechetenstein and Cheikh Mbacké Gueye, eds., Peace and Intercultural Dialogue (Heidelberg : Universitätsverlag, 2005).

(7) The Qur’an, Sura the Cow, verse 256, trans. Ahmed Ali (Princeton University Press, 2001).

(8) Abdul Aziz Said, “Achieving Peace : The Whole World Needs the Whole World”, in: Prince Nikolaus von und zu Liechtenstein and Cheikh Mbacké Gueye, ibid., p. 241.

(9) See Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, ibid., p. XI.

(10) See Epictetus, Enchiridion, 17.

(11) We should stress here that there are some kinds of cosmopolitanism that do acknowledge only the allegiance to the universal, neglecting the national parochial membership.

(12) See Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment (Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 1944), p. XI.

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