Nousland

”Global Justice and Dialogue between Civilizations” Anne Granberg

Small talk - informal conversation, trust, and cross-cultural understanding

We often think of “dialogue between civilisations” in terms of grand conversations and debates. In this paper I shall argue that “small conversations” may also play a positive role in such a dialogue. Philosophy has often been sceptical towards mere conversation while exalting the virtues of serious debate. Heidegger’s acerbic descriptions of  “idle talk” or Gerede is a well known point in case: Idle talk and pointless chatter are from the philosopher’s point of view a kind of degeneration of real or authentic communication; instead of a common exploration of the truth, we engage in a repetitive exchange of commonsensical trivialities.

Discourse ethics also takes its point of departure in communicative action as serious discussion - a type of activity where the goal is an agreement on some matter of importance. I would in this paper like to focus on a very different kind of communicative activity altogether, namely the less serious everyday conversation in its most bland and unassuming aspect - what we call “small talk”. Small talk in its purest form, as it were, typically takes place between complete strangers and is about “all and nothing”. It is a type of interaction which is pretty much universally known to all, but it is still hard to pinpoint exactly what we do when we engage in it. It is neither strategic, nor (strictly speaking) communicative action in Habermas’ sense; the point is neither self-expression, nor to reach consensus on any matter (be it truth, justice, or aesthetic judgements). Small talk could perhaps be seen as a separate type of action directed towards establishing what we can call a “minimal community” between speakers.

If we change our focus from the content of small talk  – what is said – to how this type of conversation functions and the constitutive features that make this kind of interaction possible, some philosophically relevant points can be made. It is my hypothesis that a "praxeological" analysis of small talk (by using "arguments from absurdity") can enable us to highlight some pragmatic conditions for communication in general; conditions which often remain unnoticed, and moreover carry an ethical import. Drawing on Steven Hendley's effort to combine the insights of thinkers as different as Habermas and Levinas, I will suggest that Levinas’ distinction between the “saying” and “the said”, and his notion of “proximity” is a way of articulating this ethical import.

There is a difference in talking to someone and talking at someone, and a feature of all successful dialogue is that it presupposes a specific attitude – "conversational deference" – to one’s interlocutor. Since the lack of  this "deference" leads to absurdities and communicative breakdown, we are not only obliged to be rational when entering into conversation, but we must also retain this attitude. I will suggest that "conversational deference" implies a "contrafactual ideal" of respect and care, which opens up the question of what role “small talk” can have in the process of mutual understanding between civilisations.

Theories of International Justice: An East Asian Perspective Dr. Baogang He (East Asian Institute, the National University of Singapore)

At least five major theories of international or global justice can be identified.  First, the utility-based approach stresses mutual benefit or reciprocity and sees international justice located solely in the regulation of relationships between states. The second is a rights-based approach, which stipulates the applicability of universal human rights to all states and societies. Third, we can identify an equality-based approach, which takes redistribution seriously and attempts to address practically the unequal distribution of wealth, income, resources, risks and burdens in the world.  The fourth one is the capacities approach, which begins with a conception of the individual as a social animal deserving of dignity and moves on to design an adequate conception of full and equal citizenship that embraces the mentally disabled as well as other worldwide disadvantaged groups. Finally, there is the pluralist approach, which rejects any single, unified notion of international justice in favor of a complex, community-based conception, which emphasizes difference as the key element of international justice.

This paper offers a critical analysis of these five approaches to international justice.  By examining them in real political contexts, it aims to clarify their essential elements and evaluate their respective strengths and limitations. It also attempts to outline a local approach to international justice by analyzing East Asian attitudes towards global justice and addressing problems associated with this approach.

Conceptual Problems of a Global Ethic Zhenming Zhai - (Zhongshan University)

Largely as a result of the “Declaration of the Religions for a Global Ethic” master-minded by Hans Küng, the concept of a “global ethic” has seized the attention of various intellectual communities in the world.  Though academic philosophers in the west may be well aware that a geographically defined “global ethic” is not equivalent to a “universal ethic” as philosophically understood, some proponents of a so-called “global ethic” have shown a tendency to confuse or conflate the two distinct concepts. In this paper, I will attempt to clarify how “global” does not entail “universal” in a philosophical sense, and illustrate why a substitution of philosophical reasoning in ethics with religious consensus is a misleading approach. Finally I will demonstrate why an appeal to religions for a ground of ethic will lead to either dogmatism or relativism, which is against the will of its initiators. My views demonstrated here might be taken for granted by many academic moral philosophers, but could be surprising to most of proponents of the religion-based “global ethic” or to some social scientists who are not familiar with the philosophical tradition of practical reason.

 

1.      Practical Reasoning and Universality

 

Since the beginning of philosophy, philosophers have tried to look for the universal principles from which criteria for telling the right from wrong can be derived. Such kind of philosophical endeavor implies a conviction that certain so-called “moral” rules actually held by the people of any particular tradition at any point of history could be invalid. That is, it’s possible that the majority of the people of any time and any place could hold invalid moral beliefs. There could be cases that what are held to be “right” are wrong, and what are held to be “wrong” are right. But how can we know what is right and what is wrong if not consulting the majority for their opinion?

 Philosophers believe that human rationality is a possible ground for a final verdict in matters of moral decision. Given a collection of alleged moral rules, we are capable of separating the valid ones from the invalid by using our reason in a methodic way. Such a way of using reason for the sake of deciding the right kinds of action or right action in a particular situation is called “practical reasoning,” and the discussion of issues pertaining to practical reasoning is usually called “moral philosophy.” As for ethics in the philosophical sense, it’s the actual use of practical reasoning by which to find the first valid moral principle and then the procedure for deriving valid rules of action from the principle. As we know, Kant’s deontological ethics and Mill’s utilitarian ethics are the two most respected examples of practical reasoning in moral philosophy and ethics.

Despite their actual disagreement on the first principle from which all moral rules are derived, philosophical ethicists do assume the common position that human rationality is the only means to reach a universal ethic.  This is so because universality is not a matter of incidental consensus as a contingent event, but a matter of self-evident necessity as a logical status.

Of course, such a philosophical conviction is not just a propensity of philosophers. As has been clearly demonstrated in the works of Habermas, Apel, and myself[1], no matter who makes a moral claim, it’s always meant to be a validity claim. A validity claim is a universal claim, that is, a claim whose validity does not depend on the particularity of the person who makes the claim. Thus anybody making an ethical claim is giving herself the burden of arguing for the claim’s validity by referring to impersonal reasons, that is, the burden of redeeming the claim by communicative rationality, as Habermas calls it. Suppose somebody claims: “Hitler was morally wrong in killing innocent Jews,” and then right away adds: “I just happened to feel that way, though, and everybody has an equal right to feel the opposite.” In such a case, we could legitimately accuse him of misusing the words “morally wrong” because an ethical claim as a validity claim does not allow for an opposite claim to hold. When we claim that X is wrong, we are responsible for demonstrating that it’s illegitimate to claim that X is right, no matter who makes the claim and in what circumstances. If the demonstration has finally succeeded, then the claim is redeemed as part of a universal ethic, which is based on communicative rationality. If communicative argumentation does not lead to a successful demonstration of a validity claim, then the claim is not redeemed, and no universal ethic is established.

The fact is that people do make diverse ethical claims about the same event.  That is, when people make supposedly universal ethical validity claims, they often fail to reach a universal agreement. People often attribute such a disagreement to cultural diversity, but such kind of disagreement occurs not only between people of different cultures, but also down to the individual level through every level in between.  No matter how we define “culture,” we will find that culture has no special significance in understanding ethical disagreement. Differences in age, gender, educational background, race, or any element of personal life may as well contribute to such a disagreement. The question now is: “How do we relate such a fact of disagreement to our understanding that all ethical claims are supposed to be universal claims?”

Some would draw the conclusion that a rationally established universal ethic is impossible from such a fact of actual disagreement. From a purely logical point of view, such a conclusion is certainly one of the possible options. That is:

1.      It’s impossible to establish a universal ethic in principle.

But there are many more options that allow for a universal ethic in principle despite the actual disagreement. If we take the opposite of option one as the second option, then we at least have the following alternatives that are compatible with the factual ethical disagreement:

2.      It’s possible to establish a universal ethic and:

2.1 Nobody has succeeded in doing it so far.

2.2     Somebody has established a universal ethic but some people have not recognized it.

2.3     Some people in society are unable to understand a universal ethic even if somebody has established it.

Therefore, we don’t have to follow MacIntyre and many sociologists and anthropologists in declaring the impossibility of a universal ethic in face of the disagreement on rules. Logical positivists claimed that reason could contribute nothing to the establishment of normative principles, and Max Weber followed the same line of thought. But the revival of normative philosophical approach since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has left behind the nihilistic attitude toward the possibility of reason-based universalistic ethics.

A universal ethic is a universally justified ethic, that is, it must be based on a system of philosophical ethics. Rules themselves are incapable of universality unless they are derived through a process of philosophical reasoning. Until somebody has unambiguously proven that philosophical reasoning is unable to establish the universality in question, we, as moral philosophers, will continue to look for it if we want to do moral philosophy at all.

 

 

2. Universal Ethics vs. a Global Ethic

 

       Whatever we might think of the possibility of a rationally established universal ethic, we must not confuse it with the so-called “global ethic” as proposed by Hans

Küng and other theologians of our time. The concept of a global ethic is based on the observation that many people in the world today do not seem to act in accordance with a common code of ethic, and that seems to be the cause of many avoidable conflicts. This is about how people act, not about what people believe as discussed above. Assuming such an observation is accurate, what can we make of it? If we take the second option that a rationally established universal ethic is possible, at least the following additional hypotheses are compatible with the option:

2.4      Some people have accepted the same (universal) ethic intellectually but they are unwilling to follow the ethic in action.

2.5      Some people have accepted the same (universal) ethic intellectually and are trying to follow the ethic in action, but their willpower is not strong enough to overcome their tendency to act in an unethical way.

2.6      Some people have accepted an invalid ethic but mistaken it for a universally valid ethic and act accordingly.

2.7      Some people believe that ethics is a matter of personal taste and thus there is nothing to agree or disagree on in matters of ethics so they just follow their arbitrary “ethic” in action.

2.8      Some people believe that the idea of an ethic is a result of human fantasy and thus dismiss it altogether, and disregard ethical considerations in their action.

 

These are hypothetical factual descriptions about people’s beliefs and actions. As has been widely accepted, no factual statements about what could be the case can alone logically lead to value statements about what ought to be or what we ought to do. Therefore, if anybody thinks that the truth-value of any or all of these factual statements can allow him to draw the conclusion that universally valid ethical principles pertaining to “ought” are impossible, he is illegitimately ignoring the logical gap between the factual “is” and the evaluative “ought.”

       Due to the triumph of the instrumental rationality and the decline of evaluative rationality since nineteenth century, the sociological or anthropological way of using the word “values” has prevailed.  The philosophical attempt to look for the rationally justifiable values, independently of what the majority of people within any particular culture actually hold to be values, has been largely disregarded by the public, the media, and most of social scientists.

       In the west, however, university professors in a philosophy department still know that to teach a course in ethics is to lead the students to see how great moral philosophers try to establish universal normative principles and derive specific rules from those principles.  It’s hardly imaginable that a philosophy professor would just report what people in different parts of the world, or simply what most people in their own nation, actually hold to be right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust, etc.  No professor would be as ignorant as to call Kantian deontological ethic “German ethic,” or Mill’s Utilitarianism “British ethic” in a philosophical sense. Their ethics are both taught as competing universal ethics, though a final verdict is not usually reached as to which is the truly universally valid one, if any.

       Admittedly, Hans Küng’s intention of establishing a “better global order” is a noble one, and his effort to formulate a global ethic on the basis of a minimal fundamental consensus among major religions should be encouraged. But such an attempt, regardless of its outcome, has little to do with a universal ethic as philosophers understand it. As a further illumination of the distinction between “universal” and “global” on the one hand, and between fact and value in this particular case on the other hand, we can pay attention to the following two contrasts.

First, the word “global” refers to a desired factual unity of things of different geographical regions, whereas “universal” refers to a theoretical intersubjective recognition of the first principle and rules derived from the principle. Therefore, a universal ethic as such would be a result of practical reasoning, while a global ethic would be, as Hans Küng implies, a result of survey of the facts about precepts and practices of the world’s religions. In other words, a supposed global consensus on ethical issues is a factual discovery through inductive investigation, rather than a conclusion reached by using communicative rationality.

Secondly, a universal ethic includes principles that define the ultimate standards of good life, and it does not allow us to assume that we know what is good and what is evil at the beginning before we go through a process of practical reasoning. But a notion of a global ethic already assumes that we know what a good life is (as revealed by God?) and we need only to set up rules to realize the pre-given goals. In such a conceptual framework of a global ethic, we are supposed to have already known what is good and what is evil and thus known what “a fundamental crisis” is, before we have the proposed global ethic. As we can see in the “Declaration,” arrays of putative evils have already been identified as facts supporting the view that we need a global ethic.

       In light of these two contrasts, we can raise a serious question for the proponents of a global ethic: “Does the religious consensus on ethical issues already exists among different religions?” If the answer is a “yes,” as the declaration itself suggests, then there is no need to make such a declaration because a global ethic was already there. If the answer is a “no,” then people who did not share the same ethical views before the declaration would remain unbounded by the proposed “global ethic” unless they are forced to the commonwealth, since the survey to begin with did not include them.  If the proposed global ethic is forced to the people who do not accept it voluntarily, then the ethic already violates its own tenet that it should appeal to “the inner orientation, the whole mentality, the ‘hearts,’ of people” as stated in the declaration. Even if the consensus among religious people were reached, what about those non-religious people? Why do they have to accept a code of action based on what they do not believe at all?

       Therefore, if we cannot find a rational ground that can prove to be self-evident to every rational person, we can hardly see how a declaration of an alleged global ethic can accomplish much of what its initiators have envisioned.

 

 

3. Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics

 

              In the West, outside the philosophical circle, there is an overwhelming tendency to take religion as the final ground of ethics.  But as has been shown, grounding ethics in religion is impossible. At least, we know that non-religious people are as capable of ethical conduct as religious people. Some philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre even believe that, not pointlessly, religion is by nature against the real sense of human dignity since it degrades humans to mere tools for implementing alleged God’s plan and rids us of final responsibilities. Here we need not to discuss such a radical anti-religious view. At the bottom line, we need only to see that universality cannot be based on faith or any kind of non-intellectual authority. If it can be based on anything at all, that would be reason or reason-aided conscience.

Admittedly, an alleged global ethic proposed by theologians such as Hans Küng would presumably contain precepts that largely overlap with any imaginable rationally established universal ethic. But we have good reasons to suspect that rules concerning human affairs such as sexual conduct, marriage, as found in any religious scripture, can be rationally justified.

In a global ethic proposed by Hans Küng, there could be a rule, for example, against extra-marital sex (see his earlier work, Projekt Weltethos). But it’s hard to imagine that a rationally justified universal ethic would contain such a rule. As we know, there is a model of marriage in which the involved wife and husband agree to have an open relationship, in which both sides are each allowed to have other sex partners under certain specified conditions. Given the fact that sexual intercourse can nowadays be done without leading to a reproductive outcome, what could be the rational ground for rejecting such kind of marriage?  There doesn’t seem to be such a ground.

Another suspect in the proposed global ethic is the positive Golden Rule upheld in the Declaration: “What you wish done to yourself, do to others.”  This rule seems to encourage us to make decisions for others according to our own preferences, and do the same things for others as if others always had the same preferences as ours. But as Berlin and other liberal thinkers have convinced us, such a pattern of conduct based on a concept of promoting positive freedom, is a kind of violation of human autonomy, and may lead to some kind of dictatorship if practiced in politics. If so, we can hardly imagine that a rationally justified universal ethic would include such a positive Golden Rule.

    The rule of honesty does seem to be rationally justifiable if any rule is. We are glad that honesty is a rule in any major religion and certainly in a proposed global ethic. But honesty in its full sense certainly includes intellectual honesty in the Socratic sense: if you do not have sufficient reason to believe something, then acknowledge your ignorance. Religion, as we know it, appeals to the belief in the existence and the benevolence of a Supreme Being regardless of our lack of rational ground for such a belief, and celebrates it in the name of “faith.”  Pascal’s wager on the faith in God seems to be a rational one, but it’s based on the calculation of the possible consequence of each option, and in such a calculation, believing something false is not regarded as a loss in itself. In his bet, the final criterion for choosing one’s belief is utility, not intellectual honesty. The ethical rule of honesty, however, is based on the acknowledgement of the intrinsic value of honesty itself. Therefore, the rule of honesty appears to conflict with the religious practice based on faith.

       There have been theories of ethics that attempt to ground the ultimate sanctity of ethical demands in the alleged fact that they represent the commands of God. However, since Plato’s time philosophers have been clear about the philosophical problem involved in such an account of ethics. As most of students of philosophy have learned, in Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro, a dilemma about the relationship between God’s command and piety is discussed. The analysis of the dilemma can easily be applied to any version of the divine command theory: Are good kinds of human conduct good because God makes them good as He wishes, or does God wish us to do them because they are good independent of His wishes?  On the first option, the choice of God creates goodness and value. If so, it would be pointless to praise God since whatever he wishes is good by definition, and saying “God is good” amounts to saying “God is whatever he wishes to be.”  This only shows God’s absolute freedom and power, not God’s benevolence. On the second option, there would be reasons that define the goodness and value independently of God’s wishes.  If so, God’s command would not be the final explanation of the source of goodness and value.  Either way, divine command theories cannot account for the possible validity of an ethic.

       The dilemma arises whenever an extra-rational authority is supposed to be the ground of an ethic: the sage king, the tradition, the parent, the written text, the church, the theologian, the government, the legal system, etc.  Consider the pluralistic nature of all these possible kinds of authority, our dependence on any of them in matters of ethics would lead to either dogmatism or relativism: dogmatism if we just pick one authority and totally disregard others in theory and in practice; relativism if we acknowledge the plurality in theory or in both theory and action.  Dogmatists would say: “Only my authority is a real authority who knows the complete set of ethical truths, other alleged authorities are just scandals.”  Relativists would say: “I know those people brought up in a different circumstance could have been taught a completely different ethic, so I have no problem with people holding different moral beliefs. Whatever they believe, they are as right as I am.”  As a matter of fact, philosophically uneducated people nowadays tend to swing between dogmatism and relativism. Suppose that you think that religion is the ground of ethics. If you are personally committed to a particular code of ethic from a religion, you are doomed to be a dogmatist; if you are not so personally committed, you will be a relativist. This is so even if an alleged global ethic based on world’s religions has been declared. Clearly, advocators of a global ethic do not intend to have either of these outcomes.

              In sum, even though theologians may play an active role in promoting a better global order, philosophers, qua philosopher, should follow a philosophical, instead of theological, way of doing moral philosophy and ethics. To do philosophy is not to promote ideas in view of what our world is supposed to need, but is in part to reflect on the rational ground for all fundamental assumptions, the assumption of need included.  If philosophy were as impotent as the postmodernist believes it to be, then we would rather give up the idea of universal ethic. For the sake of intellectual honesty, we don’t want to use a misleading label of “universal ethic” on an alleged global ethic.

[1] See Chapter 2 of my The Radical Choice and Moral Theory, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

Conditions and Possibilities of a Dialogue Between China and the West on Ethics Zhang Rulun - Fudan University

Since facts speak louder than words, the fact that our conference takes place successfully seems to make my paper, whose title is “Conditions and Possibilities of a Dialogue between China and the West on Ethics”, meaningless, even ridiculous. However, we also know that facts often don’t look like what we expect, or they should be. It is often the case that name falls short of the reality. In fact, a dialogue is not so easy as it seems. We often see that some so-called dialogues are really monologues, and some change eventually into monologues. It is because the “power ” factors in human relations, and the distinctive discourses associated with them are inseparably interwoven with the subjective needs of the participants.

Moreover, a dialogue is dependent upon the ways in which they are framed, as well as upon the assumptions and normative commitments of the participants. For this reason, an intercultural dialogue, especially that on ethics, which is about how we ought to live, is never an easy task. In fact, they are much more difficult than any other dialogues. A dialogue means that we must discuss with the others from the other cultures our basic values, norms and standards of the rihgts and wrongs, as well as theirs. But because of our ontological commitment to our own ethics, it is very difficult for us to suspend this commitment to enter into a real dialogue with the others on ethics.

Such a dialogue, however, is a more and more urgent task before us. It is not only hermeneutic understanding between different cultures, but also a practical action to answer the challenges with which we are faced. Our symposium shows that all of us have realized this. Thus, perhaps my essay is not so senseless as it appears. The theme that it deals with involves a lot of complicated problems. What I can do in this essay is only to sketch some of them.

In this essay I will first consider briefly some challenges shared by China and the West today, in order to bring to light the urgent need of a dialogue between China and the West on ethics. Then I will outline and explicate some apparent difficulties in the dialogue. In the third section I will explore the possibilities of the dialogues between China and the West on ethics. Finally I will attempt an examination of some conditions which such a dialogue must satisfy.

 I

     Following the end of the Cold War, there does not emerge a world of eternal peace. On the contrary, the recent and continuing events in China, the former USSR, Southeast Asia and Europe have disrupted virtually all of the conventional views concerning world order. At the same time these events and the circumstances which they have created make the analytical effort all the more urgent. We have entered a phase of what appears in 1990s as great global uncertainty----so much so that the very idea of uncertainty promises to become globally institutionalized, although it has early been predicated by philosophers. In fact, we have recently experienced the day-by-day geopolitical “earthquakes”, conflicts of races, and the clash of civilizations described by Huntington.(1)

     After all, however, we share this world and its fate. If we don’t want to perish together, we must learn each other. A common human world and its very fate rest so largely on the success of cooperative undertakings by those who represent very different worlds. An intercultural dialogue should prelude such cooperative undertakings.

     However, we are facing not only the external challenges, but also, maybe more serious in a sense, internal challenges. That is, we are facing the crisis of morality and fundamental values, although the crisis manifests quite differently in China and the West.

     From the last half of the nineteenth century, China was forced into the course of modernization. It is, however, also one of the gradual disintegration of our traditional system of morality. Several developments contributed to its dissolution. First of all, during the closing decades of the century there was a new awareness of an outside world. This awareness was deepened and exacerbated by the repeated defeats China suffered at the hands of the outside world. Equally important were various aspects of Western culture that was seeping in. Both Western science and Western religion brought in ideas and views at odds with our traditional values and worldviews. The Copernican universe of Western science was bound to collide with the traditional Chinese worldview, which explained the cosmos in terms of such cosmological symbolism as the ideas of yin-yang, the five elements, and heaven and earth. This conflict would inevitably undermine the whole traditional system of ideology, including traditional system of morality.

     As Hao Chang pointed out, the crisis modern China faced was not just a political crisis, but a crisis of orientational order,(2) or of so-called orientational symbolisms. According to Hao Chang, these symbolisms serve as the ground of meaning for the Chinese social world, because it is within the framework of these symbolisms that social relations are patterned and social values and norms take on more than arbitrary, man-made meanings. In those various ways, orientational symbolisms provide the Chinese mind with a “general order of existence”.(3) This crisis can but make us be bogged down in merciless skepticism, which cast doubt not only on the functional effectiveness of the traditional order, but also its moral legitimacy.

     The skepticism is so deep in the Chinese mind that from then on it never disappears from China. From May Fourth on it has transformed into a radical anti-traditionalism which culminated in the Cultural Revolution but did not end following the end of the Cultural Revolution. It does not mean that in modern China nobody has recourse to our tradition and tries to find resources and motive force for modernization in it. On the contrary, there are always people who do so.  The tension between radical anti-traditionalism and cultural conservatism is a too complicated story that I will not tell here. I just want to point out the fact that the process of the Chinese modernization parallels that of disintegration of traditional values and norms. Cultural conservatism can not prevent tradition from dissolution. In this way, we are short of a system of values to maintain coherence and order in our universe of meaning. Thus, with the development of the modernization ethical questions have become more and more relevant.

     In fact, however, there were many modern Chinese thinkers who have reminded people of the exceeding importance of morality for the Chinese modernization, but more people seemed not to think so. The new youth of May Fourth also advocated “new morality”, but they failed to establish it. Neither “the Movement of New Life” launched by Jiang Jieshi nor the Cultural Revolution brought China a new morality. Today, while the economic principles already override moral ones in mainland China, some people preach to establish morality being suited to market economy. Is it a rather funny irony? It can not be denied that we are facing a vacuum of morality. This is a real crisis we must deal with. Without a new moral basis, China can not be a sound society, even less a good society. But I don’t believe that we can solve this crisis by appealing to tradition, because it is not a matter of returning to tradition, but a matter of establishing a new one. That means we must find moral resources not only in our tradition, but also elsewhere. It is quite evident that a dialogue with the West on ethics will benefit us greatly.                   

     Although the modern Chinese used to turn to the West to seek the solution to their crisis, the West has its own crisis in the modern age. When Nietzsche declared “God is dead” at the end of the last century, people began to be aware of this crisis. The death of God makes humanity itself the measure of all things. All things—all the minute particulars of existence—are possible in a world without transcendental, universal meanings. But the other side of this declaration, this freedom from universals, is the transformation of the significance of experience into universal meaninglessness. For Nietzsche all thought and knowledge are particular moments of  will-power and all values must be reevaluated.

     However, the humanity, or the self as the measure of all things collapses into autonomous and mutually incoherent rational, volitional, and affective components. Modernity has its focus in the discovery, articulation, and ramification of the subjective self. The self that serves as the medium through which comes all experience of the external world, as well as all experience of the objects of consciousness, is a modern invention. The self that intends is likewise the intentional object of itself; the self that manipulates the environs can likewise manipulate itself and others, and the self as more or less intimate bundle of impressions and memories comes into its own by owning –its “ownness”, a function of what properly belongs to it. This economic self is both source and object of the passions of pride and envy, love and hate engendered by this ownership. Finally, the self creates the aesthetic objects from its imagination and feeling.

     The power of reason associated with the subjective autonomy of the human spirit forms an awkward alliance with the aggressive human desire to organize and control the natural environment, while the aesthetic impulse offers its embarrassed artifacts and advices aimed at moderating the excesses of reason threatened by political assertion and economic desire. Self-reflection, self-assertion, self-gratification, and self-articulation are the contrasting and conflicting means of fabricating self.

     Given these circumstances, it is nearly impossible to find a new universal foundation for modern Western ethics to replace those old ones. But the task of ethics is to provide a general answer to such questions: “ How should I live?” or “ What is the right thing for me to do?” However, under modern conditions, how can we have a universal ethics applicable to all self-incoherent, atomic individuals who are simultaneously amidst a great diversity of concrete norms. Postmodernism being  popular in the West seems to make a universal moral foundation less impossible.

     As a result, modern Western ethics can be departmentalized into branches like business ethics, family ethics, or sexual ethics, and the like. Moral thinking that derives its authority from the membership of speaker in a particular group may turn fundamentalist and thereby pose a threat to members of other communities. Or, in a best case scenario, it can present moral options, rules, and recommendations that have direct relevance to the lives of some people in certain walks of life, but not to others. On the other hand, by virtue of their abstraction, formalization and generalization, universalistic ethics such as the Kantian has not developed even the semblance of a common ethos, the universal guideline provided by it must remain merely formal (lacking in any substance whatever). People don’t really share a single  nomos in common.    

      Durkheim has described the crisis with the concept of “anomie”. Anomie can be described as the negation of nomos. In Durkheim’s understanding, social change was characterized by changed from mechanical solidarity in traditional societies to a new type of organic solidarity. in modern societies. The common way of life cannot persist under the new social pressures. Durkheim focused upon social phenomenon those can lead to anomie. The concept of anomie itself was precisely formulated later in his work about “Suicide” and “The Division of Labour”. The concept of anomie referred to a condition of relative normlessness in a society or a group. Durkheim already investigated the internalization of socio-cultural norms, since he interpreted anomic suicide as resulting from disorganization of the relations of the personality to its internalized culture.(4) In that sense anomie must be seen not only as a state of normlessness, but in particular as a social phenomenon which emerges when, as a result of social changes, traditional norms are no longer sufficient to respond adequately to the newly emerging situation. In that sense, anomie always refers to situations of social instability in a vacuum of generally accepted norms.

     If Durkheim’s description of anomie still tallies with the predicament the West is facing today, it is evident that the West also lands in a crisis on ethics deeply. I don’t think that the Chinese tradition can provide some panacea to overcome the Western crisis, since it itself faces a similar crisis! But I believe that it is very necessary for the West to dialogue with China on ethics for overcoming its crisis of  morality. It will provide the West a unique perspective to reflection on its crisis and a new approach to its overcoming.

     In addition to our respective crises, globalization makes us confront a lot of new and common problems. We need a common ethical attitude towards these problems at least, if not a global ethics. The notion “globalization” refers mainly the economic tendency of globalization and related phenomenon. The development of the contemporary international economy shows a new and up to now unanswered challenge to moral responsibility of all people in the world. Certain kinds of human interaction are mediated by the world market—the signals which direct this interaction are prices, while the medium of actual communication is money. It is a interaction carried out from a great distance by anonymous persons, hence it leaves almost no opportunity for face-to-face meetings between real people with moral sensibilities. And while the effects of this everyday economic activity may be felt by other human beings in other parts of the world, these effects are as unimaginable to us as the possible consequences of our use of atomic weapons. All nations and people in the world have common moral responsibility for this situation and its consequences.

     The consequences of modern economy and technology finally make us come to realize that nature, as it constitutes our biosphere and the wealth of our economic resources, is no longer undamageable and inexhaustible, as people have thought it to be throughout history, up until now. We must have a new relationship with nature, or with our ecosphere. This relationship is natural, but also moral. Without the common moral responsibility of humankind, it is impossible. It seems that the ecological crisis has come about through the technological skills to increase and expand the effects of human action. One might say, the technological achievements of humankind have always been ahead of the moral responsibilities of it, but in this century, we have had to confront this fact. For now, for the first time, it has slowly become clear that, at least with regard to our ecosphere, we are compelled to organize, somehow, a collective sense of responsibility for the consequences of our activities in science and technology.

     Perhaps we at last need a global ethics in order to provide universal principles of dealing with these questions. But I believe that such a kind of global ethics could not be achieved without sufficient dialogues and discussions on ethics between different cultures. We just enter into this great enterprise. However, in any case, a dialogue between China and the West on ethics will contribute to it greatly.

II

     However, the intercultural dialogue is not an easy task, sometimes it is even very hard. Think of Leibnitz’s failing dialogue with Confucianism. This case is full proof of that the intercultural dialogue is quite difficult. But before defining the locus of its difficulties, let us consider what is a dialogue.

     In Truth and Method, Gadamer gives an ideal of dialogue. On Gadamer’s account, a genuine dialogue, or conversation, is one in which each partner to the conversation is concerned entirely with the subject-matter(die Sache) and with arriving at the truth with regard to it. Genuine conversation is based upon a recognition that we are finite and historical creatures and thus we do not have absolute knowledge in Hegel’s sense. The knowledge we do have is akin to that of Socrates: a knowledge that we do not know and hence an openness to the possible truth of other views. Then, each participant in a genuine conversation must be concerned with discovering the real strength of every other participant’s position. The participants cannot try simply to out-argue or outwit each other; neither can they try to reduce the views of others to the conditions of their genesis. At issue is not the intention behind a person’s saying what that person says but its possible truth. Each participant must thus be taken seriously as an equal dialogue partner, as someone who despite heritage, quirks of expression or the like is equally capable of illuminating the subject-matter. As Gadamer writes: 

   Thus, it is part of any genuine conversation that one submits to the other, allows

   his viewpoint really to count and gets inside the other far enough to understand

   not him, to be sure, as this individuality but rather what he says. That which has

   to be grasped is the substantive validity of his opinion so that we can be united

   with one another on the subject-matter.(5)

Gadamer’s reference to a unity on the subject-matter here is important. The unity with which he is concerned is not the result either of one partner’s imposing his or her views on another or of one partner’s simple acquiescence to the views of another. Rather, if individuals or groups come sincerely to a shared understanding of a subject-matter, the understanding they share is not the original property of one or the other but represents a new understanding of the subject-matter issue. Gadamer’s model here is that of Socratic dialogue in which the position to which Socrates and his interlocutors come at the end represents a significant advance over the position each maintained at the beginning. Each begins with certain views and assumptions but in confronting opposing views and assumptions has to reconsider and develop his and her own. The process, then, is one of integration and appropriation. This does not mean either that the participants give up their positions or that they use those of others simply to buttress their own. Rather it means that each participant takes account of the other opinions, attempts to show what is wrong and right with them as well as with his or her own position and thereby formulates, in concert with others, a view that each recognizes to be closer to the truth than any of the original positions. As Gadamer writes:

 Coming to an understanding in conversation presupposes that the partners are ready for it and that they try to allow for the validity of what is alien and contrary to themselves. If this happens on a reciprocal basis and each of the partner, while holding to his own ground simultaneously weighs the counter-arguments, they can ultimately achieve a common language and a common judgment in an imperceptible and non-arbitrary transfer of viewpoints.(6)

And even more forcefully:

      What steps out in its truth is the logos, which is neither mine nor yours and

      which therefore so far supersedes the subjective opinions of the discussion

      partners that even the leader of the discussion always remains the ignorant

      one.(7)

      The successful conclusion of a dialogue thus reflects a shared understanding and one that, moreover, reflects a transformation of the initial positions of all the discussion partners. Gadamer argues that the same kind of shared understanding and transformation also marks the successful conclusion of the hermeneutic dialogue with aspects of one’s own or another tradition.                              

     However, Gadamer’s description here is really an “ideal model” of  dialogue, or an idealized dialogue. What happens in an actual intercultural dialogue is not so simple. The incommensurability of different cultures makes even a shared concept of “truth” impossible. In his interesting essay “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation between Confucians and Aristotelians about the Virtues”,(8) Alasdair MacIntyre explicates the difficulty sufficiently.

     MacIntyre finds that when we deal with two different or rival theories from different traditions we have no culturally neutral grounds which would provide us with the resources for adjudicating rationally between them, because each has its own internal structure in terms of which these two systems of thought and practice.(9) For instance, both Aristotelians and Confucians have internal to them their own conceptually idiosyncratic account of even certain very general features of human life. And any account which is rich enough in its identifications and characterizations to be genuinely relevant to the evaluation of a set of theoretical claims concerning the virtues will in fact turn out already to presuppose in those identifications and characterizations some one such theoretical stance regarding the virtue, rather  than its rivals. That is to say, every major theory of the virtues has internal to it, to some degree, its own philosophical politics and sociology. These dictate for the adherents of each such theory how the relevant empirical findings concerning human life are to be construed, classified, and characterized.(10)

     If so, it is clear that there cannot be a shared ground or structure which would prevent different cultures from misunderstanding, though the many points of resemblance can be observed between them, both in matter of substance and of procedure. Although there are important areas of agreement between Confucianism and Aristotelianism, those theses about which there is substantial agreement function in significantly different ways.(11) It is thus clear that their conceptual schemes and discourses are incommensurable, even their languages are not wholly translatable. For instance, the classical Chinese language has no terms for the Western concept of “truth”. Such being the case, it is very possible that they might have different understandings even on the same subject-matter, let alone about general human life and the world. Thereby, the intercultural dialogue, if not absolutely impossible, must have many obstacles to overcome.

     Besides the incommenurability of different traditions, ethnocentrism often makes a dialogue between different traditions merely nominal. A real dialogue must take into account the perspective of the “other”, or of the multiplicity of voices from which interpretive accounts of cultures are constructed. It requires one not only to say, but to listen in a dialogue. Otherwise the dialogue will become a monologue. But ethnocentrism would like merely to listen to the same voice. It would like more to speak alone. Because any ethnocentrism is some kind of universalism, which believes that it holds the only truth of the universe and that the world is like what it sees. Thereby all its claims are truth. For ethnocentrism to dialogue is to preach, it is speaker, and the other is listener. They are not equal partners of a dialogue. In this manner, ethnocentrism really makes a real intercultural dialogue impossible. The fact that ethnocentrism is not peculiar to any nation, but a universal phenomena explains at least partly why a real intercultural dialogue is so difficult.

     Another difficulty of intercultural dialogue lies in the untranslatability of one natural language-in-use into another. The incommenurability of different conceptual schemes embodies in thought and practice arises from this kind of untranslatability which is characteristically a sign of profound differences in culture. The problem of understanding an alien point of view expressed in some natural language other than one’s own, is no more and no less than that of translating it into one’s own language. If we do so successfully, we shall discover that in the very act of translating we have understood what is said from that alien point of view, in that language, as governed by the same standards of assertibility, of argument, and of evaluation which govern our own theory and practice.(12) It is in this sense the concept of “untranslatability” is used here. Suppose, MacIntyre writes, that the adherents of at least one of two such incommensurable schemes of thought and action are in fact provided in their own language-in-use with an adequate representation of the rival point of view. They can now in some sense understand what it is that they reject, for what is now presented to them within the framework of their own standpoint as an alternative to their own theorizing on some particular subject matter will inescapably be judged false by the standards informing that framework. So an advance may have been made, but it has after all only been one from mutual incomprehension to inevitable rejection. MacIntyre can but ask: How does this constitute an advance in the conversation?(13)      

     It seems to MacIntyre that if only we learn the foreign language as a “second first language” the problem will be solved. But here the problem is of incommensurability or incompatibility of the two languages as systems of belief. Given Heideggerian “pre-structure of understanding” which implies our ontological commitment, I doubt if one can learn a foreign language as “second first language” in cultural sense, of course, not in linguistic sense. Learning a foreign language does not assume the symmetry of the two cultures in question nor an exclusively ethnocentric perspective. Although the primary frame of reference remains that of the first language, there might be ways in which the perspective offered by the new language acquires prominence in certain situations. We may see this change as a sort of switch between languages as frames of reference, though we must be cautious at this point. Such switches can only occur in particular settings, with regard to specific meanings, and not as a complete change from one framework to the other. There may be not only incommensurable dimensions (for which a gestalt switch might work as a particular solution, that is, to describe and evaluate things either from the point of view of the first language or form that of the second, but not simultaneously) but also incompatible beliefs and values.

III

     Though there are the mentioned-above serious difficulties, intercultural dialogue, in particular a dialogue between China and the West on ethics, is still possible. after all, incommensurability does not means whole incomprehensibility. There are always points of overlap and crisscrossing which provide a foundation for us to use our linguistic emotional and cognitive imagination to grasp what is being expressed and said in alien traditions. We can not deny that human experiences have similar parts, even if we might have different understandings of them. Aristotelian and Galilean physicists could have different interpretations of moving bodies, but they had to have similar experiences of moving bodies and be able to agree to some significant extent both in their conceptions of moving bodies in general and in their references to some particular moving bodies, in order to have a common subject matter about which to disagree. The common subject arises from similar human experiences which constitutes the foundation of a dialogue. A common concerned subject matter is the motive force of a dialogue. Beyond doubt, ethics is one of the most concerned subject matters shared by China and the West, since we all are facing the crisis of ethics as I mention above.

     Furthermore, incommensurability between different traditions is not immutable. As MacIntyre says, incommensurability is a relationship between two or more systems of thought and practice, each embodying its own peculiar conceptual scheme, over a certain period of time. Conceptual schemes have a historical existence, and the identity of conceptual schemes through time is compatible with large changes in both their internal structures and their external relationships, and thereby two different and rival conceptual schemes may be incommensurable at one stage of their development and yet become commensurable at another.(14) I do not think that the Chinese and Western conceptual schemes of morality have become wholly commensurable at the modern age, but I do think they have more and more common subject matters. In addition, the Western theories of ethics are not absolutely irrelevant to Chinese. In fact, Rawl’s theory of justice, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, etc., already echo in the ethical discussions in contemporary China.

     Indeed, China and the West have very different cultural traditions, societal structures and political systems. They are on different levels of development. However, modernity draws them nearer and nearer each other. They have to learn each other. But as a Chinese, I can only tell the story from the Chinese perspective. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century more and more Chinese have come to realize that we must learn from the West in order to save ourselves and catch the West up. As a result, the numbers of Chinese who know the Western languages are much more than of the Westerners who know Chinese. We soak in the Western discourses so deep that even modern neo-Confucians also explicate Confucianism with the Western conceptual system! To what extent this learning changes the conceptual scheme of our tradition is another question; at least it enriches our linguistic and conceptual resources. In this way we can have an accurate representation of the other and remove a main obstacle to a dialogue with the West on ethics.

     But it does not mean that we will dialogue with the West with the same conceptual scheme and as the similar of it. If so, the dialogue will be unnecessary and impossible. The dialogue must be between the different. The dialogue is to learn from the other. In this sense, we have begun to dialogue with the West on ethics. Now more than any time before, more Chinese will learn from the West, and China is more open to the world. Meanwhile, westcentrism is more and more criticized in the West. The West is more and more willing to dialogue with China, a proof of which this symposium is. If both China and the West are willing to learn each other and regard the other as an equal partner, why is a real dialogue impossible?

     Of course, the possibility of a dialogue between China and the West on ethics can not lie only in subjective good will of both sides. Wittgenstein states, “Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.” The sentence is ambiguous. It can be read as saying that it is necessary to assume that ethics is a condition of the world to the same extent as logic, but an equally possible reading is that ethics must be the condition of the world in the same way as logic. But it is not the case as Kant believes that there exists a universal law of morals which necessitates our action, just as the universal laws of logic necessitate our thinking. As the condition of the world, it is the human condition because social regulation has been substituted for instinct regulation. No human life is possible without observing certain rules and norms. No human life is possible without the distinction between good and bad. No human life is possible without the consistent and constant application of norms and rules to member of the same cluster. However, people are confronted not only with such norms as “be courageous”, “be temperate” or “be charitable”, but also with concrete instructions for how to be this or that, what they must do in particular circumstances in order conform to these virtues. That is to say, any ethics embodies the moral custom of a given society. Only within the context can it be comprehended.

     For this reason, it is more possible today than Leibnitz’s times for a dialogue between China and the West on ethics. In Leibnitz’s times, there were few communications between China and the West. Under these circumstances, it is unimaginable that there might be a real dialogue on ethics between a Confucian and a Christian from the West. It is not only because of the incommensurability between the cult of ancestors and the cult of God, but also because of the great differences between China and the West in their ways of life and their Sittlichkeits. But today the cult of ancestors is disappearing in China, while the Western societies have been secularized. Modernization brings China and the West the similar conditions of life, even the similar ways of life, though there are still a lot of differences between China and the West. On this basis, there is now a world culture. The world culture is created through the increasing interconnectedness of varied local cultures, as well as through the development of cultures without a clear anchorage in any one territory. It is marked by an organization of diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity. No total homogenization of conceptual schemes has occurred, nor does it appear likely that there will be one any time soon. But the world has become one network of social relationships, and between its different regions there is a flow of meanings as well as of people and goods. The Chinese intellectuals read Habermas or Derrida; while there are the courses about Taoism or Wang Yangmin at the Western universities. The possibility of a dialogue between China and the West on ethics is beyond doubt.

IV

     Although there are certainly possibilities of a dialogue between China and the West on ethics, it is not an easy thing because of the apparent difficulties mentioned-above. In an actual dialogue, there is not an ideal conversational setting and then an ideal speaker and/or an ideal set of speech acts designed by theorists. By contrast, it has to satisfy some basic conditions and overcome some concrete difficulties in its being carried out. Excessively idealized conceptions of dialogue cannot account for the actual diversity of dialogues and external factors influencing them as they take place in real interactions.

     We have to become aware of the fact that in most intercultural dialogues –whether actual persons, such as politicians, academics, travelers, and immigrant workers—what is involved is more than the abstract search for truth. In fact, we will be compelled to take into account the social, political, and psychological dimensions of actual linguistic exchanges as things that are not merely external but central to the characteristics of dialogue.

     Among the problems with real intercultural dialogue is that of the asymmetry of the participants and of the languages themselves. In the first case, this problem has to do with the relations between unequal participants, or between unequal societies. These relations are matter of power. In a dialogue consisting of unequal participants, it must be the case that one participant is educator, and another is the educated. One is speaker, another listener. In this dialogue, no discussion, no argument, or no debate is needed. The speaker tells truth, and the listener receives it. If one understands modern Chinese history with the model of “challenge—response”, how can he/she avoid such a dialogue with unequal participants? Not only would the Westerners make this mistake, but also Chinese. Even Mao Zedong called the West teacher and China student! How can there be a real dialogue between advanced teacher and backward student? Obviously, both China and the West must regard self and the other as equal participants at first, then they can have a real dialogue, but it presupposes a new philosophy of history.

     But in addition to the political dimension of the problem of inequality, there are difficult questions related to the second problem of inequality, the “inequality of languages” in the sense of differences in conceptual resources and linguistic practices. This problem has to do with the suspicion that the very concept of dialogue presupposes a form of argumentation typical of modern, Western Societies, and as such, a form that cannot simply be assumed as universal. This dialogue may be a plausible alternative for intercultural conversation when the interchange takes place between societies that are not radically different, or which share some crucial aspects of a common tradition, but it becomes highly problematic in the case of relations between China and the West, which have very different traditions. It may seem that, since we have no recourse to a privileged, neutral, standpoint from which to judge the respective merits of the beliefs and practices of these two different traditions, the only non-arbitrary way to decide their respective merits will have to be that of giving equal consideration to the arguments and reasons of both parties. Thomas McCarthy has described this dialogue situation:

the symmetry of the dialogue situation would require that they try to understand

our beliefs and practices—as we must do theirs—including the reasons why we

hold the beliefs we do, the justifications we offer for accepting the practices we

do, as well as the criticisms we have developed in rejecting other alternatives in

our past—some of them rather similar to those obtaining in their society.(15)

     It does not seem too difficult for us to do that, because the modern, Western discourses have penetrated our language deeply, so that we are able to understand the Western way of seeing the world. And, in general, we have to dialogue with the West in Western languages. But it is not the main problem with which I concern myself here. What I want to say is that when a language of one participant of dialogue becomes dominant in the dialogue, the dialogue is not able to achieve its real goal—listening to each other and learning each other. The real dialogue presupposes equality of languages.

     To listen to each other and to learn each other mean that we must not treat the other as the same. If so, it is unnecessary to have an intercultural dialogue. However, often, and with good will, we look for a sameness or likeness in our encounter with other cultures and with people from the different traditions. But a sameness, in actuality, tends to assimilate the other to oneself. If intercultural dialogue is to look for the same, what is its necessity and significance for us? It would be senseless to discuss the possibility of a dialogue between China and the West on ethics, because it would be absolutely possible anyway, but its necessity and legitimacy would be in question. Given the incommesurability of concrete lifeworlds, the real intercultural dialogue is possible only when we understand the other as the other, not as the same. That we must resist the danger of pseudouniversalism and singularism is a condition that a dialogue between China and the West on ethics has to satisfy. 

     Acknowledging the radical otherness of the other does not mean that there is no way of understanding the other. Incommensurable languages and traditions are not to be thought of self-contained windowless monads that share nothing in common. Our linguistic horizons are always open.(16) This is what enables an intercultural dialogue, and even sometimes a “fusion of horizons”. In today’s world, cultures and subcultures do flow into each other, interacting both visibly and invisibly, eventually effecting value-rejection and value-modification at every stage. This only shows the vitality of cultures, which are like living organisms in which internal and external changes are incontrovertible facts. A culture as well as its constitutive values, moral and nonmoral, basic and nonbasic, faces both the internal critique (originating from human rationality) and the external challenge from the confrontation with other cultures, both causing change, development, and mutation as well as acceptance of different values within that culture. A culture that does not react and change with time is as good as a dead one or it is dying, or at best it maintains a fossilized form of existence, fit to be turned into a museum piece. The present-day cultures and societies are not like water-tight compartments, which may seldom confront one another in reality and interact. They do interact with each other, sometimes generating violence, sometimes peacefully and almost unconsciously accepting value trade-offs and value rejections.

     Therefore, an intercultural dialogue, especially a dialogue on ethics, cannot, and should not a dialogue between two deaf persons, or a meaningless chat, that is, it cannot lead to a moral relativism. Cultural diversity cannot be conflated with the relativity of good and bad about almost everything. It is true that people in the world belong to different societies which are historically and geographically conditioned and hence have developed different faiths, myths, rituals, kinship systems, standards of interpersonal behavior. The culture’s ethical system may be built upon all of these which motivate them to act. But this is not everything. It does not exhaust the domain of morality or what the motivation for some fundamental moral action is about. More important, due to modern technology and economy, in a sense human beings now share a common fate. It is never to deny the fact that each culture or individual community has its distinctive way of life, its institutions, membership conditions, and values. Each culture has certain unique rules, virtues, and obligations. But any particular morality now exists in a global context of human existence. So long as a community or culture is also connected with the rest part of the world, it must have minimal shared moral standards, otherwise it cannot coexists with the others in the world. This is probably not a theoretical problem, but a practical one. For this reason,   whatever different societies and traditions people belong to, they should not have different moral judgments to Auschwitz and Gulag.

     A dialogue between China and the West on ethics should be constructive, that is, it must be able to achieve some moral consensus. Therefore, to overcome relativism is one of its basic conditions. However, in order to avoid pseudouniversalism, i.e., to hold our own culture as a universal culture, or the model of the other cultures, we must relativize our own culture, though it may result in disorientation, or may lead us to become strangers in our own culture of origin. As Georg Simmel observed early last century, to be placed in a different culture involves both nearness and remoteness, an ambiguity captured by Simmel in the image of the stranger, for whom the experience of new forms of life places his and her own culture under the light of newly acquired freedom and distance.

NOTES:

1.Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World  

Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

2.Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:            

 University of California Press, 1985), p. 8.

3. ibid. p. 6.

4. Talcott Parsons, Foreword to: Emile Durkeim, Education and Sociology (NewYork:

  The Free Press, 1956), p.9.

5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, (Tuebingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1975), p.

  363; English translation, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975),

  p. 347.

6. ibid. p. 364; p. 348.

7. ibid. p. 350; p. 331.

8. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation between

  Confucians and Aristotelians about the Virtue”, in Culture and Modernity ed. by

  Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp.104-122.

9. ibid. p.108.

10. ibid. p.105.

11. ibid. p.106.

12. ibid. pp.113-114.

13. ibid. p. 112.

14. ibid. p.109.

15. Thomas MaCarthy, “Scientific Rationality and the ‘Strong Program’ in the

   Sociology of Knowledge”, in Construction and Constraint: The Shaping of

   Scientific Rationality, ed. by E. McMullin (Notre Dame: Indiana University

   Press, 1988), p. 87.

16. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT

   Press, 1992), p. 65.

 

Summery

A common human world and its fate rest largely on the success of cooperative undertakings by those who represent very different worlds. An intercultural dialogue should prelude such cooperative undertakings. Perhaps we at last need global ethics in order to provide universal principles of dealing with our shared problems. Such a form of global ethics can only be achieved through sufficient dialogues and discussions on ethics between different cultures. But an intercultural dialogue is not an easy task, there cannot be a shared basis or structure which would prevent different cultures from misunderstandings. Besides the incommensurability of different traditions, ethnocentrism often makes a dialogue between different traditions merely nominal. Another difficulty of intercultural dialogue lies in the untranslatability of one natural language-in-use into another. Though there are these difficulties, intercultural dialogue, in particular a dialogue on ethics between China and the West, is still possible. Incommensurability does not meant entire incomprehensibility. There are always points of overlap and crisscrossing which provide a foundation for us to use our linguistic, emotional and cognitive imagination to comprehend what is said and expressed in alien traditions. We cannot deny that human experiences have similar aspects, even if we might have different understandings of them. Although there certainly are possibilities of a dialogue between China and the West on ethics, it is not yet an easy task. In an actual dialogue, there is not an ideal conversational setting and then an ideal speaker and/or an ideal set of speeches designed by theorists. On the contrary, a dialogue has to satisfy some basic conditions and overcome some concrete difficulties in order to take place. Among the problems one has with real intercultural dialogue there is the one of asymmetry of the participants and of the languages themselves. How should we solve this problem?

Political Philosophy and Civilizational Analysis: Preliminary Reflections - (paper presented at conference on “ Global Justice and Intercultural Dialogues”, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 8-12 January 2004. Draft only)

Johann P. Arnason - La Trobe University, Melbourne

The main theme of this conference  is “global justice and intercultural dialogues.” But implicit in this substantive problematic is a more meta-theoretical one on which I would like to focus. It has to do with political philosophy and the plurality of civilizations. As is well known, the question of justice has been most central to recent debates in political philosophy; in surveys of the field, the main positions are often defined and contrasted in terms of their conceptions of and solutions to this problem. To raise the issue in a multi-civilizational context is therefore, by the same token, to pose several interrelated  questions: How does political philosophy cope with the plurality of civilizations? And what could it learn from closer contact with the work of those who have tried to develop the comparative analysis of civilizations as a distinctive branch of social-historical inquiry? How would the currently dominant framework of political philosophy have to be modified to accommodate the insights that might result from a multi-civilizational perspective? These questions are not raised in a void: they relate to existing modes of inquiry, and to possibilities of building bridges between them. It seems appropriate to begin with a brief  survey of the state of the art on both sides, and a glance at the long-term pattern of relations between them.

  The revival and  the restrictions of political philosophy

 

It is a commonplace that the last three decades have been marked by a revival of political philosophy. The 1971 publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice  is often seen as the beginning of this trend.  But on closer examination (and as critical commentators have noted), there are some strange aspects and major limits to this apparent rebirth of a long-neglected discipline. To begin with an elementary point, external to the agenda of the main works in question but useful for putting the whole debate in perspective: a renaissance of  political thought seems to have taken off a the very moment when there was a marked downturn in public expectations of what could or should be achieved through political action. This would seem to be another case of Minerva’s owl taking flight at dusk  - all the more so since the single most seminal text  can be read as an affirmative interpretation of the historical epoch that had reached maturity and was about to give way to more unsettled conditions.  As both sympathetic  and critical commentators on Rawls’s  Theory of Justice have suggested, it is best understood as a normative interpretation of the postwar welfare state, cast in abstract (and often abstruse) philosophical language and constructed in a way that systematically screens out the historical context. It may be useful to link this point to the model used in Peter Wagner’s Sociology of Modernity:  from that perspective, Rawls’s account of the welfare state – the philosophical reconciliation of “basic liberties” and a “social minimum”  - is a reinterpretation of organized modernity as an advanced liberal modernity  (the latter being., according to Wagner, so far only a possible historical outcome of the second crisis of modernity) – and in a language that implies an unbroken continuity of liberal principles.

 

This implicit streamlining of modernity reflects a more general shortcoming of  Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian political philosophy: its sociological deficit, perhaps most obvious in the abstract dichotomies that have beset the debate between liberals and communitarians (critical commentators from the sociological side, e.g. Craig Calhoun, have stressed this point). Any attempt to remedy that would – in the nature of things, and in view of current developments – have to be based on a systematic alignment with historical sociology. But the most fundamental weakness of the Rawlsian approach – too obvious to go unnoticed  by critics, but not discussed as extensively as it would merit – is the absence of reflection on the political as such. This is the other side of Rawls’s insistence on a thoroughgoing continuity of moral and political theory. It is of course true that there is a significant difference between his Theory of Justice (1971) and  Political Liberalism (1993). The shift that seems to have matured slowly over the two decades in between might be described as a partial discovery of the political. Rawls  claims – and there is no reason to doubt – that the change had more to do with growing awareness of problems in the original theory than with any objections put forward by his critics. The specificity of the political comes to the fore when the links between moral and political theory have to be loosened.  More precisely, Rawls discovers that the problem of a viable political order has to be posed at a level where solutions can no longer rely on moral integration. The keynote question of  Political Liberalism  is: “How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?” (p. XVIII). The political is, in other words, thematized form a particular angle: the task is to devise a political framework for a pluralism that cannot be overcome or neutralized on the moral level.  It should be noted that this leads Rawls to outline a historical and comparative perspective: as he sees it, political liberalism emerged against the early modern European background of religious wars and the search for a modus vivendi that would avert further disasters. The significance of this context is further underlined through comparison with the  problems which political philosophy faced in the classical world. The civilizational setting determined by the polis and its religion was very different from the early modern one.

 

Here  we have at least the first step towards a comparative civilizational perspective on the political, the reflexive approaches to it, and the constructive strategies that grow out of reflexive thematization. As I will argue, this approach should be developed on a much broader basis.  But an attempt to do  so must begin with a brief historical stocktaking. The search for points of contact between political philosophy and civilizational analysis can still draw inspiration from classical sources. If we go back to Greek beginnings, it seems clear that the first theoretical reflections on political order (not to be equated with the beginnings of  political thought as such) are closely linked to perceptions and interpretations of the cultural differences between the Greeks and their neighbours (including the older civilizations of the Near East as well as the more unequivocally inferior barbarians).  This applies not only to the systematic work done by Aristotle, but also Herodotus’s combination of historical and cultural-anthropological inquiry. Early modern thought is still – at least in exemplary cases – characterized by close contact between comparative perspectives on political institutions and on broader civilizational patterns (Montesquieu’s  Spirit of the Laws  is perhaps the most representative work of that kind). Changes in the cultural and intellectual atmosphere at the end of eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century moved the two fields of inquiry further apart and gave rise to specific obstacles on each side. It can be argued that the main reasons for the problematic status of political philosophy for a century and a half – between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the revival after 1970  -  are, with obvious variations in  relative weight and contextual meaning,  the same as those which led to the oblivion or marginalization of civilizational perspectives. They include several interconnected trends: the markedly Eurocentric turn taken by  Western thought around 1800 (for closer analysis of this, see Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens); the ascendancy of utilitarianism as a “kind  of tacit background  against which other theories have to assert and defend themselves” (W. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, p. 10); and the spread of a diffuse evolutionism that influenced projects of the social sciences in decisive ways, even when the authors in question did not subscribe to full-fledged evolutionary theories).

 

The twentieth-century record of civilizational analysis – revived in more or less explicit opposition  to dominant currents of social thought – is a markedly fragmentary and discontinuous one. The first landmark to be noted is the discovery  of civilizations by the sociological classics; this occurs in different and mutually independent ways in the French and the German branches of the tradition, but in both cases civilizational themes are overshadowed by other concerns in the following phase of development. A second wave of civilizational studies and theorizing, exemplified by the work of S. N. Eisenstadt, began around 1970 and is perhaps best understood as a critical alternative to the openly evolutionistic turn then taken by a part of the functionalist mainstream. Finally, the metahistorical projects exemplified by the works of Spengler and Toynbee should at least be mentioned: they represent a tradition that has proved less easy to accommodate within the intellectual division of labour, and is widely seen as lacking academic legitimacy. The question whether we can still learn something from it will not be discussed here; for my present purposes, the most important part of the abovementioned cluster of traditions is the work of Max Weber. His comparative studies were the most substantial result of the first wave and the most significant source rediscovered in the course of the second.

 

One of the most striking aspects of Weber’s comparative framework is the underdevelopment of its political dimension; this may, in the present context, be seen as a counterpart to the absence or near-absence of comparative civilizational perspectives in the current mainstream of political philosophy. More specifically, the main analytical focus of  Weber’s studies is on interrelations between the religious and the economic sphere; although it is true that more careful reading of his work has put paid to the idea that the detailed  analyses of China and India were nothing more than a kind of counter-experiment to the Protestant  Ethic, there is no doubt that the problematic of that work cast a disproportionate shadow over the whole sequel. The most culture-specific and meaning-sensitive interpretations to be found in Weber’s work – however much they leave to be desired when judged from the perspective of more demanding inter-cultural hermeneutics -  have to do with the world-perspectives of  different religious traditions.  They are linked to analyses  and tentative explanations of developments or developmental blockages in the economic sphere, but here the attention to specifics is less evenly focused. Weber admits the diversity of premodern capitalisms (in that limited sense, he pioneered the typology of capitalisms); but when it comes to the modern transformation and the unprecedentedly dynamic form of capitalism that appears as the “most fateful force” involved in this process, the emphasis is clearly on a uniform pattern that transcends civilizational boundaries – even if its original breakthrough was facilitated by successive “concatenations of circumstances” within one specific civilizational complex.

 

Our main concern is, however, the leveling and uniformitarian logic built into Weber’s conceptualization of the political sphere. This begins with the systematic focusing of  political sociology on the problem of legitimation, defined with tacit reference to Western historical experiences that brought the problem of the justification of authority to the fore, but with an explicit claim to universal validity. The problematic of legitimacy is then reduced to the well-known three types: traditional, legal-rational and charismatic; the traditional type is defined in a markedly reductionistic way that disregards the specific features of civilizational traditions. Weber’s insistence on subsuming all relevant  cases under these three – and only three – types is as striking as his failure to give any compelling reasons for the tripartite division. Finally, the analysis of the forms of domination in terms of their administrative structures (as Weber puts it, “in everyday life  domination means  administration”) focuses on two extremely general ideal types, patrimonialism and bureaucracy (there is no distinctive pattern of administration that would correspond to charismatic domination as such). Both these concepts are less historical and less sensitive to cultural context than the ideal types central to Weber’s sociology of religion. Bureaucracy is defined in a way that makes all historical developments of that kind appear as approximations to a rationalizing projection of modern patterns; patrimonialism becomes a common denominator of premodern regimes. A closer examination of Weber’s work on China (which cannot be undertaken here) would, in my opinion, show how the combination of these two concepts obscures the specific characteristics  - and the specific historicity – of the Chinese imperial order. In particular, the Chinese case illustrates better than any other the  astonishing absence of sacred kingship, its metamorphoses and its enduring constitutive symbolism, from Weber’s frame of reference. It may be suggested in passing  that the problematic of sacred kingship – as the crucial link between  religion and politics – would have been the appropriate counterpart to the “religious rejection of the world” that became the key theme of Weber’s sociology of religion. But more generally speaking, Weber’s political sociology  is constructed in a way that minimizes and marginalizes the question of cultural definitions of power and – more comprehensively – of the political domain and its place in the social world.

 

This question is – in the present context – a useful starting-point for comparison with the second generation of  civilizational analysis. Eisenstadt’s work is indisputably the most important post-Weberian project in the field, and it represents a major step forward in regard to the point at issue here. Eisenstadt thematizes the relationship between cultural tradition and political dynamics in a way that Weber never did; in so doing, he opens up new perspectives for the comparative study of cultural frameworks of political power, organization and conflict, and draws contrasts and parallels between the patterns of ideological politics in different civilizational contexts (“Cultural traditions and ideological dynamics: the origins and modes of  ideological politics”, in ). On the other hand, his focus on the common core structures of “axial civilizations” sets limits to diversity in the relationship between culture and politics. To cut a long story short,  the “axial” turn – supposedly taken by the major Eurasian civilizations during a formative period around the middle of the last millennium BC, and further developed through the subsequent rise and diffusion of world religions – gives rise to a new cultural ontology: a cultural interpretation of the world as divided into a transcendental and a mundane realm. This interpretive framework affects the self-understanding of society, the definition and justification of social power, and the articulation of social conflicts in fundamental ways. Solutions to the problems posed by the axial turn vary from one civilization to another, and some of them involve a more central role for politics than others. As Eisenstadt sees it, different traditions with a strong emphasis on the political sphere – and correspondingly different definitions of its meaning and functions – developed in China and Ancient Greece. But however divergent the resultant political cultures may be, the axial frame of reference is taken to imply some invariant principles. The whole problematic of axial – or Axial Age – civilizations is now undergoing a new round of debates, and for a wide range of reasons, it seems likely that a reformulation will tone down the initial presuppositions about a common underlying pattern. In view of that, it would –  for present purposes – seem advisable to bracket the issue of axial civilizations and assume that more detailed comparative analysis of civilizational variations in political culture is one of the prerequisites for a reassessment of the axial model.

  Towards an agenda for comparative analysis

 

To sum up, the divergent cultural interpretations of the political have emerged as a  theme that might serve  to re-connect civilizational analysis with political philosophy. But to make proper sense of this suggestion, it must be linked to internal problems of  the latter discipline. As we have seen, the post-1970 mainstream has been characterized by a strong tendency to construct normative projects without any correspondingly extensive reflection on the constitution or the problematic of the political.  For a corrective to that trend, we may turn to Leo Strauss’s definition of political philosophy as “the attempt to know both  the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order.”  But the two key elements of this definition  -nature and order - must be reformulated in a way  that will disconnect them form Strauss’s more specific political positions: questions about the political as such are not necessarily formulated in terms of a given nature, and visions of political alternatives do not necessarily translate into full-fledged models of order.  This adaptation of the Straussian definition lends itself to a civilizational turn: the varying cultural orientations that enter into the constitution of the political sphere and the aspirations to political order call for comparative analysis. A focus on cultural contexts does not ipso facto rule out normative concerns or claims to universal validity. There is, in other words, no compelling reason why the combined internal and interactive dynamics of civilizations should not give rise to projects that transcend their boundaries. But no adequate understanding of such projects will be possible without  an interpretive reconstruction of their cultural background. In that sense, we are in the realm of  “lateral universality”, as Merleau-Ponty put it:  the universality that can only be articulated through encounters between different but not mutually inaccessible universes of meaning.

 

A comparative civilizational approach would thus begin with inbuilt cultural definitions of the political (this would seem to be the best key to the understanding of “political cultures”, often thematized by political scientists without any sustained interest in conceptual underpinnings and ramifications). But the reflexive dimension, i.e. political thought in the broadest sense, articulated  on various levels and in multiple genres, must also be included. Finally, it seems useful to distinguish political philosophy in the strict sense, i.e. reasoned theorizing of the political as such, from the broader context of political thought. This distinction has recently been emphasized by classical scholars; as they see it, the exclusive emphasis on political philosophy – the tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle – had obscured the significance of an exceptionally broad spectrum of political thought, expressed in poetry, history and tragedy. Among other things, this enlarged perspective has led to a better grasp of democratic thought: the estrangement of classical political philosophy from democracy is misleading if seen in isolation. Tensions and dissonances between the different levels may also have to be taken into account. The introduction to the recent Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought  argues that philosophical theorizing distorted the practical notions of the political that were built into both Greek and Roman versions of the citizen-state, and that more work on other forms of political thought is needed to redress the balance.

 

On all three levels, the Chinese tradition is a particularly promising field for comparison with the West. With regard to political philosophy, it seems appropriate to begin with a reference to B.-A. Scharfstein’s thesis about the “three philosophical civilizations”, Greece, India and China: these were the only cultures that produced mutually independent philosophical tradition (in the two Christian worlds – Western and Byzantine – as well as in the Islamic one, the ascendancy of monotheism transformed the Greek legacy in different ways, none of which has any parallels in India or China, but this did not amount to the creation of autonomous traditions). In the case of India, the scope for comparative studies of political philosophy seems rather limited: as far as I can judge, the Arthasastra is virtually the only subject of debate, and controversy centres on the question whether it represents an Indian counterpart to Machiavelli (Max Weber took that view) or an offshoot of a fundamentally different tradition, unintelligible in isolation ( K.J. Shah, “Of Artha and the Arthasastra”, in A.J. Parel and R.C. Keith, Comparative Political Philosophy, New Delhi 1992, 141-62). That leaves China as the only separate major tradition to be compared with the Western one. On the level of political thought, it is a commonplace that political concerns are almost all-pervasive in the Chinese tradition; the diversity of genres may not be comparable to the Greek case, but the omnipresence of political themes would seem more pronounced. Finally, the comparative analysis of cultural definitions of power must take particular interest in sacred kingship, as well as in its patterns of transformation, fragmentation and mutation into different models of sovereignty. In this context, the uniquely prolonged and complex Chinese experience of sacred kingship is bound to be of major importance.

 

To round off  this discussion, let us note some academically marginal but intrinsically significant currents that tend to be ignored in the most widely read surveys of contemporary political philosophy. They are, in crucial ways, more attuned to comparative reflection than the mainstream. On the conservative side (to use a conventional but not very insightful term), the approaches represented by Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and their disciples cannot be amalgamated into a single tradition, but they share at least a strong interest in broadening  the perspectives of political thought beyond the internal horizons of modernity. In particular, the intercivilizational frame of reference became increasingly important in Voegelin’s work. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet may now be said to  add up to a school of thought that took off from the radical left but has (most evidently in Gauchet’s work)  moved towards a critical engagement with liberalism and disavowed revolutionary  illusions. In this case, the strong interest in the cultural dimension of politics – even if the authors in question tend to prefer other concepts – opens the way for comparative inquiry. Finally, Hannah Arendt should perhaps be mentioned – as a link between the two otherwise separate universes of discourse  which I have just mentioned, and as a somewhat more familiar figure to students of contemporary political thought. She was to some extent engaged in dialogue with Strauss and Voegelin; she influenced  - in different ways – the thought   of Castoriadis, Lefort and Gauchet; and when classical republicanism is recognized as a distinctive current within twentieth century political thought (as for example in Kymlicka’s survey, quoted above), she is usually listed among its representatives.

  Reflections on democracy

 

It seems best to conclude these preliminary reflections with a few remarks on democracy as a shared theme of political philosophy and civilizational analysis. Democracy has, in a sense, imposed itself  as a central theme of political philosophy. It was not, as such, the main concern of Rawls’s seminal work: the focus was on justice as “the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”; this virtue had to be cultivated under the conditions of democratic equality. But the shift that culminated in Political Liberalism led to a much stronger emphasis on democratic principles as such. Alternative approaches exemplify the same trend. Kymlicka divides contemporary political philosophers into two camps: those who defend liberal democracy (in a variety of sometimes incompatible ways), and those who criticize its existing institutional forms, even if the critique is to some extent based on its principles and expressed in demands  for more adequate translation into practice. There is no doubt that this growing centrality of democracy reflects the mood of the times: the new liberal-democratic triumphalism that gained ground in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s. Those who did not take it to the extremes of an “end of history” had to consider the difficulties encountered in various places and contexts, and this could easily lead to questions about civilizational backgrounds. Samuel Huntington’s Third Wave, published at the beginning of the 1990s and summarizing the lessons form an apparent worldwide breakthrough of democracy, is perhaps the best-known example. Huntington cautioned against premature optimism about the chances of democratic transformation and consolidation in non-Western settings. His view at the time was that a “Confucian democracy” would be a contradiction in terms; the only potentially democratic element in the Confucian legacy was, as he saw it, the examination system (hardly an idea that historians of China would now support); but a thoroughgoing democratic transformation would in any case entail a thoroughgoing demolition of traditions. As for Islamic democracy, Huntington thought the evidence was less conclusive, and time would tell. The ideas first formulated in the book later developed into the famous/notorious thesis about the “clash of civilizations”; but despite the emphatic invocation of civilizational theory. Huntington’s actual use of scholarly work in that field was extremely arbitrary and perfunctory. As for a connection to contemporary political philosophy, it is almost non-existent.

 

Comparative views have been articulated in other contexts, with les massive ideological connotations; and once again (for obvious reasons), the Chinese case seems particularly relevant. Although the question of democratic trends and potentials in the Chinese tradition has remained marginal to the two universes of discourse mentioned above, enough has been said to enable us to draw up a tentative typology of positions. It seems to me that four different views can be distinguished. The first stresses the presence of democratic thought in the Chinese tradition, while acknowledging the existence of specific obstacles and a pattern of slower growth in comparison to the West; but this is a difference in degree rather than in kind,  and the same general principles are supposed to be at work on both sides.  A good example can be found in Kung-chun Hsiao’s History of Chinese Political Thought ; he compares Mencius’s  “theory of the importance of the people” to Western thought.  Democracy is summed up in the three principles of  “for the people”, “of the people” and “by the people”;  Hsiao argues  that Mencius  began with the idea of “for the people” and proceeded towards “of the people”, but did not (and could not) grasp  the idea of “by the people”, nor the problematic of institutions needed to  put it into practice (p. 161). He does not seem to think that any decisive breakthrough  in this regard can be found  in the later history of Chinese thought. But by the same token, Mencius  was – as a fourth-century BC thinker, and in comparison to the overall western pattern of development  - anything but backward.

 

The second view is best seen as an inversion of the same picture: the specific obstacles become defining features of the Chinese tradition, and the prevalent “unquestioning acceptance of the emperor’s total authority” (Derk Bodde,  Chinese Thought, Society and Science, p. 189) is seen as a decisive factor. This view can then be backed up by an analysis of the Chinese imperial order as an enduring model of sacred kingship, and an embodiment  of civilizational continuity back to the Bronze Age. Some version of this thesis  can perhaps be glimpsed in  the  background of Huntington’s pronouncements on the Confucian tradition.

 

The two other positions are based on more specific arguments and may be seen as more promising starting-points   for debate. In his history of ancient Chinese thought, Benjamin  Schwartz  suggests that the traditional Chinese  - and more specifically Confucian – acceptance of hierarchy and authority needs to be placed in a historical context where it might appear as a complement and corrective to the western  - originally Greek – conceptions of democracy, especially if we admit that “really existing democracy” is an uneasy compromise between visions going back to a very peculiar version of the city-state and the realities of complex large-scale societies: “We must  candidly note that despite the widespread triumph of modern ideologies which posit the notion that hierarchy and authority are transient vestiges of an evil past about to be eliminated from the human scene, it remains unproven that complex civilizations can dispense with them even though there have been some successes in creating methods for confining their scope and rendering them accountable. Confucius’s problem of how one humanizes the exercise of authority and inequalities of social power remains with us whatever we may think of this solutions” (The World of Thought in Ancient China, p. 70).

 

Finally, there is the position most forcefully argued by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames in The Democracy of the Dead.  As they see it,  certain aspects of and currents within the Chinese – and more specifically Confucian -  tradition can be linked to the contemporary search for a communitarian model of democracy. They go on to argue that John Dewey’s theory of democracy provides the most suitable philosophical foundation for  such a synthesis. A “commonality” of  pragmatism and Confucianism – not complete, but significant enough for a “real alliance” (p. 162) to be possible – thus appears as a plausible basis for mutually instructive developments of democracy in China and the West. Here I cannot discuss the details of Hall and Ames’s analysis; suffice it to add that the whole argument involves a critique of individualistic and rights-based liberalism, and a plea for “freedom-in-context” as the proper starting-point.

 

In view of these alternative positions and the unfolding but underdeveloped debate between them, it seems advisable to reconsider the question of the cultural definitions that enter into the operative ideas of democracy and open up the possibility of  rival interpretations. It is widely accepted that democracy is an essentially contested concept, but mainstream political philosophers often note this fact without pausing to reflect on its meaning. In Political Liberalism,  John Rawls refers to a “conflict within the tradition of democratic thought itself” (p. 4), having to do with the problem of reconciling the values of liberty and equality; but he has little to say  on specific reasons for the tradition bifurcating in this way. On that point, some sociological interpretations of modernity – especially Eisenstadt’s Paradoxes of Democracy – seem to have advanced further Eisenstadt links the conflicting interpretations of democracy (centred on the tension between constitutional and participatory models) to a broader account of the antinomies inherent in the cultural premises of modernity.  But here it may also be useful to refer to the abovementioned writings of Castoriadis, Lefort and Gauchet.  One of their common themes – most extensively developed by Gauchet – is the understanding of democracy as a reflexive articulation and appropriation of the self-constitutive capacity of society. But this reflexive turn never occurs in a vacuum: it is always  anchored in distinctive traditions. Moreover, in the specific Western context, it is accompanied by alternative models of autonomy and sovereignty. The democratic transformation unfolds against the background of the early modern absolutist state, whose self-legitimation in terms of the divine right of kings was only part of a process that at the same time led to the rationalization of state structures and the emergence of the state as a separate agency of societal self-organization. On the other hand (and, as Durkheim had already suggested, in close connection with the progress of state formation), the image of the sovereign individual as the ultimate claimant to autonomy  crystallized  as a strong and sometimes dominant but never uncontested  meat-model of democratic order. Closer analysis of this civilizational-historical context might help to clarify the tasks of comparative study.