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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?