DIALOGUE of cultures is a concept that is both hopelessly general and varies hugely across systems. Though this observation might suggest that no necessary linkages, positive or negative, can be drawn between cultures and a dialogue that promotes a peaceful and democratic world, it is nevertheless worth exploring the relationship between culture and dialogue, not least because so many assertions, both favourable and critical, abound in the public discourse about such a proposition. So there is a merit in shedding new light on this subject.

It is probably a sign of the times that the issue of dialogue of cultures is being raised again among politicians, academics and social actors. It goes without saying that all over the world globalization is bringing fundamental changes. The pace at which established cultures are changing as a result of the mixing of peoples and ideas, and flows of goods and services, means that it is not always possible to identify what has remained unchanged in different cultures where these transformations have taken place. As such, the only way for cultures to creatively construct a common future is to have a dialogue together instead of retreating in an exclusive identity paradigm or abandoning their cultural heritage in the face of a homogenizing political and economic globalization.

For this to be possible, two conditions must be present in every culture: first a readiness to seek dialogue with other cultures and, second, some general agreement on the aim of constructing ‘common shared values’ beyond the legitimate diversity of the cultures. That is to say, different cultures can see the world in very different ways while sharing norms that are universal. Cultures with shared common values naturally look to the universal, and hence mutuality and solidarity, while the process of dialogue among them thrives on diversity, and hence encourages difference. Dialogue of cultures is thus both a philosophical as also an urgent political task for our world.

In the beginning is dialogue. This is one of the great mysteries of human existence. There can be no search for meaning in the face of life’s finitude, fragility and finality without the process of dialogue. Human life is not just a random act of living in the present, but also that of speaking and interacting with others. As such, dialogue has a projective dimension in the lives of human beings in a society. In short, there can be no dialogue on culture without a culture of dialogue.

People often think of dialogue as merely an exchange of words. But there is more to a dialogue than a simple human interaction and exchange of messages, what Martin Buber describes as the I-thou relationship. This means that one will relate to and experience another person as another person. Parties relate to and experience each other as ends and not means to achieving goals. Dialogue, therefore, implies an ethical meaning, since it allows participants to come to a mutual understanding.

 

There is a hidden sense of openness and respect in dialogue that translates into a moral enterprise. That is to say dialogue is a reciprocal relation to the ethical as a way of relating to truthfulness. Dialogue is, hence, a hermeneutic act of remaining true to the ethical while engaging oneself to perceive the spirit of the other in a threefold perspective of mutuality, solidarity and hospitality.

Valuing hospitality, mutuality and solidarity could well act as a necessary antidote to the endemic fears that are the result of the misperception, misunderstanding and stereotyping of the other. As ethical categories, solidarity, mutuality and hospitality embody a dialogical function, but also extend the hand of friendship to others as an extension to the spirit which moves within them.

As such, any dialogue starts with a spiritual effort of openness in the midst of ethnic diversity and cultural plurality. The protection of diversity cannot be effective unless the threats of ignorance and rejection of the other is ward off. Indeed, perpetuating harmful stereotypes against others has always blocked paths of dialogue in the history of mankind. Stereotypes are engines that drive intolerances. They proceed from the inexperience of the world and from underestimating other cultures and civilizations. This matter has been a perennial source of debate from its conception. It touches all the cultures which base their judgment of others on a minimal or limited knowledge of them.

 

Stereotypes are created when cultures look at each other without really observing and understanding each other. It is interesting that though people have discussed prejudice for centuries, they continue to type and stereotype each other, often perceiving others not merely as being different, but as inferior in their capacity to learn, make decisions and govern themselves. The devaluation of the Other has always served to impart a sense of security to nations and acts as an antidote to fears engendered by domestic violence and chaos. By externalizing an evil to another race, culture or religion, one ‘purifies’ oneself by declaring the Other ‘impure’. The responsibility of the evil is projected on another culture. The Other, therefore, is perceived as a threat and as a potential enemy, who can be harmful for the communal unity of the nation.

As the image of the enemy develops, the Other is progressively dehumanized. All this can progress to the point where the enemy is perceived as literally demonic and as the incarnation of evil. However, such an image of the enemy tends to impoverish a nation’s own self-identity in that it is tempted to define itself primarily as the opposite of its enemy. That is, the image encourages monolithic rigidity, lacking in depth and complexity. As such, a universal feature of the enemy image is the necessity of violence against the enemy.

By projecting the blame for one’s responsibilities on the enemy, one seeks to protect one’s own self-esteem from the errors and injustices that have been made. Therefore, the enemy phenomenon is a powerful excuse for not keeping in tune with reality. But the image thus created of the enemy is not only dangerous for a dialogue among cultures but also has highly negative consequences for the national life of cultures. Therefore, transcending the image of the enemy inevitably requires rising to a new level of thinking and acting toward the other cultures. Once such a mode of thinking has been created there will be a desire to see everything in a light which will reinforce the dialogue.

 

Dialogue opens minds and ends resistance to change in cultures. But it also extends the scope of the debate on the idea of ‘culture’ itself. Dialogical understanding as true matrix of hermeneutical encounter always generates a logic of ongoing differentiation and negotiation that seeks to authorize a new approach to the phenomenon of civilization as a process of human self-consciousness. That is to say there can be no phenomenological process of civilization making without a strong process of caring for and sharing with other human beings as citizens of human history.

However, the claim that dialogical citizenship rests on the authority of tradition in general denies the possibility of critical self-reflection and its ability to break with the dogmatic elements in every tradition of thought which works against any effort at dialogue. One needs to add that the hermeneutical understanding of traditions (both religious and cultural) inscribed in a phenomenology of dialogue, contributes to the discovery of a common voice in different traditions of thinking. Therefore, even in a closed and dogmatic society where citizens are discriminated and divided, there is still space for dialogue which could be strengthened, by giving voice to elements of solidarity and togetherness which underlie civic life of each tradition. As such, what can make this state of interconnectedness authentic and practical, is neither the work of rationality nor our use of language, but an empathetic perception of togetherness.

 

In other words, a feeling of empathy is necessarily a matter of sharing life with others, a recognition of the fact that in the context of human life certain others are similar to us as humans, though different from us as members of another tradition of thought. We can see from this that living in a tradition of thought is automatically accompanied by a sense of shared values with other members of the same community. But it has also to do with what we might call a universal impulse, in the sense that its orientation toward its own life experience is based on an understanding of other communities as different experiences of the same shared life.

This idea of shared life binds members of different communities together in various ways, though this binding is not the result of a recognition that other communities and cultures are or must be like each other. But it goes without saying that our situated-ness in a specific culture or tradition is indistinguishable from an effort to subsume one’s individual history in a common history of humanity.

This common history stands before us as our common destiny and through its presence our shared fate is called forth, put into play, discussed and revised. Through this give and take something comes into being that had not existed before and that emerges from this shared destiny. It is coming- into- history of a human destiny that is common to us. We can say, then, that the discovery of a common fate is a productive result of the dialogical process of cultures and traditions.

 

Each culture discovers oneself in other cultures and other cultures in oneself by seeing at the same time something common and something distinct. As such, a sense of solidarity is created not only because of the consciousness of similarities, but also because of the dissimilarities and differences that exist between human cultures. In fact, dissimilarities potentially bring every culture to an awareness of solidarity with other cultures.

This awareness is not only based on knowledge of the Other but also on a reciprocal empathy. Dialogue with the Other is a dialogue with the self. In other words, every culture sees the other culture as an event and an openness. The presence of the other culture is vital for creating new possibilities and so a new horizon of truth is brought forward by the encounter with the other cultures. Therefore, each culture can serve as a corrective to the other cultures. The solidarity that emerges from a dialogue of cultures will always be accompanied with a horizon of a shared life and what we have in common as humans. This general sense of what binds cultures to each other also emerges through an awareness of the particular ways that cultures are bound to each other.

It is interesting that this territory of plurality and solidarity can emerge despite ontological and anthropological differences between cultures, for each culture has a specific way of perceiving the world and a particular way of being in time. Not every culture in the world views the concept of time in the same way. Some cultures are wary of time and some ignore the time that passes by. There are cultures (for example, American culture) which define their way of being in the present and in the future through time. Some (like the Amazon Piraha tribe) do not have a sense of time in the western sense of the term. They have no past tense, because everything happens in the present. Their culture is a culture of carpe diem. It is interesting to see that even when cultures live in the present with no modern conception of time, the collective experience of the immediacy of time could be translated in a form of dialogue. Human beings are narrative animals and all human cultures have a way of giving an account of what they do.

 

Cultures evaluate the world around them even if they do not qualify and classify it in the same way. That is to say, when we think of cultures before thinking of a dialogue among them, we need to identify them as worlds of representations and significations which create some degree of internal and external differentiation. As such, each culture represents itself as the ‘other’ of the other cultures. In Tzvetan Todorov’s famous words, there is a Nous (us) and there are Les Autres (them).

But who are ‘us’ and who are the so-called ‘them’? More often than not in history, this Manichaean binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ has prevented dialogues and encounters between cultures. This sort of generalization, viewing cultures through the filter of exclusion, equally contributes to the spread of fanaticism with respect to one’s past, present and future. The imposition of a ‘monistic’ vision on a culture thematizing a singular, collective identity and destiny is the end of that culture.

Here resides the key contrast between the monistic standpoint of closed-ended cultures and the pluralist standpoint of open-ended cultures. Unlike a close-ended culture, an open-ended culture does not a priori exclude other cultures with different values or ethical backgrounds. Any culture which is open-ended, inclusive and reciprocal should be viewed as dialogic. I say ‘should’ because by understanding the idea of dialogue too narrowly, we stand to miss the true meaning of a cross-cultural dialogue as minimal norms of mutual respect and solidarity. These norms are themselves situated within the horizon of a specific culture of dialogue which holds together in an equal and fair way different life-experiences. This culture of dialogue is positive in the sense that it always generates the coexistence of different ethical and political views.

 

However, this inclusion and openness is not unconditional. There can be no dialogue without simultaneous prejudice, fanaticism, dogmatism and exclusion. To use a deconstructive phrase, the condition of possibility of dialogue is its limit or absence of dialogue. Not only does dialogue require the absence of dialogue or let us say the non-dialogue, but the limit between dialogue and non-dialogue requires certain conditions that are conditions of possibility of norms of dialogue.

In short, the threshold of dialogue is both the outcome of dialogue and posited prior to it. One way or another, dialogue is rooted in and allows open public space deliberations. Therefore, dialogue serves to include cultures and ideas in a space where they were absent. Thus, dialogue ameliorates a lack. It is arguably the most radical form of learning and liberation in thinking. To understand this is to rise beyond the one-dimensional identity which is provided by culture, social class and gender. Conversely, it is to let the idea of another person, but also of another culture expand in us like a living thing.

 

Let me turn here to one of Spain’s greatest minds, José Ortega y Gasset, who in his Commentary on Plato’s Banquet’ of 1946 writes, ‘The world is toward us and we are towards the world.’ In other words, the self, far from being a closed subject, is ‘par excellence the open being.’ Ortega went on to say later in his book Man and People, that ‘being open to the other, to others, is a permanent and constitutive state of mind.’ That is the reason why, in Ortega’s view, humanity as such, ‘does not appear in solitude... (because) Man appears as the reciprocator.’ That is to say, human being, in order to find who he is, needs first to ask himself who and what the things around him are.

It is clear that the dialogical implications of such a view are obvious. The driving force here is the constant search for what Ortega y Gasset called ‘an all embracing connection.’ It is in this spirit that he defines philosophy as a ‘general science of love’ and a mode of thinking against hatred which leads ‘to the extinction of values.’

As he delved deeper in this direction, Ortega was led to an interpretation of life as an intercultural dialogue. Consequently, in the opening lectures of his university courses, Ortega insisted that the students had to begin with the culture in which they found themselves, but that, in the same way as the creators of culture, they should analyze it critically and change it by understanding other cultures. This is why Ortega defined ‘culture’ as the system of living ideas belonging to each period. ‘What I call living ideas or the ideas on which we live,’ he wrote, ‘are those that contain our basic convictions regarding the nature of the world and our fellow human beings, the hierarchy of values for things and actions, which ones are worthy of esteem and which ones are less so.’

 

Intercultural dialogue as the highest form of dialogical thinking thrives on a wealth of perspectives, but it remains alert to the danger of relativism while stressing the difference of values. A dialogue of cultures has operative values such as inclusiveness, mutuality, solidarity and hospitality. They all function in service of a sovereign value which is the principle of ‘remaining truly ethical to the other.’ That human life is violent is part of the dramatic truth of the human condition. But the fact that humans are also capable of going beyond violence and distinguish between good and evil and choose the good is what makes humanity confident of its future.

It is true that we know nothing about our future, except that some day each of us will die. Nevertheless, humans can live ethically, and in doing so, the future appears to them as a task, a goal and a choice. The ethical choice of ourselves as men and women involved in distinguishing the good from the evil preserves a grain of nonviolent heritage. This can only be accomplished via face-to-face interactions and cross-human conversations. This assumes that every culture is capable of intertwining selfhood and otherhood, by responding to the other culture and transforming oneself anew.

Therefore, the idea of an intercultural dialogue takes as its starting point the recognition of differences and the acceptance of the multiplicity of the world in which we live. These differences of outlooks, opinions and values, exist not only within each community or nation but also between cultures. A dialogical viewpoint seeks to approach these multiple cultures and traditions with a desire to understand and learn from them. An effective dialogue of cultures is, therefore, an enriching and fruitful exploration of worldviews which define societies and individuals.

As Isaiah Berlin points out clearly, ‘Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.’ In other words, life is plural by definition, and in a world of interdependent nations and cultures, the ability to engage in a tolerant and nonviolent dialogue is a vital element for communities and individuals.

 

Today we are living in a very exciting moment in history. Something profound and wonderful is happening which can be seen only if we stand back and observe the spectrum of cultures and religions that have been evolving over the centuries. If we can do this and enter into an inter-religious and intercultural dialogue, something amazing begins to show itself, a deep pattern that has been centuries in the making. It appears that the different religions and cultural worlds converge in a common horizon of acting and judging ethically.

Civilization is a difficult and daunting task. It is a never ending quest for excellence and exemplarity. It is the thin distance that mankind has placed between itself and barbarianism. That is the reason why intercultural dialogue represents a deep change in our being. It is not simply standing where we are in our particular worldviews and speaking it out to others and listening to others from afar. It calls for a true ethical challenge and a true responsibility, a willingness to revise and transform our global culture in a critical and dialogical way. But it also means that this consciousness of dialogue and this essential task of mutuality and togetherness is an effort of making a global ethics across cultures and religions.

 

As such, today there is no ethics which does not try to be a universal moral principle. For our dialogue emerges principally not only at the level of human beings, but also at the level of our responsibility for the non-humans. Our future is at risk and this risk is directly related to the nature of our responsibility towards the non-human. This understanding of the close relationship between the human and the non-human beyond all process of the inhuman is the true ontological ground for all future culture of dialogue. To learn to think beyond the inhuman, as an absence of dialogue, we not only have to unsettle and shake up our well-entrenched concepts and categories, but our task is also to resist our comfortable and familiar ethical and political categories which turn us away from ethical and spiritual definitions of life and sink us deeper into barbarism.

We should not forget that, as Diderot said, ‘From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.’ If we wish to resist the ultimate tendency of our civilization to be toward barbarism, we need to manage tensions and violence in our world through a nonviolent dialogue of cultures; otherwise we should be prepared to accept barbarism. A dialogue of cultures is humanity caring for dialogue, culture and the future of the globe. If we can really understand this challenge, the answer will emerge, because the answer is not separate from the challenge.