Dialogue is a process of prayerful mutual encounter, and to reach out to the other in a spirit of dialogue calls for a commitment to truth, and also a growing awareness of the fact that truth cannot be “possessed” in the strict sense of the term, and that through dialogue we become co-seekers of truth.
Raimundo Panikkar
Despite the fact that the hermeneutic background is permeated by power, it nonetheless remains “hermeneutic” as such, it is in principle accessible to the agents themselves, and remains always a negotiable part of the agents’ own self-understanding. Interpretive schemes are not as fixed and static as the classical structuralist or discourse-analytical models assume; especially in struggles concerning the cultural, political, social and “gendered” identity of groups, the meanings of basic terms are up for grasp and targets of ongoing re-negotiation.
Hans-Herbert Kögler
Abstract
Understanding is a multi-dimensional journey. Understanding of self, other, cultures and the world is influenced, to some extent, by cultures where we are born and live. But understanding is not totally determined by it, and it also has the capacity to transcend its initial binding and communicate with other selves and cultures in open, critical and creative ways. Culture has transcultural dimensions within and across it. This essay explores pathways of cultural and trans-cultural understanding. Understanding has a hermeneutic dimension, but this is not just hermeneutics of texts as a textual practice. It involves walking and meditating with people, texts, cultures and traditions across multiple topoi of our world. In the present essay this is called multi-topial hermeneutics and I will argue how this is an integral part of cultural and trans-cultural understanding. It is also shown how multi-topial hermeneutics is a critical project involving movements of critique, creativity and transformations across borders. Furthermore, pathways of conversations are explored with regard to and across our roots and routes of cultural practices and philosophical traditions what is called planetary conversations here. The present paper then engages with Confucianism, Buddhism and Vedanta as an instance of multi-topial hermeneutics and planetary conversations.
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Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all omissions, emphasis and entries in square brackets in all quotations are by the author.
Here, in addition, what Hans-Herbert Kögler (2007, p. 82) writes about language is helpful: “Linguistic world disclosure, by its very nature of being a symbolic (that is, non-causal) relation to the world, contains the seeds for a creative and reflexive thematization. This potential, however, is ‘domesticated’ by numerous and pervasive social practices of normalization, standardization, and stereotypification of the experiencing self.”.
Anthropologist David Blake Willis talks about formation of Pacific Creoles in the making of creole identities of Americans and Japanese. Here what Willis writes deserves our careful consideration: “Culture for the Pacific Creoles, for transculturals and transnationals, is clearly not a continuous developmental process, nor is it a place or a state of mind. Rather, it is an arena for conscious choice, justification and representation. […] For them, the shapes of cultures are less bounded, more fluid—and more of a daily challenge. […] Pacific Creoles demonstrate an expansion of the concepts of identity and loyalty that are critical if we wish to see transition to a humane world system. For them national identity is less important than what can be called a transcultural Creole identity: they are more than simply in the world—they are with the world.” (Willis 2001, p. 200).
Godrej (2009, p. 141) also presents us with important additional thoughts here: “However, the phenomenological method, while rightly recognizing objectivism to be misguided, also raises a potential problem for the comparative political theorist. It asserts that the text and its interpreter are already bonded to one another because the subject has some ‘‘prejudices’’—understood, in the Gadamerian sense, as presuppositions based on immersion within the concepts and categories of our own tradition—about the object she encounters. And, approached in the right way, this presupposition aids us in making sense of a text. Thus the interpreter’s subjectivity is brought into focus as unavoidably important, rather than something to be repressed or battled in the quest for a mythical ‘‘objectivity.’’ The danger here is that the interpreter’s subjectivity, when tied to her immersion in her own tradition, might lead her to misunderstand a text from another tradition.”.
This can open up further dialogues among the works and thoughts of Raimon Panikkar, Piet Strydom and Hans-Herbert Kögler.
It is helpful to explore further the link between my proposed path of “foot working” and “on-foot-meditating” (see further down below in the text) hermeneutics with Heidegger pointing to a hermeneutics of facticity. Here we J. L. Mehta’s following creative interpretation of Heidegger is helpful: “Even in his earliest lectures, long before Being and Time, Heidegger conceived the main task of phenomenology [as understanding] how our factual life as actually experienced hides depth which its spontaneous self-explicating activity must bring to light [..] [For Heidegger, for this] a way must be found to eliminate the baggage of traditional ontology and to interpret factual life afresh by means of a “hermeneutics of facticity”, as Heidegger called it […].” (Mehta 2004, p. 239–240).
Here the following remark by Ingold and Vergunst (2016, p. 2) deserves our careful consideration: “A way of walking, for example, does not merely express thoughts and feelings that have already been imparted through an education in cultural precepts and properties. It is itself a way of thinking and feeling, through which, in the practice of pedestrian movement these cultural forms are continually generated. But could we not also put this proposition in reverse, to argue that thinking and feeling are ways of walking?”.
Jaina tradition refers to Anekantavada, multiple perspectives of Truth. On that basis I talk about Anekantapatha, multiple paths of Truth.
Marotha (2009, p. 280) makes an interesting remark here: “In cross-cultural encounters the anticipation of meaning leads to boundary constructing processes in which the self and the other are equally involved in the construction of meaning. However, when cross-cultural encounters are unequal and based upon a power relationship then the anticipation of meaning on the part of dominant self becomes the standard with which meaning and understanding are constructed.”.
What Kögler (2014, p. 277) writes here is helpful: “The core idea of such a “critical hermeneutics of self-displacement” can be expressed in conceptual contrast to the principle of rational assimilation that I sketched above. If it were possible to understand differently situated agents without assimilating their views to ours, we could then employ the hermeneutic understanding of such views to look at ourselves from their perspective and thereby achieve a relative outsider position vis-á-vis our own taken-for-granted interpretive schemes. Inasmuch as many of our usual beliefs and assumptions are intertwined with power relations, such a hermeneutics would, by displacing our interpretive schemes, contribute to a reflexive self-distanciation from our power-shaped social agency. This hermeneutic project would thus allow for the reflexive reassessment of our situation in order to achieve a higher degree of self-empowered agency and autonomy. Also, interpretive practices in the human and social sciences would support the normative project of reflexive self-determination.”.
Here, Marotha (2009, p. 277) suggests that in hermeneutic encounters outsiders and strangers “dialectically adopt a frame of mind characterized as a ‘subjective objectivity’ which involves both remote and near, detached and involved, indifferent and concerned”. Marotha here refers to the work of sociologist Robert Park and his conception of a hybrid self-emerging from cross-cultural encounter which involves a more complex and meaningful mode of understanding. He also discusses the works of Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman and Peter Pels (a contemporary Dutch anthropologist) where “social epistemology of stranger” gives rise to a “third position” (Marotha 2009, p. 278). We can relate to such a “third position” to transpositional subject-objectivity of participants in hermeneutic meetings and encounters.
According to de Sousa Santos (2014), Antonio Gramsci also employed a mode of “living philology.”.
Here Bruce Janz also tells us that Paul Ricoeur uses “hermeneutics as a tool for the excavation of philosophical thought within culture” (Janz 2015, p. 483).
Here, what Bruce Janz writes in his essay “Hermeneutics and Intercultural Understanding” deserves careful consideration: “The central question is that of how existence might be exercised in the face of pervasive violence” (Janz 2015, p. 482).
I use Truth in the capital here to point to the fact that such a Truth is not just relative, but it cuts across our varieties of relative manifestations of it and has a demand quality to it to adhere to and to follow in our lives.
For example, Foucault (2011) writes: “[P]airhesia is the courage of the truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor’s courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.” (Foucault 2011, p. 13).
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I am grateful to Hans-Herbert Kögler (University of North Florida) and David Bartosch (Beijing Foreign Studies University) for their helpful comments and suggestions
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Giri, A.K. Cultural understanding: multi-topial hermeneutics, planetary conversations and dialogues with Confucianism and Vedanta. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 8, 83–102 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-021-00212-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-021-00212-6