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Abstract
The paper begins to elaborate an interpretative framework that takes account of the intercultural element of the human condition in-the-world. It situates itself within an emergent and diverse current of thought that emphasises the intercultural context of the recent ‘cultural turn’. Recent developments within phenomenological – and post-phenomenological – currents that emphasise cultural articulations of the world horizon, the ‘uncanniness of the alien’ or ‘the heterogeneity of the intercultural’ offer a range of important insights into this problematic. The paper turns to Johann P. Arnason's historical phenomenological investigations of the world horizon as a promising starting point. For Arnason, interculturality is an inescapable dimension of the world and the phenomenal field; he elaborates it along relational and interactive lines as part of his emphasis on the trans-subjective – that is, cultural – level of analysis. The paper reconstructs five overlapping approaches to the problematic of the intercultural in Arnason's thought.
Notes
1. For present purposes, the focus will be on the alien imaginary, rather than on the figure of ‘the stranger’, which is more common in the sociological literature, or the spectre of ‘the other’, as with much philosophical literature. For convenience, I will refer to ‘strangeness’, but the polysemy of its meanings – for example, alienness, otherness, etc. should be kept in mind.
2. The concept of ‘interculturality’ (or its derivatives) is not included in the recent Wörterbuch der phänomenologischen Begriffe, for instance.
3. These conceptual couplets are seen to be too tainted with a ‘comparative’ and ultimately ‘Western-centric’ approach. See also, CitationFuchs.
4. On Nietzsche's hermeneutical philosophy, see CitationFigl.
5. The ‘unfinished dialogue’ between Weber and Merleau-Ponty remains an important thematic in CitationArnason's thought. See, for example, Praxis; “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber”; Civilizations, “Merleau-Ponty and the Meaning of Civilizations”.
6. The post-phenomenological field is particularly heterogeneous. Arnason's version – and his reconstruction of the field – is very different to the perhaps best-known representative of post-phenomenological currents, Don Ihde, who draws extensively on postmodernist sources.
7. For further discussion of Arnason's culturological approach, see CitationAdams.
8. Integral to this is what Castoriadis calls the ‘defunctionalisation’ of the imagination, which, as opposed to other living beings, does not operate in a functional closure (cf. Castoriadis Imaginary Institution of Society especially Chapter 6).
9. For further discussion, see, for example, Waldenfels (“Der Primat der Einbildungskraft”), CitationCiaramelli and CitationDescombes.
10. Castoriadis argues that the imagination is the ‘other’ of reason (Imaginary Institution of Society especially Chapter 5).
11. Arnason does use this schema. Instead he speaks of the classical past as ‘external’ to modernity.
12. Arnason does not limit his analysis to civilisational mutually interactive civilisational signatures, but stresses the importance of intercivilisational encounters – and ensuing analysis – at political and economic levels as well.
13. The idea of ‘encounter’ articulates a mode of being in the world as variously overlapping aspects of interpretation, creation and interrogation in shifting historical configurations and modes of social doing.
14. Arnason draws on this quotation by Whitehead in a paper on Patočka, as well as the epigraph to his 2003 book, Civilizations in Dispute.