Abstract
In this chapter we present the sketch of a global social theory that overcomes the paralyzing opposition between ethnocentrism and relativism by making the cultural situatedness of theory construction its starting point. Avoiding the master-narratives of either a developmental or a transcendental grounding, we aim to reconstruct the agentive resources that allow individual subjects to position themselves critically and reflexively within their cultural and social contexts. Cultural worlds thus emerge as the localized inescapable horizons from within which cultural critique necessarily emerges. Our global social theory develops its formal framework by first grounding itself in hermeneutics, followed by developing an account of how linguistically mediated conceptual schemes pre-structure intercultural dialogue, to eventually arrive at three dimensions of self-reflexivity that are entailed in all meaning-constitution: existential self-reflexivity, dialogical other-reflexivity, and holistic world-reflexivity. We probe our account by engaging Chinese thought and ethics vis-à-vis the relation between self, other, and world-embeddedness. Neo-Confucianism raises concerns vis-à-vis the distinction between social normativity and cosmological ontology, but promises multiple pathways of non-Western modes of conceptualizing the crucial relation between self and being. Irreducible self-reflexivity, egalitarian self-other relations, and interpretive self-awareness present universal marks of our otherwise thoroughly contextual and cultural practices of global self-understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
If on that basis the prospects of relativism are not accepted, say because we generally hold on to our beliefs and assumptions even if they lack a universalist foundation (as, say, Rorty would argue), we could then return to an assertive ethnocentrism, in which we simply claim superiority of our values regardless of whether they are universal. Rorty termed this position “frank ethnocentrism.” For reasons that will become clear, we aim to avoid such a conclusion to the dilemma between ethnocentrism and relativism.
- 2.
To be clear: The uniqueness of such a background may not be construed so as to make impossible a shared understanding about basic issues. For arguments that have been well established in the philosophy of language and philosophical semantics, the idea of closed conceptual schemes that are nevertheless linguistically mediated and function as conceptual schemes, is untenable. Yet this essential openness does not devalue the idea of conceptually distinct background understandings that lead to vastly different conceptions of how something is to be understood. What does need to be taken into account is the reflexive awareness that the basic conceptions that define one’s approach are tacitly informed by preconceptions and practices that are shared in the initial contexts of concept formation.
- 3.
For a sophisticated approach that defends a reformed and enlightened developmental approach, one which is highly reflective of its historical affiliation with ethnocentric power-defined perspectives in a colonial/post-colonial setting, see Thomas McCarthy (2009). See Lorenzo Simpson (2014, 263) for an alternative approach, for whom the “resources for critique can be unearthed when careful attention is paid to the autonomously voiced preferences and concerns of those local agents who are affected by such practices—that is, how the critical potential of these resources can be redeemed independently of any one-sided imposition of ‘Western’ standards.” Our project aims to prepare a general framework of global social theory that similarly avoids “one-sided” Western standards and yet allows for the unleashing of the resources for social (self-)critique.
- 4.
For a good introduction to this criticism and the ensuing debate concerning “hermeneutics and the critique of ideology,” see the essays by Habermas, Gadamer, and Ricoeur in Ormiston and Schrift (1990).
- 5.
Gadamer’s dialogical approach, whose conception of a necessary intertwinement of questions on meaning and validity, or of the sense of a text and its subject matter (die Sache selbst), are endorsed by Habermas as an important step towards an intersubjective understanding of social research; Habermas’ own later model of communicative action owes its informal structure of validity oriented discourse to no small degree to this core hermeneutic insight (Habermas 1983; Habermas 1988). Tradition, as the linguistically mediated and holistic background of understanding, becomes the lifeworld as the taken-for-granted background within which agents “always already” understand themselves, and against which they coordinate their action plans via either communicate or strategic actions. See also Kögler (1999).
- 6.
For an inspiring and suggestive account of how this debate matters in a discussion of Neo-Confucianism and its relation to tradition, see Wright (2015).
- 7.
A philosophical seminar where such texts are read shows that critical objections to a text are part of reinventing and reproducing the tradition, while internal coherence is provided by the issues and background assumptions that are articulated in the back and forth with the text. Yet having a text internally disclosed and discussed like this, also opens up the reconstruction of its basic assumptions vis-à-vis cultural and social environments. So the distance that requires our re-ignition of a text’s (or context’s) possible truth brings out the resources to objectify basic assumptions and pair them with culturally prevalent ideological premises, like the inferior ontological status of women and slaves, the lack of a universal conception of human identity, and so on.
- 8.
Important examples of a hermeneutic critique of the Cartesian conception of mind and understanding are found in Heidegger’s critique and deconstruction of Descartes (Heidegger [1927] 1962; Heidegger 1999); Gadamer’s critique of Dilthey deals with the continued consequences of Cartesianism in terms of an objectivistic conception of the human sciences (Gadamer 1989); similarly Habermas’ early attack on positivism in Knowledge and Human Interest (Habermas 1971) is a central document in this regard; more recently, see Dreyfus and Taylor (2015).
- 9.
We will show how the situated reflexivity that we just sketched can be internally differentiated into several distinct ways of immanent social criticism, to distanciate ourselves from one’s taken-for-granted traditional pre-assumptions. Going through these different options will present a systematic account of how intercultural dialogue about basic concepts and ideas figures within the conceptual profile of a global (and non-ethnocentric) critical theory. In the subsequent section we engage in a concrete intercultural interpretation offering up alternative visions of core concepts of situated agency, including the self and nature, in order to spur on such an interculturally mediated project of theory building. See also Kögler (1997).
- 10.
Regarding the unfamiliarity with China among critical theorists belonging to the tradition of the Frankfurt School, see, for instance, Fabian Heubel’s study “Transkulturelle Kritik und die Chinesische Moderne. Zwischen Frankfurter Schule und Neokonfuzianismus,” which begins with the question: “What does Critical Theory know about China, traditional Chinese Culture, or even about modern Chinese thought? Almost nothing” (Heubel 2009, p. 43) [translation by Ľubomír Dunaj, original in German].
- 11.
- 12.
With regard to the issue of self in China, cf., for instance, Shun and Wong (2004). Cf., for example, some research activities of Melissa S. Williams or Marek Hrubec.
- 13.
Although Egon Bondy never declared his inclination to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, if by critical theorist is meant anyone who attempts to contribute theoretically to a solution through a critique of undesirable developments that might help to avoid problematic future scenarios, then maybe Bondy added to this tradition of thinking. Not to mention that since members of the Institute for Social Research fled from Frankfurt, Germany, after Nazi persecution to the USA, there are many academic centers in which critical theory developed. According to the definition of critical theory in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Bondy belongs to critical theory in the broader sense, cf. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/.
- 14.
Cf. Benjamin B. Page’s introduction to the English translation of Consolation of Ontology (2001, p. X), which is a very helpful way in to Bondy’s philosophy.
- 15.
Dao De Jing is a classical Chinese text that, along with the book Zhuangzi, serves as a fundamental resource for both philosophical and religious Daoism, which ha strongly influenced other schools, such as Legalism, Confucianism, and Chinese Buddhism.
- 16.
Of course, we are aware of the ways in which the idea of social harmony can be misused in contemporary China, or has been misused in history, as we will clearly state in our conclusion. Stephen C. Angle reminds us that the word harmony can be also understand negatively today: “in current Chinese slang, to ‘be harmonized’ can mean to be disappeared by agents of the government” (Angle 2012, p. 147). Our aim is not the advocacy of contemporary Chinese state policy. We would like to stress, however, that the Chinese government in not completely lacking in legitimacy. As Yasauki Onuma points out, while some Asian regimes (including China) indeed suppress the voices of some intellectuals and citizens, who demand greater respect for basic freedoms and liberties, this does not mean that human-rights activists in those countries represent the will of all citizens (Onuma 1999, 105). Moreover, he states that those regimes will slowly modify themselves in accordance with more “Western standards.” But it is necessary to understand all social and political movements in their proper historical context. Onuma concludes that one of the main arguments of East Asian residents against Western proponents of human rights is that contemporary Western countries, especially the USA, suffer from many social problems, such as criminality and drugs, as well as the general degradation of family and communities. They argue, with some plausibility, that these negative aspects of Western societies could be consequences of an exaggerated legalism and individualism, which are important components of the ideal of human rights (Onuma 1999, p. 107).
- 17.
Cf. Fairbank and Goldman (2006, pp. 17–23).
- 18.
Cf. Fairbank and Goldman (2006, pp. 14–17).
- 19.
For a contemporary attempt at cosmological determinism cf. Qing (2013).
- 20.
To their credit, they acknowledge this deficiency in relation to many points of their interpretations (Bondy 2009, p. 248).
- 21.
This is similar, for instance, to François Jullien’s interpretation of The Book of Changes (Jullien 2011).
- 22.
Another reason (beside his orthodox Marxist residues), is that until his death, he maintained a very strong skepticism of liberal democracy, especially after experiences with economic transformation in post-socialist countries after 1989, as well as experiences with US imperial politics after the end of Cold War. While Čarnogurská shared Bondy’s skepticism of democracy, it was also connected—rather paradoxically, since she attempts to develop a dynamical ontology—with a strong conservativism in political issues.
- 23.
They do not always make the difference clear since they often translate the adjectives Daoist or Neo-Confucian simply with the adjective Chinese.
- 24.
- 25.
Egon Bondy had stressed the potential of Zhuangzi for the development of a non-atomist individuality (1993, pp. 95–97). Indeed, Bondy saw one of the most promising aspects of the holistic feature of Chinese philosophy as a tool for overcoming the negative impacts of a hypertrophic subjectivity (2009, pp. 332–333).
- 26.
We cannot enter into Heubel’s defence of contemporary Chinese research in Zhuangzi, where he states that interpretations of the Zhuangzi within contemporary Chinese philosophy seems to create such conditions, in which the teachings of cultivation and energetic transformation is referring to Zhuangzi, but at the same time with appreciation for Zhuangzi’s recognition of discontinuity and plurality (Heubel 2016, p. 127).
- 27.
The self’s ontological being is similarly not based on any autonomous sense of self, on a self-contained realm of meaning. Rather, the self is, prior to even developing a self as a distinct and reflectively self-objectifying phenomenon, entailed in trans-subjective meaning acts that always already disclose a meaning as such-and-such in the context of “my relation to that of the other.” In immediate acts of emotional disclosure, in the recognition of an event as an action, and in the understanding of self-evident thoughts and expressions, I always find myself situated in a context of meaning (Bedeutungszusammenhang) that encompasses me and another vis-à-vis some shared meaning in some context. The self is capable of differentiating itself as an invaluable and insurmountable reference (Bezugspunkt) within such a context, but is never (and needlessly) there “before” or “apart from” such a context.
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Kögler, HH., Dunaj, Ľ. (2018). Beyond Ethnocentrism: Towards a Global Social Theory. In: Giri, A. (eds) Social Theory and Asian Dialogues. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7095-2_5
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