Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermeneutics

http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.85.3.500 - Vince Marotta - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 6:48:45 PM - Deakin University IP Address:139.132.1.133

5 0 0 l et t er s i n ca n a d a 2 0 14 Ming Xie, ed. The Agon of Interpretations: Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermeneutics. University of Toronto Press. vii, 326. $65.00 The intercultural turn in the social sciences and humanities has focused on the social, political, and economic conditions required for genuine cross-cultural dialogue to occur. The discourse on interculturalism has been confined to policy responses with little analysis on the conceptual and philosophical issues underlying interpretation and understanding across cultures. This edited volume provides a rigorous intercultural account of such issues. It moves beyond the intracultural construction of meaning—the major concern of traditional hermeneutics—to a multifaceted conception of critical intercultural hermeneutics that both reveals and transcends western/non-western binary thinking. Drawing on various philosophical traditions and writers, the first part of the edited collection addresses the intercultural problematic. Ian Angus investigates the difference between the phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to tradition and their role in formulating intercultural understanding. He articulates a non-universalistic philosophy that is grounded in both intercultural learning and intercultural critique. Such a philosophy maintains difference while overcoming foreignness. The difference between phenomenology and hermeneutics is blurred in Jean Grondin’s chapter on the affinities and differences between HansGeorg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Through this insightful and longoverdue comparison, Grondin perceptively re-examines the nature of the historical condition of knowledge and its relationship to relativism, nihilism, agency, language, and the constitution of being. Through a detailed and rigorous exploration of the work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocˇka, Cornelius Castoriadis, Johann P. Arnason, and Plato, Suzi Adams formulates a ‘‘hermeneutics of the intercultural’’ that is trans-subjective rather than intersubjective. In Bermjard Waldenfels’s attempt to blur intercultural borders, he investigates the role of comparisons in intercultural understanding. To compare involves learning to see ourselves through foreign eyes, but this assumes, as Waldenfels points out, that the cultures we are comparing are distinct and fully formed. If cultures are instead entwined and bound to one another, then what is intercultural is already a part of the intracultural. Radhakrishnan re-examines the relationship between the intracultural and intercultural and reveals that power plays a more prominent role in intercultural hermeneutics. Drawing on Gandhi’s political and social ideas, he argues that the so-called openness of hermeneutics is circumscribed when crosscultural encounters are immersed in epistemic violence. Most of the chapters in Part Two attempt to overcome this epistemic violence. Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy reinterprets the exoticism, realism, and essentialism that are at the heart of the orientalist university of toronto quarterly, volume 85, number 3, summer 2016 6 university of toronto press doi: 10.3138/utq.85.3.500

http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.85.3.500 - Vince Marotta - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 6:48:45 PM - Deakin University IP Address:139.132.1.133

h u m a n i t i e s 5 01 discourse. Zhang Longxi’s essay questions the claims of subjectivism and relativism directed at Gadamer’s hermeneutics and argues that, for Gadamer, not all understandings and interpretations are equally valid. Longxi’s critical hermeneutic demonstrates the intercultural misconceptions and misunderstandings that are embedded in East-West crosscultural studies where ‘‘the East’’ and ‘‘the West’’ are treated as fixed categories. Hans-Georg Moeller’s systems theory approach also critiques binary thinking by questioning the fundamentalism evident in both the universalist (western human rights discourse) and cultural relativist (Islamic self-assertion discourse) positions. David B. Wong’s critical intercultural hermeneutics contends that in order to understand others we need to interpret others as being like us but also different. Drawing on Chinese thought, Wong illustrates how we can locate a common world with common responses in which the Other is not treated as a passive object of interpretation. Part Three begins with Mihai Spariosu’s exploration of the underlying principles and practices of a global intercultural hermeneutics. The role of a global intercultural hermeneutics is to become mindful of the complicated, interrelated, and hidden interconnections of our global reality and to be critical of the ‘‘critical thinking’’ underlying the western intellectual tradition. Lawrence K. Schmidt’s chapter investigates the role of legitimate and illegitimate prejudgments (prejudices) within Gadamer’s notion of tradition and maintains that, for Gadamer, the inherited prejudgments that constitute tradition are not always legitimate. Thus, the authority of tradition is not absolute but changes according to the role of distance and otherness in the interpretative process. As an example of intercultural hermeneutics, Richard Shusterman and Wojciech Małecki succinctly examine the relationship between pragmatism and hermeneutics. Adopting a pragmatic lens, they demonstrate that critical intercultural hermeneutics is not a flawless method because intercultural encounters may lead to the rejection of the Other’s perspective for its very otherness. Lorenzo Simpson’s chapter identifies the conditions for genuine understanding of other cultural formations that move beyond Enlightenment universalism and postmodern responses to difference. His third way treats cultures as contested landscapes in which normative disagreements can be analysed as intracultural conflicts over social and cultural practices. The last chapter, by Hans-Herbert Ko¨gler, uses the case study of ‘‘female excision/genital mutilation’’ to explore the relevance of three hermeneutic perspectives: empathetic, dialogical, and ideology-critical standpoints. By combining the insights of all three standpoints, Ko¨gler foregrounds the impact of power in understanding oneself and the Other. This edited volume provides us with a dense and detailed examination of critical intercultural hermeneutics. It incorporates a view of agon that focuses on the contestation over views and interpretations and adopts a university of toronto quarterly, volume 85, number 3, summer 2016 6 university of toronto press doi: 10.3138/utq.85.3.500

http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.85.3.500 - Vince Marotta - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 6:48:45 PM - Deakin University IP Address:139.132.1.133

5 0 2 l et t er s i n ca n a d a 2 0 14 notion of the critical that acknowledges our partial and incomplete view of the reality. Such a stance is more likely to respect and engage the Other’s view. The text has shed light on the nature of the intercultural interpretative process that has been missing in the discourse on interculturalism in Europe. Vince Marotta, Department of Sociology, Deakin University

Ardis B. Collins. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles. McGill-Queen’s University Press. xvi, 488. $95.00 Around the mid-twentieth century, revivals of scholarly interest in Hegel began to take place in a number of countries, not least in Canada, which has made an outsized contribution to the gradual process of restoring Hegel’s philosophy to a central place in the canon. This multinational effort has reached a peak of intensity over the last couple of decades, with major studies of Hegel appearing at frequent intervals from many quarters, based on impressively close and exhaustive readings of the original texts, which have themselves been painstakingly revised in a new Gesammelte Werke. The subtitle of Ardis B. Collins’s work, The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles, refers to a nested complex of several issues. In the most basic terms, the issue is simply, what is the relation of the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic? The latter work spells out the content of philosophical science, or knowledge proper, in terms of pure thought thinking itself, beginning with the most minimal possible (and necessary?) standpoint of ‘‘Pure Being.’’ This thought-object is allowed to develop freely in accordance with its own inherent, necessary dynamic, revealing the ultimate structure of rationality through an autonomous process of dialectical self-development. The unfolding does not cease until it eventuates in the identity-in-difference of thought and being in the Absolute Idea, having revealed the structure of rationality common to both. But does one adopt the initial standpoint of Pure Being simply as a hypothesis, hoping that it may ultimately lead to the comprehension of actuality? Or can that starting point be justified in some way as necessary? If such a justification is possible, it must be found as the outcome of the argument of the Phenomenology, which deals with the realm of ordinary conscious experience. On the title page of the first edition Hegel

university of toronto quarterly, volume 85, number 3, summer 2016 6 university of toronto press doi: 10.3138/utq.85.3.502