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AIPPh Documentation Leusden 2009
(© Münnix 2003, 181)
Perspectivism has often been under suspicion to be inevitably relativistic. But as we see,
this is not necessarily the case. What has to be discussed in intercultural philosophy
however – beside other important topics - are issues of truth and tolerance and ways of
thinking. (see Münnix 2003)
5. Understanding Otherness: “Intercomprehension”
Are we able to understand differences not only about the identity of humans but also
about the cosmos they live in? Misunderstandings are normal, but may be dangerous.
Taking different perspectives from one’s own habits of seeing the world may not be as
easy as described above.
Thomas Nagel’s famous essay on what it may be like to be a bat illustrates that even if
we can describe every brain process of bats scientifically, we will never know what it is
like to be a bat from the inside. The inner subjective side of consciousness will never be
reached from outside, other minds are not fully accessible. There are similarities, but
also enough differences which will remain foreign. And we often tend to project our own
categories and interpretation schemes into the foreign consciousness, which may even
cause greater misunderstandings.
Let me give three examples:
1. A historical anecdote, the so-called “Valladolid controversy” (Latour, in Robertson-von
Trotha, 2007, 44f) shows clearly that it is naive and ethnocentric to assume that
enemies or people from different cultures agree in baseline principles: The Spanish
conquistadores held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being
saved (they might habe been something like wild animals). (In his essay about
inhabitants of the New World, who were even supposed to be cannibals, Montaigne
ironicaclly describes uncivilized people as those who do not wear breeches at all!).
On the other side Indians were engaged in a no less important debate; namely whether
or not Spaniards had bodies or were some sort of spriritual beings - like Gods. “It was
not to decide whether Spaniards had souls, so much was obvious. In their cosmos all
entities share the same fundmantal organisation: A licuri palm, a peccary, a priranha,
the macaw: Each has a soul, a language, and a family life modelled on the pattern of
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