Asian-Arab philosophical dialogues on globalization, democracy ...

across them, it fails to realize our potential for growth. Not understanding how to create new syntheses,
it merely entrenches our differences. 63
Difference is a means of forward movement in a dialogical world. Respecting our differences does not
mean regarding them as sacrosanct. Rather, it means employing them as vehicles for change. We show
respect for our differences when we explore them together in order to discover what is to be said for
alternative possibilities and different points of view. This includes learning to use our disagreements
as occasions for gaining a better appreciation of both the potentials and the limitations of our present
convictions. It involves building upon each other’s ideas. It means trying to achieve a more inclusive
view. Showing respect for differences also means moving away from habitually seeing ourselves as
advocates of firmly established positions. It includes learning to change our minds in response to
evidence and argument. It means bouncing off each other in order to discover fresh possibilities, some
of which may hold out a far greater promise than the certitudes under which we presently labour. It
involves a preparedness to explore our differences together in the spirit of open inquiry, and thereby to
discover the extent of our ignorance. This is the path to wisdom that Socrates began to mark out.
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Asia-<strong>Arab</strong> Philosophical Dialogues on Globalization, Democracy and Human Rights
In comparison with a dialogical world the post-modern condition is a tawdry thing. Dialogue makes all
the difference between tolerating our diversity and working with it. Between fixing on our differences
and creating new syntheses. Between papering over conflicts and using them creatively. Between
holding to disparate ideas and seeking a wider field of vision. Between living with old fears and going
forward with fresh hope.
63 Nearly forty years ago, Robert Paul Wolff criticized pluralism in America in The Poverty of Liberalism. Beacon Press
(1968). He argued that there was a pressing need to “give up the image of society as a battleground of competing
groups and [to] formulate an ideal of society more exalted than the mere acceptance of opposed interests and
diverse customs” (p. 160). Wolff went on to sketch a philosophy of community which centered on the idea of
‘rational community’. By this he meant “an activity, an experience, a reciprocity of consciousness among morally
and politically equal rational agents who freely come together and deliberate with one another for the purpose of
concerting their wills in the positing of collective goals and in the performance of common actions” (p. 192). The
dialogical society is in this sense a kind of rational community.