Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

100
Recognising Beauty : On The Intercultural Dialogue In Philosophy - Mahlete-Tsige Getachew
conventionally attractive instead of celebrating or
propagating the beauty already available to them.
What should be obvious – and what is obvious in
Morrison's novel – is that this is as much a story about
money and power as it is about preconceptions and
paradigms of beauty. For example, the celebrated
migration of intellectuals to the West – the "brain drain" to
wealthier, more politically stable countries – is not a
philosophical problem per se but a problem that also
afflicts philosophy. But even if we, as philosophers, cannot
prevent the large-scale inequities and pressures, we can
choose to avoid complicity with these inequalities in our
own sphere of activity, and we can still act to prevent the
particular loss of particular philosophical beauties.
3. Intra-cultural philosophy
So far I have discussed what the intercultural dialogue in
philosophy cannot or should not be. I would now like to
comment, briefly, on what a good intercultural dialogue,
where diverse manifestations of beauty are admired and
created, might look like.
The first suggestion is that we teach, and allude to,
philosophy's different cultures in tandem and not in
parallel; for example an undergraduate course or an
academic research paper in ethics should be just as likely
to draw on work by Kant or MacKinnon or Gyekye or
Levinas. Honneth has argued that a condition for
recognition is that one contributes to a community's goal: it
is important that marginalised philosophical cultures are
given an opportunity to contribute to philosophy's goal, and
just as important that this contribution is recognised with
contributions from other sources.
The second suggestion is that we must accept that
cultures may be incommensurable – that in addition to
offering different answers to the same question, different
contributions to the same goals, they may in fact be
answering different questions, a startling familyresemblance
series of questions. Rather than just
selecting the aspects of another culture that are useful to
the particular question our dominant culture has chosen,
we must instead be willing to face the wider metaphilosophical
context and reconsider our sense of what
philosophy's questions and goals might rightly be.
I suspect that these suggestions will have the effect
of creating, more than anything else, an intra-cultural
dialogue. Rather than being a series of isolated and
discrete cultures, philosophy will encompass conflicting or
even incommensurable intellectual positions, layers of
debate and discussion, a free and consistently surprising
intermingling of ideas and arguments; in short, there will be
a single philosophical culture characterised only by its
richness and flexibility. Surely this is a goal desirable to all
of philosophy's sub-cultures? I believe it is, and I believe
that proof of its manifestation will be when we no longer
need to use the phrase "intercultural dialogue".
References
Honneth, Axel 1995 (transl. Joel Anderson) The Struggle For
Recognition : The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Polity Press:
Cambridge.
Morrison, Toni 1970 The Bluest Eye Vintage Books: New York
Nussbaum, Martha 1997 Cultivating Humanity: A Classical
Defence of Reform in Liberal Education Harvard University Press:
Massachusetts
Said, Edward 1978 Orientalism Vintage Books: New York
Taylor, Charles 1991 The Ethics of Authenticity Harvard University
Press: Massachusetts