Intercultural Understanding After Wittgenstein

By Chon Tejedor

This volume addresses, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the philosophical question of how to understand other cultures. It develops an approach to this question that emphasizes the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects, bringing into conversation Wittgensteinian and other cultural philosophical traditions, notably from Japan, China, India and the West-African Yoruba communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839987847

Book preview

Intercultural Understanding after Wittgenstein

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein publishes new and classic works on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book series aims to bring Wittgenstein’s thought into the mainstream by highlighting its relevance to 21st century concerns. Titles include original monographs, themed edited volumes, forgotten classics, biographical works and books intended to introduce Wittgenstein to the general public. The series is published in association with the British Wittgenstein Society.

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein sets out to put in place whatever measures may emerge as necessary in order to carry out the editorial selection process purely on merit and to counter bias on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and other characteristics protected by law. These measures include subscribing to the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) Good Practice Scheme.

Series Editor

Constantine Sandis – University of Hertfordshire, UK

Forthcoming Titles in the Series

Normativity, Meaning and Philosophy: Essays on Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein on Other Minds

Intercultural Understanding after Wittgenstein

Edited by Carla Carmona, David Pérez-Chico and Chon Tejedor

Anthem Press

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Contents

Introduction

Index

Introduction¹

This volume aims to address, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the following philosophical question: ‘How are we to understand other cultures?’ (hereafter, the question of intercultural understanding). In so doing, it brings into conversation Wittgensteinian and other cultural and philosophical traditions, stemming notably from Japan, China, the West African Yoruba people or India. The book is therefore not just about intercultural understanding; it also brings together, under the umbrella of Wittgensteinian philosophy, a plurality of cultural voices and philosophical cultures.

We set out to develop an approach to addressing the question of intercultural understanding that emphasizes the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects. The Wittgensteinian tradition – spanning not only Ludwig Wittgenstein’s own corpus but also the work of other prominent and up-and-coming philosophers directly influenced by Wittgenstein – is ideally suited to this task. The contributions to this volume build on a wealth of Wittgensteinian strategies and methodologies to develop an imaginative, fresh portfolio of philosophical responses to the intercultural question, as well as strategies to address the special challenges it poses. The book is divided into two parts, each of which includes six chapters. Part I presents a series of new proposals on how best to model intercultural understanding after Wittgenstein. Part II examines a new set of challenges to intercultural understanding, stemming from relativism, the philosophy of disagreement and the problem of cultural exclusion, among others.

Constantine Sandis launches Part I with ‘Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-Reading)’. In this chapter, Sandis draws on the analogy with historical understanding to argue that understanding contemporary cultures that may appear alien to us involves a form of thinking with that does not require any agreement in opinion but, instead, a parallel sharing of thought processes. This idea is explored in relation to recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Drawing partly from Wittgenstein and Clifford Geertz, Sandis suggests that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather of conceptual immersion.

Chon Tejedor, in ‘Intercultural Understanding, Epistemic Interaction and Polyphonic Cultures’, revisits three central Wittgensteinian views: philosophy understood as an activity of interactively engaging with a real or imaginary interlocutor; nonsense as self-stultification; and perspicuous representation. She argues that it is the former two perspectives – interactional engagement and nonsense as self-stultification – that are, in fact, most useful in elucidating the question of intercultural understanding. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice and José Medina’s work on epistemic resistance, Tejedor argues that privileging perspicuous representation, when this is understood as the unilateral, one-directional mapping of concepts and practices, can actively distort the process of understanding between polyphonic cultures.

Carla Carmona and Neftalí Villanueva, in ‘Situated Judgement as a New Model for Intercultural Communication’, argue for a new model of intercultural understanding in contemporary liberal societies, one that emphasizes that this form of understanding is a common, rather than an exceptional, phenomenon. The chapter aims to construct a genuine intercultural normativity by questioning the assumption that meaningful communication is an activity that either presupposes a common frame of reference or aims to establish one. From this, Carmona and Villanueva continue to examine the notion of situated judgement through a series of de-idealized examples of intercultural communication.

Alice Morelli, in ‘Seeing Differently, Behaving Differently. Intercultural Understanding between Ethics and Aesthetics’, examines Wittgenstein’s morphological-comparative method and its usefulness in understanding other conceptual systems and cultures. She argues that intercultural understanding is an ethical process that is achieved through an aesthetic tool, akin to the sharpening of the eye. Morelli discusses this idea within the context of Wittgenstein’s view that ethics is intimately connected to aesthetics, which, she suggests, must be incorporated into the very process of conceptual clarification through the education of a related intercultural sensibility.

Eran Guter, in ‘Musicking as Knowing Human Beings’, aims to illustrate that Wittgenstein’s thinking about and with music is a philosophical subject matter in its own right, which can help to elucidate the question of intercultural understanding through its emphasis on the notion of Menschenkenntnis: An interpersonal, immediate and experienced form of knowledge that is, in fact, a skill or an ability – a form of knowing how. For Wittgenstein, music affords a genuine locus – a myriad of natural, straightforward instructive occasions and exemplars – for this kind of knowledge of human beings.

Curie Virág, in ‘Intercultural Understanding and the Possibility of Cross-Cultural Philosophy: Wittgensteinian and Zhuangzian Perspectives’, develops a cross-cultural philosophical methodology for engaging with Wittgensteinian approaches to intercultural understanding. She argues that the dominant Wittgensteinian critiques of rationality and epistemological practices can be further illuminated and deepened through the perspectivist philosophy of the early Daoist text, the Zhuangzi 莊子. Virág illustrates how that the Zhuangzi’s concern with the epistemological issues that arise from the multiplicity and diversity of perspectives, values and forms of life within which human beings are situated leads to an emphasis not only on the relativity of vantage points, but also on the possibility of knowing others through shared experience and activity.

Part II of the volume further expands the discussion of the question of intercultural understanding by considering a series of challenges stemming, in part, from relativism, the philosophy of disagreement and the problem of cultural exclusion.

Josep Corbí launches Part II with ‘Rule-Following, Unconditional Prescriptions and the Elusiveness of Intercultural Understanding’. In this chapter, he discusses two issues of intercultural understanding: relativism and exclusion. With regard to the former, he presents a transcendental argument that can take us from relativism to pluralism and enable us to develop social practices capable of providing suitable grounds for intercultural understanding, thereby avoiding relativism. With regard to the latter, his conclusion is more pessimistic, as he argues that a certain degree of exclusion is constitutive of the normativity of our very social practices. From this, it follows that a society from which exclusion has been eliminated makes no sense, and, therefore, intercultural misunderstandings are constitutive of our social practices and can be only partially and temporarily overcome or dissolved.

Sandra Laugier, in ‘Interculturality, Ordinary Language and Translation from Wittgenstein to Cavell’, first examines the concept of translation in the work of Willard Van Orman, Quine and Wittgenstein, based on which she subsequently discusses a concept of interculturality that is implicit in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Drawing on these sources, she defends, following Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Veena Das, the idea that an ordinary anthropology can provide a renewed philosophical approach to address some of the key challenges to intercultural understanding.

Sophia Miguens, in ‘Truth in Ethics and Intercultural Understanding: Cora Diamond on a Dispute between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins’, draws on Cora Diamond’s approach to ethics to address some of the challenges that relativism poses to intercultural understanding. She argues that the Wittgensteinian philosopher, here embodied by Diamond, is not, contrary to what is often assumed, an ethical and cultural relativist. In Diamond’s view, the pluralism of language games of the Philosophical Investigations does not result in incommensurable language games in human cultures, of which moral language games would be one case in particular. To elucidate this idea, she draws on an influential debate between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins on relativism and cognitivism.

Patrice Haynes, in ‘Beyond Contemplation: On Decolonizing Philosophy of Religion and Thinking with Indigenous Ontologies’, discusses the challenge posed to intercultural understanding by the need to diversify the philosophy of religion and extract it from its Eurocentric Christian-centred approach. By critically engaging with Mikel Burley’s religious pluralism and D.Z. Phillips’ concept of contemplative religion, she aims to develop an alternative approach to intercultural understanding, drawing partly on West African epistemology and ontology, while focusing in particular on the concepts of orí (personhood) and world-making.

Meena Dhanda, in ‘Thinking with Wittgenstein on Caste-bound Morality and Caste Prejudice’, presents the case of caste prejudice in the UK-based Indian diaspora as an especially intractable challenge to intercultural understanding. She argues that conflicting interpretations of sociocultural practices associated with caste actively obstruct consensus on how to remedy this particular form of prejudice. At one extreme, caste apologists reject talk of casteism as a product of ‘colonial consciousness’, and at the other, anti-caste advocates demand statutory legal protection for victims of caste discrimination in the UK, akin to the protection offered against race discrimination. These conflicting positions hinge on the self-interested sense-making needs of a divided ‘caste world’. Bystanders outside the ‘caste world’ are thereby left in a difficult position. While some ‘neutrally’ accept caste identity on the basis of multicultural tolerance, others support criticism of little-understood social practices. Dhanda explores the case of caste prejudice using the Wittgensteinian concept of ‘shared practices’ and considers two internal critiques of inherited traditions exemplified in the debate between B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) on understanding the caste system.

Gilad Nir, in ‘Understanding Misunderstanding’, concludes the volume with his exploration of how we may come to draw from within the limits of misunderstanding by examining different variations thereof, notably those of the anthropologist and the logician. The chapter aims to clarify the connections between Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer and his fellow philosophers, in particular Frege, to elicit an important continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought, namely that addressing misunderstanding is fundamentally an ethical rather than a theoretical problem.

Note

1 This book was produced and co-edited as part of the research project Intercultural Understanding, Belonging and Value: Wittgensteinian Approaches (2019–2022) funded through a grant (ref. PGC2018-093982-B-I00) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities and the European Union’s ERDF ‘A Way of Making Europe’.

Part I

Models of Intercultural Understanding after Wittgenstein

Chapter 1

Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-Reading)¹

Constantine Sandis

What kind of spider understands arachnophobia?

Robert Wyatt, ‘Free Will and Testament’

Prologue

If the past is a foreign country, then it is plausible to expect the conditions for understanding contemporary cultures that seem alien to us to parallel those of historical understanding. R.G. Collingwood famously suggests that such understanding involves ‘the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind’ (Collingwood 1946, 216–17, 301).² This view finds recent expression in Bettina Stangneth’s proclamation that ‘to understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that’s a philosopher’s job’.³ Such thinking with does not imply any agreement of opinion. Its task is to see things from within a system of concepts and values that is alien to one’s own.

This chapter attempts to illustrate that intercultural understanding requires a parallel sharing of thought processes. It does so through an exploration of recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. With some help from Wittgenstein and Geertz, I suggest that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather one of conceptual immersion.

The Universe of Human Discourse

How does one enter the mind of another culture, past or present? How could one? It has become popular to use the expression ‘mind-reading’ as a shorthand for understanding another person’s thoughts. This is not a harmless figure of speech but a misleading portrait of communication that has its contemporary roots in John Locke’s theory of human understanding, which considers all thoughts to be private in that they ‘cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4–10).⁴ Accordingly, ‘to communicate our Thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4–10).

Locke believed that human understanding requires the translation of inner thoughts into a shared language. This enables communication with recipients, whose minds, in turn, translate our words into their own hidden thoughts.⁵ Locke coined the term ‘Σημειωτική’ (Semeiotike) for his accompanying doctrine of signs, ‘the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4). The term gave rise to what Margaret Mead would term ‘semiotics’ (Mead 1964, 279; Sebeok 1964, 5, 275), which also influenced the works of Jakobson (1960), Barthes (1964), Sebeok (1976) and Kristeva (1984).⁶ It would also influence Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism (1962), the symbolic anthropology of Geertz (1973) and the semiotics of translation of Eco (1975) and Steiner (1975).

Geertz, however, rejects Locke’s thought that the purpose of signs is to translate our private thoughts. In so doing, he embraces the later Wittgenstein’s dictum that ‘shared human behaviour is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language’.⁷ The primary task of the anthropologist is not to explain this behaviour but rather to observe and describe it. Its results involve the registration and analysis of public signs that lie at the core of the ‘symbolic systems’ constituting culture:

Culture is public because meaning is. You can’t wink (or burlesque one) without knowing what counts as winking or how, physically, to contract your eyelids, and you can’t conduct a sheep raid (or mimic one) without knowing what it is to steal a sheep or how practically to go about it […] the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse. (Geertz 1973, 13–14)

Some form of understanding could, indeed, emerge from such a process, but it should not be projected onto it. According to Geertz, we can ‘gain empirical access’ to cultural practices ‘by inspecting events’ (Geertz 1973, 17). This distinctively one-way characterization of the anthropologist’s job is deemed by some to be more objective than the two-way interactive model. Arguably, however, one cannot get another culture without actively participating in it.⁸ This places certain limits on historical understanding (where one is logically limited to re-enactment) as well as on the understanding of behaviour that we do not want to immerse ourselves in (e.g., for moral reasons).⁹

Whereas Geertz’s approach is an uneasy blend of Locke and Wittgenstein, Steiner is clearly wedded to a theory that is Lockean through and through:

Any model of communication is at the same time a model of trans-lation, of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities used words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings. Each living person draws, deliberately or on immediate habit, on two sources of linguistic supply: the current vulgate corresponding to his level of literacy, and a private thesaurus […] Thus, a human being performs an act of translation, in the full sense of the word, when receiving a speech-message from any other human being. Time, disparities in outlook or assumed reference, make this more or less difficult […] ‘Translation’, properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communication which every successful speech-act closes within a given language. (Steiner 1975, 45–7)¹⁰

Steiner makes explicit what was implicit in Locke, namely the view that every act of communication involves translation from a private language to a shared one, and that differences across cultures and their languages merely exasperate a difficulty that is even present in the ideal scenario of communication between identical twins who grew up together. For Steiner, each culture has a unique body of shared secrecy buried within its language.

Contemporary debates on mind-reading assume all this as a given. The only contested question is that of how people’s thoughts are being accessed in the first place. Philosophers disagree about whether access to other people’s ‘mental contents’ is primarily reached with the help of data inferences (attribution theory and theory theory)¹¹ or through the use of emotional tools such as empathy (simulation theory).¹² Against the grain, I argue that the dispute rests on two misguided assumptions: (1) that understanding others is a matter of accessing the so-called ‘contents’ of their minds; and (2) that the success of such a procedure is a matter of employing the right rational and/or emotional tool, which becomes a key to another’s inner theatre.

Wittgenstein famously quips that ‘if God had looked into our minds, he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of’ (Wittgenstein PPF § 284). But how else are we meant to access the thoughts of another person if not through some form of mind-reading? If God cannot even do it, what hope have we mortals? Following Geertz, I maintain that the relevant understanding does not require ‘long-distance mindreading’ (Geertz 1973, 14), but a deep immersion into an altogether different way of life. This involves learning more about the background, education, traditions, practices, interests and concepts of others, which, unsurprisingly, becomes harder to achieve with age.¹³

Following Geertz and other symbolists, understanding is not a matter of cracking some symbolic code, but of being with others, thinking and acting with them, as opposed to merely observing and reporting on their behaviour.¹⁴ To a certain extent, such understanding may be acquired indirectly, by means of books, films and the testimony of those who do the ‘fieldwork’. When it comes to the distant past, one can but imagine what it must have been like to partake in their practices. And in the case of violent or fascist cultures, one may inch closer by going undercover. But this all falls short of the complete cultural immersion and conceptual enlightenment in which the anthropologist is not so distinct from a layperson who immerses themselves with abandon in a new school, workplace, neighbourhood, or their partner’s extended family.

Real Presences in Japan

At 14:46 p.m. Japan Standard Time on 11 March 2011, the Tōhoku undersea earthquake triggered a 120-foot-high tsunami which hit the east of the Oshika Peninsula, in turn causing a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. The entire event – commonly referred to as 3.11 – killed more than 18,000 people within six minutes.¹⁵ Most of them were crushed, burned or swept out to sea. Many of the bodies were never retrieved and, soon thereafter, people began to see ghosts.

Taxi drivers reported despondent passengers requesting rides to abandoned buildings and then disappearing; there were sightings of mud-plastered figures walking around; fire engines were regularly called out to deserted locations; groups of soaking-wet people were seen standing in doorways on sunny days or walking on the beach dressed in coats at the peak of summer; some survivors claimed to be possessed by multiple spirits, including those of animals from the power plant district; others heard voices for days on end, received calls from deceased loved ones on their mobile phones or witnessed the toys of deceased children move autonomously. The variety of these supernatural experiences is considerable. For the most part, however, the dead were not there to haunt the living but rather to bring them comfort (Parry 2014, 2016; Shuji 2017; Harding 2018a, 494; 2018b).

At first sight, this may all seem surprising for a country that self-identifies as staunchly secular and rationalistic, but the phenomenon led to a revival of Japanese ghost stories (‘Kaidan’) through storytelling evenings, writing competitions and new anthologies.¹⁶ Whatever experiences people were having should be partly understood against this cultural backdrop. Cultural historian Chris Harding spoke with people from the area, including chief priest Jikisai Minami:

JM: The dead are a very real presence […] there’s only one difference between the real and the virtual. With something virtual you can switch it off whenever you want, you can switch it on whenever you want. Something real is different. You can’t control it […] Something that’s real appears regardless of human actions, of our intentions or feelings. But some people can change your actions even after they are dead.

CH: Sometimes we talk in our country of a dead person being real in the sense of remembering them very vividly. Are you talking about remembering someone vividly or are you talking about something else?

JM: If you’re remembering someone you can conjure them up in your mind, on demand. This is different. It’s not on demand. Even if you want to forget someone who’s died, they appear. You can’t control it. They really exist. Just as powerfully as that table, sometimes even more so. It’s completely different from them existing in memories. It’s not a spiritual question of the soul. It’s a question of the existence of a deceased person, with whom you have a relationship. They are a very real presence. If you turn that into a conventional almost trite story about the souls of the deceased you lose that vivid sense of reality. It wouldn’t make sense anymore.

CH: I would probably make quite a fine clear distinction between a living person and a dead person […]

JM: The living aren’t that real a presence […] you can’t say that the living are real and the dead are virtual. They’re the same. People insist on making futile distinctions about death […] – either ghosts exist, or it’s all about grief; either we appear again somewhere else, or we don’t – because on the whole they have yet to understand life: its reality and also its unreality. (Harding 2019; 2018a, 406, my emphasis)

Independently from Harding, British foreign correspondent Richard Lloyd Parry interviewed Reverend Kaneta, a Zen priest performing ‘exorcisms’ on those claiming to be possessed:

RK: Personally I do believe in them, but from an academic point of view we cannot explain whether ghosts exist or not. […] I don’t think it really matters whether you believe in the literal existence of ghosts […] what’s more important is that these experiences feel genuine to those who’ve had them and they express very sincere emotions and genuine needs but I also think it expresses in the end a reconciliation with death and with the dead and maybe even a way forward out of the disaster for this place […] I think it’s natural to see ghosts […] seeing or hearing the dead is nothing strange. It isn’t a case of believing or not believing […] You would struggle to understand what is going on.

RP: I’m trying to work out whether it’s psychological on the one hand or whether something is really happening in the world on the other. Do you have a different way of looking at it?

RK: All of us, even if our eyes are good, there are limits to what we see. If there are people whose eyes or ears are better attuned than normal, then that’s fine. From a Buddhist point of view it’s the coming together of lots of causes and elements in the world that gives us all the appearance of existence. Lots of people don’t see ghosts […] Rather than believing or not believing it’s about consciously engaging […] Not about true or false but sharing an emotional experience.

RP [narrating]: One of the things that […] came up more and more as I