In the ‘bloodless abstraction’ post, the position attributed to Rorty is that our “sensuous sympathies” are first of all extended to our immediate (culturally specific) group rather than to some generic ‘humanity’.
There is, though, another move, whereby one's folk is prematurely identified with this 'generic humanity' as such; so that the traits specific to this familiar group – historically and culturally local - are misrecognised as the physiognomy of humanity per se. The particular, disguised as the universal, can then dismiss other specific folks as enemies of the universal, as inhuman rather than as (so to speak) only pathologically different.
What is sometimes misnamed 'cultural relativism' can be seen as precisely the attempt to avoid this error of misrecognition. That is, what the understanding of cultural difference seeks to do is to move toward a comprehension of the true generic humanity. It does this through the cautionary insistence that no particular society is to be simply identified with it.
There may be some who experience a frission at the mere fact of difference, difference qua difference without regard to content, but this is an empty formalism. Difference is only a sign and summons to pass on.
The call to (in a contemporary idiom) 'listen to the Other' is not an invitation simply to be stimulated by the discordant yet enigmatic notes of Difference. Nor should it be an interdiction telling us to go no further. It solicits, rather, a re-tuning of our understanding and a timely awareness of our own finitude - of the categories and concepts through which the world has appeared to us. But this awareness of limitation only makes sense in relation to an implicit and coming universality, the prospect of which this finitude opens up.
So it is that the comprehension of cultural difference points beyond difference.
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