Session 4(a): Interculturalism and Philosphical Hermeneutics

Session 4A: Interculturalism & Philosophical Hermeneutics
Chair: Patrick Imbert

Gadamer and Davidson in Dispute
Bart Vandenabeele
University of Leuven, Belgium

The idea that to understand one another (best, ideally) one needs to share a language is widespread; it is omnipresent and only rarely questioned in debates concerning language, (intercultural) communication, interpretation, and translation. Donald Davidson is one of the very few philosophers who explicitly uttered qualms about the idea and necessity of a common language. I shall argue that Davidson is right to claim that a common language is not needed for successful (intercultural) communication. Furthermore, Davidson rightly rejects the conception of a world as something neutral that lies outside all conceptual schemes, and this chimes well with Gadamer. Yet Davidson has been unable to develop this insight fruitfully and underestimates the importance of the embeddedness of language and communication in (what Gadamer calls) a tradition. Some sort of synthesis is possible, although these thinkers draw on quite different philosophical traditions. However, neither comes out of the confrontation unscathed: Davidson’s notion of idiolect must be de-essentialised and so must Gadamer’s notion of tradition, if they are to be used to explain what happens when people from different backgrounds communicate with each other. Communication cannot be reduced to fusion of horizons, openness or tolerance: one of the dangers of this is that in the name of tradition and openness in theory , the procedural rules redefine tradition on so narrow a base that the real life status quo changes not a jot.

Gadamer and Interculturalism: Ethnocentrism or Authenticity
Helder De Schutter
KU Leuven, Belgium

Intercultural communication is susceptible to ethnocentrism in two different ways. First, a self-conscious and overtly ethnocentric relativist may base his perception of the other totally on his own prejudices. A second ethnocentric danger originates from a certain universalism, which pretends to envisage a neutral transcendent omega-point, but nonetheless often and surreptitiously ends up with the imposition of its own particularity in the name of a universal truth.

In this paper I want to investigate whether Gadamer’s hermeneutical position is ethnocentric. Therefore, in a first part of the paper, I formulate the general view of Gadamer on (necessary preconditions of) authentic intercultural communication. In the second section, this position is confronted with the dual lure of ethnocentrism. On the basis of the importance that Gadamer assigns to the Vorurteile (prejudices) that everyone inevitably takes along in every possible understanding of texts or others, Gadamer has mainly been accused of ethnocentrism in the first sense, which gave rise to the Habermas-Gadamer debate. In this debate, Gadamer has remained free of the second charge of ethnocentrism. Nevertheless, although the Unaufhebbare Differenz (inevitable difference) plays a central role in his work, his concept of Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons) and the strong appeal to symmetry and equivalence between life forms do make his hermeneutical position vulnerable to this second criticism. Therefore, a more positive assessment of the opacity of the process of intercultural communication, might be appropriate.

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