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24 Charles Ess

characteristic of each culture. “Culture shock” is the name we give
this experience. In part, the shock involves precisely the realization
that what one has presumed, perhaps for all of one’s life, to be uni-
versally human ways of talking, believing, valuing, are instead lim-
ited. Other peoples, other cultures, do and believe differently, and
usually seem to thrive in doing so. As the properties of invisible par-
ticles may be inferred from the traces and debris of their collisions,
so culture shock allows us to uncover the usually fundamental but
tacit assumptions of our and other cultures, as it forces us to make
explicit the manifold presumptions of colliding worldviews.
Such collisions, in fact, are not the whole story. When we, as
newcomers, seek to become oriented in a new place, we sort
through what is radically different and what seems shared (“Every-
one cooks with water,” the Swiss say). Gradually, we may find that
what initially seemed alien is not so strange. Indeed, many of us
often find that some beliefs and habits of other cultures make more
“sense” than our own, and we seek to sustain those ways of being
when we return to our own places (making us seem very odd ducks
indeed to those neighbors who have not had the privilege of living
elsewhere). In most cases, we do not reject all of our original beliefs
and values (“going native,” as it is said). We become, instead, what
is variously described as multicultural (Adler 1977) “intercultural”
(Gudykunst and Kim 1997), or “Third Culture Persons” (Finn-Jor-
dan 1998)—that is, multilingual cultural hybrids, able to travel,
speak, and live (in varying degrees of facility) in more than one cul-
tural domain. 28
This process of making explicit and sifting through the funda-
mental elements of diverse worldviews, and constructing new hybrid
views and ways of being, is one focus of intercultural communica-
tion, and can be aided by cultural studies (see Samovar and Porter
1988, esp. Part 4; Bennett 1998). At the same time, this process en-
gages us in several of the distinctive tasks of philosophy: identifying
both our and others’ most fundamental assumptions concerning
what is real, how do we know, who are we as human beings, what
ought we to value and disvalue, etc.; critically evaluating differing
beliefs; and attempting to determine for ourselves just what we may
hold to be true in a new synthesis of views. In Plato’s well-known al-
legory of the cave, this process involves precisely leaving the world of
one’s everyday experience—one’s own city or culture. But once a
more complete understanding of the cosmos is achieved, the philoso-
pher returns to the place where she started, seeking to integrate her
new understanding with the familiar beliefs and habits of her co-