Page 152 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE OTHER CULTURE 145

To try to make them, even in large measure and not wholesale, true,
would be to "rationalize" them in a manner that would tend to abolish
the other's own mode of thinking. While saying all this, I would still
insist that there would be, in the other's world, behefs which I would
not hesitate to share, and which would provide me with the foothold I
need to be able to proceed to the task of interpreting the more "foreign"
areas. What I want is that the principle of charity must be supplemented
by the principle of empathy.
The fact is, interpretation is, theoretically and in principle, a two-
way, or perhaps, a many-way track. If A, B, and C are from three
different cultures, then it may be that: A interprets B, while B is also
interpreting A At the same time, B is also interpreting A's interpreta-
tion of B. A, not satisfied simply with interpreting B, also interprets B's
interpretation of A As for C, he interprets, not A and B separately, but
also A's interpretation of B and B's interpretation of A, and the other
higher level interpretations obtaining between A and B.
This complex situation obliterates the priority accorded to one's
home language (culture, world). The other is translating mine to his,
while I am translating his into mine. In and through this complicated
many-layered work, we discover points of agreement as well as of
difference—also an increasingly accumulating vocabulary in which to state
them. The idea of "overlapping of noemata" seeks to capture this in a
HusserUan conceptual framework. Note that my scheme above allows for
noema of noema i.e., higher order noemata.

Lessons from Hegel and Kant

What is often forgotten by philosophers is that the tension amongst
cultures is not simply a question of the authenticity of interpretations.
There is also the practical conflict arising out of power and domination.
Thus it is necessary to recall, in this context, the significance of Hegel's
dialectic of master and slave for a culture's achieving self-consciousness
through extracting recognition from the other. At the same time, we
need also to counterbalance this Hegelian insight by the Kantian insight
that a truly ethical community is not a political or cultural unit, but a
pluralistic mankind founded upon mutual recognition and common
commitment to the principles of perpetual peace. What the Kantian idea
suggests is that while at the poUtical level there is conflict of cultures,
and even the interpreter is not free from the will to dominate, there is