Introduction

Why is intercultural understanding so elusive? Is there anything inherent in the concept of a culture that renders intercultural understanding such a difficult and unstable achievement? In this chapter, I shall outline a partial answer to these questions by elucidating the kinds of prescriptions that are constitutive of the concept of a culture.

We may initially consider a culture to be a network of rules. But what does following a rule consist of? In ‘Following a Rule and Aspect Perception’, I shall defend a reading of Wittgenstein’s analysis of rule-following, according to which following a rule presupposes the ability to see something in a context; in other words, to see X as an aspect of a certain object or situation. Aspect perception will thus emerge as constitutive of our ability to follow a rule. Wittgenstein was mainly concerned, however, with conditional rules or prescriptions; that is, rules or prescriptions whose binding power is conditional upon the subject’s decision to engage in a certain practice. I shall argue, though, that a culture construed as a web of practices requires not only conditional but also unconditional prescriptions; that is, prescriptions whose bindingness does not depend on the subject’s willingness to take on a commitment.

To motivate this view, I shall examine in ‘Unconditional Prescriptions and the Formation of the Subject’ how the idea of a subject is to be conceived of if we are to understand the fact that prescriptions, conditional or otherwise, are not private but determined within a social practice. The subject engaged in such practices cannot be approached as a Cartesian self that has direct access only to its inner events and decides after private deliberation what principles or rules should govern its life; an alternative view is required. Therefore, I shall outline a view of the identity of a subject as constitutively dependent upon the cultural context in which it has been formed; for this purpose, I shall draw some materials from Bernard Williams’ approach to the relation between sincerity and authenticity (Williams 2002) and Judith Butler’s performative account of the formation of the subject (Butler 2005, 2011).