Intercultural dialogue

‘The idea of multiculturalism as a social and political project appears, at first sight, to be a latecomer to both public debate and the social sciences. Yet this is not so’ (Reference Baumann and VertovecBaumann and Vertovec, 2011: 1). It is not merely a dialogue of cultures. ‘Intercultural’ means ‘questioning the content of what one transmits; it means questioning what one calls art, heritage and self-expression’ (EC, 2014: 10).

Imagine a second-generation Chinese-Italian child who attends a humanities sciences high school in Italy. At a certain point, s/he might be asked to read a text by Plato, possibly the Apology of Socrates – first in Italian, then perhaps in the Greek original or in the classic Latin rendering of Marsilius Ficinus. The student ought to read the same text in modern unified Chinese as well, so that s/he might be able to start a discussion on Socrates in his/her Chinese-speaking family. Inversely, schoolmates might appropriate, say, Confucius’ Analects through the conceptual references indicated by our student. Together they might start a discussion on dong (movement), jing (rest), renji (human being), ren (humaneness), and eventually come to grasp some key tenets of Neo-Confucianism, such as the dictum ‘restoring the Heavenly Principle and diminishing human desires’ (Reference WangWang, 2005: 320). Due to some affinities in the traditions, the students might eventually agree that ‘metaphysics is bound up with ethics’, so that reality determines what is ethical (Reference SimSim, 2015: 616). Students today delve easily into multilayered, multilingual hypertexts, and they do so on the basis of the reciprocal guidance made possible by social reading tools.

Even this local example shows that time is ripe for going beyond previous attempts to establish an intercultural dialogue in philosophy (Reference WimmerWimmer, 1990; Reference KimmerleKimmerle, 1991; Reference Dawson and IwasawaDawson and Iwasawa, 2000; Reference MallMall, 2000; Reference Fornet-BetancourtFornet-Betancourt, 2001; Reference MabeMabe, 2005; Reference Sweet and LenkSweet, 2009). The case of the Chinese student and his/her schoolmates gives us a vivid instance of intercultural dialogue both in theory and in practice (Reference MallMall, 2000: xi). What our students are engaged in is rethinking philosophy within an intercultural framework. ‘The term interculturality stands for an attitude, for the conviction that no culture is the culture for the whole of humankind. … The spirit of interculturalism approves of pluralism as a value without undermining a personal commitment to one's own position. It is not monolithic and discriminatory, although it is preferential and discriminating’ (Reference MallMall, 2000: 9).

In its current global dimension, philosophy is overcoming past distinctions and is ready for a fresh encounter with the world.^{Footnote 3} According to the idea that non-dichotomous thinking is needed (Reference Sweet and LenkTu Weiming, 2010: 91), philosophy is moving beyond exclusive dichotomies such as traditional/modern, West/East and local/global. An approach that is historical in nature is also needed. ‘Rather than elaborating ever more intricate principles for differentiating historical and non-historical cultures and texts, we need to consider what happens to historicity when we imagine all peoples, regardless of race, religion, or literacy, as historical, and to think of their narratives as different varieties of historical discourse rather than the romantic alternative to it’ (Reference KleinKlein, 2011: 111). In principle, there is nothing new about scholarship in the history of philosophy looking at philosophy around the globe. The effort to understand cultures, not only past but also alien, has been a frontier of intellectual history for a long time. At the end of last century, scholars were talking about the point of view of the ‘other’ – not only those excluded from the male cultural monopolies, such as women and members of ethnic minorities, but also colonial victims of the expansionist spirit of Western powers – which can only be inferred from the outside, thus forming ‘the eternal dilemma of anthropology’ (Reference KelleyKelley, 2002: 307–308). The urgent question now is rather: ‘What if anything might be new about working on the history of philosophy in the era of globalization?’ (Reference SchneewindSchneewind, 2005: 170). In short, the philosophical community ought to realise that it is time to abandon parochialism for an approach that turns on the need to factor other cultures into one's own. Historians of philosophy should not ‘tell the story of the past only from the vantage point of a single part of the world or of powerful elites, but rather widen his or her scope, socially and geographically, and introduce plural voices into the account’ (Reference DavisDavis, 2011: 190).

Migration

Migrations should not to be reduced to the emigration or immigration processes of populations or ethnic groups. The scope of this phenomenon accompanies the whole history of civilisations, involving continuous relations and exchanges among cultures, hence translations through different linguistic, economic, political and cultural contexts. This appears with full evidence if we adopt the perspective of Mediterranean and European cultures. In this context, the European Commission Report on the Role of Public Arts and Cultural Institutions in the Promotion of Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue recommends that measures for the democratic governance of cultural diversity at the national, regional and local levels be swiftly adopted: ‘Democratic citizenship and participation should be strengthened, intercultural skills should be taught and learned, spaces for intercultural dialogue should be created’ (EC, 2014: 9; Reference Pozzo and VirgiliPozzo and Virgili, 2016).

Migration has become a benchmark of political decision-making and a decisive segment of the economic, environmental, ethical, sanitary and cultural development of our societies. Research on migration finds itself at the frontiers of science insofar as it integrates technological with social as well as with cultural innovation. As such, it provides substantial added value to a global community citizenship. The current migrant and refugee crisis poses a comparable challenge to the ecological crisis that arose in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when acid rains became one of its iconic by-products. This ecological crisis was partly overcome by means of a momentous effort in research that brought about an industrial reconversion and a change in the mindset of citizens. Today, migration requires a cross-disciplinary research initiative that involves the domains of social sciences, humanities and cultural heritage together with mathematics, physics, chemistry, life-sciences and medicine, environmental sciences, logistics, agrifood and ICT. Migration asks for a change of paradigm that involves all disciplines and points towards a new hybrid consideration in which top-down modelling of phenomena interacts with new bottom-up cognitions emerging from the big masses of available data.

Common goods

A considerable challenge is represented by the passage from data science to data humanities. The European Union has recognized the urgency to provide advanced facilities for interdisciplinary cutting-edge research in the Social Sciences and Humanities area. The main goal is to deal with every aspect of science and technology related to this field in order to offer innovative solutions to current and future societal challenges. As a matter of fact, researchers in the social sciences and humanities are confronted with increasingly complex and large amounts of data in highly interdisciplinary settings. Examples are enabling technologies such as NFC-Near Field Communication, CRM-Content Rights Management, Contents-aware networks (fruition and enjoyment), Low-latency networks (warning and security) or Huge-bandwidth networks (augmented reality).

European research infrastructures today are of different kinds. They range from large-scale facilities with advanced instrumentation (e.g., the CERN Laboratories in Geneva, the European Synchrotron Laboratory, etc.) to resources for knowledge storage, such as archives and databanks. The latter are no longer mono-locational; they are instead the result of an integration of resources and laboratories that are distributed all over Europe. Their governance and legal status are structured as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).

Such research infrastructures are common goods. They are planned, built and managed for serving vast research communities, which operate in diversified sectors on the principles of open access and competition. Currently, six research infrastructures for ‘Social and Cultural Innovation’ are up and running, while a seventh one is under evaluation:

1. i. CESSDA ERIC (Council of European Social Science Data Archives) is an umbrella organization for European Social Science data archives, which has been active since the 1970s to improve access to data for researchers and students, and to enhance the exchange of data and technologies among data organisations.

2. ii. CLARIN ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a large-scale pan-European collaborative effort to create, coordinate and make language resources and technologies available and readily usable.

3. iii. DARIAH ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) is the first permanent European digital infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.

4. iv. E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science) creates synergies for a multidisciplinary approach to heritage interpretation, preservation, documentation and management.

5. v. ESS ERIC (European Social Survey) aims not only at providing an academically robust way of ‘knowing Europe’, but also at contributing to the scientific community's endeavour to develop, test and implement methods of reliable social measurement.

6. vi. SHARE ERIC (Survey on Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe) aims at elaborating a statistical survey of lifestyle, health, economics and social life in over fifty European countries (ESFRI, 2016).

7. vii. RESILIENCE (Religious Studies Infrastructure: Libraries, Experts, Nodes and Centres) collects historical documents and current information on global theological political issues while fostering interfaith dialogue (under evaluation).

Migrations are transfers of cultures, knowledge and competencies. They are occasions of encounter as well as of misunderstandings and conflicts. All things considered, it does not seem that migration researchers need a research infrastructure of their own. They confer data, models and scholarly outcomes to a number of communities – and receive other data, models and scholarly outcomes from the same as well as from other communities. In fact, besides the six infrastructures we mentioned, the other ESFRI working groups (Energy, Environment, Health and Food, and Physical Sciences & Engineering) embed six further infrastructures that might be involved in the cross-disciplinary research on migration:

1. i. SoBigData (Social Mining and Big Data Ecosystem) provides an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life, as recorded by big data.

2. ii. EMSO (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory) ensures long-term monitoring of environmental processes related to the interaction between the geosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere, including natural hazards. It is composed of several deep-seafloor and water column observatories.

3. iii. IAGOS (In-Service Aircraft for a Global Observing System) conducts long-term observations of atmospheric composition, aerosol and cloud particles on a global scale from commercial aircraft of internationally operating airlines.

4. iv. LifeWatch ERIC (E-Science and Technology Infrastructure for Research on Biodiversity and Ecosystems) connects biodiversity data, observatories and researchers from all over the continent.

5. v. BBMRI ERIC (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure) biobanks are essential for the understanding of the diversity of human diseases, biological samples and corresponding data are required for the development of any new drug or diagnostic array and are critical for the advancement in health research.

6. vi. EUBI ERIC (European Research Infrastructure for Biomedical Imaging) provides open physical user access to a broad range of state-of-the-art technologies in biological and biomedical imaging for life scientists (ESFRI, 2016).

Judging from the possible relevance of these infrastructures to research on migrations, it becomes evident that migration as a field of research ignites a holistic approach that embraces all four aspects of sustainability – cultural, social, environmental and economic.

Shared experiences

‘Social innovations aim to directly address unmet social needs in new ways by developing or enhancing new products and services through the direct engagement of the people who need and use them, typically through a bottom-up process’ (EC, 2016: 6). They take place when a new product or service answers positively to the following three questions: (1) Does it solve the problem? (2) Does it have a fair cost? (3) Is it universally accepted? (EC, 2013: 17–18). An example of social innovation is the regional healthcare card of the Lombardy region in Italy. It was introduced in 1999 as a pioneer endeavour. It solved the problem of providing access to data; not only did it cost right, but it enabled substantial savings; and it was accepted without major opposition. On the contrary, according to an ESF Report, the paradigm of personalised medicine would not meet the requirements for social innovation, as it has solved the problem only very partially in terms of life expectancy for terminal cancer patients; it carried enormous costs and did not really find general acceptance (ESF, 2012: 39–47).

Although cultural innovation may sound like an oxymoron, it is not. It does really top up social and technological innovation. Yet, how can we measure ‘cultural innovation’? Referring to Reference Prahalad and VenkatramPrahalad and Venkatram (2000), the answer would be through co-creation, i.e., by analysing the traces that we leave behind when we have a shared experience. In fact, ‘there is no audience in intercultural dialogue – intercultural work means a process of co-creation’ (EC, 2014: 42). An emerging approach is to focus on co-creation for growth and inclusion: ‘Engaging citizens, users, academia, social partners, public authorities, businesses including SMEs, creative sectors and social entrepreneurs in processes that span from identifying problems to delivering solutions. Access, participation, and co-creation are preconditions for achieving intercultural dialogue in practice’ (EC, 2014: 91).

Cultural diversity

The Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (UNESCO, 2001) recognises cultural diversity as a ‘common heritage of mankind’ and considers its preservation as a concrete and ethical imperative, inseparable from respect for human dignity. This Declaration was reinforced in 2005 by the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, which also addresses ‘the goal of fostering interculturality in order to develop cultural interaction in the spirit of building bridges between peoples’ (UNESCO, 2005). The Council of Europe emphasised the political actions needed for intercultural dialogue to advance through its White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue ‘Living together as Equals in Dignity’ (COE, 2008). Finally, the Faro Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (UNESCO, 2007) encourages reflection on the role of citizens in the process of defining, creating and managing a cultural environment in which communities evolve.

Growing diversity in Europe appears nowadays as a cultural reality, to be recognised and addressed at the individual as well as collective levels (EC, 2014: 5). Democratic governance in a time of cultural diversity should be multifacetedly adapted. Democratic citizenship and participation should be reinforced, intercultural skills fostered, spaces for intercultural dialogue created and ‘intercultural dialogue should be taken to the international level’ (EC, 2014: 9); at stake is the promotion of social cohesion (ESF, 2004; Reference Grant and ChapmanGrant and Chapman, 2008; Reference CaiCai, 2010).

It is time to move beyond a merely passive acceptance of the plurality of cultures co-existing in a society, to actively promote cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue. In other terms, a transition from inclusive to reflective society is required: ‘Intercultural dialogue cannot exist without the recognition of cultural diversity, while cultural diversity can exist without giving rise to intercultural dialogue’ (EC, 2014: 9). The idea of ‘cultural diversity’ may implicitly emphasise some common characteristics of human groups, such as language, religion, lifestyle, artistic expression, gender and inter-age relations, and so on. Yet all cultures are also hybrid, mixed, infused (EC, 2014: 10). Steven Vertovec has proposed to call such hybridity ‘super-diversity’ – a term under which he includes the interplay of factors such as ‘differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents’ (Reference Vertovec and Vertovec2010: 66).

Reference Brague and CassinRémi Brague (2004) has noted that the Arabic term for dictionary, قاموس (qāmūs), is a translation of the name of the Titan of Greek mythology Ὠκεανός (Okeanós), in the original literal sense of a liquid extension that embraces all emerged lands, permitting navigation and hence communication. G.W. Leibniz has used the ocean metaphor for an encyclopaedia, which is the very same idea concerning languages that this paper seeks to defend. As Karl Jaspers pointed out, Confucius and Laozi lived and taught in China, the Upanishads were produced in India, where the Buddha lived, like Zarathustra in Persia, the prophets in Palestine, Homer, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato in Greece. ‘Everything implied by these names developed almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West’ (Reference JaspersJaspers, 1949: 2). Today, the intercultural history of philosophy gives rebirth to the cultural melting pot that Plato spoke about in the Timaeus (23c) with regard to translation, thus prefiguring ‘the translation of Greek words, culture and thoughts into the Latin words of Cicero and Boethius, or the dynamics of the great Mediterranean cultural circle made of translation and tradition of philosophical, religious, and medical texts from Greek and Hebrew into Arabic, Latin, and all vernacular languages’ (Reference Gregory and SgarbiGregory, 2012: 12). In the Far East, ‘the Buddhist conquest of China during the Tang dynasty and the Confucian transformation of Buddhism are a process that brought about the introduction via Daoist categories, domestication, growth, and appropriation of an Indian form of spirituality, which lasted for at least six centuries’ (Reference Sweet and LenkTu Weiming, 2010: 219).

Intercultural history of philosophy provides much more than intercultural philosophy. It is an innovative way to involve traditions, and it encourages young people to use their philosophical ability for a meaningful transfer of competencies. The start is the appropriation of terminology (Cassin, 2004). For instance, Islamic philosophy insists on God having infinite names and attributes, the most important one being the Mother of Names, Ummahāt al-asma. The names themselves are in the following order: havy (living), alim (knowing), murid (willing), qadir (powerful), mutakallim (speaking), sami (hearing), basir (seeing). The category of living is presupposed by all others. It has priority over all the rest, which is exactly the same function as the Aristotelian ousía (Reference Yahya and SahliYahya and Sahli, 2014).

Spaces for exchange

Libraries in multiple languages have proven to be effective spaces for exchange (EC, 2014: 11). We can now do so much more than we once were able to. We already rely on hypertexts that provide metadata-rich and fully interoperable sources, translations, bibliographies, indices, lexica and encyclopedias. Users begin by perusing general narratives, from where they follow the links to details of critical editions, their translations in a number of languages, articles, indices and monographs. In sum, research infrastructures are spaces for exchange of the utmost importance; they make it possible for users to engage in access, participation and co-creation; they serve as hubs insofar as they facilitate all services of virtual and instrumental access to data.^{Footnote 4} Concerning educational applications, the paradigm of multicultural education as ‘social reconstruction’ asserts the need to ‘reform the institutional structures and schooling practices that maintain the societal status quo’ (Grant and Chapman, 2011: 1). As Cai suggests, the issue boils down to ‘How do we understand how culture influences communication?’ (Reference Cai2010: xxi). An important factor about our Chinese-Italian student is that s/he is bilingual, as s/he masters both Italian and Chinese, and possibly multilingual, as s/he must have learned English and might as well be able to read Greek and Latin (Reference LiLi Wei, 2010; Reference Gardner and Martin-JonesGardner and Martin-Jones, 2012).

Globalisation is not a new experience. It is a long-term historical process that enhances regional, national and local identities (Reference Sweet and LenkTu Weiming, 2010: 331). In addressing Europe's need to adapt to historical change, one needs to challenge the anachronistic notion of a European intellectual identity. Europe has evolved beyond its Greco-Roman intellectual roots, and has become much more diverse: ‘When talking of ancient luminaries such as Aristotle, who profoundly shaped European thought, we can correctly describe them as forming part of Europe's intellectual basis. European intellectual identity, on the other hand, is now much broader in scope, enriched through historical change, particularly immigration’ (EC, 2015: 8). Cultural identity is a ‘polysemic, slippery and illusory’ syntagma (Dervin, 2012: 181; see Butler, 1990; Lévi-Strauss, 2004). In fact, ‘culture cannot be but plural, changing, adaptable, constructed … A culture that does not change and exchange with other cultures is a dead culture’ (Dervin, 2012: 183). Cultural identity is therefore ‘what we construct whenever we are in contact with other human beings – regardless of the fact that they are from the same environment or not’ (Dervin, 2012: 183).

The Horizon 2020 topic ‘Reflective Society’ introduces another syntagma that covers a vast array of the social sciences and humanities dealing with the past and the present, from history to geopolitics through cultural heritage studies and up to practically all fields of the Humanities (EC, 2015: 6). A closer scrutiny reveals that this syntagma is strongly inspired by philosophical ideas referring to the crucial role of deliberative communication of citizens in a modern public sphere aiming at mutual understanding (Reference Habermas and FahrenbachHabermas, 1973). As a matter of fact, Jürgen Habermas has applied to society what G.W.F. Hegel had elaborated as the passage from the surface of being to the ground of essence, a passage that takes place, literally, by reflecting into the thing – like reflected light that illuminates something previously invisible, or creates a pattern not previously existing. The current migrant crisis has made it clear with extraordinary force that a most urgent objective is to work towards Euro-Mediterranean societies that are inclusive, reflective and attentive to the impact that migration is having on social and cultural innovation, security and health, environment and biodiversity.