Intercultural Philosophy & Communication

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Quite a few western universities nowadays are interested in giving courses in ‘world civilizations’. Most of these courses want to describe and analyse the different cultures of the globe, especially the eastern ones, by looking at their anthropological, sociological, political, historical and/or aesthetic characteristics. As such they intend to offer a clear-cut picture of the civilizations in question without having the objective to evaluate them from a different, read ‘outside’, point of view. A more evaluative approach comes forward when, in courses of Intercultural Communication, the difficulty of communication between different cultures will be discussed: then it becomes clear that often communication will be frustrated by obstacles that find their causes in cultural aspects. Even at a very superficial level communication between civilizations can become disturbed and quite ineffective, due to cultural peculiarities that form the background of every possible act of communication. Most of these courses confine their attention to this ‘every day aspect’ of the phenomenon: they study, from an anthropological and/or sociological position, the well known problems that participants meet when they are engaged in the process of communication with partners who are of a culturally different origin. It is interesting though to go further than that. If one assumes that acts of communication are intrinsically related to a specific culture, then it is important to probe deeper than the superficial level and to find out if and how at a more ‘intellectual’ layer a civilization’s philosophical mindset is responsible for the organization of its communication. As such there is clearly a philosophical perspective in the study of intercultural communication and this insight becomes even more urgent if one reflects on the philosophical question regarding the sheer possibility of having any intercultural communication at all! Furthermore and on the basis of the foregoing is it possible to comprehend intercultural communication as in essence a manifestation of intercultural philosophy and the other way round. In every piece of communication between cultures there will be a meeting of different philosophies and when culturally dissimilar philosophies get together there can or even must be an appearance of communication.