INTERNATIONAL PROGRESS ORGANIZATION - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Professor of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck ( Austria )

Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, for instance, may serve as a methodological basis for a theory of cultural self-comprehension. His concept of Verständnishorizont (the horizon of understanding) includes all the socio-cultural environments into which the concrete human being is integrated in the course of his/her life. According to his conception, a person's understanding of the world (the "life-world", i.e. of reality in general, including the social reality) is the result of a complex interaction of specific horizons of understanding that constantly overlap.[18] To describe this structure of self-comprehension - which is at the roots of cross-cultural understanding - Gadamer coined the term Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons). A similar conception has been developed by Ali A. Mazrui in the context of applied social science. He states: "How people view the world is greatly conditioned by one or more cultural paradigms to which they have been exposed."[19] Culture, in Mazrui's conception, provides "lenses of perception and cognition"[20] in the concrete social-historical context. According to Gadamer, the universal horizon of my understanding of the world (Gesamthorizont) is constantly being modified by my encounter with other human realities in my own individual "history," which is part of a larger history of interacting civilizations. My understanding of reality and of myself is not something static, it is a dynamic process shaped by those cultural perceptions which enter my individual horizon and the collective horizon of the cultural community (civilization) I belong to.[21] The "cultural ego" is not a static entity that exists in a world defined according to one tradition only. Such exclusiveness would be the death of any critical understanding of one's own social environment and the world as such. It would make tolerance towards other cultures impossible.