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In-Suk Cha, Chair in Philosophy, UNESCO
Former President of The International Council
for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (CIPSH), Ph.d
Seoul National University
Human beings inhabit the same planet and they do so sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict, but the fact of the matter is, they coexist. All human beings are born into a particular community, inheriting a language, a culture, and ways of interacting with other members of the community. And here they connect to each other as fellow beings and develop their individuality through the various modes of coexistence, that is, using Fink’s categories, through love and hatred, domination and subjection, work and play, and death. It is through these modes of coexistence that our understanding of self, society and nature is developed.
The modes of coexistence cited in the above are not models or blueprints as to how human beings might develop in an ideal way. They are simply descriptive of what humanity is. They are intertwined and bound together in all cultures and the lives of all of us are also bound in them in the most intricately experiential and complex ways. Nevertheless, no matter how these modes of coexistence are manifest, they are intrinsically the same in every society. A child first learns love in the bosom of the family, as love unites mother and child. Hatred might, perhaps, first come in the form of sibling rivalries and moves to quarrels with neighbors, and these often lead to loss of lives through destructive death. To avoid this heart-aching calamity humans learn to find ideal ways to peaceful coexistence among themselves..
The family unit works together but their subsistence mainly depends upon community and the unit works with its neighbors as well. Together they hunt, till the land and harvest crops, build dams, temples, towns, cities, states and lastly civilizations of complexity and magnitude. After long day’s hard work, family and neighbors come together to share food and drink at the evening table. There they drown the pains of the body, thus lifting the spirit. Drinking invites them to sing and dance life’s burden into oblivion. In every culture the idea of play is a universal conception. In play, the make-believe is brought into a status of reality. The capacity to imagine and to create alternative realities is uniquely human. Through play we learn the true meaning of the freedom of self-expression.
It is human life itself that is expressed in these modes of coexistence. For example, love discloses to humans the meaning of unity and peace whereas hatred that of violence and destruction. Work certainly reveals the magnitude of our potentialities and the relevance of cooperation for the survival of humanity. And these meanings formed through various modes of human coexistence constitute the basic structure of intersubjective understanding among individuals and groups. As individual subjective meanings are formed through intersubjective communication and interaction, those meanings are in the community domain and are thus shared and understood by others in the community. It is through these meanings that people communicate, argue, agree, and give reasons and make definitions and so on.
Biologically and genetically, each of us is unique, so different from one another that even an infant is predisposed to show preferences and to have certain propensities, talents and dislikes. It seems that we are arranged so as to play different tunes. We are always aware that we are different from one another even when we compare our similarities. The self-reflecting human being may be solitary. but the ontological structure dimension of the individual subject coexisting with others decidedly demonstrates that to be an individual is to be social and that an antithesis of either alone or collective is groundless. One can say that to be human is to be rational, but rationality derives from societal interaction. Only in association with others does one’s individuality come into being. Dewey maintains that “Selfhood is not something that exists apart from association and intercourse (The Theory of Moral Life, p.63). It is only in community that individualss progress in intellectual capacity, in observation, imagination, judgment, and invention (Democracy and Education, p.297).
Even when we find ourselves in different cultures and societies, we find the modes of coexistence, love and hatred, domination and subjection, and work and play, and death, functioning there in daily life. Because this is so, adapting to strange situations is possible. Normally, we begin our life in the family and start out from our homes to the neighborhood. Perchance, we venture even further to new surroundings, and then, home again. Sometimes, of course, we embark on journeys to entirely unknown and strange worlds. It is through repetitions of leaving home and returning again that the different worlds we visit become ever more familiar, ever more like home.
When we find ourselves in a strange environment, we at once see what is different from our homeworld. But we also see what is similar and as we come to negotiate with what is similar, we also come to accommodate what is strange by virtue of how it fits in with what we recognize as similar. The similar is easily taken into our existing schemata of orientation, which itself widens with the acceptance. In that widening, we are able to reckon with the strange and accommodate it into our schemata as well. This process is generally called cultural assimilation. Its end result is that we finally are able to think and act in the manner of the other, interacting with the reality of the other’s environment as if it were our own. I sum, what was once strange and unfamiliar is transformed into something comfortable and familiar. By way of this assimilation, the boundaries of our individual homeworlds become constantly widened as the strange world we encounter become absorbed and transformed into our own homeworlds. This phenomenon I call “the mundialization of home.” What effects the mundializastion of home is the mediation of common elements found in both the schemata of orientation of the homeworld and that of the strange world.
The links between the homeworld and the alien are the modes of human coexistence. The world at large which includes the homeworld and the strange world of the other is social and cultural, a place wherein human beings interact in thought, feelings and actions in intertwining modes of coexistence. All communicative acts, in family, school, office, business, factory, arts and politics are interacted, enacted and transacted with the modes of coexistence. And within this experiential structure, humans traverse a multitude of different worlds. We are worlds-experiencing, worlds-constructing and reconstructing beings. Today, in this age of globalization, as never before in the history of human kind, we have arrived at the mundialization of the homeworld.
A new lifestyle brought about by easy movement of capital, technology and workforce across national borders through global economy and rapid progress of telecommunication is emerging across the globe. It recognizes no cultural boundaries for we see it and hear of it in London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow. The list goes on. Young white-collar workers in Beijing and Seoul cruise around cyberspace all day long. At noon, they take a quick bite at fast food counters, and in the evening they watch videos and listen to CDs. They don’t have to be Englishmen and Russians to understand Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. They comprehend mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Hamlet who avenges his father’s murder and Raskolnikov who kills a much hated, parasitic pawnbroker. Educational and technological advancements worldwide have made this converging trend in lifestyle possible for young people nearly everywhere on the planet. They tend to think alike, feel alike and behave alike in many pervading areas of life. Their preferences in cuisine, music and entertainment seem to be almost homogeneous. Never again can anyone quote Kipling’s “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” as if it were a truism. The flow of exchanges between and among East, West, North, and South is constant.
In truth, no culture of any folk or nation is indigenous. Culture is always a culture of cultures. It is a complex of many cultures and always in a state assimilation of other cultures which contribute toward its unity. Culture is nearly always in the state of instability because it is always transcending its boundaries and confines. With the accelerating globalization this flexible nature of culture will eventually lead to a global consciousness of multi-identity of all individuals and groups of the regions of the planet, which in turn should resolve intolerance of differences, mutual suspicions, and animosities among peoples of all localities and regions of the planet.
It is clear that the establishment of a cultural common ground for mutual understanding is certainly a necessary condition for founding the world in which we can live together in peace and harmony. It is an essential prerequisite. However, it also is clear that this mental common ground can be swiftly overridden by particular interests within national boundaries. As we see workers, capital and technology easily going over borders, we also see the most of the populations of the countries in which this is happening carry on with their lives within their borders. Their interests remain intact and so conflicts arise in terms of the newcomers and their priorities, Indeed, to many, it seems a situation in which the differences of the other have launched an invasion into their homeworld. This sort of problem is but one of many posed by the current global economic globalization. Rational thinking is necessary for their solution. Fear, suspicion, violence, and scape-goatism are among the factors to be addressed and abated through the power of rational thinking. The truth of the matter is that the very survival of humankind today depends on cooperation. The economic crisis which the world is currently experiencing manifestly demonstrates all nations and peoples are so inextricably interrelated and so deeply interdependent on one another that peaceful resolution of conflicts of interests appears to be the prudence required for the well-being of all humanity.
The notions of human dignity and human rights have become today part of the internationally standardized democratic ideas that have come to represent the interconnectivity of global survival: to wit, no human being has the right to exercise his or her rights at the expense of another’s. Of course, this idea of human rights is by no means universally accepted. Nonetheless, over centuries of mundialization processes, it now encompasses every corner of the earth. Transforming globalized ideas into our own schemata and making them our own is accomplished through transculturation, which is mediated through the elements in our culture’s conceptual schemata that are compatible with elements in the conceptual schemata of another culture.
In fact, the mundialization process takes place by virtue of transculturation through the medium of which such ideas such as freedom, equality, social justice and human rights are now coming to pose as the real essentials of democracy world wide. All nations and peoples of East and West need to see these ideas as being constitutive of our interpretative schemata for understanding political and social reality.
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Panel № 4 Mobility