Beyond cultural borders: Transcultural Perspective

Beyond cultural borders: Transcultural Perspective / Za hranice kultur: Transkulturní perspektiva (in Czech only)

Our modern society has come to its experimental phase in which history is turning into a laboratory searching for a new mechanism of balance and stability. The question what to respect and what not to respect is getting more and more complicated to answer, and is threatening with an outbreak of conflict and violence. 

The main challenge of this publication are the relationships between the pole of diversity and the pole of unity. How to find the pole of unity in the pole of diversity? And how to find certain common ground between these two poles?  Is there any tool which can make the existence of a common language possible? We need a kind of Ariadne´s thread that would lead us out of the labyrinth of diversity to unity. Experience gained in the past decades has shown us that unity does not arise from just placing varied differences simply side by side. Such a hope was carried by the idea of multiculturalism. The original idea of multiculturalism was guided by the fairly correct belief that unity does not result from suppressing of diversity by some means and sophisticated procedures (which was the ways sought by various tendencies of social engineering). However, neither does unity result from differences being favoured and worshiped (which is the case of various forms of multiculturalism that create such fruitful ground for nationalisms and subnationalisms). The identity of human beings which would be bound solely and exclusively to mechanical factors of constructing social reality establishes neither the pole of unity or nor mutuality and intercommunity. A universal desire for and need of happiness / hope, which are typical of human beings, could be the above-mentioned Ariadne's thread leading us out of the framework of particular boundaries and barriers. This need leads human beings towards overcoming the boundaries and obstacles that hold them back. On the transcultural path to the pole of unity from the labyrinth of diversity, we need to let all our perspectives, ideas and desires go through and be ground in an imaginary "grinder of happiness" which represents the dignity of a person. The supposedly universal inter-cultural, multi-cultural or cross-cultural immanent perspectives, which themselves do not guarantee human dignity of a person and sooner or later fail, will not hold water by themselves. They are grains that will only be ground in the mill of human dignity of a person into a transcultural perspective based on a transcendent guarantee of human dignity. In this perspective, the meaning of living in a labyrinth of differences and the meaning of all the feeling of being lost in diversity are revealed. Cultural identities then do not have to be perceived as negative frameworks that must be left or rejected.

 

The author of the book, which was published in 2016 by CDK, is František Burda.