For cultural relativism to make any sense,
we should have a definition of
culture,
such that it be
closed and self-contained;
so that we can talk about
``one culture, two cultures...''
The overall image is, I said,
like pigeon holes.
Thus I dubbed the relativism
I was going to defend
``pigeon hole relativism.''
I am and have been a pigeon hole
relativist for the whole of my career of anthropologist ;
and there are,
of course, lots of criticism
against this stand point,
which I just simply ignored.
Some say,
``If culture is as you think it is,
then how come culture changes?''
I say ``It changes all of a sudden.
Actually one culture ceases to exist
and another takes its place ---
that is how culture changes''
Others say,
``If culture is closed on itself,
then how come an anthropologist
from one culture
is to understand the other culture?''
I say, ``Understanding comes all of a sudden,
just like understanding of
a foreign language or
understanding of a foreign game''
All those nonchalant answers
come from my conviction that
for an anthropologist of the ``inside'' persuasion,
such questions are
outside her
research program ---
she need not care (as people inside
the culture do not care),
for example, how
a culture comes to existence.
Then there came a shock ---
That was when I was
reading How To Talk about What
Cannot be Talked about
（
[野矢 2011]）
by a Japanese philosopher, Noya Shigeki.
The title of the book, of course,
comes from the famous concluding
remarks of Tractatus
(
[Wittgenstein 1961])
(by Wittgenstein),
that is,
"Whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
Noya, a philosopher, not an anthropologist,
tackled the problem
of cultural relativism,
not just relativism but
but cultural relativism,
with all his sincerity
[野矢 2011].
I was moved by his efforts and,
then and there, decided to
follow his footprints.
The task is,
in a nut shell,
to surpass the arguments
in "On the very idea of conceptual scheme"
by Donald Davidson
[Davidson 1984 (1974)].
(
[デイヴィドソン 1991])
In other words,
once we surmount this (seemingly
unclimbable) mountain,
we'll get to the paradise of
cultural relativism.
For the sake of the arguments,
let me simplify Davidson's paper;
his point is that
if schemes are
incommensurable (untranslatable)
to each other,
then
how come one who lives
in one scheme can be aware of
the other scheme;
she just cannot know that something is
a kind of conceptual scheme.
Noya pointed out the similarity of
Davidson's arguments in the paper
with Wittgenstein's Tractatus,
in that both can be called
``solipsism''.
Of course there is a big difference;
Davidson's deals with solipsism at the level
of community,
whereas Wittgenstein's Tractatus is
a treatise of solipsism at the level
of individual.
[1]
Noya is very very cautious in
dealing with this difference of levels,
found in the arguments of Davidson and Wittgenstein.
Here, let us suppose that we can
safely talk about two kinds of
solipsism, "indiscriminately" so to speak,
whether it is at the level of community
or at the level of individual.
Now let me restate the similiarity
(or rather "identity") between the
two theories.
Wittgenstein says (according to Noya)
that
if there is only one self,
or only one view-point,
one can talk about
neither "self" nor "viewpoint".
Those concepts ("self" or "viewpoint")
make no sense of the solipsist.
Wittgenstein says,
"Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with
pure realism". (5.64)
In the same tone,
Davidson's argument can be rephrased
that,
if there is only one conceptual scheme,
there is no scheme,
that is,
no viewpoints,
no "culture".
This is the gist of Wittgenstein's remark,
"Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent".
"What one cannot speak of" is the other self
(in Wittgenstein's solipsism) and
the other culture
(in Davidson's "cultural" solipsism).
In other words,
cultural relativist cannot speak of
the other culture,
because she cannot know the existence
of the other culture.
You now recognize the height of
the Davidsonian mountain,
which says
"cultural relativism is an impossibilium".
Here we will part with Noya
and enter my own arguments.
Let me explain what Wittgenstein
calls "pure realism" more in details.
In non-solipsistic world,
that is, the world where we live,
there are always someone else;
that means
my world is just one of the worlds;
my world is a world as seen by me,
and we know that there are other worlds
seen by others.
So the world I see is an
epidemiological construct.
We know that
our non-solipsistic world has lots of things
which are missing:
for example,
I cannot see the back of a bottle
standing in front of me;
I cannot see the backside;
but I know the backside exists;
in the sense that I know that
someone else standing
in a proper place could see it.
Let's call this feature of our world "negation".
The most important negation is the other;
the other emerges as negation;
that is something which we cannot see/understand.
That is why we wish to understand the other.
Now to the solipsistic world...
In the solipsistic world,
as I said,
there is only one person who sees the world;
there is no other person nor viewpoint.
In that way, the "person" or the "self"
just vanishes and so goes the notion of
"viewpoint".
The world is not as is seen by a
person,
but as it is.
The most siginificant feature of this world
is the lack of negation.
There is nothing which is missing.
Everything is as it is.
One might say that she (the solipsist) cannot
see the backside of a bottle, and that, thus,
the backside is missing from her world.
No.
It is not the case that the backside is not in her
world;
this kind of sentence does not make any sense
in her world.
Everything exists as it is there.
So, there is no other, no
alterity,
That is the gist of Wittgenstein's remark:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent.
The other and other negation are
what is missing from her world.
My starting point from
Noya's arguments is to
point out the very similiarity
between solipsism (as defined by Wittgenstein
via Noya) and
autism (as described by Murakami
[村上 2008].
Actually,
the very word, "lack of negation", I borrowed
from Murakami's book on autism.
Here I'm not going into details to show
how it transpires that the solipsist world
and the autistic world have the same
structure
(see
[中川 2015]).
Here let us pretend that I've shown enough
evidence to convince you that
the two worlds are of the same structrure ---
both lack the negation.
Now my strategy is this:
If we assume that there is no qualitative
difference between autistic children and
non-autistic children,
it is by finding an ability that is missing in autistic children
bu that non-austistic children have,
that we can explain the difference.
So the research has become empirical
(rather than purely speculative).
According Murakami,
this crucial ability is
[2]
"perceptual phantasy"
(
[Husserl 2005]).
"Perceptual phantasy" is simply
an ability to play a game,
an ability to make-believe.
In playing house,
a participant sees a stone,
and regard the stone, make-believedly,
as a piece of cake.
And she pretends to eat that stone.
Or in the game world,
she "eats the cake".
"Eating a cake in the game" is the thing
which an autisic child cannot do.
Sometimes she just eats the stone
(says Murakami
[村上 2008]).
Here I want you to
see that
this "perceptual phantasy" or "make-believe"
is exactly
what Wittgenstein shows us by
showing rabbit-duck picture;
that is "aspects".
(See
[中川 2009]
So there comes a happy ending:
we don't have to throw away our starting position,
that is "cultural relativism".
What we have to do is to
provide the members of one culture with
the ability (which is common to human being)
of grasping aspects.
Then a member of one culture,
while living in a solipsistic culture,
can grasp the aspect of the other culture.
Before preceding to the concluding part,
I would like to point out, perhaps rather
unnecessarily,
that there is no such thing as "one aspect".
Just like "view point" and "self",
one can see aspects when there more than two
aspects.
Aspect is an appearance,
what is seen from one view point;
thus if there is only one aspect,
it's not an appearance but an existence.
Now let me summarise our long and winding path
so far,
using the concept of "aspect".
I will recount a kind of "Just So Story".
Hearing this,
please remember (if you've ever read
my book
(
[中川 2009])
that
aspect-grasping is always holistic,
in that an aspect has a game (or a culture,
if you like) behind it.
Now here you have the famous rabbit-duck
picture.
And suppose there is a culture
(a closed and self-cotained system,
a solipstic culture) called A,
where every member sees a rabbit in the picture.
Actually it's not seeing;
it's a simple recognition (of what it is there).
So, what a member would say is,
not "I see a rabbit",
but "This is a rabbit".
And suppose antother culture, B,
where every member sees a duck in the picture,
and says "This is a duck".
Now suppose that
a member of the culture A, call him "a",
and "b", a member of the culture B,
meet with each other in a galaxy far far way,
both standing in front of the "rabbit-duck" picture.
After a while,
a mumbles "Oh, this is a rabbit".
And b counters "No, this is a duck".
Let's call this phase one.
When "a" returns home and
he reports that 'I met a silly ass in
front of the picture
and he said "this is a duck"'.
And that's that.
While in the culture B,
"b" does the same report.
Nothing happens, but just call this
phase one dash.
Now a miracle occurs.
"a" now says:
"He sees a duck in the picture.
Actually it looks like a duck to me.
It seemed to me that it was rabbit".
Let's call this Phase two,
the stage of the understanding of the
other/other culture.
The same goes, vice versa, with "b" back
in his own culture B.
Now that they have accomplished
the understanding of the other culture,
the two persons and, perhaps,
two cultures lived happily ever after.
[1]
And, furthermore,
Davidson argues against
solipsism and Wittgenstein
tries to enhance the position of
solipsism.
[Back]
[2]
Murakami doesn't say that this is
the crucial factor.
What Murakami says is, perhaps, that
this is just one of those which
autistic children lack.
[Back]
