Making Sense of Other Cultures: Phenomenological Critique of Cultural Relativism

Abstract

The concept of cultural relativism enabled anthropologists to overcome ethnocentrism. Nevertheless, if we hold that every culture is valid on its own terms or all cultures are equally worthy of approbation, then it douses the spirit of a critique of culture. Husserl in his earlier writings deploys the self-contradictory nature of relativism as one of the central arguments against the thesis of relativism and argues for a concept of philosophy that is absolutistic, a viewpoint that is equally problematic. However, in his later writings one can discern a more balanced perspective, one that accepts the challenge of relativism but does not succumb to the same. By making use of the concept of multiculturalism, we argue that each culture is always plural in its constitution and that the plurality of culture is desirable. However, this plurality is not to be understood as engendering relativism, rather multiculturalism undercuts the possibility of any such radical relativism. The Husserlian overcoming of relativism, akin to multiculturalism, is not by dismissing the differences out rightly, rather by traversing the path of relativism through dialogue and mutual understanding that finally one could point to the regulative concept of one world as the correlate of plurality of world-noemata.