It is an honor to be invited to speak at this Center for Dialogue among Civilizations. On the one hand, I wish to congratulate President Khatami and the people of Islam for this initiative which, for reasons I will detail below, reflects their unique identity and contribution to the world. On the other hand, I note both a similarity and a contrast to the well-know work by Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Consequently, it would seem appropriate to ask regarding this project of dialogue of civilizations and the projection by Samuel Huntington of a clash of civilizations: what is the difference between the two and what difference does it make? To wonder is the beginning of philosophy; to wonder today about this central and urgent issue is to begin to philosophize in a contemporary and responsible manner.

My response to the above questions consists of four main steps. The first is to look at the emerging state of unity with diversity in the world today. The second is to consider Samuel Huntington’s thesis that civilizations as major identities of peoples are based on religion, which is not declining but rather rising in importance and influence in people’s lives. Third is to note that he sees identities as contradictory and consequently civilizations as incomparable and conflictual in nature. Thus, it becomes a matter of living with and, it would seem, living by conflict. Fourth, in contrast to the thesis of an essentially conflictual nature of cultures, and especially of civilizations as based on religion, this chapter will suggest another model, namely, not a conflictual but a convergent relation of religions and civilizations.

It is now commonplace to note that the world has become one. This is true in a number of ways. Psychologically it became true in a special way as people first took up space exploration, landed on the moon and were able to look back at the globe as one. If Nicholas of Cusa noted the vast difference between considering things piecemeal by reason and seeing them whole by intellect, then this act constituted a special stage in human awareness. No longer is the world made up simply of many particulars; instead individuals are the world — contracted perhaps, but world nonetheless.

To this must be added, of course, the more prosaic but powerful developments in commerce of a global market, and in communications of a global system. Finally with the end of the Cold War all this has moved from a bipolar to a one world status.

At the same time there has taken place a new interior exploration taking account not only of objective reality reducing subjects to the status of objects for inspection and manipulation, but of subjectivity lived reflexively and from within. This enables a people to take direct conscious account of the exercise of creative freedom over generations, whereby the cultures and traditions have been developed.

This provides not only an awareness of one’s own cultural identity, but an analogical awareness of the distinctiveness of the cultures of other peoples. In this lies the heart of the present dilemma, namely, that the very same step in self-awareness entails as well awareness of both the cultural universe in which we stand and its inherent and essential distinctiveness, and by implication then the diversity of cultures.

In view of this Huntington notes that the world is no longer ordered either by the great empires of the past or by the nation states of the Treaty of Versailles, nor by the ideological hegemonies of the bi-polar world of the cold war era. All of these have proven alternately incapable of retaining the allegiance of people and/or of providing for their welfare.

Now in contrast the platoons are tribes and ethic peoples, the regiments they compose are the nations, and the great armies are the civilizations. The major forces which have always operated and continue to do so are rather the pair of blood and belief, that is, of family and faith. Blood and family extended to ethnicities and races represent the physical lines of relationships among humankind. Belief and faith are the major belief systems according to which we interpret our lives and respond to our challenges.

Huntington, as noted above, sees civilizations as based on religions. In order to elaborate his thesis that the future bodes conflict between civilizations he argues at great length the present increasing importance of the role of religion in the life of peoples and of cultures today. He does this on a number of bases.

First, interest in, and the life of, religion entails a central role as the key to a person’s and a people’s self-identity. Attention to this religious source intensifies to the degree that self-identity is threatened, making religion more consciously needed. Huntington observes this in the more educated and the more mobile groups.

On the enlightenment model it had always been expected that such groups would be less attentive to religion. It was supposed that to the degree that they were "enlightened," understood as being possessed of a Promethean reason, their attention to religion would atrophy and disappear. Religion, as Marx remarked was but a superstructure of an outmoded system and would disappear with human development.

In fact, however, as Huntington points out, in many cultures it is precisely among the more educated and mobile that religion appears to be either increasing or holding its own at periods of young adulthood when religious practice and concern normally decline. This is true especially of the more educated groups in the Islamic world. As they enter into new cultural and intellectual worlds and there find a challenge to their self identity this propels them to new attention to the religious foundations of their identity. Correspondingly, this same group tends to be more mobile and to move from more rural to more urban contexts. As they move away from family and from the roots of their self-understanding they find themselves in greater need of more clearly re-articulating the foundations of their life and identity. As they do so they turn greater attention to religion. Consequently, precisely where religion was expected by the Enlightenment to atrophy, in fact, the contrary is happening as attention to religion increases.

Second, the process of communication has new impact on the peoples of Islamic and Eastern cultures as their access to television programming from various cultures intensifies. This, in turn, creates a new issue of self-identity and a need for a reaffirmation of the religious roots of this self-identity.

The third reason for the projection of an ascendancy of religiously based cultures is related to the overall changes in the world. Demographically peoples who are religious in their cultural roots and consequently in their civilizations are increasing. In contrast, in the West, where secularization has attenuated attention to religion one finds declining populations. The relative disproportion between those two groups is so notable that, as we move on into the next century, the difference will become determining.

Fourth, in the global pattern of power if influence follows cultural conscious then the emerging self-identity of peoples, founded religiously, promises to translate into an increasing assertion of power by Islamic and Eastern peoples.

Fifth, Huntington’s thesis about the importance of the role of religion in public life conflicts with the Western liberal effort to envisage the world in a way which abstracts from the religious dimension. The classic liberal mind traces this to the religious wars, the War of the Roses and the consequent peace of Westphalia as an agreement on the need to separate religion from political life. But this was a militarily imposed solution rather than a matter of the free assessment and assent the people. The supposition of the liberal mind that its position in this regard reflects a universal and necessary truth entails the intent of imposing upon the rest of the world this Western separation and removal of religion from public life.

Huntington sees this as false, immoral and dangerous. First, it is false because religion is in fact not declining but increasing. Second, it is immoral because, in view of this increasing adhesion by peoples to religion, to impose the Western system of separation of religion from public life is alien to Islam and the East. This requires increasing applications of power, that is, of violence by the West thereby undermining its own profession of respect for freedom. Third, it is dangerous because the balance of power is shifting towards religiously concerned peoples and inevitably will lead to the defeat of the West if it makes a principal of standing against religion and isolating it from public life.

Indeed, it would seem that this effort is being felt significantly and resented in Latin America and other parts of the world. The linking of support for economic, health, ecological and other measures to democratic reform understood in the West as the separation of religion from public life imposes the liberal secularist view by myriad and pervasive financial and other means. In response Professor Kapal on whom Huntington draws notes a significant change from the middle of the 1970s in his work The Revenge of God. For Islam it consists of a shift of emphasis from the modernization of Islam to the Islamization of modernization, which implies as well the desecularization of the world.

In the view of his extensive and intensive study summarized above, Huntington sees the shift as being rather towards religion and that this promises to be a decisive factor in the exercise of power in the future.

As the major message of religion is peace, Huntington’s grounding of civilizations in religion of itself would seem to entail hopes for a trend toward peace as the religious sensibilities emerge. In fact his concluding rather to a clash of civilizations suggests that he has a second premise. The fact that this is largely unstated and unexamined suggests the urgency of such an examination. In fact, the second premise of Samuel Huntington is particularly disturbing; it is that identities are essentially conflictual. Here, the basic reason is the atomistic character of modern Enlightenment thought. This thought is basically analytic attempting to divide everything into its atomic components each distinct from the other. This implies that when basic units are arrived at they are by nature conflictual and contrasting in nature.

With this atomistic vision he concludes that there are seven or eight major civilizations, each constituting the basic identity for the peoples within its sphere. On the above basis he supposes them to be automatically conflictual in character; consequently, the title of his book: the clash of civilizations.

This thesis shows up in another form expressed with Thomas Kuhn in terms of the notion of paradigms as incommensurable. In this view one cannot understand the other and consequently, wittingly or unwittingly, each is on a course of conflict with the others.

As this is a key supposition in Huntington’s thought a major task of philosophers in this regard is to examine this question to see whether cultural identities are conflictual in principal or whether on the contrary, precisely as cultural and as founded on religion, they are in principal convergent.

This, of course, is not only an issue of principle but of historical practice as well. But here the fact that in the past religions have conflicted does not and should not determine the future. Rather the ongoing historical development of human understanding as we enter into a global age makes it possible to mine anew in more effective, and indeed more authentic, ways the convergent potentialities of the religions which undergird the multiple civilizations.

From the combination of the two major thesis mentioned above, namely, the increase in religious awareness and sensitivities and their supposed conflictual character Huntington sees the increasing identification in terms of religion, culture, and civilizations as generating a threat of broader conflicts. These will be passionately fought precisely because more deeply grounded, not merely in economic or geographic reasons, but rather in the most basic religious self-identifications of peoples. Hence, the imposition of one culture upon another, or one family upon another, of one faith upon another cuts to the quick and generates the most impassionate reactions.

By way of critique it should be noted that Huntington does not seem adequately to distinguish the levels of concern. A first level of concern is the physical realm of material goods. The interchange and interrelation of these constitutes the economic order which is entered into for motives of profit. Because physical goods are mutually exclusive and such a good possessed by one is not available to the other these natively are bases for conflict. The second level of concern is political. This is a matter of the exercise of power; again its possession by one implies a subjection of the other.

Moving beyond these two levels of economics and politics, that is, of profit and power, one comes to the spiritual level of concern. Here, in contrast to the other two goods this order is not possessed exclusively by one vis-a-vis the other, but can be shared. Thus, if one shares one’s knowledge with the other, one does not thereby lose it; in fact, the very process of sharing this can be a process of acquiring it more firmly. This is the experience of teachers that it is in teaching that they come finally to comprehend their subject.

In view of this it is important to note that Huntington’s thesis is precisely that the focus of attention is indeed shifting from the first two levels of economic and political concerns to the third level of self identity and its religious roots. In view of this dramatic changes are taking place with far reaching implications.

In the past Jean Paul Sartre carried the Enlightenment to its logical extreme in asserting that for one to be free meant freeing oneself from any Transcendent: one could not be free if there was a God. Today all of that is being reassessed as Enlightenment reason is embarrassed with the consequences it has generated and people look for a more secure and humane dimensions of rationality. This shift appears in such fora as the United Nations, which have moved from the clashes in the Security Council of the two major Cold War economic systems to the great UN conferences on environment in Rio, on family in Cairo, on women in Beijing, and most generally to the issues of culture and minorities.

Seen then in terms of this third level of values and cultures, the self-identity of cultures which generate civilizations need not be conflictual.

Beyond this there is the foundational question whether it is possible to generate an understanding of the other which will be constituted of a positive relation and concern. Is it possible to see the other not merely as not contradictory, but as positively related to my own self-understanding and self-realization so that cultures and civilizations are by nature not conflictual but complementary. This issue of whether cultures are conflictual or cooperative is the central point of great importance.

This question might be approached first in a more external fashion. Here to answer this simply in the affirmative would be too simple for the emerging cultural self-awareness entails diversity as well as unity. Hence an answer must be complex in order to be true. In this sense it is important to consider cultures and civilizations, and their religious roots, not only inasmuch as they are similar but also inasmuch as they are dissimilar.

As similar all religions are now recognized as authentic paths to the one God and hence as convergent paths to the Holy Mountain after the image of the prophet Isaiah.

But cooperation is made possible also by the very diversity between religions and civilizations. This is true externally inasmuch as each has had its own experience in pursuing its own path to God and is therefore able to make a distinctive contribution to the others in their pilgrimage. Islam, for instance, has always stressed and exemplified fidelity to the one God and all can and should learn from Islam in this. Christianity for its part has long faced the challenges of the secularizing force of modernization. Indeed secularism is sometimes referred to as a Christian heresy carried out by and for humankind alone.

Moreover, diverse religions and civilizations are able to contribute one to another if other civilizations are looked upon not simply as alien or other, but as stimulating all to look again into their own tradition in order to enable it to speak afresh the truths we need for our times.

These hermeneutic considerations make possible new attitudes in the relation between religions and civilizations, which may be the most important for practical interaction. But they remain impeded both epistemologically and psychologically.

Abdullah Lalai in his Islam and Modernity mentions that for too long Islam has understood itself in relation to Christianity. In this close contact the outlook tends to be one of contrast and conflict. This he believes has restricted self-understanding to a defensive position which militates against one’s own cultural creativity. Consequently, he suggests that the horizon of Islam needs to be broadened to include other great religions such as Buddhism. This indeed is happening at the present time due to the process of globalization not only of the economy, but also of political and especially informational and cultural interchange. Consequently, it becomes much more feasible in these days for Islam to understand itself in relation to the broad field of world religions and thereby to feel more free to adapt and progress. In order for this to take place requires a new outlook and a new sense of being. This is a matter of epistemology and of metaphysics.

Here, the thought of Nicolas of Cusa can be suggestive Nicolas was a lay lawyer in the service of the Pope at the time when Islam occupied Constantinople. That fact was seen in the West as a great tragedy, but Nicolas of Cusa returned from a mission to Constantinople with a strange and unaccustomed message, namely, that perhaps the presence of Islam was not as bad as was being perceived and might even be good. It would carry his thought forward a bit to conclude that possibly Christianity with Islam is better than Christianity alone. But he was centrally impressed by the fact that while absolute unicity befits the Absolute, it was impoverishing for humankind. His metaphysics and epistemology hinged upon this truth more common in Islam and with great implications for social theory.

Today many factors make us newly aware of the world as a whole. This, of course, leaves the reality of the individual components, but rather than being seen in contrast and as exterior one to the other they are seen in terms of the one whole which they constitute.

In the view of Cusa predicated upon a whole, in terms of which all is seen, each individual must appear as the whole contracted. In this light the individual is not an insignificant species in a vast universe, but is rather the one who shares consciously in the reality of the whole. Each one has the importance of the whole as its exists in and as oneself: to be is to partake in the whole.

David De Leonardis attempts to express this in two principles. The first is a principle of individuality, namely, that each individual contraction imparts to each entity an inherent value which makes it indispensable to the whole. Correspondingly, the second principle is that if the contraction of being making each thing to be everything in a contracted sense.

From this notion of contraction there follows the creation of community in which all the entities are related not externally, but ontologically on the basis of their very constitution and hence internally. This relatedness is not artificial or arbitrary, but constitutional.

As a result his vision is marked by cohesion and complementarity. All are related in a manner not dissimilar to the parts of a body. That is, each depends upon the other and it is by each that the whole achieves its goal.

Further, precisely as a contraction of the whole, in order for anything to be what it is it must in a certain sense be everything which exists. In view of this the other is in no sense alien, but rather a part of one’s own definition. Implicit in this is not only that each is needed as for each member of a team. Much more, by acting with others, in the service of others and for their good, one achieves one’s own fulfillment. In this the analogy to a family is perhaps the most relevant.

In all of this the central concept is that of identity in terms not of contradiction, but of relation to others. In our world of economic competition this may seem too far to reach for we have been raised up on the notion of competition. But Francis Fukuyama’s work on Trust Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity suggests that this notion of relatedness and cooperation is not really distant. Indeed it may be so deceptively present that it passes unnoticed but is not inactive. He shows how the economic sphere (and by implication all areas of human interaction) needs to be grounded in this deeper sense of unity. He points out how Weber and others would identify a number of virtues as important for the development of the economic order: diligence, saving, rationality, innovation and risk taking. These are all virtues of the individual and with them one might be on the third or lower level of unity in Cusa’s understanding, that is, a vision simply of many individuals alongside each other and locked in serious competition or even combat.

Fukuyama, however, points out that these virtues would be simply conflictive were it not for a deeper undergirding set of virtues of a social nature: honesty, reliability, cooperation and responsibility. Beyond any sense of competition there is required a unity within which we find ourselves related to others with whom we share and to whom we are responsible.

In this light the cooperation that now is needed between civilizations appears not to be so distant or esoteric. In contrast, it is the supposition on which we live our daily life in our restricted circumstances. As we move now to global horizons this needs to be better understood in order that is applications and implications be able to thought through in our increasingly complex world. In this it is essential that religions no longer be seen as conflictual and be excluded from public life, but be enabled to play their foundational role in understanding and motivating positive relations of cooperation not only in family and community, but in cultures and civilizations.