Professor Kwame Gyekye, in this work Beyond Culture: Perceiving a Common Humanity, has taken up a philosophical issue that is foundational for this newly global age.

In the past peoples have lived far from one another separated by great geographical distances and the physical barriers of mountain ranges and treacherous oceans. What was communicated from one people to another was precious due to its rarity. Today, we have an opposite experience. The electronic media make all places present and in real time, and the easy exchange of goods and services makes them inexpensive and ubiquitous. We have come in a very short time to constitute one world, and this fact is now shaping the lives of all.

With regard to cultures and our common humanity some indicators for a response can be found in earlier experience. One is sociological data on families migrating to a newly pluralistic context. The first generation born in the new land tends to reject radically the cultures from which they came and to insist, even more passionately than their teenage colleagues, on dressing and acting exactly like their peers. Often they intend to distance themselves from the culture from which their parents sprang. Once fully assimilated and unencumbered by their parents’ insecurities regarding their identity, however, the next generation of offspring develops deeper questions regarding their identity and shows renewed interest in their distinctive culture of origin. Another indicator is the common experience that, though each person must venture forth from family to be socialized in the common ways of the broader village or city life, when mature they return to play a responsible role as a more fully aware member of their family.

Analogously, as philosophy and philosophers today find themselves in a new and fully diverse global context they face in new ways the fundamental philosophical issue of "the one and the many," of "unity and diversity". All come from a culture and civilization which developed its distinctive character over vast temporal and geographical distances; they enter now a global forum of exchange of goods and information to which successful adaptation is a first requisite for survival. The deeper challenge, however, is to rediscover their identity within the new unity.

Like the classical problem of the one and the many the problem of a common humanity has two components: unity and diversity. This work of Professor Gyekye focuses upon the first. Bringing to bear the full sophistication of the process of abstraction first introduced by Aristotle, it moves swiftly beyond cultures to identify the human essence or nature that is common and foundational to all cultures. This is shown to be not only a chance convergence or an overlapping consensus, but a set of prerequisites for any community life. Thus, killing and dishonesty are basically destructive of life altogether, as are anarchism and disdain for elders who bear the human experience and exemplify the social learning of their people. This work argues strongly for the consensus across peoples on these fundamental building blocks of social life in any age. Few have stated the argument as clearly and forcefully as does Professor Gyekye. His is a basic text for every culture and civilization; it should be read, pondered and followed by all.

Yet, we are in but the very first decades of the new post ideological global unity, having broken beyond a bipolar world structure only in the very last decade of the last century. On entering the new millennium we find ourselves in a vastly different world which we tend to approach with the philosophical tools and instincts of the past. Hence we see with eyes trained by the modern scientific – even scientistic – character of our education which to abstract from the differences in order to get to "the heart of the matter". Univocity and universality are our keys to meaning and our assurance of truth, as Kant pointed out not only in his first critique on pure reason, but in his second critique on practical reason. Conversely, Western philosophy is little experienced in the motifs of harmony explored in Kant’s third – and till recently ignored – critique of aesthetic judgement. It is precisely this, however, which characterises the rest of the world’s civilizations

This suggests that philosophy today is at the beginning of a long and exciting road for which this work of Professor Gyekye on the unity of humankind lays a firm foundation. The task ahead will be to reinforce this unity by incorporating the different modes or cultures in terms of which alone life can be lived. The global community must become an open community able to leave room for, to take account of, and to respect the experiences and free creativity of all.

Different cultures do exist, notes Professor Gyekye, but may have been closed to us. In this global age, as these cultures are newly encountered, the task will be to discover and develop the human abilities of mind and heart to recognize, value and engage them. For this new modes of human awareness will be required. We will need to apply phenomenological methods to take us more deeply into human consciousness in order to discover the deeper creative sources, and the true nature, of cultures. We must find ways to understand them, not as walls which constrict (a simile both repeated and rejected here), but as lenses by which we are enabled to look out, and through which we can both engage and be enriched by other cultures and horizons.

It is a basic insight of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics that we are born and raised in a particular locale, language and symbol system, culture and civilization, through which we are enabled to understand and relate to others. Finite beings have no privileged position to which all things are present or in which they are present to all. In our human condition everyone has to be somewhere. What we need to discover is how we can be enabled by our distinctive culture and begin to make it work for us in interacting with others.

This suggests the need to return afresh to metaphysics for a new and more humanized approach to the problem of the one and the many, beginning not from the lofty ideas of a Plato, the universals of an Aristotle, or a set of politically dictated abstract rights. The place to begin, or rebegin, is the essentially unique exercise of human freedom by our forebears in facing human challenges and forming their hopes. Their creativity established the ways of cultivating one’s life and raising one’s offspring—one etymology of the term "culture"—with which alone we are endowed.

This generates neither an abstract rationalist "approach from nowhere," nor one that is essentially Greek. Instead, the peoples dispersed across the world must be able to join the new global dialogue from wherever they are, make their own contribution, and be enriched by all other cultures. As a result in the future philosophy must be modelled not on a flute as are the monolithic deductive rationalisms of modernity, but on an organ with the full range of sonorities of the world’s cultures. The result, it can be hoped, will be not a philosophic tradition that is hegemonic imposing itself universally, but one composed, as in the image of Isaiah, of the many peoples converging each along its own path to the holy mountain.

Practically, this convergence of unique cultures has been emerging through the more than 100 studies of this series: "Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change". Generally the volumes have been written by research teams, each working on a present problem of its own people and drawing in response upon its cultural tradition. The commonly shared challenges of community life, particularly in our time of global change, are their central concern. To these the responses are as differentiated as is the free cultural creativity of the many peoples coming from the all points of the compass.

Yet there are philosophical resources which give founded hope that these people can be convergent rather than conflictual. These are found at a level deeper than formal and abstract ethical principles; they must be rooted rather in the common point of emergence and convergence of all human life, and indeed of all creation. If so then in this work, Beyond Cultures: Perceiving a Common Humanity, devoted to unity in diversity, Professor Gyekye has assured the basis for the major project of our day, namely, to build upon our essential unity-in-diversity an existential diversity-in-unity in which all can celebrate their own life with, and through, that of others.