FROM THE DIALECTICS OF CIVILIZATION TO DIALOGUE AMONG CIVILIZATIONS

Hossein Bashiriyeh

Dr H. Bashiriyeh is a Senior Lecturer at the Tehran
Univesity

The main argument of this article is that the project of
dialogue among civilizations as a prescriptive policy is founded upon the
historical dialectics of civilizations as a descriptive term. In Freudian words,
dialogue takes place on a conscious level, whereas dialectics occurs within 'the
unconscious' of history. We offer this argument in opposition to two major
theoretical standpoints on the subject:

1) The concept of a single dominant, scientifically based
rational civilizations i.e. the western civilization pervading the world, as
proposed by philosophers such as Cont, Kant, Hegel, Spencer and Toynbee,
according to whom the decadent or declining civilizations based upon religion
and tradition shall eventually vanish.

2) The concept of a plurality of civilizations, distinct and
divorced from each other, that has recently emerged as a response to the
so-called crises of western modernity and civilization to the failure of that
civilization to spread all over the world and to the emergence of
traditionalist, anti-modernist and counter enlightenment movements in the 20th
century. This school of thought is itself divided into two versions: the
antagonistic version (e.g. S. Huntington) and the peaceful interpretation (S.
Hirschberg and some post-modernists).

In this article it is argued that neither of those two
perspectives (the first putting emphasis on the internal unity of civilization
and the second on the diversity and exclusive nature of them) can capture the
synthetic, concrete and multi-faceted nature of civilizations. Higher
civilizations are those that have absorbed various elements of other
civilizations. So there is no pure civilization as there is no pure culture or
religion. Man today is more advanced and sophisticated because he is a
multi-civilizational being. The conclusion is that the project of dialogue among
civilization is not, in G. Lukacs's term, a utopian possibility', but brings to
consciousness what has taken place in the 'historical unconscious'.