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'.