Sources of Pluralism – Introduction

Introduction

As the editor of Philosophy and Social Criticism it has been my privilege to supervise the publication of and to participate in Reset-Dialogues on Civilization annual meetings at Bilgi University in İstanbul. Although pluralism or the lack thereof was present in each of the prior seminars, this year the decision was made to approach the subject directly by focusing on ‘The Sources of Pluralism: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Law and Politics’. The subject, pluralism, has a long history and its relevance in the current global context cannot be underestimated. In this issue several dimensions of the phenomenon of pluralism will be presented. This issue begins with the origins of pluralism with articles on its origin as a topic within pragmatism, the sources of pluralism in law, the roots of pluralism in India, and a comparison of the pluralistic outlooks of Gandhi and Berlin. The second section considers the development of pluralism within democracy, as juxtaposed to populism, in relationship to realism and relativism, and under the rubric of the social. The third section evaluates pluralism in Turkey as expressed through the revival of Kemalism, as associated with the treatment of minorities and in relationship to the protests at Gezi Park. The final topic is pluralism within Islam, which considers an epistemological justification for Islam, the threat to pluralism in Indonesia, understanding secularism in Indonesia, and in relationship to fundamentalism.

On the origins of pluralism

Richard Bernstein’s article ‘Cultural Pluralism’ provides an interesting point of departure for these dialogues because it points to the origins of the pragmatic discussion of that topic with Oxford lectures of William James entitled, A Pluralistic Universe. Reflecting the background of the growing diversity of the population with the vast immigration that took place in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries in the United States, James attempted to provide a philosophical foundation, to give a normative definition, as it were, to what was to be called by one of his students, Horace Kallen, cultural pluralism.

James’ contribution is seen against the backdrop of the monistic philosophies of German idealism, as Bernstein puts it:

…there are and always will be competing ‘points of view’. There is no single God’s- eye point of view that humans can achieve. James makes a metaphysical point – that reality of the universe itself is pluralistic and the craving to see the universe as consisting of a single total unified system is misguided. James knew that his radical pluralism was offensive to many philosophers – but nevertheless he believed it was far more truthful to the tangled quality of experience and reality.

That metaphysical point would be taken up as a normative one by Horace Kallen, one of the students who attended James’ lectures, to confront the idea of the American melting-pot that came to characterize cultural integration in the form of homogenization. His view rather was through cultural pluralism to preserve the uniqueness of each individual.

One other student who attended those lectures was Alain Locke who as an African American came to focus the idea of pluralism on ethnicity and race. He and along with him W. E. B. Dubois were pioneers in developing a pluralist attitude that would respect difference as well as integration.

In ‘Law as a Source of Pluralism’ Ulrich Preuß presents an argument for the origins of pluralism which is both historical and normative. The historical side of the argument associates the phenomenon of pluralism with the early Greek appearance of the courts which provided a means of resolving disputes beyond the direct resort to violence that characterized pre-legal societies. This development is traced from this early manifestation to so-called early-modern western society which found the source of legitimacy of the law in authority and not truth as summarized the famous phrase associated with Hobbes, auctoritas, non veritas facit legem. Though it appears that this authoritarian justification is anything but pluralistic, the very idea of the social contract based on the right of self-preservation opens up the possibility for pluralism. Preuß traces the historical development of pluralism through the dissolution and reconstruction of authority leading up to and including the French Revolution. The normative side of the argument is based on the distinction between regulative and constitutive legal norms. Regulative norms simply refer to an existent social reality for their legitimation while ‘constitutive norms convert power into authority’. The latter require the existence of pluralism that is grounded on the development of institutions, the primary example of an institution being a constitution. One might conclude that pluralism finds its fundamental expression in the notion of a people upon whose consent authority is justified.

In ‘The Roots of Indian Pluralism: A Reading of Asokan Edicts’ Rajeev Bhargava presents a very careful reading of the interpretatively difficult edicts of the Emperor Asoka who managed somehow to affirm pluralism during his reign in India during the 3^rd century BCE. Bhargava’s question, in the light of the history of characterizing the toleration attributed to Asoka which many claim is analogous to modern forms of toleration, is, what kind of toleration was it? Contrary to a significant amount of literature on the subject, this ‘vivid quasi-phenomenological account’ speculates that in the context of what must have been conflict of a more radical kind than most interpreters presume a new public sensibility had to be worked out. It is important to note that this sensibility was developed in an essentially oral culture, meaning that self-restraint would focus on speech. This resulted in a ‘new political morality [which] placed at the centre a series of self- and other-related self-restraints’. Fundamentally, the argument contends that this is a kind of toleration that differs fundamentally from the one the West has inherited from the 17^th century which depended upon the repression of neutralization of ill-will or hatred, in other words, a form of privatization which made toleration possible. Instead, although there is not really a definition of this form of toleration, its meaning could be closer to what we today call ‘civil’.

Ramin Jahanbegloo’s article, ‘Two Concepts of Pluralism: A Comparative Study of Mahatma Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin’, argues that Gandhi’s idea of civic friendship is correlative with Berlin’s anti-monism not in the sense that they are identical positions but that one position can be seen as an extension of the other. Admittedly, Berlin’s concept of negative freedom was the endorsement and development of a certain kind of liberalism seen in the context of the various dangerous totalitarianisms of his day; while Gandhi’s idea of self-emancipation would lead to social emancipation, Berlin’s value pluralism could be seen as a foundation for ‘spiritual growth’. In the end, both contribute to the idea of pluralism in the sense that they counter relativism on the one hand and affirm universal values on the other.

On the development of pluralism

In ‘Democracies in the Plural: A Typology of Democratic Cultures’ Alessandro Ferrara argues that in the 21^st century our approach to democracy should not begin with the problem of justification. Rather we must approach democracy from the perspective of democratic culture, or more precisely our approach must begin with the plurality of democratic cultures. As Eisenstadt and others from the ‘multiple modernities’ approach have shown, there is no singular approach to modernity. Analogously according to this argument there is no singular approach to democracy. The key here in the tradition of Montesquieu is to look at democracy from the perspective of its ethos. This approach, informed by considerations of democratic ethos to be distinguished from more procedural approaches characterized by the spirit of Protestant culture with its ‘passion for individualism’, ends by presenting a typology that among other things distinguishes democracies that rest on a priority of rights from those forms that emphasize duties. Hence the conclusion: ‘As the 21^st century begins to unfold, an age-old dictum can still be inspirational when aptly reformulated: Cuius religio, eius res publica.’

In ‘The Populist Threat to Pluralism’ Julian Baggini makes a case for a non-ethical justification of pluralism on an epistemological basis before turning to a critique of populism. The reason for this turn to the epistemological is that it is clear that in a pluralist society not all people are pluralists. ‘Therefore the role of politics is to balance and negotiate between competing claims and demands so as to enable as many compatible goods from different incompatible positions as is possible.’ Baggini argues that we do have an epistemological basis for making valid decisions, however. First, the principle of normative rationality is introduced as a relatively neutral principle that states, ‘we should believe what it is most rational to believe’. There will of course be situations where competent judges disagree. This will lead us to the principle of epistemological pluralism, which states that when we come to situations of conflict, and politics is about conflict, we have a more or less rational basis to accommodate other positions even though we may believe ours to be true. The principle of epistemological populism states that where competent judges disagree we should accept the views of ordinary people. In other words, populism fails to accommodate pluralism.

In the article ‘Realism, Relativism and Pluralism: An Impossible Marriage?’, Paolo Costa argues that pluralism is ‘a precarious and open-ended combination of realism and relativism’. The ‘impossible marriage’ comment refers to the religious believer who searches for an absolute truth which is a matter of life and death (realism). However, at the same time the believer, following the fundamental separation of the immanent and the transcendent in axial religion, witnesses the relativation of all in the sense that a transcendent God is the ‘Great Leveler’. Given this perspective the author argues that relativism often judged negatively by philosophers is not so bad, given its manifestation as a kind of openness to the world. On the other hand, one requires a sense of realism to ground our beliefs. It would follow that pluralism mediates this duality between realism and relativism.

In the article ‘Collective Intentionality or Documentality’, Maurizio Ferraris argues against the idea promoted by John Searle and others that reality is a matter of social construction through intentionality. Instead, he argues that human beings are primarily the creatures of the document. Rejecting a constructivist orientation that goes back to Kant, Ferraris argues that it is the document, the fact that life is made up of documents from the artifact to the Internet, the recording of everything, that determines our reality and consequently our responsibility. This results in the claim that rather than our normativity being socially constructed we are ‘socially dependent’ on norms of which we are for the most part unaware but for which we are responsible just the same. According to this argument we are not the ‘legislators’ of social reality but rather its humble social subjects.

Pluralism in Turkey

The provocative title, ‘All Quiet on the Kemalist Front?’, of the article by Murat Borovalı and Cemil Boyraz signifies the current dilemma of the Kemalist movement that played a predominant role in Turkey’s post-Ottoman past. Given Turkey’s current political situation which reflects the success of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and after extensive interviews with four Kemaliat organizations attempting to rebuild a ‘civil’ Kemalism, the authors render a rather skeptical judgement. Hence the conclusion:

Based on an examination of the views of the representatives of the four Kemalist associations…it has to be concluded that this movement is currently unable to present a credible, progressive and agenda-setting opposition.

The reason in part for this judgement is the failure of the Kemalist organizations to free themselves from the ideology of the past that makes it impossible to deal with the current need for the recognition of diversity. Hence one might draw the conclusion that democratic pluralism which many regard as missing in the current regime will not be recognized by civil Kemalism either.

In the article ‘Turkish Politics of Doxa: Otherizing the Alevis as Heterodox’, Markus Dressler argues for Turkey: ‘the secularism inherent to the modern project curtailed the political and public roles of religion and in this way rendered the question of religion a political one’. The consequence for the Alevis was that they were essentially named by the state as ‘heterodox’ and thus discriminated against by the modern secularism. This ‘heterodoxification’ has a history, which the article lays out. When Kemalism became the dominant force in Turkey the state had an interest in defining itself as secular from an external perspective while assuming that internally it was defined as Sunni-Muslim. Hence the politics of doxa resulted in the otherizing of the Alevis. One can conclude that in the process of modernization in Turkey the potential for a robust pluralism was in this instance lost.

Two articles, ‘The Manner of Contention: Pluralism at Gezi’ by İlay Romain Örs and Ömer Turan, and ‘Resources and Shortcomings of Pluralism in Today’s Turkey: Gezi Park Protests in the Light of Pluralism’ by Cengiz Aktar, attest to the lack of pluralism in Turkey’s political and civil society and the manifestation of it in the Gezi Square protests in the spring of 2013. Taken together they both attest to the peacefulness and the overall civil graciousness of the movement while at the same time they bear witness to the lack of a concrete expression of pluralism in Turkish political society.

Pluralism within Islam

In ‘The Epistemology of the Truth in Modern Islam’ Khaled Abou El Fadl argues on essentially theological or interpretative grounds that to anchor the interpretation of Islam in an epistemology frozen in the 7^th century not only is wrong but also fails to come to terms with the richness that is Islam. The article shows through an overview of the history of Islam that in the past it has been able to adapt to a vast number of cultural developments. Unfortunately ‘Puritanical-Salafism’ referring to the theologies of Wahhabism and Salafism has obscured the civilizational contribution made by Islam. The author states:

I am absolutely certain that if Puritanical-Salafism with all its unwavering creedal dogmatism and epistemological absolutism had the type of influence upon Islamic culture that it has today, Muslims would not have built a civilization and they would have contributed nothing to humanity. Today, the moral and aesthetic lead has been taken by democracy, pluralism and human rights, and the inescapable and challenging question that confronts all religious traditions is: What can they offer that could constitute moral progress in a postmodern world?

Through a careful textual analysis the author shows the potential for an understanding of Islam that can accommodate postmodern culture.

Syafiq Hasyim in ‘Majelis Ulama Indonesia and Pluralism in Indonesia’ analyses the role of the Council of Indonesian Ulama (MUI) in enforcing an essentially anti-pluralistic orientation within the Indonesian state and society. Arguably Indonesia founded by Sukarno (1945) through Pancasila (five principles) was based on a foundation that was essentially pluralistic. Significantly, the Ulama played a fundamental role in the establishment of Indonesia and suffice it to suggest that it in the MUI (founded 1975) provided the basis for Suharto’s authoritarian anti-communist rule. In 2005 the MUI issued a fatwa against pluralism, secularism and liberalism. According to the author, ‘MUI perceives that the danger created by pluralism is more dangerous than that of secularism and liberalism because belief is the kernel of Islam (Arabic: uṣūl al-dīn)’. This leads to the larger picture which can be summed up as follows: ‘Historically speaking, the ideological conversion of MUI from Pancasila to Islam reflects the spirit behind the disassociation of MUI from the official ideology of Indonesia’ attempting to ‘establish an Islamic polity which is purely based on the norm of Islam’. The author concludes with the suggestion that the recent post-Arab-spring developments have contributed to this movement against pluralism.

Saskia Schäfer in ‘Renegotiating Indonesian Secularism through Debates on Ahmadiyya and Shia’ takes a somewhat different approach to the question of religion and the role of the state. By looking particularly at the question of the role of the Ahmadiyya she considers the place of secularization in Indonesia but not with the model of separation inherited from the West. Hence, she makes the following observation: ‘the debates on orthodoxy and deviance show that the question of secularity in Indonesia is not as much about religion or not religion, but more about defining what kind of religion is acceptable, and who holds the defining power’. Hence, the issue is not whether religion is ‘reviving’ but how it is being renegotiated and in this sense religion is very much a part of Indonesian modernity. The author reminds us that for the parameters of religion to be renegotiated religion has to have ‘political currency’ and there must be ‘renewed authority’ both on the political and the religious scene. The author concludes:

I want to suggest that an alternative to measuring non-western realities against the prevalent concepts of secularism is to look in more detail at the proliferation of religious authorities as a danger to supposedly ideal models of separation. A closer empirical analysis of these cooperations will help to shed fresh light on the relationship between state, society and religion.

Volker Kaul in the article ‘What Makes a Fundamentalist? Metaphysics, Morality and Psychology’ argues that the basis for taking a fundamentalist position lies neither in metaphysics nor morality but rather in psychology. The difference between fundamentalists and moderates is to be found in the self/other distinction. The argument is that it is for psychological reasons that fundamentalists cannot be pluralists.