The European Legacy, Vol. 17, No. 6, pp.

731743, 2012

On Margins, Marginals, and Marginalities: A Conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo

RAMIN JAHANBEGLOO, COSTICA BRADATAN
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AURELIAN CRAIUTU

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tre Francais est une evidence: on nen souffre ni on ne sen rejouit . . . . Le paradoxe E tre Persan (en loccurrence, Roumain) est un tourment quil faut savoir exploiter, de un defaut dont on doit tirer profit. E. M. Cioran

Costica Bradatan: We would like first of all to thank you for kindly agreeing to take part in this conversation on marginality and its relevance for understanding trends and changes in our contemporary world. What has struck uswhat, after all, has set this project in motionis the elusive nature of this notion when it comes to understanding how humanistic knowledge is produced. I have in mind, for example, why an author who is first considered marginal becomes mainstream one day, sometimes long after his death (or the other way around). In the social sciences scholars have been working on marginality for quite some time. The topic is popular in sociology, obviously, but also in other fields such as international relations. I am thinking, for example, of Immanuel Wallersteins influential work in this area. However, in the humanities (and humanistic social sciences such as political theory), marginality is often perceived as something fuzzy, uncertain, and difficult to conceptualize. How are we to understand this situation? Is marginality here intrinsically mercurial and should we leave it at that? If not, how exactly should, or could, we handle it? Where should we start? Ramin Jahanbegloo: In his famous essay Human Migration and the Marginal Man (1928), Robert Park, one of the original members of the Chicago School of Sociology, defined marginality as a state of limbo between at least two cultural life-worlds. I propose here to revisit briefly Parks theory in order to produce an intercultural analysis of marginality. Parks formulation of marginality is directly related to Georg Simmels neur who has essay The Stranger (1908). For Simmel, a stranger is a potential fla the freedom of coming and going. The stranger is a detached person who comes in contact, at one time or another, with every individual, but is not organically connected with any single one. What characterizes Simmels concept of stranger is not only the act of detachment but also that of nearness. Talking in the context of the modern city,

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Centre for Ethics at University of Toronto, 6 Hoskin Ave., Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1H8, Canada. Email: ramin.jahanbegloo@utoronto.ca Costica Bradatan, The Honors College, McClellan Hall, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA. E-mail: Costica.Bradatan@ttu.edu Aurelian Craiutu, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, 210 Woodburn Hall, 1100 E. 7th St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. Email: acraiutu@indiana.edu
ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/12/06073113 2012 International Society for the Study of European Ideas http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2012.715805

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Simmel is aware of the fact that marginality is the outcome of urbanization and industrialization of modern societies. As a member of the Chicago School of Sociology, who himself had to deal with migration and change of culture, Park is more concerned with marginality as a process of internalizing a dominant culture and sacrificing ones cultural peculiarities. As Park affirms: It is in the mind of the marginal man that the moral turmoil which new cultural contacts occasion manifests itself in the most obvious forms. It is in the mind of the marginal manwhere the changes and fusions of culture are going onthat we can best study the process of civilization and of progress. Aurelian Craiutu: Can we then adopt or use in some other way Parks old notion of marginality? What are its strengths and shortcomings?
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Ramin Jahanbegloo: The problem with Parks conception of marginality is that it is one-dimensional. It fails to comprehend the intercultural and the border-crossing essence of the marginal experience. Marginality, it bears repeating, is not a schism in the soul. One can share two cultures as part of the same soul. That means that the world of the marginalized is not a challenge to intercultural living. On the contrary, intercultural living will grow if we accept the challenge of marginality. Intercultural transformation presupposes that an individual has to pass through the stage of marginality, which is actually the peripheral position of a person in society. Marginality is usually referred to as a transitional personality that is isolated and unprotected and is searching in vain for an opportunity to take roots in a dominant discourse or culture. But, on the contrary, being culturally marginalized describes the experience of a person who has been molded by exposure to two or more cultural traditions. Such a person does not tend to fit perfectly into any one of the cultures to which he or she have been exposed, but may fit comfortably on the edge, in the margins of each, by keeping his/her critical distance from both. This intercultural in-betweenness suggests a form of constructive marginality that is able to move easily and powerfully between different cultural traditions, acting appropriately and feeling at home in each. Intercultural marginals tend to put their multicultural experiences to good use. It is by valuing and celebrating their intercultural marginality that they gradually become mainstream one day. Costica Bradatan: I find this notion of constructive marginality a very promising insight, something we can start from and build on. If I understand you correctly, this is the paradoxical condition of someone who is, at once, weak (because that person does not fully belong to a dominant paradigm) and powerful (because not belonging to the dominant culture is precisely what enables him/her to engage in an intercultural experience, which is something that enriches a human being). What one loses by not being attached, in a rigid sense, to a distinct culture is fully compensated through ones gaining access to a richer and more refined sense of the self. In this manner marginality is somehow avenged and the marginal individual can even potentially become something of a model as someone who seems to be living a desirable life. Not only does the notion of constructive marginality suggest an overcoming of the traditional dichotomy center-margin but it also presupposes a more nuanced understanding of the selfthe self as a project, as a matter of self-definition, a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation, and so on. In addition, such an insight fits quite nicely with some of the basic principles that regulate life in a multicultural society.

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Ramin Jahanbegloo: The idea of constructive marginality is an effort to overcome the traditional dichotomy between center and margin. In todays world the relationship between the center and the margin has changed. We are witnessing a double shift of focus. First, the center has been fragmented so that it is no longer possible to conform to one absolute subjectivist ontology as was the case in modern philosophy. Secondly, we can witness new creations emerging from the sidelines towards the center. Marginality as a broken perception of the world replaces the linear and monolithic discourse of reality with a dialogical vision of civilization. Dialogical understanding as the true matrix of the hermeneutical encounter always generates a logic of ongoing differentiation and negotiation that seeks to authorize a new approach to civilization as a process of human self-consciousness. That is to say, there can be no phenomenological process of civilization making without a strong sense of caring for and sharing with other human beings as citizens of human history. However, the claim that dialogical citizenship rests on the authority of tradition in general denies the possibility of critical self-reflection and its ability to break with the dogmatic elements in every tradition of thought that work against any effort of dialogue. One needs to add that the hermeneutical understanding of traditions (both religious and cultural) inscribed in a phenomenology of dialogue, contributes to the discovery of a common voice in different traditions of thinking. Aurelian Craiutu: Would that be the case in any type of society, or only in a particular society? Ramin Jahanbegloo: Even in a closed and dogmatic society where citizens are discriminated and divided, there is still a space of dialogue which could be strengthened in the absence of a culture of dialogue, by giving voice to the elements of solidarity and togetherness which underlie the civic life of each tradition. As such, what can make this state of interconnectedness authentic and practical is neither the work of rationality nor our use of language but an empathetic perception of togetherness. In other words, empathy is necessarily a matter of sharing life with others. It is the recognition of the fact that in the context of human life certain others are similar to us as humans though different from us as members of another tradition of thought. We can see from this that, living in a tradition of thought is accompanied automatically with a sense of shared values with other members of the same community but it has also to do with what we might call a universal impulse, in the sense that its orientation toward its own life experience is based on the understanding of other communities as different experiences of the same shared life. This idea of a shared life binds members of different communities together in various ways, though this bind is not the result of a recognition that other communities and cultures are or must be like each other. But it goes without saying that our situatedness in a specific culture or tradition is indistinguishable from an effort to subsume ones individual history in a common history of humanity. This common history stands before us as our common destiny and through its presence our shared fate is called forth, put into play, discussed and revised. Through this give and take something comes into being that had not existed before and that exists from this shared destiny. It is the cominginto-history of a human destiny that is common to us. We can say, then, that the discovery of a common fate is a productive result of the dialogical process of cultures and traditions. Each culture discovers itself in other cultures, and vice versa, by seeing at the same time something common and something that is distinct to each.

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Aurelian Craiutu: What is the upshot of all this? And how can the rediscovery of the dialogic nature of social life help us reflect on the nature of marginality broadly defined? Ramin Jahanbegloo: A sense of solidarity is created not only because of the awareness of similarities but also because of the dissimilarities and differences that exist between human cultures. In fact, dissimilarities potentially bring every culture to an awareness of solidarity with other cultures. This awareness is not only based on knowledge of the Other but also on a reciprocal empathy. The dialogue with the Other is a dialogue with the self. In other words, every culture sees the other culture as an event and an openness. The presence of the other culture is vital for creating new possibilities and so a new horizon of truth is brought forward by the encounter with other cultures. Therefore, each culture can serve as a corrective to other cultures. The solidarity that emerges from a dialogue of cultures will always be accompanied with a horizon of a shared life and what we have in common as humans. This general sense of what binds cultures to each other emerges also through an awareness of the particular ways that cultures are bound to each other. So the theoretical frame to think of our complex and controversial world would be many marginalities, one humanity. We have no choice but to learn more about each others marginality if we intend to protect our shared fate. If we succeed we will be helping to create an era of constructive marginality where intercultural bordercrossing and learning would replace global mass culture. Costica Bradatan: The anatomy of such an encounter is indeed fascinating. I do not te here, but I wonder about its conditions of possibility. I cannot want to be the trouble-fe help asking myself, for example: How operational is this model? What is its scope of applicability? Isnt there something utopian about it? I can certainly agree that the model works in any number of individual cases, especially when talking about educated individuals whomore or less deliberatelyparticipate in the rituals and protocols of more than one culture. This is the ideal case. But how about the Moroccan, or Ukrainian, or Chinese laborer who livesmaybe illegallyon the outskirts of Rome, Paris, Madrid or London, where the living conditions are so harsh that there is hardly any culture left, let alone cultural blending? There is something almost physical about the marginality of these people who often go without food or shelter. Living on this kind of margin, they cannot experience any form of cultural sharing but only forms of separation, segregation and ultimately rejection. How can we convince them to use their marginality constructively? Ramin Jahanbegloo: There is nothing utopian about using ones marginality in a constructive way. I guess marginality is not the path given to us, but the path we choose for ourselves. It is a cultural process. As Clifford Geertz affirms, There is no such thing as human nature independent of culture. In other words, human beings are culturecreating beings. The work of culture is to create, reproduce and alter individuals by transforming them into culturally fabricated human beings. Therefore, it goes without saying that human beings produce cultures and are produced by cultures. However, humans are also able to radically rethink cherished ideas about humankind. This is why cultures are more than cultures; they are what give meaning to humans as members of the human race. Humans are created by cultures in the image of their societies. But they are a remarkable paradox. Though they are made for their own cultures, they have the capacity

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to reach out to other cultures. Human beings can bring humaneness out of the inhuman, as they can bring beauty out of ugliness and peace out of war. This is the formidable ability to show tolerance in the face of intolerance, compassion in the face of indifference. This is the ability to choose to go beyond ones marginality in a given set of inhuman circumstances. The word cultura derives from the verb colere, which also means to inhabit, to honor and to protect. This reminds us that culture has a spiritual dimension and a dimension of reverence towards life. It also makes culture a highly ambiguous term, for it could refer to a particular social or collective lifestyle or to an aesthetic sensibility. In any case, it connotes the constitutive features of humankind, indicating those qualities that humans have in common and also those which constitute many of their differences. While human societies and cultures are not the same, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to each individual in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products tre of their of people interacting with each other. Human societies find the raison de survival in culture. So culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is also a fragile phenomenon because it is constantly changing and easily degraded and destroyed. Costica Bradatan: Because culture is both the offspring and the victim of time. Ramin Jahanbegloo: Human societies produce culture to find permanence in time and history. What time delivers to us is never stale, because what time creates has eternity in it. Cultural values that are established in history as universal are not only for the present but also for eternity. Our humanity is measured not only by our belonging to our own culture but also by our attitude to other cultures. Culture is not as Matthew Arnold thought just the best that has been thought and said in the world; culture is what gives individuals the critical capacity to exit their marginality. The relevant question, therefore, does not concern why we are marginal but what we do with our marginality. To me marginality is rich and large and many-sided. As a result, even the Moroccan, Ukrainian, or Chinese laborer who livesmaybe illegallyon the outskirts of Rome, Paris, Madrid or London, does not constitute a hermetically-sealed form of marginality. His/her boundaries of marginality may change as he/she encounters other marginal characters. When portrayed in this way, partners in an inter-marginal dialogue end up engaging in a process of questioning rather than intimidating or patronizing each other. What they can learn from this cross-marginal dialogue is to be profoundly responsive to their shared fate. But who says response says also responsibility. Responsibility moves the individual to respond to the suffering of the other. Importantly, this means facing the dialogue with marginality, not avoiding it. It is engaging in an empathic relationship where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, as Tagore says in his poem. The question then is whether we are at the point in history when we should lose our faith in marginality or whether we must work towards understanding how an inter-marginal dialogue can forge new norms of solidarity in a plural world. Aurelian Craiutu: One of the conclusions thus far is that there are several types of marginality and that we should avoid the temptation of using it as a one-dimensional concept. As you suggest, marginality is always relational and must be interpreted as an open-ended and fluid concept that changes with time and place. It might be useful then to try to delineate a few types of marginality. The most obvious type that first comes

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to mind is authorial marginality, the marginality of an author in relation to the mainstream. Can you think of some relevant cases and, if so, what do they teach us about marginality in general? Ramin Jahanbegloo: I think the most relevant case of authorial marginality can be found in the works of Jean Genet. Genet is the best representative of marginality within contemporary French literature. Unlike many previous French writers, Genet lived as a marginal and celebrated marginality is his writings. In his autobiography, The Thiefs Journal, Genet describes his youth as a forbidden universe of opium-rackets, prostitution, begging and stealing. If I wanted my policemen and hoodlums to be handsome, it was in order that their dazzling bodies might avenge the contempt in which you hold them. Hard muscles and harmonious faces were meant to hymn and glorify the odious functions of my friends and impose them upon you. Whenever I met a goodlooking kid, I would tremble at the thought that he might be high-minded, though I tolerated the idea that a petty, despicable mind might inhabit a puny body. In the same manner, in his work, Querelle of Brest, the main character, an amoral sailor and murderer, proclaims: My wife is the sea; my mistress is my captain. In their letter to the president of France supporting the cause of Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau contextualized Genets marginality within a tradition of legendary poetes maudits like Villon and Verlaine. All of Genets work, they write, tears him from a past of glaring misdeeds . . . . We beg you . . . to save a man whose whole life will now be devoted only to work. Genet, however, speaks of French literature as his enemy. Costica Bradatan: Being a marginal, then, can be turned into a cultural asset that helps us understand new universes and explore new horizons. Ramin Jahanbegloo: From his perspective, writing is a matter of being an outlaw of French official culture, while continuing to make visible what Gordon Marino described as the invisibility of marginality. As such, in Jean Genets novels and theater, the official discourse of hierarchical bureaucracies is always perverted and transformed by the deviant narrative of the characters that are socially marginal (i.e. prostitutes in Le Balcon). This leads us to consider auctorial marginality as the literary manifestation of a singular sensibility in contradistinction to the collective experience of narrative. Genets writings derive their most striking marginality from the juxtaposition of a radical political discourse and erotic elements which brings into crisis the conventional sense of bourgeois liberal societies. Therefore, rare writers like Genet experience through their own auctorial marginality the possibilities and limits of imagining or representing marginal individuals and their strategies of survival as subaltern heroes. For Genet, marginality is a refusal to obey or recognize the law, and the withdrawal of legal rights and protections. But how do we move on from here without merely collapsing into violence? This is where we can soften the political edge of Genets revolutionary theory of marginality into a merely transformative one. As Michel de Montaigne writes: Laws are now maintained in credit, not because they are just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other . . . . Whosoever obeys them because they are just, obeys them not justly the way as he ought. Like Genet, Montaigne thus distinguishes the law from justice. The laws only real legitimacy is the authority established by its violence. This means that marginality exposes this violence and transcends it.

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Aurelian Craiutu: You claimed earlier that the theoretical frame to think of our complex and controversial world would be many marginalities, one humanity. We have no choice but to learn more about each others marginality if we intend to protect our shared fate. At this point, it might be good to change gears and explore for a moment your own case of marginality. Your own backgroundan Iranian philosopher, educated in France, who spent two years in India, and who taught in Canadais a fascinating case in point. You once said that you like to think of yourself as an Indian, who without being an Indian citizen, has an Indians metaphysical view of the world. You grew up reading Tagore and Nehru, before writing on Gandhi. Two decades ago, you produced a wonderful book of your conversations with Isaiah Berlin (it was this book, which I first read in French, that convinced me to study political philosophy and made me an avid reader of Isaiah Berlin). How do you view your own trajectory from the point of view of our discussion of marginality? What have you learned from living for two decades in what used to be the cultural center of the world, Paris? What have you learned from India? What have you learned from Isaiah Berlin? Ramin Jahanbegloo: As Nietzsche says: Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. But as St. Jerome adds: True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks. I believe, as a philosopher, that philosophy has to do more with being a friend of thought than with having a love for wisdom. But, being a friend of thought cannot go without being a friend of the world. And one cannot be a friend of the world without being a friend of ones time. Costica Bradatan: This is far from being an easy task. Some of us seek refuge in the past and idealize it, while others prefer to imagine a radiant future rather than live in the present. How did you find the right balance to be able to live here and now? Ramin Jahanbegloo: Yes, to attempt to understand ones Zeitgeist, the Spirit of ones time, is a difficult task. No one who is in it can take a detached view of it. However, as rational social and political agents we cannot help asking questions about the meaning of our times and our relation to it. Yet, to do that, one has to expose oneself to what Hannah Arendt calls the junction points of life. Being exposed to the meaning of life is to be gripped by the idea and the passion that life and thought are one. It means simply that one places ones thought at the cornerstone of ones life and at the same time takes the theme of human life as the main axis of the process of thinking. For me, this process of thinking has always been in relation to the simple fact of being born in a world where life has no other goal than living among others. If thinking and being alive become one, then certainly one can conclude that human history is a meaningful process of life and thought. Im using Hegelian philosophy here in saying that the idea of life becomes the idea of cognition. As such, life is not only something which is already there (ein Vorhandenes) but something which is its own externality toward itself. In other words, thinking is an opening up to the world that goes hand in hand with participating in a common world. It is a kosmos koinos (common world) in which each of us has his/her own kosmos idios (private world). That is to say, it is within the socio-historical institutions of the world that one can think and talk. So there is never any possibility of a tabula rasa or a radical search for the conditions of thinking and acting, since we think and we act in history and with history.

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Aurelian Craiutu: Yet, many philosophers, from Plato to Heidegger, have proved to be, in Mark Lillas evocative phrase, reckless minds who fell prey to the temptation to try to cure the world of its radical ills. Ramin Jahanbegloo: Under these conditions the primary problem of any philosophy of praxis is that humans have the potentiality to give their individual and collective life a signification that they have to make. We can interpret this phenomenon as the emergence in society of the possibility and the demand for freedom. Now, there is something paradoxical about freedom because it is a foundation that does not found anything. Since the modern world is based on freedom, it remains a world without foundation. That is why modernity is a world that continuously has to re-invent itself. The idea has special interest for me and has led me to teach and write on Hegel, the first modern philosopher who realized that modernity is the sole world that is not destroyed but is maintained and revitalized by the ongoing dialectical process. Therefore, in Hegels model the dynamic of modernity is an ongoing process even if it is socially and politically arranged in the trinity of the family, civil society, and the state. The paradox of freedom is maintained here as a living paradox: the modern state is supposed to constitute freedom, but it is supposed to be founded itself on the idea of freedom. That is to say, modern politics is a public space where individuals can meet as equals and find their relative positions only by the merit they gain in the eyes of their fellow humans. Maybe this is why action is inherently unpredictable and disorderly, given the freedom and plurality of those who engage in it. Costica Bradatan: I attain a sense of who I amand what my freedom isonly as a result of my encounter with others. Ramin Jahanbegloo: Let me go back to Arendt and underline with her that sovereignty and freedom are not the same. No man can be sovereign, says Arendt, because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth. In other words, politics is the exercise of plurality. What interests me in this Arendtian definition of politics is that if we understand by politics not the space where the dream of an ideology is realized, but mainly a sphere where there is a constant struggle of opinions against one another, which is why so-called public opinion is where each individual requires the surrounding environment of the multitude of other opinions. That is to say, opinion is both inescapably individual and intrinsically linked to a world that the individual shares with others. Therefore, political thinking belongs within the sphere of opinion. Here, I turn to Isaiah Berlins celebrated doctrine of value-pluralism. As you know, I was quite close to Sir Isaiah, (our book of conversations has been translated into 14 languages). I was lucky to have known him, for Isaiah Berlin, as Arthur Schlesinger said, was a beacon of wisdom and humanity in the most terrible century in western history. Costica Bradatan: What kind of person was he? Ramin Jahanbegloo: Isaiah Berlin had a serene, comic, joyous and secular personality. But I am sure that Berlin himself would have preferred to be remembered as what the eighteenth-century philosophers called an animateur didees. His commitment to clarity hlung, however went hand in hand with what he called an unavoidable effort at Einfu precarious and difficult and uncertain. He saw his task as one of contributing to the

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history of ideas by displaying, clarifying and criticizing the master ideas that lie behind the foundations of Western civilization. This task required the rare gift of understanding historical events and figures in all their variety. Aurelian Craiutu: It is likely that his origin (he was born in Riga and understood the Russian mind quite well) fostered his passion for ideas and gave him a keen eye for political ideas as well as for unconventional (perhaps even marginal) thinkers. Ramin Jahanbegloo: Berlins portraits of thinkers, politicians and artists are not a way for him to exercise the art of exegesis but an effort to present them from the inside. His contacts with his subjects are usually direct and full of psychological sensitivity. That is the reason why Berlin never gives the impression of seeking to conceal or mask these thinkers beneath a deceptive surface of ordinary and flat exhibition. Nor is he prone to the temptation of trying to minimize the enigmatic quality of the writers. On the contrary, he shows himself to be acutely attentive to the visionary character which informed the thinking of thinkers like Vico, Herder, Herzen, Hamann, or Maistre. Such perspicacity is hardly found among philosophers and historians of ideas. Hence, Berlin has this exceptional ability to reveal to his readers the concepts and categories that inspired these thinkers, while painting in an exemplary manner the atmosphere of hope, fear, excitement and disturbance that surrounded the development of these ideas. Costica Bradatan: Nonetheless, he was not exactly a systematic thinker and even his famous distinction between the two concepts of liberty (positive and negative) has been criticized by more analytically-minded philosophers. Ramin Jahanbegloo: It would be difficult to approach Berlin as a systematic thinker and philosopher or to reduce his writings to a systematic statement. Yet, while Berlins work ranges across many disciplines and embraces a varied cast of concepts and ideas, there is one principal leitmotif behind all his concerns and convictions. For Berlin the history of ideas was not a way to analyze the belief-systems of the past or to portray the progress from one idea to another, but rather an art of understanding peoples relationships to each other and to their institutions. Berlins anti-teleological approach to history and his advocacy of pluralism are perfectly consistent with his comprehensive perspective on ideas and his experience of liberal humanism as a Russian Jew living and flourishing in England. Berlins commitment to pluralism and moral humanism was born out of his experience of violence in the Russian Revolution and was forged by the Kantian respect for the individual as the sole source of morality. His defense hlung made him an antiof Herzens sense of reality and Herders concept of Einfu utopianist with an intuitive appreciation of the plurality of lived human experience. As such, Berlin was vehemently against the shaping of human society according to a blueprint. He believed that human beings should be given the chance to find out what kind of world they live in and what kind of world they are making, otherwise they would walk in darkness and be governed by a single set of rules. Aurelian Craiutu: You have mentioned Berlins conception of freedom. Are there any other important concepts in his work that remain relevant for us today? Ramin Jahanbegloo: Many people are familiar with Sir Isaiahs famous distinction between the two concepts of liberty, but not too many people know about his original

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idea of pluralism. Pluralism, as Berlin defines it, holds that communication and understanding of moral views are possible among all people. Pluralism is the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other. Relativism, in Berlins definition, would make moral communication impossible, while pluralism aims to facilitate moral communication. Therefore, pluralism accepts a basic core of human values, and from a pluralist point of view, values fall within a common human horizon. This horizon sets limits on what is morally permissible and desirable, while the core of shared or universal values allows us to reach agreement on at least some moral issues. This view rests on a belief in a basic, minimum, universal human nature beneath the widely diverse forms that human life and belief have taken across time and place. So for Berlin (and I agree with him on that), there is a difference between pluralism and relativism. Relativism is the view that things have value only relative to particular situations and that nothing is intrinsically goodthat is, valuable in and for itself, as an end in itself. A slightly different way of putting this would be to maintain that there are no such things as values that are always valid; values are valid in some cases, but not others. For instance, liberty may be a value at one place and time, but has no status as a value at another. So, relativism is a form of moral irrationalism, whereas pluralism facilitates moral communication. Berlin is correct in saying that fundamental human values are in conflict and that when they collide with each other they engender hard choices. Aurelian Craiutu: Berlins emphasis on the incompatibility of values is at the core of an agonistic form of liberalism that seems to better fit the multifarious contours of our world than those theories of justice that avoid taking seriously the permanence of these conflicts between irreconcilable values and principles. What is your position on this issue? Ramin Jahanbegloo: This is the basic pluralist dilemma: we live in a diverse world that is unable to accommodate all human virtues and values into one life. It is impossible for one life to contain all combinations of values and virtues. The idea of moral perfection is an illusion. In other words, diversity cannot be reconciled with utopian ideals but will only be realized under a system that accepts value-pluralism as a fundamental fact of ethical life. The diversity of ethics that is put forward by Berlin is what we can call cultural pluralism. Now the question to ask is: What type of relationship exists between the acceptance of value-pluralism and cultural diversity? Does value-pluralism give unlimited license to diversity? The recognition of the truth of pluralism necessitates the recognition of the need for diversity. Many in this world find value-pluralism difficult to accept; indeed, it would be curious if this were not so. The fact remains that we do live in a world of conflict. If the purpose of political life is to reach some sort of reasoned compromise over our divergent beliefs, values and lifestyles, then it would seem important to recognize value-pluralism as the matrix of our cross-cultural dialogues. Cross-cultural dialogue has been one of the central ideas of my philosophical research during the past twenty years. I am myself in a way a product of cross-cultural encounters. I was born in Iran. I traveled and lived around the world with my parents until the age of seventeen. After that I lived, studied and worked in France for twenty years as a philosopher and as a political scientist. After finishing my PhD at the Sorbonne, I did my post-doc work at Harvard and worked for a year in Washington, DC, before going to

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Canada and teaching at the University of Toronto. During the past ten years, I have been traveling and lecturing around the world, but I spent two interesting years in India and five years in Iran. My philosophical marginality and proximity with Iranian civil society took me to solitary confinement for 125 days. Today, if I have to describe myself, I would say that I am a critical cosmopolitan and a constructive marginal. Aurelian Craiutu: What does it mean, from the viewpoint of marginality, to be a critical cosmopolitan in a world that prides itself on being more and more without borders and in which information circulates so quickly? Ramin Jahanbegloo: It means the need to reformulate and to restructure cosmopolitanism from the perspective of a peripheral and marginal world. It is a counterpart and a corrective to the pan-European cosmopolitanism, and holds the promise of a harmonious coexistence among world citizens and a broader thinking and conversation among cosmopolitan subjects. My aim is to get a better sense of solidarity and empathy among cultures by celebrating and respecting the idea of diversity, but also by having a critical intervention against an uneven and unequal global design. What I have learned from this cross-cultural dialogue is that one has to be profoundly responsive to the sense of belonging that human beings experience in different cultures. But who says response says also responsibility. Responsibility is not the attribution of guilt to an agent for his/her acts or failure to act; responsibility moves the individual to respond to the call of the world and to create a future which would otherwise not happen. I join here vinas and Paul Ricur, whom the thoughts of two French philosophers, Emmanuel Le vinas for a year at the I knew both personally and intellectually. I was a student of Le Sorbonne back in the 1970s. As for Ricur, he was a friend and a mentor, to whom I have dedicated my book on Gandhi. With the Jewish background of his philosophical vinas could not accept the primacy of the ontological subject over the other. thinking, Le For him, ontology is the philosophy of injustice because it is an understanding of Being over an understanding of the relationship among persons. For Ricur, the ethical response to the other is also a reaction against violence in society. This means that ethics presupposes the freedom of the good, and this good is the source of ethics, not violence. In other words, for the disclosure of the good, violence has to be negated. Therefore, transforming a culture of irresponsibility into a culture of responsibility goes hand in hand with a philosophy of nonviolence. That is to say, only an open-ended, hospitable and empathetic dialogue which takes otherness (Fremdheit) seriously could be a genuine civilizational encounter. By civilization I do not understand progress in science, technology and industry, but a moral enterprise which shows to us the path of being human. Costica Bradatan: How did you become interested in Gandhi and what did his philosophy teach you in particular? Ramin Jahanbegloo: My interest in Gandhian philosophy is related primarily to the concept of self-realization as a process of enforcing civic engagement and empowering ` -vis the state. The dharmic nature of civilization brings Gandhi to civil society vis-a compare his concept of Swaraj to a house with its windows and doors open. So, Swaraj means essentially being open to others, but it means also building a character for oneself by living ones life as a moral project. In this sense, civilization is not just

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a self-proclamation of freedom. True freedom is not merely the freedom to do what one desires, but the ability to ensure that what one chooses is the result of a sense of duty and human solidarity. In other words, in order for civilization to be an ongoing moral progress it has to combine the dynamic and innovative characteristics of the dialogue. This is what will help resolve the dichotomy between the old and the new, tradition and modernity, continuity and change. Therefore, dialogueas the power of communication entailing both speaking and listeningcan contribute to the survival and growth of civilizations. So, the idea of a clash of civilizations is suspicious of mans capacity to engage in dialogue and of civilizations possibility to evolve as a living organism. At a time when mankind is confronted with a grim scenario involving clashes of national self-interest, religious fundamentalisms and ethnic and racial prejudices, the dialogue of cultures can be a well trusted means of laying the groundwork of a new cosmopolis. I believe sincerely that by promoting a better understanding of the other and by drawing on the best in human cultures, the dialogue of cultures can help generate fresh impulses of creativity in human societies. My multiple encounters with India have brought me to understand that the texture of life in India is in many respects similar to the texture of life in Iran. Aurelian Craiutu: In what sense has your identity as a constructive marginal been enhanced by your Indian experience? Ramin Jahanbegloo: Let me just say a few words about the Iranian-Indian dialogue, which from my point of view is important for the expansion of cooperation between two Asian countries which are both as old as history. The cross-cultural dialogue between Persia and the Indian subcontinent, starting from the Achaemenid period and going through the medieval period, appears in a new intellectual and political framework in the twentieth century. The deep interest of Tagore in the Persian poet Hafez and Persian poetry in general and his unforgettable visit to Iran in 1936 brings to our attention the significance of the common heritage that has shaped the historical destinies of India and Iran. I have also seen Iran, newly awakened to a sense of national self-sufficiency, attempting to fulfill her own destiny freed from the deadly grinding-stones of two European powers, writes Tagore in his last essay Crisis in Civilization, three months before his death in 1941. What I believe we can learn from Tagores experience in Iran is that there is a great need today in both countries for a deeper mutual understanding and mutual appreciation. As members of the global periphery, but also as two great Asian countries, Iran and India need to take a greater interest in each other. Alone, they will be always dependent on the West. Together, they can hope to have at least some impact on the future of relationship between center and periphery. Ottoman Turkey had a wonderful word for hospitality: it was musaferperverlik, a compound that included an Arabic noun (musafer), plus a Persian noun (perver), and one Turkish suffix (lik). I believe that the peoples of India and Iran must become conscious of their common cultural roots and once again practice musaferperverlik with each other. Costica Bradatan: As a very brief parenthesis, in Romanian musafer became musafir, somehow preserving the original meaning (in Arabic musafer means traveller and in Romanian musafir means guest). Now, keeping in mind that todays Romania used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, conquered and reconquered many times, we become

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almost nostalgic about that golden age of hospitality when even an invading army would be considered nothing other than an innocent group of guests. All joking aside, how do you see the role of intellectuals in creating and cultivating a new culture of cosmopolitanism? Ramin Jahanbegloo: I have no doubt that the future renaissance of Asian values will be led by India, Iran, and China. These comments lead me, or have led me already, deeply into my last point which is the question of democracy and the role and responsibility of intellectuals in promoting and defending democratic life. Let me just point out that this has also been a topic of my research for the past fifteen years. It goes without saying that the celebration of cultural diversity and philosophical border-crossing are the very prerequisites of a global civil society. The main aim of this global civil society is not a common search for truth, but the search for the basic human values that are shared by all cultures. This is an educational, developmental and dialectical process of Bildung, to use the German expression. Bildung is the process by which an individual is inscribed within the process of togetherness. To my mind, democracy concerns not only the question of governing institutions but also the question of citizenship as a form of participation. Thus, democracy comes to mean a way of learning to live together. What we can call education for democracy is what Kant calls the courage of using ones own reason in public. As you know, for Kant the public use of Reason is the condition of an Enlightened mind. Therefore, Kant is concerned with moving the subject out of a context of heteronomy into the context of autonomy. What Kant shows us clearly is that thinking is a way of life oriented toward working on our own judgment by working on the common judgment that we share with the others. Here I am not talking about a vertical enlightenment but more about a horizontal or democratized enlightenment, where we all become potential enlighteners of each other. If enlightenment means the liberation of humanity from any self-imposed dependency, then maybe we could embrace part of our human heritage from the Kantian motto of the Enlightenment in order to defend critical thinking. Because today the most pressing question is: how to preservenot only in theory, but concretelythe courage of each individual to form and defend a personal judgment. It would be an error to consider this as a European expression; I have dealt with it in my own work as an Iranian intellectual, as an attitude of mind and as a moral orientation. This brings me back to my point of departure which is the relation between life and thought. I believe thinking is the greatest gift human beings have, but it comes to life only among human beings. It is only then that thinking freedom and freedom of thinking can go together. It is not because one has lost the freedom of thought that thinking freedom becomes impossible. But there can be no real freedom without a life of the mind, because thinking life makes life more exciting, and a life of thought makes a person conscious of his/her capacity of being free. The Czech ka once wrote: A life not willing to sacrifice itself to what makes it philosopher Jan Patoc meaningful is not worth living. Aurelian Craiutu: Ramin Jahanbegloo, we would like to thank you for what has been a wonderful conversation on a topicmarginalitythat unites us beyond space and time. We are very grateful to you for finding the time to answer our questions, and wish you the best of luck in consolidating your identity as a constructive marginal in a world that needs, more than ever, lucid and courageous voices like yours.

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