Cultural Illusions
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CULTURA CULTURA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of 2012 Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed journal devo- 1 2012 Vol IX No 1 ted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to pro- mote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages OLOGY the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are I judged to make a novel and important contribution to understan- LOSOPHY OF I ding the values and cultural phenomena in the contempo rary world. CULTURE AND AX AND CULTURE ONAL JOURNAL OF PH I INTERNAT ISBN 978-3-631-63867-5 www.peterlang.de PETER LANG CULTURA 2012_263867_VOL_9_No1_GR_A5Br.indd 1 24.07.12 15:37:38 Uhr CULTURA CULTURA INTERNATiONAL JOURNAL OF PHiLOSOPHY OF CULTURE CULTURA AND AXiOLOGY Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of 2012 Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed journal devo- 1 2012 Vol IX No 1 ted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to pro- mote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages OLOGY the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are i judged to make a novel and important contribution to understan- LOSOPHY OF i ding the values and cultural phenomena in the contemporary world. CULTURE AND AX AND CULTURE ONAL JOURNAL OF PH i INTERNAT www.peterlang.de PETER LANG CULTURA 2012_263867_VOL_9_No1_GR_A5Br.indd 1 24.07.12 15:37:38 Uhr CULTURA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology E-ISSN (Online): 2065-5002 ISSN (Print): 1584-1057 Advisory Board Prof. dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy Prof. dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Prof. dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA Prof. Emeritus dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany Prof. dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain Prof. dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, John F. Kennedy University, Buenos Aires, Argentina Prof. dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines Prof. dr. Alexandru Boboc, Correspondent member of the Romanian Academy, Romania Prof. dr. Teresa Castelao-Lawless, Grand Valley State University, USA Prof. dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA Prof. dr. Fernando Cipriani, G.d’Annunzio University Chieti-Pescara, Italy Prof. dr. Elif Cirakman, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey Prof. dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan Prof. dr. Carmen Cozma, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Nancy Billias, Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph College, Hartford, USA Prof. dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany Prof. dr. Leszek S. Pyra, Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland Prof. dr. A. L. Samian, National University of Malaysia Prof. dr. Dimitar Sashev, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Prof. dr. Kiymet Selvi, Anadolu University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Gloria Vergara, University of Colima, Mexico Prof. dr. Devendra Nath Tiwari, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India Prof. dr. Massimo Leone, University of Torino, Italy Prof. dr. Christian Lazzeri, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France Prof. dr. Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors: Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Facoltà di Scienze Sociali Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania Scalo, Italy [email protected] [email protected] Executive Editor: PD Dr. Till Kinzel Dr. Simona Mitroiu Englisches Seminar Human Sciences Research Department Technische Universität Braunschweig, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Bienroder Weg 80, Lascar Catargi, nr. 54, 700107 Iasi, Romania 38106 Braunschweig, Germany [email protected] [email protected] Editorial Assistant: Dr. Marius Sidoriuc Designer: Aritia Poenaru Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology Vol. 9, No. 1 (2012) Editor-in-Chief Nicolae Râmbu PETER LANG Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Wien Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Umschlagabbildung: © Aritia Poenaru ISSN 2065-5002 ISBN 978-3-631-63867-5 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2012 All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.de CONTENTS CULTURAL ILLUSIONS Danial YUSOF 7 Parallels between Contemporary Western and Islamic Thought on the Discourse of Power and Knowledge Andrei CORNEA 29 Relativity and Relativism: On a Failed Analogy Andityas Soares DE MOURA COSTA MATOS 43 A Western Cultural Illusion: State and Law or State as Law? Steven CRESAP, Louis TIETJE 57 Irreconcilable Foundations: An Analysis of the Cultural Environment Facing Moral Educators Liudmila BAEVA 73 Existential Axiology Paola PARTENZA 85 Mary Wollstonecraft: Ideology and Political Responsibility Dan-Eugen RAŢIU New Theoretical Framework for Approaching Artistic Activity: the 101 Principle of Uncertainty. Pierre-Michel Menger’s Sociology of Creative Work Frederic WILL 123 Cultural Illusions Dennis IOFFE 135 The Notion “Ideology” in the Context of the Russian Avant-Garde Abdul Rashid MOTEN 155 Understanding and Ameliorating Islamophobia Seungbae PARK 179 Against Moral Truths Reena CHERUVALATH 195 Analyzing the Concept of Self-Deception in Indian Cultural Context Alexander BAUMGARTEN 205 Li/toij ferome/noij. Notes towards Plotinus’ Semiology of Heaven Morten Ebbe Juul NIELSEN 215 The Duty to Recognize Culture Madalena D’OLIVEIRA-MARTINS 235 The New Feminine Emotional Codes in Hochschild: New Perspectives for Modern Social Studies Vilmos VOIGT 249 The Bridge in Semiotics 10.5840/cultura20129125 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(1)/2012: 123–134 Cultural Illusions Frederic WILL School of Advanced Studies University of Phoenix, S.U.A. [email protected] Abstract. Being part of a culture seems, on the face of it, empirically describable, and verifiable. But in fact that kind of participation is not so easy to characterize. Our existence as members of a culture is given to us fleetingly, and in awarenesses tightly locked to the awareness of the other, who is not our culture. Being part of a culture therefore is part of knowing yourself as limited. But to what are you limited? You are limited to being a presence other than that of the other that you are defined off against. It is thus worth noting that being of a culture is a fleetingly given aware- ness of a condition in which your not being something else is what defines you. The logical consequence of this structural situation is that you, or I, exist foremost as a site, rather than as a substance, in our occupying a post within culture. Keywords: anthropology, culture, cogito, illusion, philosophy, Enlightenment, con- sciousness ANTHROPOLOGY In the West cultural anthropology became conscious of itself in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu, inquiring “comment être persan?” wonders how it is possible to be a person of another culture. Even in asking that he has taken a giant stride beyond the fifth century Athenian on the street, whose proud parochialism led him to mock the speech of foreigners as “barbaric” –the sound which the Greeks heard coming from those untuned throats. (Not that this was the whole story of the Golden Age of Athens, for Aeschylus, in The Persians, wept, through his chorus of Persian widows, the loss of human beings in war, even if it was to the Athenians themselves; while Herodotus chased folklore and gos- sip throughout the eastern Mediterranean, brushing heavily against the “cultural other,” if not putting to himself the Montesquieu question, which queries the abstract interrelation of one culture to another.) Mon- tesquieu was writing on the cusp of true cultural miscegenation – international commerce, improved means of transportation by ship, the slave trade, military conflict such as led to the end of century revolutions in France and America – and yet for all the vastness of his sensibility, he 123 Frederic Will / Cultural Illusions remained, as a proto social scientist, outside such philosophical traditions as that of Descartes, which in formulating the cogito already a century earlier twinned the anthropology of the empirical other with the concep- tual query of how the other can at all be knowable. The philosophy- anthropology gap was thus left staring us in the face as it will to this day. Cultural anthropology and epistemology remain sharply distinct inquiries. It was still far from Montesquieu to Taine’s