CULTURA 2012_263867_VOL_9_No1_GR_A5Br.indd 1 CULTURA mote theexplorationofdifferentvalues andculturalphenomenain ted tophilosophyofcultureandthestudyvalue. Itaimstopro- www.peterlang.de are ding thevalues andculturalphenomenainthecontempo­ that research original on based judged tomake anovelandimportantcontributiontounderstan- manuscripts of submission the contexts. international and regional and ulture C F ounded in2004, ISBN 978-3-631-63867-5 ISBN xiology A hilosophy of hilosophy P of ournal J International ultura. C isasemiannualpeer-reviewed journaldevo- T he editorial board encourages encourages board editorial he rary world. 2012

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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

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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 race moment et milieu, which supported the general notion that conditions make for the peculiar dif- ferences among cultures, and still farther to, say, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which attributes cultural differences to such un- appealably concrete conditionings as differential stages of plant and ani- mal domestication. The dilemma presented by the cogito being there to- tally dispensed with, and empirical science putatively replacing the myste- rious nostalgia of even Montesquieu’s query. With so little left to explain, about the reasons for cultural difference, perplexities of knowing the cul- tural other now reduce to matters of fact. The incalculably fine texture of living yourself as in a culture is no longer significantly difficult to formu- late. Or is it? What is living in a culture? What, for that matter, is knowing that you are living in a culture because you are aware of the cultural oth- er? Hard to say. To say that it’s a byproduct of eating foods distinctive to your position in the history of food production, that started only a cou- ple of millennia after the end of the Ice Age, is not adequate. We are our culture to the degree that even discussing it is being short of “it.” For in- deed we are both profoundly our cultures, and at the same time everything but parts of a culture: our clothes, our lifestyles, our sex lives, indeed our values – comb through those definers of what we are, and you will find nary a trace of a culture, any more than you will find beauty in a collec- tion of beautiful paintings in the Louvre. Being in a culture, living a cul- ture, is empty language in search of an illusion. Yet it is language which, once we have heard it, we can not do without. So is it that the culture each of us is an illusion, without reference? Or is that culture a reality al- ready there before we can begin to try to name it? The languages available to name or deny culture will never be propor- tionate to the actuality of being in a culture. Only a serene but violent nominalism is up to the challenge of naming your culture as though it was a real it living you. You name your culture, define yourself and the other by it, and are at the same time replaced by the culture you are liv-

124 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(1)/2012: 123–134 ing. The very Cartesian formulation, of your moves to reify and know the other that is the culture you are, is undercut by being here formulat- ing that culture. So deeply does this self-transaction underlie common- place referential discourse, so irregularly does it undermine even the lan- guage by which we here address the language of reference, that the mere existence of being in a culture seems a carelessly reified taking of posi- tion in being. Can we take by the horns this snarling bull of nominalism, which threatens to abort the present topic, and recreate a papier mache nominal- ism which allows us to highlight frameworks of cultural otherness even as we see ourselves undermined? Can we determine our presence as parts of a culture, even while putting all we can say of the matter in brackets? We could begin by acting out the presence of a conversation within the family, with wife, son, daughter, Mom, no matter whether of the same language group as us or the same racial stock, or for that matter the same location – the conversation could be taking place over the tele- phone to Mongolia, while the speaker is in Oklahoma. The negotiation through language is what counts, here, and it is give and take. A word or two from this corner, a word or two from that, and we are off, as in the present fabric of words we launched into an imaginary dialogue with ourselves, moving our keyboard finger tips accordingly, and seeing the closet drama of a conversation generate itself. Now let’s “take seriously” the designation of the place and nature of the life upbringing of Mom or my stepmother or my long lost nephew. Let’s play a game with our con- figuration. The long lost nephew may have been brought up in Warri, Delta State, Nigeria, while I am the scion of Midwestern America. Or the nephew may have shared an identical place and character of upbringing with me, right here in Iowa. Doesn’t matter. All construction of the oth- er, all going beyond yourself into the other, is giving yourself a momen- tary location, which, even though it may be allowing itself to be subtract- ed from you as it is formulated is nonetheless bracketable as the opening of an other which gives you temporary purchase on being an I here. The discovery of the very other by the very other, the Papuan hunter gatherer by the Anglo Saxon Prof of Anthro from Ohio State, is sure to eventuate in a feast of observed otherness. This guy notes that guy eating tree frogs and that guy notices this guy’s striking inability to put together a bamboo hut. It’s all mutual. I stare at him, he stares at me. My staring, be- cause I’m a highbrow westerner, has always seemed like the power stare.

125 Frederic Will / Cultural Illusions

I go home and write about what I saw and lo I become an Associate Professor, while he talks to his uncle and his wife about the things I can’t do and they share a good laugh and a leaf cup of fiery cane brew. That’s the Other in caps. I’m so much in my own culture because the transac- tion makes that culture so clear to me, that I sure nuff recognize that we are both in cultures. This culture talk is very different from the above discussion of the evanescence of being in a culture, and the very fine fili- ations that constitute that condition, a condition so subtly deep that even to think about it is no longer to be in it. Retreat to this zone of analysis is retreat into the perception that knowledge of the other altogether, the Cartesian and eventually Kantian dilemma, is questionable at so deep a level, itself, that “knowledge of the other,” whether in Port Moresby or Springville Iowa or upstairs in my house, is questionable. Being in a cul- ture, really being in a culture, is being your own life, which means always being out ahead of that life, registering the other by increments and re- gressions, and without much room for differentiation between the other as anthropology defines it and the other which is a body of a certain size lying on the stuffed palette called a mattress spread out beside you. From the radicalness of this I where I am, a being in culture, comes the drop into the spatial. Where we are ourselves we are the center. Is it possible to be the other as the inside of another place? Is the answer no what Wittgenstein meant by we can’t know the headache of another person? Is there not some good reason to value the notions of the earth as the center of the universe, of my town as the center of my state, which is the center of my country, which is the center of the populations on the globe? What kind of Cartesian privileging of experimental method deserves to dis- place centrality-sentiments which are what the world is for us? That set of queries feels sound, yet what if, and this is the ultimate move from within the Cartesian cogito, we regress incrementally back into the cog- nizing self, and find, as though in a myopia turned inward, ourselves closer and closer to the proximity to ourselves which occludes any per- spective directed to the other? The paintings of Chuck Close are em- blems of the point. He goes in too close to the face, as we say, loses the perfect classical perspective, and has no distance left from the object. We enter the pores of the portrayed face.

126 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(1)/2012: 123–134

BEING YOUR CULTURE

I don’t want to be my culture, in either the Cartesian/Kantian sense, in which I am unable to verify any breaking of the bonds that hold me into selfhood, or in the anthropological sense that has left me shored in a par- ticular corner of race moment milieu. Of course I don’t want those condi- tions. I know I said centrality is natural to us, and that I value the com- fort of being at the center of the universe, in fact of being the center of the universe, but I cannot retail myself as this point of limit. I feel shame at that limit. (“Shame,” where did that archaic category come from? Is there a “religious” component to my desire? What is my wanting to be more than my culture, and to transcend the perceptual limits that pre- tend to have locked me into the prison of my selfhood? Is it the desire to be free? Is it the desire to love recklessly, wherever my kind addresses me? Is it the fear of the jailhouse blues?) As a Prof of Comparative Literature, and a scion of international aca- demic culture, I began early to fabricate the profile of the whole cultur- al/empirical world. My bedroom was lined with outlines – a periodic chart of the elements, a chart of the major Pharaonic dynasties of Egypt, a chart of the military involvements of France and England with one an- other, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. It seems I was al- ways maximally impatient to know the total culture profile of our world, the other out there at the end of a consuming hunger, and in this adoles- cent Faustian mode growingly aware of the ultimate futility of my hun- ger, the pain and anger of having to be defined by this profile I was seek- ing, and at some point the incremental sense that I was locked into my- self and unable to reach the other of the profile, by, I suppose I sensed, the Kantian adages of the problem of knowing, and the awareness of how microscopically I belonged to the culture I was. In a paragraph, above, I simply had to write “sure nuff recognize,” for it was so me in my time that even though I am trying to write this text for people I will never meet, in places I will never be, I passionately wanted to sound my- self in native phoneme clothed. Being of a certain culture, no matter how finely you tune your self identification to the string theory that accounts for self in place, means giving full attention to the existential nullification of your cultural situa- tion. That is, I say boldly, that before you are from this little house, at this writing desk, in this little town, in this little Iowa…und so weiter…you

127 Frederic Will / Cultural Illusions are, you simply are, you are not “human,” you are not good you are not bad, you are, and even to say it is to be so far after the fact that the you are is as irretrievable as the Higgs Boson because it is as prior as that par- ticle. And so where does that being in the crosshairs of a singular culture emerge from the pure “that you are?” Just as the historical falls into space, the prehistorical you are falls into the crosshair of a culture, and that Fall is The Fall, the being less than, i.e. more defined than, the condition under which you entered this life. In that original fall spume forth the hungers to consume the profile of the global other, for in that fall we define a home as we go, and a desti- nation which aspires to be that home as we go refound. The being in a culture bit is nothing more than a falling into history, enduring it, and panting to recover a world lying beyond us in a fullness that is the point of origin from which we came. Culture is the word of the moment. Cultural studies, cultural history, cultural background or factors, cultural aspirations: at many a site culture wants to be said instead of literary, philosophical, or “spiritual.” The omni appearance of “cultural” has to mean that we are wrestling with the evanescence of our passage, and ascribing a firmness to the illusory. I just wrote the ten thousandth form of my autobiography, this time an entry for Wikipedia. I grasp at the wind. Why? To take the responsibility for what I am, and thus to lie in a fashion corroborated by the whole human adventure in language. What is my culture but the similar names given, by many people on my small landmass, to aspirations, self images, and apotropaic cries which somehow unite our enterprise? What would be true globalization? Wouldn’t it be the site of converging names, a sin- gle language of aspirations, etc., slowly pervading the homo sapiens bio- mass? Would there then be a world culture? The universal human, a shibboleth of Enlightenment thought in the West, a byproduct both of discovering the extraordinarily other – the hu- man of the Americas – and the in common to all mankind – Johnson’s natural man in Rasselas, the “man” of Pope’s Essay on Man – that univer- sal man is created from the Western dynamic, in its eagerness to ascribe its own plenty to a half discovered globe in which plenty and famine co existed. This globalizing project in thought, as said above, coincided with a doubled contribution of Kant to the Western optic. As a proponent of world peace Kant was a foremost agent of universal man thought, an ex- pression in philosophy of Leonardo’s vision of homo universalis or of Bee-

128 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(1)/2012: 123–134 thoven’s total human profundity in the Razhumovsky quartets. At the same time Kant subjectivizes the knowing process to such a degree that the other per se, absolutely, is only knowable under certain regulatory conditions authorized by the knower’s consciousness. We are back to the dilemma on the horns of which the very concept of cultura is gored. The illusion of belonging to a culture is as real as are all illusions. We can write about this illusion as illusory, we can expose it to many lights, banish it, live it, talk about it, talk about how we can’t talk about it, and yet this illusion of living in a culture, being thus in a center for percep- tion, cannot be dispersed, as can the fiction of the novelist or Michelan- gelo’s David. What is the peculiarity of the illusion of being cultural, and how is it different from the more evanescent illusion created by works of the artistic imagination? The work of artistic imagination is both supremely real, touching, shaping, directing human visions, as Homer and Shakespeare have pro- foundly realigned people’s understanding and compassion, and at the same time fictive on its face, a game of semes and phonemes. The illusion of the reality of the culture we are in can be dispersed with a flick of the wrist. Take me apart and examine me. The body’s easy. I’m the same basic stuff as everyone else. Take my imagination, thoughts, insights, feelings – same old stuff, given a tweak. Take even my soul, or call it consciousness, and thus seemingly strip me out of existence, strip me back to the point where my existence begins, that rush of desire and pas- sion, and yet after all that you will not have wiped away my sense of be- longing to a culture. Are we coming to define one’s culture as the ulti- mate mode of angularity, the perceptual beyond which not? And if so, is culture getting itself defined as an illusion or the most stubborn portion of reality in us? “Comment être persan?” Indeed! Let’s cut the fancy talk, which has launched enough aerial manoeuvers, and needs to settle down toward a conclusion which will be all meat and potatoes. My wife is back home in Nigeria for a few weeks. I am batching it. It is quiet in the house, except for the living room TV, which I’m watching while eating my salad. What am I watching? The New England Patriots and the San Diego Rangers are in the third quarter, battering out their brain cells, and fighting to re- cover a punt. I’m absorbed. The phone rings. It’s my son in law, Nigeri- an, lives in Cedar Rapids. He asks what I’m doing. I start setting the din- ner and quietude scene, then launch into the account of the game. Very

129 Frederic Will / Cultural Illusions succinct. Give him the quarter, number of minutes left, score, position of the ball. Then I pause. I’ve been in a flurry of accounting. Two or three minutes. He hasn’t replied. He hasn’t even grunted. I stir him. I unpackage. He responds. Fact is, .he says, I had no idea you liked foot- ball, and I have no idea how you play it or what you are talking about. I respond that I feel just the same way about soccer, his football, and that I always have. I add the bit about the absurdity of not using your hands, man’s most valuable tool for achievement, while playing a game with a ball. He responds appropriately. I know what he is saying without hear- ing it. All of which has to do with the surface of the issue of being in a culture, and really being stuck there, but even at that I haven’t made the slightly more subtle point I want to make. The fact is that I have long lost my interest in American football, especially on the professional level, and Silas’s call caught me at a rare moment of visual stasis. I’m just doing football at this moment. Then why did I respond with all that shit about using your hands, about the precision of play, about the time tenseness of the football game in front of me? Why did I go pro for Silas’ benefit? Or was it my benefit? I don’t know. Being in a culture involves assuming a lot of attitudes, some unpremeditatedly snapped on candid camera, when I’m just being there, just rummaging around looking for my butter instead of ghee or margarine, just being Anglo-Saxon, but some adopted and sustained for the sake of identity, which I think is what was going on with my response to Silas about my relation to a game toward which I am normally indifferent, even scornful. So wide a palette of intentions and self-imagings does a person become the site of, in letting himself be that illusory but persuasive thing his culture makes of him. Rendering the shades of this palette requires tact, for occupying a culture, as we have seen, is striding an evanescence. No activity in the fleeting site of the cul- tural in placeness more vividly dramatizes the challenges of “cultural un- derstanding” than the act of translation, which is a concentrated effort to be in your own culture by being another culture’s voice, and in literary cases that voice tweaked and tuned to an exquisite color.

TRANSLATION

To translate is to get inside the voice of another, while remaining in your own voice. Don’t we all know what it is to be in our own voice. Remem- ber that nuff, above? That is one of my voices, my intellectual playing

130 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(1)/2012: 123–134 with country talk which is by now dated, and therefore which exists in a private limbo from which I can under rare circumstances withdraw it for use. Those circumstances are not easily defined. In the present case, the circumstances resemble those required for me to get away with ain‘t, in settings where my interlocutor knows how counter conversational is that now déclassé word which was once standard American English. I can’t say ain’t without bracketing the saying, and therefore an other who want- ed to translate or even hear me fully, when I say ain’t, would have to be privy to several levels of “attitude” within me. Much of speech, and only a little less of writing, is inflected with attitude. Naturally we hear our- selves speaking, even when we are “just speaking” with friends, in the kind of conversation where the absolute minimum of self-consciousness is involved. We are all inflection, and must know this about ourselves in order to translate from “foreign cultures,” whose language users inflect into their work the multi layered self-referentiality language work is. The illusory nature of culture, when viewed through this lens of translation, comes down to the microscopically fine tuning of each individual’s stance into the available means of communication. My granddaughter is one year old. Her parents are from Nigeria, but are now American citizens, and the little girl is thus American by birth. I watch her grow. She is now walking, sometimes a bit drunken sailor, but upright, and touching/pulling/grabbing everything she can get hold of; handles on the oven, glass vases on tables. She is protention and nothing more, a reaching forth and a Faustian passion – we described such pas- sion earlier, in accounting for our reach toward the other – not to be de- nied. Generic human, one would say, a product of biology and genetics. Back home in Nigeria, or in Paraguay, she would be doing what she is doing in my house, being her outgrab hunger, alternating with inges- tion/digestion/defecation/sleep. When would there enter, into that pat- tern of behaviors, something like a cultural valence? Her mother and I agree that between Baby Koro, who is one, and her older sister, Hope, who is three, something I want to call self- consciousness has entered. How do I see that? Hope fancies herself, to herself, some kind of display object, a catwalk model – how she tweaks those fanciful clichés, who knows? – and is thus somehow (but how?) imagining herself inside some viewer (is that really what she is inside? how about a fragment of herself? where would such a viewer come

131 Frederic Will / Cultural Illusions from?) Self-consciousness, in Hope’s case, comes down in part to a dramatization of one part of herself by another, though how she experi- ences herself as ‘parts’ is hard to formulate. To formulate such a psychic process would best be interpreted as a do it yourself project, in which you enact the other’s enactment, calling it yours. Does Baby Koro be- come the site of fissures – to abide with this single example – in the way Hope does? And if not, is there between the girls some shaping growth profile, involved with the integrity of the self, to which we might want to trace the emergence of a positioning within culture? I can’t answer my question, but I know that some way in which Baby Koro introduces the problematic into the I-other confrontation, through which she is at pre- sent rampaging, will be relevant to the molding of experience, around year two, in the course of which she confronts the other as the other en- riched by a sense of the I confronting the other. The genesis of a socio- cultural positioning is perceptible at this two year old site, and the thought that would bring us to this way of putting it would invariably, in our day, rely on physiological evolution as the discourse of its explana- tion. Would we thus be finding ourselves led to consider the birth of cul- ture a fact of biology? Or would we jettison as illusion the reflection that “the human being has as organic characteristic the quality to be a mem- ber of a collective?” To be as distanced from this issue as is implied by being able to formulate the issue this way, is probably to disqualify one- self as judge of whether the cultural is illusory.

ILLUSION AND SURVIVAL

The illusions brought with it by the breakthrough of the cultural sense are as inexpugnable as are the assertions of empirical science, and as ready to be remodeled by fresh expressions of the cultural. Illusions are notoriously flexible, and reckless overcomers of data. For all my adven- tures in the minds of the other, for all my convictions that I am “here” on existential leave, am nothing but a site, I can’t deny that my cultural valence is for me an indispensable prop. My cultural stance is a tissue of responses, hypotheses, survival gambits – the learning field which will prove increasingly palpable to Baby Koro, as she approaches her second year – and wherever it finds itself invoked gives the salt of life under the tongue. I can choke up before a flag – which my good sense has trained me to scorn; can proudly defend the sturdy Anglo Saxon work ethic –

132 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(1)/2012: 123–134 which my critical sense assures me has nothing distinctive about it; and I can sure look at the moon, on just the right snuggly night, as an append- age of my cloppety clop heart. Not surprisingly, though, the layering by which this cultural allows itself to be sited is as multitextured as any in- gredience into time could desire. I finger my passport, with a birthdate, an issue date, an expiration date, and a photo; as incorrigible a congeries of private data as you could want, and yet, because being in a culture is so attitude rich, I relate the data right off the stiff passport page. My face, my age, my identity – Professor? Or should it be Writer? – are all felt against, as I eyeball them. Data they are, date argued into, against, for, they are. Citizen of the United States I am, but not as a fact, as a site of attitude. (I feel a power behind me, as I display the document; I feel an against when I play Old Glory against conglomerated militarism – an at- titude theme for me; I feel back an Illinois pathway and a twelve year old’s first date there. Nothing about the cultural setting of “being Ameri- can’’ is inert enough to stay long on the passport’s pages, which are as unlikely to prevail over attitude as is the heliocentric theory to prevail over the way the sun comes down to me here in this place in the morn- ing, and pays obeisance to my master planet. It is an archaic adage that illusions are the food of human survival. Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, Martir is a searing reminder of this truth. In mid life the village priest discovers that he no longer believes in the truths behind his vocation. He is tempted to abandon his priestly career. But his congregation are on the whole devout, and count of him to sus- tain their own visions of the world. So San Manuel silences the expres- sion of his doubts – not the doubts themselves – and continues to minis- ter to the needy, as though the belief system on which his giving is based was firm and whole. Illusion plays a life saving role. So in fact do many of the illusions that prop up societies. I drift toward a personal example. I am married to a Nigerian, though I am a white Yankee, and we have a house in Nigeria. The area is dangerous, a place of kidnappings, armed robberies, endemic corruption, and a feeble security system. This last is- sue is paramount. We are sitting ducks in our house without more pro- tection than the easily breached walls that enclose us. This scenario, I dare say, is an image of the entire human situation, in which the last ref- uge of the innocent is the illusion that they should not (cannot?) be be- sieged in their own homes. So there we sit, more or less secured by the illusion that when the householder, no matter how succulent and lucra-

133 Frederic Will / Cultural Illusions tive, is in his/her own home, he is “protected.” That in unique cases this illusion effect is impotent is beside the point, for what overwhelms the macro observer, especially the reader of Hobbes, is that though man is a wolf to man, the illusion remains that in fact vulnerable men and women are “off bounds,” or do we want to say, in archaic lingo, that such people are in many cases “in sacred territory?” Illusion is not only an avenue of personal stance taking, but a permanent factor in the grace that lets soci- ety hold its own. Critics of the great religions, and even followers of them, have proclaimed the value of illusion, in maintaining creative order under their umbrellas. The opium of the masses, say many wise theologi- ans, may just be the balm of peace and control among the bulk of the devotees. And indeed it may well be asked, as we near the end of this tour of the illusory, why we should so ardently defend ourselves from illusion. Does one have an appendectomy without anesthesia? Does one choose to die without the comforting presence of priest, or at least friend and relative? Would one always prefer the truth, as in the adage to shun denial, over the ease of the doctor’s careful, “we can’t be sure?” What we call the truth may simply be one version of the truth, while the illusory, as in the truly prestigious magic of a Mulholland, may in the end be a convincing version of the truth. Are Shakespeare’s fictions illusions or cunning guises under which the truth consents to display itself.

References Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies. Berkeley: Universi- ty of California Press, l997. Unamuno, Miguel de. San Manuel Bueno, Martir. Newark (Delaware): LinguaText Ltd., 2009.

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