Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 5, No. 1 (June 2008), 121–146 © 2008 Pragmatism and Social Ethics: An Intercultural and Phenomenological Approach Lenart Skof This article deals with some intercultural and phenomenological uses of pragmatist thought. In the first part, early methods of comparative philosophy are linked to James’s radical empiricism. The second part analyses Dewey’s social philosophy, interpreted from the inter- cultural perspective and linked to James’s philosophy. The third part argues for an enlargement of the uses of Deweyan social thought in the broader intercultural contexts. Finally, the phenomenology of breath is introduced and proposed as the basis for a new pragmatist social ethics of solidarity. A conception of human life and of its prospects has taken over the world. It is the most powerful religion of humanity today… At its extreme limit, it is the visionary conviction … that all men and women are bound together by an invisible circle of love. R. M. Unger1 1. From a methodological and epistemological point of view, perhaps one of the greatest imaginable differences existing within twentieth century philosophical thought is that between pragmatism and intercultural philosophy. Pragmatism is a distinctively American philosophy and an integral part of the Western philosophical (and scientific) tradition. Intercultural philosophy is a (relatively) new mode of thinking related to critical philosophical movements of the twentieth century. They appear to represent two opposite sides of philosophical discourse and worldview – pragmatism, an essentially (and historically) ‘ethnocentric’ philosophy of Western culture, and intercultural philosophy as its most natural adversary and rival.2 However, from the perspective of their practical results and importance for contemporary thought, a different story can be seen to emerge about pragmatism and intercultural philosophy – one pregnant with implicit as well as explicit interpretative possibilities. In his paper “Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought,” Richard Shusterman already pointed out many roots of pragmatism that extend to Asian thought: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James drew 122 LENART SKOF directly from Asian sources (Upanishads, Yoga, Buddhism, Vedanta); while John Dewey, during his visits to Japan and China, was fascinated and influenced by their cultures.3 According to one of the leading American pragmatist philosophers Cornel West, Emerson can be viewed as a forerunner to the entire tradition of American pragmatism. Emerson disregarded the philosophy of his time and rejected its epistemological problems (the “quest for certainty” and “search for foundations”).4 Being a fervent (but practically oriented) “mystic,” Emerson intuitively drew from various Western and Eastern sources (the latter being predominantly Vedic/Upanishadic) in conceptualizing his worldview. Because of the nature of his eclecticism it is impossible to conclude how much of each tradition has actually entered his “proto-pragmatist” thought, but clearly there is a link to Indian thought in his most important notions about the soul.5 Emerson influenced Charles Peirce and William James,6 and John Dewey described the Emersonian worldview in terms of a historical, “European,” Hegelian thinking. Within the intercultural philosophy, on the other hand, the comparative philosopher P. Masson-Oursel offers us some interesting insights that point to its relation to the tradition of classical American pragmatism. It was P. Deussen who strove to describe anew the history of world philosophy (in his major work Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, 1894–1917). Deussen, as a Schopenhauerian, was still unable to evade a great, ‘classical’ and Europeanized philosophical synthesis of Plato, Kant and Vedanta. It was therefore P. Masson-Oursel’s Comparative Philosophy that methodologically established a new line of thought in philosophy.7 Masson- Oursel was both a radical Hegelian historicist and a radical Comtean positivist thinker, in the sense of being committed to the observation of specific facts rather than dogmas.8 As a historicist, he inductively took in his science historique “the facts of philosophy from history,”9 and as a positivist, he was convinced that there is not a single historical fact of society or civilization, be it large or small, that could not be objectively analyzed or interpreted in a thoroughly scientifically positive, i.e. non-ethnocentric way – “for there is no society without some civilization.”10 This was an important nouveauté in philosophy, a rarity even, for it was unusual for social and cultural anthro- pological writings of that time to give so much emphasis to the thought of the ‘Other’ when dealing with non-European thinking. This was long before the emergence of (postcolonial) African philosophy, as well as before the rise of intercultural philosophy. Methodologically, however, Masson-Oursel’s aim to construct a positive comparative philosophy is not entirely unproblematic. Masson-Oursel’s study is an example of positivist philosophical thinking – a scientific method “pragmatically” committed to hypotheses, its major feature being scientific probability. Although he was convinced that no fully objective and anti-ethnocentrical philosophy is possible (“We are obliged to take Europe as our point of departure because we can only comprehend our neighbor relatively to ourselves, even though we learn not to judge him by ourselves”11),.