Beyond Multiculturalism:
Recognition Through the Relational Reason
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Publication date: 2009-06-30
Polish Sociological Review 2009;166(2):147-178
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ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism is a term spreading in the West during the 1960s to indicate respect, tolerance
and defence of cultural minorities. The idea of multiculturalism has become a collective imaginary (“all
different, all equals”). It has generated a political ideology supporting an inclusive citizenship towards
“different” cultures. After being adopted as official policy in many Countries, multiculturalism has generated
more negative than positive effects (fragmenting the society, separating the minorities and fostering
cultural relativism). As a political doctrine, it seems harder and harder to be put into practice. At its
place, today we talk of interculturality. But this expression too seems quite vague and uncertain. This essay
discusses on the possible alternatives to multiculturalism, asking itself whether the way of interculturality
can be a solution or not. The Author’s thesis is that the theory of interculturality has the advantage to stress
the inter, namely what lies in between different cultures. But it does not possess yet the conceptual and
effective means to understand and handle the problems of the public sphere, when the different cultures
express cultural values radically conflictual between them. The troubles of interculturality result from two
lacks: an insufficient reflexivity inside the single cultures, and the lack of a relational interface between
the different cultures (between the carrier subjects). Modern western Reason created a societal structure
(lib-lab) promoting neither the first nor the second one. In fact, it neutralizes them, because it faces the
dilemmas of values inside the cultural diversities through criteria of ethical indifference. Such criteria
set reflexivity to zero, preventing individuals to understand the deepest reasons of the vital experience of
the others. Reason is emptied of its meaning and of its understanding capability. To go over the failures
of multiculturalism and the fragilities of interculturality, a lay approach to the coexistence of cultures is
required, being able to give strength back to Reason, through new semantics of the inter-human diversity.
The Author suggests the development of the “relational reason,” beyond the forms already known of
rationality. To make Reason relational might be the best way to imagine a new social order of society, being
able to humanize the globalizing processes and the growing migrations. The after-modern society would
be more or less human, depending on how it will be able to widen the human Reason, structuring it inside
a new “relational unit” with the religious faith.