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RESISTING NIHILISM SINCE 1989 Keynote Address to the 12th World Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue, Lima, Peru.

100%

Brown C.

Dialogue and Universalism

2019

issue 1

9-16

The International Society for Universal Dialogue (ISUD) was founded, in a moment of optimism and hope, to be an active part of a global resistance to nihilism while working to realize a more peaceful, humane, and just world order. Today, the hope for cultural renewal has faded as we sense that our ability for authentic public discourse on issues of meaning and value has diminished. The cultural dominance of instrumental rationality along with the steady spread of market practices and market logic into our everyday taken-for-granted understanding of things frames the pursuit of individual self-interest and calculative impersonal relations as the model of rationality and all social relations. Our bonds of attachment and our sense of shared community are replaced with impersonal contracts and Hobbesian self-identities. The result is that what Edmund Husserl and Jürgen Habermas called the “lifeworld,” our taken-for-granted background of shared meaning from which cultural achievements emerge and from which meaning is created and replenished through the sharing of perspectives and open dialogue—has now been corrupted, captured, colonized by creeping nihilism. This paper argues that the contemporary challenge for ISUD and philosophy itself is to repair and replenish our shared and overlapping lifeworlds through the recovery, critique, clarification, and renewal of authentic values, insights, and achievements from the widest possible plurality of traditions, cultures, and philosophical visions. We must liberate the life world from the snares of creeping nihilism. We must repair and replenish the life world through open and honest communication, through philosophical dialogue among an ever-greater plurality of perspectives and points of view.

First Impressions—Lasting Memories: “As I Remember”

51%

Brown C.

Dialogue and Universalism

2020

issue 2

59-76

This essay is divided into two parts. The first part is an account of my own very personal impressions and memories of my encounter with Janusz Kuczynski’s vision of a “new form of universalism.” I focus on Kuczynski’s attempt to interpret “the meaning of recent history” in his day and times. This account does not aim at a definitive account of Kuczynski’s thinking but rather at my interpretation of what I consider to be the most promising and defensible version of his ideas. This is an account of my impressions as I remember them filtered through personal experiences over the past three decades. Other interpretations are possible and perhaps even necessary for a more complete account. The second part attempts to articulate what I consider to be the lasting relevance of those ideas. I attempt to say something about the meaning of “this moment in history,” unfolding in my place and in my times. I hope to point toward the lasting relevance of Kuczynski’s thinking by relying on those ideas to say something insightful about the ecological, social, and political events occurring as I write this essay, events that are shaped by a historical pandemic as my country erupts into massive political demonstrations seeking social and racial justice in my country.

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RESISTING NIHILISM SINCE 1989 Keynote Address to the 12th World Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue, Lima, Peru.

First Impressions—Lasting Memories: “As I Remember”