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C H A P T E R 2 PLURALISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS: FROM HISTORICAL BELONGING TO THE CHALLENGE OF RADICAL CONTINGENCY AND DIFFERENCE The play will be all, after all.1 As chapter 1 concluded, the radical consequences of the historicist turn had begun to emerge in bold clarity, dramatizing the polycentric and plural character of human dwelling in the world by representing all events and significations as finite products of exigencies bound to particular times and places. I suggested there that what Giordano Bruno’s centerless polycentrism does to our sense of space, the leveling play of historical consciousness does to our perception of meaning and value, relativizing and democratizing any and all such expressions as sociocultural productions. I will now draw out in more detail the implications of the concluding statements of chapter 1. As Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests, historical consciousness is paradoxically both a privilege and a burden.2 On the one hand, it is a monumental achievement that provides a starting point for appreciating diversity as an ineluctable fact of human life, one that reflects the historicity of reason and thereby opens up the possibility for new forms of understanding. The lens of historical consciousness directs our attention anew to myriad cultural forms and shapes, refracting and magnifying their differences as they present themselves in their own multivalent life-contexts. With its double critique, this “nonevaluative” approach stands as an alternative both to the distortive lens of ethnocentrism, which swallows differences into parochialisms of one sort or another, and to the disembedding objectivism of Enlightenment rationality, which, in the mode of epistemic imperialism, all too quickly instrumentalizes the particular as a means to approach the universal . The end product is a democratic ethos of particularism. 43 On the other hand, historical consciousness ironically engenders a sensibility that threatens to vitiate the very particularity it so powerfully yields. In effect, it trivializes cultural-historical differences by reducing all local positions to equivocation and homogeneity. All are interchangeable, endowed—in principle—with the “same” value as centers of significance in their own right. History knows no privileged point of origin; it is a realm of centerless neutrality . There are no unmitigated principles of uniformity around which differences might cohere and come to be judged. All particular viewpoints thus have an identical stake in the play of plurality. While this foments a “democratic” acknowledgment of difference, it winds up reducing differences to depthless equivalence as well, flattening out and leveling all historical life into banal artifacts cut loose on a vast and empty sea of polycentric indifference. For there exist no transhistorical criteria whereby each center can be made to recognize, value, and preserve the genuine differences of others. Not only does this preclude critical judgment by granting a priori equal status to all standards and perspectives , regardless of their ethical adequacy, but it also amounts to not taking seriously the positive value of differences.3 Reacting nobly, as it does, against imperialist claims of cultural superiority , historical consciousness can end up invoking rhetorics of parochialist exclusion , disintegration, fragmentation, ironist indifference, and even nihilism, all of which presume that every viewpoint and practice carries the same weight. This fact is well exemplified in the statement, “you do your (sociocultural) thing, I’ll do mine.” Charles Taylor, in acknowledging the need for a multicultural politics of “mutual recognition,” warns that the “peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically—perhaps one should say tragically—homogenizing.”4 In granting a kaleidoscopic and irreducible plurality , it seems that historical consciousness (despite itself ) induces a kind of homogenizing spectator-like neutrality toward the very differences that constitute this plurality. The danger is a kind of empty universalism, a vacuous monism of sorts that would nullify the integrity of genuine heterogeneity. This sobering paradox, harkening back to Giordano Bruno, gets to the heart of the problem of historicism, and of the relativism that accompanies it. It also emerges as a dominant twentieth-century motif in the West, seeping into the broader cognitive and ethical horizons of various discourses—from cultural anthropology to the philosophy of language to postempiricist theories of science to both revisionist and postliberal theologies to the politics of difference. In point of fact, it has become part and parcel of the “postmodern,” which is less a moment in time than a certain mood that stretches modernity to its breaking point. As we have seen, historicism surfaces as a consequence of Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy even though it remains relatively unproblematized in...

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