study of any other culture. The validity of the claim has to be
demonstrated concretely in the actual study of the culture.
Indeed, for a culture sufficiently different from our own, we
may have only the foggiest idea ex ante of in what its valuable
contribution might consist. Because, for a sufficiently
different culture, the very understanding of what it is to be
of worth will be strange and unfamiliar to us. To approach,
say, a raga with the presumptions of value implicit in the
well-tempered clavier would be forever to miss the point.
What has to happen is what Gadamer has called a “fusion of
horizons.”38 We learn to move in a broader horizon, within
which what we have formerly taken for granted as the background
to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside
the different background of the formerly unfamiliar
culture. The “fusion of horizons” operates through our developing
new vocabularies of comparison, by means of
which we can articulate these contrasts.39 So that if and
when we ultimately find substantive support for our initial
presumption, it is on the basis of an understanding of what
constitutes worth that we couldn’t possibly have had at the
beginning. We have reached the judgment partly through
transforming our standards.
We might want to argue that we owe all cultures a presumption
of this kind. I will explain later on what I think this
claim might be based. From this point of view, withholding
the presumption might be seen as the fruit merely of prejudice
or of ill-will. It might even be tantamount to a denial of
equal status. Something like this might lie behind the accusation
leveled by supporters of multiculturalism against defenders
of the traditional canon. Supposing that their reluctance
to enlarge the canon comes from a mixture of prejudice
study of any other culture. The validity of the claim has to be
demonstrated concretely in the actual study of the culture.
Indeed, for a culture sufficiently different from our own, we
may have only the foggiest idea ex ante of in what its valuable
contribution might consist. Because, for a sufficiently
different culture, the very understanding of what it is to be
of worth will be strange and unfamiliar to us. To approach,
say, a raga with the presumptions of value implicit in the
well-tempered clavier would be forever to miss the point.
What has to happen is what Gadamer has called a “fusion of
horizons.”38 We learn to move in a broader horizon, within
which what we have formerly taken for granted as the background
to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside
the different background of the formerly unfamiliar
culture. The “fusion of horizons” operates through our developing
new vocabularies of comparison, by means of
which we can articulate these contrasts.39 So that if and
when we ultimately find substantive support for our initial
presumption, it is on the basis of an understanding of what
constitutes worth that we couldn’t possibly have had at the
beginning. We have reached the judgment partly through
transforming our standards.
We might want to argue that we owe all cultures a presumption
of this kind. I will explain later on what I think this
claim might be based. From this point of view, withholding
the presumption might be seen as the fruit merely of prejudice
or of ill-will. It might even be tantamount to a denial of
equal status. Something like this might lie behind the accusation
leveled by supporters of multiculturalism against defenders
of the traditional canon. Supposing that their reluctance
to enlarge the canon comes from a mixture of prejudice
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