1. Introduction
Academic philosophy is undergoing a process of epistemic and geographic diversification that involves increasing recognition of heterogeneous traditions including African, Asian, Latin American, Oceanian, and other Indigenous philosophies. While this process of “diversifying philosophy” (Kirloskar-Steinbach 2019; Silius 2020) promises an epistemically more fruitful and politically more just philosophical discourse, it also generates new methodological challenges of navigating between heterogeneous intellectual traditions. Intercultural philosophy became institutionalized in the 1980s as a philosophical program that aims to address this challenge by creating and organizing spaces for intercultural encounters. Intercultural philosophers have aimed to provide a methodology for these encounters that focuses on replacing the cultural hegemony of so-called “Western philosophy” with a dialogue among equal partners. A broad understanding of intercultural philosophy would comprise scholars such as Paul Masson-Oursel (1926), Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1923), and Poola Tirupati Raju (1962), who did not only compare different philosophical traditions from the East and the West with each other but considered them contributions to an intercultural dialogue that examines analogies and complementarities (Sweet 2014). From the 1990s onwards, a group of scholars who explicitly self-identified as intercultural philosophers—among them Raúl Fournet-Betancourt, Kwame Gyekye, Heinz Kimmerle, Ram Mall, Franz Wimmer, and Kwasi Wiredu—chose the paradigm of dialogue and proposed a set of principles on how such a philosophical dialogue could be regulated, as well as a set of attitudes required of dialogue participants in order for it to facilitate respectful intercultural learning. A third generation has further institutionalized intercultural philosophy, for example through the journal polylog and the Vienna Society for Intercultural Philosophy (Gmainer-Pranzl & Hofner 2023) or the Society for Intercultural Philosophy (Stenger 2006; Weidtmann 2016). At the same time, the notion of intercultural philosophy has become used in increasingly diverse ways, being transformed through its interaction with different philosophical traditions including African philosophy (Chimakonam & Ofana 2022; Isife 2023; Mosima 2022; Vassy 2017) and Latin American philosophy (de Carvalho 2021; Rosero 2020; Rubinelli 2019; Viaña and Barreto 2022).
According to Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, intercultural philosophy begins with the encounter between philosophical voices that are aware that their speaking is conditioned by belonging to different cultural contexts (Fornet-Betancourt 1998: 50; Yousefi 2010: 47).1 Building on this paradigm of intercultural interaction, Franz Wimmer (1998) defines intercultural philosophy as a dialogue between as many philosophical traditions as possible—a dialogue which he refers to as a “polylogue”. Heinz Kimmerle (2004) specifies five aspects of intercultural dialogues. They are characterized by an attitude of listening to one another; a recognition of the equality and differences of all dialogue partners; an open-endedness to the dialogue; attention to its rational, linguistic, emotional, and embodied aspects; and an acknowledgement that the dialogue can produce genuinely new knowledge. Regarding Kimmerle’s last point, Ram Mall (1998) stresses the emancipatory role of intercultural philosophy as it explicitly includes and encourages engagement with African, Asian, Latin American, Oceanian, and other Indigenous philosophies and rationalities that have been marginalized. Furthermore, Wim van Binsbergen (2003) emphasizes that intercultural philosophy does not merely endorse philosophical pluralism but investigates how the various philosophical traditions relate with one another, how it is possible for them to create knowledge about one another and about the life-worlds that each of these philosophical traditions builds for their adherents.2
While philosophers differ in their definitions and conceptualizations of intercultural philosophy, in this article we focus on three elements at the core of intercultural philosophy: (1) the presuppositions of intercultural dialogues, (2) dialogue principles that participants should comply with, and (3) attitudes that are required for intercultural dialogues. These three elements are not meant to be interpreted as necessary or jointly sufficient conditions for intercultural philosophy but rather to capture key debates that intercultural philosophers engage in.
However, with the rising prominence of decolonial scholarship the idea of intercultural dialogues aiming at mutual intercultural understanding has been challenged. By emphasizing differences in historical, socio-political, and cultural terms, decolonial scholarship suggests that intercultural dialogues will often fail under real-world conditions. Colonial history has driven a deep wedge between marginalized and hegemonic philosophical traditions that is difficult to overcome by means of dialogue. Power inequalities between the dialogue partners may prevent a dialogue among equals, even though all participants agree on a certain set of dialogue principles. Deep differences between ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies can limit mutual understanding and have led to extensive debates about “radical alterity” (Risjord 2021) that is characterized by insurmountable differences rather than common ground for dialogue. While radical alterity is sometimes presented as straightforward incommensurability without bridges between dialogue partners, frameworks such as Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) “controlled equivocation” assume that limitations of mutual understanding can still leave spaces for productive dialogue.
Decolonial scholarship can also be delimited in a variety of ways. Interpreted broadly, it is an umbrella term for Global South scholarship in struggle against colonialism—from Césaire’s Discours sur Le Colonialisme (1950), to Fanon’s Les Damnés de La Terre (1961), to Nkrumah’s Africa Must Unite (1963), to Freire’s Pedagogia do Oprimido (1974), to Said’s Orientalism (1978), to Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). More narrowly, decolonial scholarship is distinguished from, and to some degree critical of, related movements such as postcolonial studies. In this sense, Grosfoguel calls for a “decolonial turn” that challenges the postcolonial reliance on Western poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida or Foucault and opposes what he calls “the myth of a ‘postcolonial’ world” in the light of ongoing struggles against colonial realities (Grosfoguel 2007: 219). Related calls for decolonization have been embraced across a wide range of fields, such as anthropology (Allen & Jobson 2016), development studies (Ziai 2020), philosophy (Gordon 2019; Mbonda 2021), and psychology (Bhatia 2017). This more recent decolonial scholarship tends to emphasize three key issues that might also challenge the possibility of an intercultural dialogue among equals: (1) the persistence of colonial history rather than a postcolonial world of intercultural dialogue, (2) the ubiquity of power inequalities in intercultural encounters, and (3) the radical alterity of the ontological, epistemological, and axiological backgrounds of intercultural encounters. Once again, in listing these three key issues, we do not intend to establish necessary or jointly sufficient conditions for decolonial scholarship but rather to highlight important discussions that decolonial scholars are involved in.
Comparing core issues in intercultural and decolonial debates, one may assume that both approaches are fundamentally incompatible by embracing either dialogue or confrontation, either common understanding or insurmountable differences. While such incompatibility is indeed sometimes suggested—for example, by intercultural critics of decolonization debates whom we will discuss in section 3—we argue that it provides neither a descriptively accurate nor a normatively helpful divide of globally engaged philosophy. Many philosophers recognize insights of both intercultural and decolonial scholarship and could not be easily classified as belonging to either side of a simple divide. Beyond descriptive accuracy, the aim of this article is to argue that a simple divide between intercultural and decolonial philosophies fails to recognize the need for both dialogical and confrontational motifs. Tensions between intercultural and decolonial emphases therefore turn out to be productive in highlighting the need to take opportunities for mutual understanding and (un)equal power dynamics equally seriously. While building mutual understanding through dialogue is an essential component, so is the non-dialogical confrontation of material and discursive conditions of inequality. As a group of five scholars from both the Global South and the Global North with backgrounds in both intercultural philosophy and decolonial approaches, we have sought to include a wide range of scholars in our discussion, although a focus on African and European scholars has emerged over the course of our research. Our paper is structured in the following way: First, we discuss how intercultural philosophers can benefit from incorporating the critique of decolonial scholars. Second, we examine how decolonial scholars can benefit from including insights from intercultural philosophy. In a third step, we propose a broader toolbox that comprises elements from both intercultural philosophy and decolonial scholarship without being a simple compromise between the two bodies of literature.
2. How Intercultural Philosophy Can Benefit from Incorporating Decolonial Insights
Intercultural philosophy aims to reply to the following three questions: First, what are the presuppositions of intercultural dialogues, and can they be fulfilled in a real-life situation? Second, which dialogue principles could structure an intercultural dialogue in such a way that it facilitates mutual understanding? And third, which attitudes are required by the participants in an attempted intercultural dialogue so that one actually takes place? In this section, we look at each of these three questions in turn and suggest possible ways to address them. We also discuss each answer from a decolonial perspective to see what intercultural philosophers could learn from decolonial scholarship.
2.1. Presuppositions of Dialogue
Intercultural philosophy approaches dialogues through a variety of anthropological, socio-cultural, and political presuppositions. Anthropologically, it presupposes that human beings are able to reflect on their own culture and transcend their own point of view through dialogue. As Ramose puts it: “In the dialogical encounter, it is possible to assume the point of view of the ‘other’ in the quest to understand and change reality” (2020: 285). Socio-culturally, it presupposes that cultures are not closed entities but dynamic systems that can be extended, modified, and criticized (Paul 2008: 18–21). Politically, it presupposes that the dialogue participants can recognize each other as different but equal at the same time with regard to their role as participants (Kimmerle 2004: 70–72).
If we look at these three presuppositions from a decolonial perspective, several problems emerge. The anthropological presupposition risks conflating general commentary about human ability to shift points of view with empirical claims about the ability of specific actors to shift their point of view under specific socio-historical conditions. As decolonial scholarship highlights, hegemonic actors commonly establish highly successful mechanisms for minimizing, invisibilizing, and misrepresenting the points of view of colonized people even under conditions of well-meaning dialogue. For example, biodiversity conservation increasingly identifies Indigenous peoples as key stakeholders but also often creates superficial forms of dialogue that expect Indigenous peoples to integrate into bureaucracies of environmental governance and to frame their knowledge through academic language (Nadasdy 2003). The participation of Indigenous peoples therefore becomes a tool for dominant actors to legitimize themselves instead of assuming the point of view of the “other” in the sense of Ramose. The socio-cultural presupposition creates tensions with decolonial debates about deep differences between cultures that limit the prospects of fruitful interaction and mutual understanding. As we will discuss in section 3, decolonial emphasis on “radical alterity” and “incommensurability” can cast doubt on the very possibility of fruitful intercultural encounters and may even misframe every external influence as a form of colonial violence (Táíwò 2022).3 Finally, the political presupposition appears to gloss over existing power inequalities. Every intercultural dialogue is so pervaded by power inequalities that it is impossible to deny them in a dialogical model. Instead, it will be necessary to consider carefully the persisting power inequalities throughout a dialogue and develop tools for challenging them.
2.2. Dialogue Principles
Taking these concerns seriously has substantial implications for the ambitions of intercultural philosophers to identify principles that are required by intercultural dialogues. In the work of many intercultural philosophers, their approach has been oriented towards the ideal of a symmetrical, equitable dialogue (Weidtmann 2016: 73). Such an orientation suggests a number of principles for dialogue as they have, for example, been elaborated by Jürgen Habermas in his analysis of the implicit presuppositions of communicative action (1983; 1998). We will therefore revisit the following five principles that underlie an intercultural dialogue that assumes symmetry and equity between the dialogue partners:
Anyone has an equal moral right to participate in the dialogue.
Anyone has an equal moral right to introduce assertions, challenge assertions, and express their opinions, desires, and needs.
Anyone has an equal moral right to be listened to.
No speaker may be prevented by constraint within or outside the dialogue from exercising their moral rights established in (1), (2), and (3).
Anyone has an equal moral right to request a revision of the dialogue principles.
A look at these dialogue principles from a decolonial perspective reveals a number of shortcomings. If we take into account colonial history, it will not be sufficient to assign to each speaker the right to express their opinions, because relations between colonizing and colonized people often generate testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. Testimonial injustice occurs when colonial prejudices cause an audience to doubt a speaker’s credibility (Fricker 2013: 1319) or to fail to recognize a speaker as a knower (Dotson 2011: 242). Hermeneutical injustice occurs when colonial power inequalities are reproduced on an epistemic level so that the collective interpretative resources of the colonized are systematically “ignored, dismissed, marginalized, or silenced” (Koggel 2018: 241). Cross-cultural dialogues are often drenched both in testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. In academic philosophy, for example, linguistic inequity is one major mechanism of testimonial injustices as philosophers who write with small grammatical mistakes or even just speak with accents are commonly assigned less epistemic credibility (Chapman et al. 2021). Linguistic issues also illustrate the prevalence of hermeneutical injustices in academic philosophy as entire traditions of thought are rendered invisible through the increasingly monolingual structure of the mainstream of academic philosophy (Gobbo & Russo 2020; Schliesser 2018).
In this case, additional dialogue principles might have to be introduced to enable a renewed recognition of these resources. One way to reintroduce these hermeneutical resources would be to adopt Nancy Fraser’s proposal of counterpublics and organize small, protected groups within the intercultural dialogue that are encouraged to “invent and circulate counterdiscourses” in order to challenge the prevailing interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs (Fraser 1992: 123).4 Such counter-discourses could also help to identify and dislodge oppressive concepts that block access to one’s hermeneutic resources and their application (Falbo 2022: 354).
In a similar vein, these dialogue principles seem to address power inequalities to some extent but might not be sufficient. If power inequalities are deeply ingrained in the communities that participate in an intercultural dialogue, mere dialogue principles might not be able to guarantee the minimum level of equality that is needed for such a project. In such a case, it might be helpful to resort to an external facilitator who can point out existing power inequalities that undermine a dialogue or tacit norms that restrict free speech (Bicchieri 2017: 158).
The final question with regard to radical alterity concerns the question whether the dialogue principles are understood in the same way by all dialogue partners based on their ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments. A question that might emerge regarding rule (4) is, for example, which amount of “constraint” is acceptable according to the dialogue partners. Can both sides agree on a preliminary definition of “constraint” or is it rather necessary to make possible equivocations explicit and take these equivocations as a starting point of further reflection on the dialogue (Viveiros de Castro 2004). For example, if one dialogue partner assigns specific authority to their elders to exercise some sort of constraint, this could serve as a starting point for a reflection on the role of seniority in dialogues.
The fifth rule on switching from dialogue to meta-dialogue (5) can help to add or revise dialogue principles, introduce an external facilitator, or come to an agreement on certain linguistic meanings. It can also play a crucial role for specifying and contextualizing intercultural dialogues by determining the scope of the dialogue and the question of who should be involved (e.g. experts, community members as individuals, or communities as groups). Another question that can be discussed on this metalevel is whether the dialogue is open to all speakers, only to those who self-identify with a specific cultural identity, or even only to those who are accepted as group members by specific cultural communities.
2.3. Attitudes of participants
After having addressed the first question on the presuppositions of intercultural dialogues and the second question on dialogue principles, we now proceed to the third question on the attitudes that are required from the dialogue participants so that the dialogue can facilitate mutual understanding. Kimmerle, for example, proposes an attitude of listening to one another (Kimmerle 2004: 69–70). An additional attitude might embrace open-endedness regarding the result of the dialogue. An intercultural dialogue does not necessarily have to lead to a consensus, an agreement, or a fusion of horizons and can still support mutual understanding. A further attitude might be the willingness to engage in communication for communication’s sake and not for strategic reasons, e.g. to manipulate or convince the dialogue partner (Cooke 1994: 159). If dialogue partners merely try to convince one another, intercultural understanding becomes impossible. Another attitude that is relevant is the openness and willingness of involved actors to be influenced and transformed by others. It means that dialogue partners (or their ideas, knowledge, worldview, etc.) may be changed or transformed by each other. If dialogue participants are not committed to be potentially transformed, they should not engage in a dialogue.
These attitudes can also be criticized and supplemented from a decolonial point of view. First, colonial history has privileged Western conceptions of dialogue and the underlying attitudes. Iris Young has criticized the Western prioritization of speech that is assertive and confrontational, formal and general, or dispassionate and disembodied over other forms of speech (Young 1996: 123–24).5 In many cases, the labeling of passionate speech as a sign of the speaker’s irrationality can even amount to epistemic silencing (Bayruns García 2019). Following Young, attitudes that underlie tentative, exploratory, or conciliatory forms of speech could be incorporated into intercultural dialogue. Second, power inequalities might not arise directly in the attitudes of dialogue participants but still be present at a structural level. In this case, an attitude of unmasking hidden power inequalities might prove useful. Third, radical alterity can help to concretize what “listening to one another” could mean. Sass and Dryzek (2014: 21) provide two examples in which listening does not only involve the moment in which dialogue partners listen to one another’s speech but also the reply that they give. Among the Tswana people, an aggressive reply would usually be considered a vice. And in the Merina culture of Madagascar, people would often regard it as rude if a speaker is interrupted or challenged during their speech.
In sum, there are a variety of ideas within decolonial scholarship that can sharpen philosophies of intercultural dialogue. These ideas comprise an investigation of the colonial history of presuppositions, dialogue principles, and attitudes; a focus on the power inequalities that might still be present in them; and respect for the possibility of radical alterity that makes a univocal definition of them difficult. Table 1 provides a structural overview of these ideas.6
Table 1: Philosophies of Intercultural Dialogue as Learners from Decolonial Scholarship.
| (B) Elements of intercultural dialogue | |||
| B1. Presuppositions of dialogue | B2. Dialogue principles | B3. Attitudes of participants | |
| (A) Elements of decolonial scholarship | |||
| A1. Colonial history | how to investigate the colonial history of presuppositions | how to investigate the colonial history of dialogue principles | how to investigate the colonial history of attitudes |
| A2. Power inequalities | how to address power inequalities regarding the presuppositions of dialogue | how to address power inequalities regarding the dialogue principles | how to address power inequalities regarding the participants’ attitudes |
| A3. Radical alterity | how to bridge radical alterity and respect it | how to develop dialogue principles across radical alterity | how to conceptualize attitudes across radical alterity |
3. How Decolonial Scholarship Can Benefit from Incorporating Insights from Intercultural Philosophy
Decolonial and intercultural scholarship provide distinct entry points for philosophical engagement with cross-cultural encounters. While intercultural scholarship tends to focus on ideals of equitable dialogue, decolonial scholarship highlights the continuity of conditions of coloniality and their effects on cross-cultural inequity and oppression. Although we have argued that decolonial scholarship provides an important reality check to overly optimistic promises of equitable intercultural dialogue, this does not mean that intercultural scholarship can simply be replaced by decolonial scholarship. In this section, we focus on the concerns of two African intercultural philosophers—Mogobe Ramose (2020) and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (2019; 2022) —who have both critiqued decolonial scholarship: for Táíwò because it reduces the complexity of African cultural and political life to the singular pole of coloniality (Táíwò 2019) and for Ramose (2020) because it takes a colonial perspective as its main reference, thereby reinforcing injustices of colonial domination. Yet, while each author follows a different path of argumentation, they both argue that decolonization scholarship risks undermining the very possibility of fruitful intercultural encounters.
3.1. Ramose’s Argument in Favor of Mothofatso
Ramose’s (1999) seminal work on ubuntu may be considered a prime example of epistemic decolonization in the sense of Grosfoguel’s (2007) emphasis on endogenous intellectual traditions instead of reliance on Western frameworks of poststructuralism in earlier postcolonial studies. In his critical discussion of Grosfoguel’s work, however, Ramose (2020: 271) insists that “backed by the philosophy of ubuntu, we would rather opt for mothofatso and not ‘decolonial’.” Mothofatso refers to “re-humanisation of human relations” (2020: 304) in the Sotho language cluster of the Bantu-speaking people. The term is related to the ethical principle motho ke motho ka batho, which can be translated as “to be a human being is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them” (Ramose 1999: 37). As such, mothofatso calls for an ethical revolution that not only contrasts the dehumanizing logic and experience of colonialism but also stands on its own as an alternative grounding of positive intercultural encounters. While Ramose’s critique of calls for a decolonial turn is multifaceted, two elements are especially pertinent for a discussion about the relation between decolonial and intercultural philosophy. First, Ramose argues that framing philosophies like ubuntu as decolonial conceptually still prioritizes coloniality and undercuts its intellectual standing as an active, homegrown philosophy. In this sense, Ramose asks “why should ‘decolonial’ return to Africa […] not only as a reminder that there were colonies in the continent but also as the harbinger of a purportedly new epistemic paradigm to deal with the already challenged epistemological paradigm?” (2020: 302)
Second, Ramose suggests that centering on coloniality as the dominant frame of interpretation risks mispositioning African philosophy by making it “cognitively impossible” (2020: 284) to engage in dialogue and adopt different viewpoints: “‘colonial difference’ is not tantamount to radical epistemological inexpressibility, leading to inevitable solipsism. On the contrary, the immediacy and directness of experience is mediated by expressibility, which is the possibility condition for dialogue. In the dialogical encounter, it is possible to assume the point of view of the ‘other’ in the quest to understand and change reality.” (2020: 285) Rather than centering on coloniality, Ramose therefore suggests focusing on mothofatso as a core contribution from ubuntu that grounds a philosophy of re-humanization and thereby realizes what Ramose describes as ontological equality of all human beings. Such a move does not only shift philosophical attention from coloniality to ubuntu but is also meant to build the basis for genuine intercultural and liberatory dialogue about dynamics of de- and re-humanization.
3.2. Táíwò’s Case against Decolonization Discourse
Both of Ramose’s key concerns reappear in Táíwò’s “Rethinking the Decolonization Trope in Philosophy” (2019) and his more recent book Against Decolonisation (2022) that develops a polemical case against decolonization discourse based on a critique of Ngũgĩ’s (1992) and Wiredu’s (1997) calls for linguistic and conceptual decolonization (for a decolonial response, see Emmanuel 2021). While Ramose and Táíwò differ in their respective emphasis on ubuntu and modernity, two of their key arguments converge. First, Táíwò argues that the decolonization trope risks making colonialism the “singular pole for plotting the grids of understanding and narrating African life and thought” (2019: 150). Second, Táíwò suggests that this use of colonialism as a singular pole is both descriptively and politically flawed as it precludes intercultural exchange by instead framing any type of external influence as a colonial imposition and form of violence.
Both the descriptive and normative critique are developed as part of Táíwò’s broader project of distinguishing colonialism and modernity as argued in depth in his How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (2010). On the descriptive side, Táíwò challenges colonialism as the singular event that defines Africa historically or contemporarily. According to Táíwò, such a framing misunderstands the complexity of intercultural encounters in African history and thereby also leads to misrepresentations of the current state of African life and thought. On the normative side, Táíwò argues that these misunderstandings encourage a misdirected nativism that rejects all kinds of intercultural encounters as colonial domination.
Addressing calls for conceptual decolonization, for example, Táíwò warns of unintended consequences of using coloniality as a singular pole in interpreting the reality of intercultural and conceptual exchange—“Yorùbá, my ‘own African language’ is infused with Nupe, Portuguese, Arabic, Hausa” (2019: 148) just as many European languages have been used by African writers from Léopold Sédar Senghor to Chinua Achebe. While Táíwò reflects on the importance of embracing Indigenous languages, he argues that conceptual decolonization risks misframing external linguistic influences exclusively as destructive colonial imposition. Moving beyond linguistic questions, Táíwò warns that the decolonization trope risks rendering everything external or modern into colonial oppression: “if, say, philosophy was to be an integral part of colonization, we cannot claim to decolonize while retaining philosophy. […] This is why it is crucial that we not be careless in attributing more to colonialism than can be supported by the historical record. For illustration, if modernity were part and parcel of colonialism, it is clear that a decolonized society would have no truck with it” (Táíwò 2019: 143).
3.3. Intertwining Decolonial and Intercultural Scholarship
As we have highlighted in the previous section, decolonial scholarship challenges intercultural scholarship to move beyond idealizations of equitable dialogue by engaging with the deeply unequal reality of dialogues that are shaped by colonial structures. Ramose and Táíwò turn this challenge around: If colonial structures are the starting point, how does decolonial scholarship move from a critique of an unequal reality to positive visions of intercultural encounters? While this challenge is helpful in clarifying the possibility of nativist misinterpretations of decolonization, we think that Táíwò is far too quick in moving from the diagnosis of a possible misinterpretation to a wholesale rejection of decolonization discourse regarding African philosophy, historiography, political science, and academic language. Even if it is misleading to turn colonialism into the singular pole of analysis, coloniality remains a relevant pole of analysis in African cultural and political life. Even if it is misleading to reject all external influences as forms of colonial violence, it remains important to question when intercultural encounters are actually mutually beneficial.
While Táíwò (2022: 19) presents the choice between a narrow historical interpretation of “colonialism” according to which Africa has been successfully decolonized and a broad culturalist interpretation that turns all intercultural encounters into “colonialism”, the reality of decolonial discourse is much more complex in highlighting colonial continuities without rejecting the possibility of fruitful intercultural encounters. In the context of African philosophy, for example, Chimakonam and Ofana (2022: 606) depart from similar considerations as Ramose and Táíwò when worrying about scholarship that focuses exclusively “on the differences that exist among worldviews and experiences while overlooking the importance of social collaboration between different socio-cultural blocs.” At the same time, they take their intercultural view to be decolonial in aiming at “dismantling the hegemony imposed by coloniality. Where coloniality seeks to erode the particular cultural worldviews in favor of an absolute instance, decoloniality seeks to restore and recognize the validity of various local epistemic formations” (2022: 614). Along similar lines, Mbonda’s (2021) recent book suggests the following three steps of the decolonial project: critique of hegemonic and universalist reason (deconstruction), a critique of colonized reason (emancipation and epistemic disobedience), and a reconstruction of knowledge within the framework of a common transcultural space (migration and translation). The first and the second steps ensure that the decolonial project addresses the problem of hegemonic, universalist, and colonized reason (Eboussi Boulaga 1977; Mbembe 2013a), while the third step opens the door to a common space where some sort of intercultural dialogue can take place. But for that dialogue to be meaningful and fruitful (i.e. respectful of the equitable conditions of intercultural dialogue), the first two steps should be met first (Mbonda 2021).
Chimakonam, Ofana, and Mbonda remind us that there is no intrinsic conflict between decolonial perspectives that highlight unequal realities and intercultural perspectives that aim for equitable encounters. In fact, much of decolonial scholarship retains intercultural elements and does not fit Táíwò’s characterization of the decolonization trope as a rejection of everything that is external (e.g. Chilisa 2019; Mbembe 2013b; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). The real challenge is not a theoretical but a practical compatibility—how do we embrace equitable forms of dialogue without compromising on the political edge of decolonization when challenging oppressive structures in intercultural encounters? In addressing this question, intertwining decolonial and intercultural scholarship becomes of crucial importance.
We characterized decolonial scholarship through three tenets. First, emphasis on the persistence of colonial history instead of the myth of a postcolonial world of harmonious intercultural dialogue. While Táíwò warns against treating coloniality as the singular pole that defines everything else, neither Ramose nor Táíwò deny that colonial history has had an important impact on political and intellectual life in Africa. While decolonial scholarship indeed involves the conscious decision to highlight coloniality, this does not mean that coloniality constitutes the singular pole that takes priority in interpreting all aspects of political and intellectual life in Africa. Indeed, emphasizing decoloniality in contexts of colonial oppression is entirely compatible with a multi-polar approach that can embrace positive intercultural encounters in other contexts. The rich tradition of intercultural philosophy in Africa (e.g. Gyeke 2013; Oluwole 2014; Ramose 2007) provides plenty of resources for spelling out such multi-polar opportunities despite uncompromising insistence on decolonial framings in the face of oppressive colonial structures.
A second tenet of decolonial scholarship is the emphasis on power inequalities in intercultural encounters that challenge idealized assumptions of equitable intercultural dialogue. Assuming conditions of equitable dialogue can be misleading in practice if the reality of dialogue is deeply unequal. However, both Ramose and Táíwò are concerned that decolonial framings may have unintended consequences of undermining the very possibility of dialogue through their exclusive focus on inequality and oppression. While decolonial scholarship indeed highlights that colonial structures remain deeply entrenched in intercultural dialogues, it is not committed to the view that such structures dominate every dialogue without any prospects of improvement. Pointing out the political complexity of non-ideal dialogues also means not simply inverting the ideal of equitable dialogue into a characterization in which every dialogue reduces to colonial oppression. Intercultural dialogues are complex and typically involve both inequalities and opportunities for mutual understanding to different degrees. Indeed, navigating between challenges of external colonial oppression and fruitful external exchanges has been a continuous theme of both African philosophy and politics. Six years after Ghanaian independence, Nkrumah (1963) famously theorized the persistent cultural and economic power of colonialism while simultaneously acting as the president of Ghana and embracing influences from China to the United Kingdom to the Soviet Union when deemed in the interest of the people. Cabral exemplifies an unapologetically internationalist philosophy that embraces the crucial importance of modern science and external borrowing (2016: 123) while simultaneously advocating for a “return to the source” in which Indigenous tradition becomes central and “national liberation is necessarily an act of culture” (1973: 42–43). For Cabral, external borrowing and returning to the source are both crucial in the articulation of a future beyond Portuguese colonialism. The cases of Nkrumah and Cabral could easily be complemented with cases of other African revolutionaries from Fanon (1961) to Nyerere (1987) to Sankara (1988), who were equally uncompromising in centering on colonialism and embracing external influences where seen as supporting emancipatory goals.
We emphasized radical alterity as a third tenet of decolonial scholarship that challenges overly optimistic promises of intercultural understanding by focusing on deep epistemological, ontological, and axiological differences between actors. Highlighting these differences challenges a simple integrationism that assimilates Indigenous and other colonized perspectives into dominant frameworks without taking their tensions into account. Again, however, this does not mean that decolonial scholarship is committed to characterizing intercultural connections exclusively in terms of radical alterity. Instead, intercultural relations are permeated by what Ludwig and El-Hani (2020) call “partial overlaps”: On the one hand, they involve sufficient overlaps in epistemological, ontological, and axiological assumptions to allow for fruitful dialogue and co-creation of knowledge. On the other hand, these overlaps always remain partial and thereby highlight the methodological and political challenges of navigating difference in cases of deep disagreement and power differentials (Kramm 2021). Decolonial scholarship highlights practices of marginalizing perspectives that do not integrate into dominant frameworks. Highlighting radical alterity in this way, however, is entirely compatible with sensitivity to finding overlaps that provide common ground in intercultural encounters (Dussel 2016: 45).
To sum up, intertwining intercultural and decolonial scholarship provides an opportunity to move beyond the nativist caricature of a singular pole that interprets all intercultural encounters as a clash of mutually unintelligible worlds that are exclusively understood through colonial oppression. Decolonial scholarship can highlight these elements in an uncompromising manner without suggesting that all intercultural encounters need to be interpreted through a singular pole of coloniality. On this basis, decolonial scholars could facilitate intercultural dialogues based on principles that make colonial history, power inequalities, and radical alterity explicit. And they could promote epistemic virtues that foster awareness of colonial history, power inequalities, and radical alterity. Engaging with insights from intercultural philosophy can help decolonial scholars to articulate a position that is non-compromising in challenging coloniality without generically reducing intercultural to colonial encounters. Table 2 below provides a brief summary of these insights.
Table 2: Decolonial Scholarship as Learners from Philosophies of Intercultural Dialogue.
| (B) Elements of intercultural dialogue | |||
| B1. Presuppositions of dialogue | B2. Dialogue principles | B3. Attitudes of participants | |
| (A) Elements of decolonial scholarship | |||
| A1. Colonial history | colonial history as only presupposition does not allow for thinking about intercultural dialogue constructively | dialogue principle to make colonial history explicit without reducing dialogue to a colonial encounter | epistemic virtue: awareness of colonial history as well as multiplicity of historical factors shaping intercultural encounters |
| A2. Power inequalities | power inequality as only presupposition does not allow for thinking about intercultural dialogue constructively | dialogue principle to make power inequalities explicit without reducing dialogue to power politics | epistemic virtue: awareness of power inequalities as well as possibilities of equitable forms of interaction |
| A3. Radical alterity | radical alterity as only presupposition does not allow for thinking about intercultural dialogue constructively | dialogue principle to make radical alterity explicit without assuming impossibility of any mutual understanding | epistemic virtue: awareness of radical alterity as well as entry points for creating mutual understanding |
4. A Broader Toolbox
Calls to “diversify philosophy” have become ubiquitous (Khalidi 2020; Kirloskar-Steinbach 2019; Silius 2020), broadening academic attention not only towards social stratification along dimensions such as class, disability, gender, and race, but also highlighting the global heterogeneity of philosophical traditions from Africa to the Americas to Asia to Oceania. Meaningful philosophical engagement with this diversity, however, comes with complex methodological challenges as it requires navigating between vastly heterogenous concepts, methods, and philosophical ambitions. We have identified intercultural and decolonial scholarship as two major strands of academic discourse that articulate related but also strikingly distinct approaches towards global diversity in philosophy. While intercultural philosophy focuses on the need for equitable dialogue that creates spaces for mutual understanding, decolonial scholarship emphasizes structures of domination that often cast doubt on the possibility of equitable dialogue in intercultural philosophical encounters.
We have argued that decolonial critique can sharpen intercultural dialogue just as intercultural dialogue can sharpen decolonial critique. Given this potential of mutual learning, one may be tempted to articulate a unified framework that meets in the middle between intercultural and decolonial philosophy by incorporating insights from both traditions. We think that philosophers should resist this temptation. Some situations require uncompromisingly confrontational approaches to effectively respond to violence while others require open dialogical attitudes to establish common ground. Rather than finding a compromise that is a “little bit intercultural” and a “little bit decolonial”, we want to argue that a critical global philosophy will benefit from embracing productive tensions between these intellectual currents.
Intercultural and decolonial motifs have different functions in contemporary philosophy that need to be foregrounded in different contexts and encounters. Indeed, the global diversity of philosophy demands spaces for dialogue and mutual understanding. Intercultural philosophy plays an important role in creating such spaces and carefully reflecting about the structure of dialogue between heterogeneous actors. At the same time, the reality of global philosophical encounters would be fundamentally misrepresented through the cliché of one happy philosophical family in equitable intellectual exchange of a globalized “republic of letters” (Daston 1991). The current state of academic philosophy remains shaped by colonial structures as Western philosophy continues to dominate setting standards of intercultural encounters. Decolonial scholarship plays an important role in confronting this reality and highlighting the need to challenge intellectual and institutional structures in which Western philosophy remains dominant from the definition of acceptable languages to the standardization of reputable forms of publication to the formulation of acceptable methods and relevant questions for philosophical research.
The upshot of our discussion is therefore that intercultural and decolonial strands remain in tension but that this tension is itself productive for approaching debates about epistemic and geographic diversification in philosophy. Some contexts require emphasis on dialogue and understanding. Other contexts require emphasis on critique and confrontation. We do not need a murky compromise between those modes but rather acknowledgment that the tension between dialogue and confrontation is here to stay because it captures the challenge of navigating between the need to find common ground in global encounters and to confront colonial structures in a non-compromising manner. As Dutilh Novaes has recently argued, norms of argumentation should not be limited to general calls for “cooperation” or “adversariality” but rather follow a principle of “proportional adversariality: an argumentative situation should be adversarial in proportion to the pre-argumentative levels of adversariality (conflict of interests) between the parties involved” (2021: 884). Global philosophical encounters involve plenty of outright oppressive constellations with high levels of “pre-argumentative levels of adversariality” as well as spaces of care, solidarity, and mutual aid. Decolonial and intercultural tools are both needed to navigate this complex landscape.
There is a wider lesson in this case for productive tensions in debates about epistemic and geographic diversity in philosophy. The global diversity of philosophies makes the articulation of one unified global philosophy highly questionable, no matter whether it is articulated through an intercultural, decolonial, or some alternative approaches. Different approaches serve different functions and may also turn out to be suitable for different geographical contexts.
We therefore suggest considering decolonial and intercultural approaches as two poles on a continuum. This continuum ranges from contexts permeated by colonial injustices, deep power inequalities, and radical alterity to contexts where conditions for genuinely equitable dialogue have been created. These different contexts require different approaches, varying from refusing to engage in dialogue to attempting to reach intercultural consensus.
In Table 3, a distinction is made between seven different contexts, which is a heuristic simplification. The seven modes clearly reflect our own positionality as a group of African and European scholars in assuming asymmetries created through European colonialism. Not all intercultural encounters are shaped by European colonialism and especially South-South dialogues often exhibit dynamics that are not captured through the proposed framework (Rodriguez Medina 2019). That being said, the literature on South-South relations also emphasizes that global conditions of capitalist market integration often reproduce inequalities between dominant and subjugated partners (Gonzalez-Vicente 2017) that raise questions about the possibility of equitable dialogue and mutual understanding.
Table 3: Seven Contexts of Decoloniality and Interculturality.
| Contexts | Decoloniality – Interculturality | Aim | |
| ongoing colonial injustice, deep power inequalities, radical alterity… | |||
| 1 | …are denied by colonizer | refusing dialogue with colonizers | cultural survival |
| 2 | …remain invisible | claiming cultural self-determination | finding and reasserting one’s cultural voice |
| 3 | …are made explicit by the oppressed | challenging colonial domination | challenging colonizers |
| 4 | …are recognized by both sides | aiming at mutual recognition | mutual recognition |
| 5 | …are analyzed by both sides | comparing different cultures | mutual understanding |
| 6 | …are discussed by both sides | facilitating intercultural dialogues | intercultural exchange |
| 7 | …are addressed by both sides | aiming at intercultural deliberation | intercultural consensus |
The first context is characterized by a direct struggle against colonial oppression, where no equitable dialogue is possible, and any dialogue offer should be refused. In the second context, the (formerly) oppressed community enters into a process of articulating and reasserting its cultural voice in order to claim cultural self-determination. In the third context, the colonizers are challenged so that ongoing colonial injustices, power inequalities, and radical alterity can be made explicit. The fourth context is a significant step forward as both sides recognize each other’s worth as cultural communities (Taylor 1994) as well as the underlying issues of justice and power. In the fifth context, both sides analyze and compare their cultures and seek to understand each other, although a dialogue is still lacking. In the sixth context, an intercultural exchange begins in which both sides share insights with each other. The seventh context marks a stage at which both sides engage in intercultural deliberation which might lead to a consensus which can, among other things, generate policies about how to address colonial injustice, power inequalities, or radical alterity.
Contexts (1) to (3), where power inequalities pervade the relationship between colonizer and colonized, require a decolonial approach, whereas in contexts (6) and (7), where these power differentials have been mitigated, an intercultural methodology would prove more fruitful. However, the table does not contain any indications as to the direction in which intercultural encounters are developing (e.g. from refusal to consensus or from inequality to equality). On the contrary, in socio-political reality there are numerous factors that influence the direction in which such encounters move and which are complex to predict. Accordingly, it would be counterproductive to prematurely apply an intercultural methodology in contexts (1) to (5).
Although we cannot provide a complete set of criteria for determining the context in which an intercultural encounter takes place, a crucial indicator is the way in which the encounter is understood and framed by the dialogue partners. In context (1), possible challenges that might arise from injustice, power inequality, or alterity are simply denied by one of the dialogue partners. In context (2), these issues are not flatly denied but remain invisible and inaudible. Only in context (3) can they be made explicit—but only by the suppressed or less powerful dialogue partner. In context (4), an acknowledgement of these challenges begins on both sides and can lead to an analysis in context (5), an open discussion in context (6), or a problem-solving deliberation in context (7).
In this article, we suggest a broader toolbox that makes use of both decolonial and intercultural scholarship to address the different contexts in which intercultural encounters can take place.7 This broader toolbox is particularly important for contexts (6) and (7). Decolonial scholars can provide valuable tools to address colonial injustice, power inequalities, and radical alterity in contexts (1) to (3), but they can also contribute to developing dialogue principles and epistemic virtues for intercultural dialogues under non-ideal circumstances in contexts (6) and (7). Intercultural scholars, in turn, can learn from decolonial scholarship on how to reflect on colonial history, power inequalities, and radical alterity that underlie dialogue presuppositions, dialogue principles, and epistemic attitudes.
The result is not a one-size-fits-all approach that is “a little bit intercultural” and “a little bit decolonial”, but rather a broader toolbox that encompasses both decolonial and intercultural scholarship and the productive tensions between them to address different ways in which intercultural encounters can play out. Decolonial and intercultural methods can thus supplement each other, and, in this way, contribute to a diverse toolbox that can be applied to a variety of contexts and is more comprehensive than either decolonial or intercultural methods would be on their own.
Notes
- The concept of culture is notoriously difficult to define. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) survey 164 definitions of culture. Baldwin et al. extend this list to include 313 definitions but criticize the attempt to construct a summary definition, as some of the definitions contradict one another (Baldwin et al. 2006: 24). While we do not provide a definition of culture in this paper, we clearly distinguish culture from other concepts such as ethnicity, geographical location, language, or nationality. ⮭
- Van Binsbergen asserts that “[i]n a more specific form […] we would conceive of intercultural philosophy as the search for a philosophical intermediate position where specialist philosophical thought seeks to escape from its presumed determination by any specific distinct ‘culture’. […] [W]e render explicit the traditions of thought peculiar to a number of cultures, and we subsequently explore the possibilities of cross-fertilisation between these traditions of thought” (Van Binsbergen 2003: 468–469, italics in original). ⮭
- Some intercultural philosophers, such as Kimmerle, have attempted to address the phenomenon of radical alterity by pointing to the “radical strangeness” between dialogue partners in which the very possibility of interpretation is called into question (Kimmerle 2004: 77). However, while for Kimmerle “radical strangeness” constitutes a worst case scenario in a dialogue, decolonial scholars tend to take it as a starting point. ⮭
- Another question that needs to be addressed is whether a particular speaker or group of speakers are justified in representing their own group or culture in an intercultural dialogue. ⮭
- For similar reasons, Schepen (2023: 209) suggests a list of skills and attitudes for intercultural dialogues that comprises, among other items, embodied presence, empathy, and trust. ⮭
- We have chosen to employ a table to indicate what intercultural philosophers could learn from decolonial scholars. However, there is a risk that it overemphasizes the opposition between both bodies of literature. While the emphasis on power inequalities and colonial history is very evident in decolonial scholarship and less so in intercultural philosophy, both groups of scholars have addressed questions of radical alterity or radical strangeness, respectively. ⮭
- Some of the elements of this toolbox that we have discussed in this article are: applying controlled equivocation; introducing counterpublics; introducing external facilitators; allowing for tentative, exploratory, or conciliatory forms of speech; implementing conceptual decolonization; dismantling cultural hegemony; identifying partial overlaps; challenging ontological domination. While a compromise framework would prescribe a specific combination of these methods for all contexts, a contextualist approach recommends a careful choice of methods depending on what a specific context requires. ⮭
Acknowledgments
Matthias Kramm’s work on this article was funded by a Rubicon grant (019.212SG.001) from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). During the research for this article, he was hosted at the Institute of Biology of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), represented by Francisco Vergara-Silva. David Ludwig’s contribution has been supported by an ERC Starting Grant (851004 Local Knowledge) and a NWO Vidi Grant (V1.Vidi.195.026 Ethnoontologies). The authors would like to extend their gratitude to the members of the GEOS project for their comments on the manuscript. Furthermore, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback.
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