Reflexivity and globalization: Conditions and capabilities for a dialogical cosmopolitanism

The case for an agent-centered account of a cosmopolitan public sphere

In the quickly expanding discourse on cosmopolitanism, the phenomena that define our new global interconnectedness are thematized under various headings, with political, moral, legal, cultural, and economic processes often taking center stage (Delanty, 2006, 2010). What is discussed much less, however, is how exactly these structural changes are reflected at the level of the individual agents—that is, how they come to affect and transform the agents’ self-understanding, how they impact on their concrete beliefs and practices, and how they redefine their lives and values within their situated settings (Rovisco & Nowicka, 2011; Kögler, 2011). The question is: How can the critical self-understanding of situated agents within globalization become the ground of a cosmopolitan consciousness? I suggest that the cosmopolitan dimension of globalization can only come to fruition if the reflexive self-understanding of agents targets their own situatedness in global networks, that is, if agents become capable of bringing the objective processes in which they take part to self-consciousness. It is in this context that care of the self takes on the form of a theory of reflexivity that reconstructs its global situatedness as a challenge to develop a new cosmopolitanism.

The reconstruction of the structural grounds of situated self-reflexivity will thus be central. We will have to inquire as to how agents can critically thematize objective social, historical, and political processes, that is, as to how such a structural self-understanding may be possible under the conditions and constraints set by globalization. We will also have to see how such a process can be seen to realize the normative ideal of a universally recognized conception of self-determined agency which lies at the core of a moral conception of cosmopolitanism (Nussbaum, 2000; Appiah, 2005, 2006). Grounding cosmopolitanism in the situated consciousness of agents requires the moral Ought to be paired with a global-historical Can. This means that we have to show how our moral conception of an egalitarian ideal of reflexive self-determination can be brought about under global conditions. This in turn includes how the concrete cultural, social, and value-oriented beliefs and practices of agents can be mediated with the universal demands of a cosmopolitan vision of equal freedom and self-realization for all (Appiah, 2005).

The vision set out here rejects a top-down approach to cosmopolitanism. It rejects a purely moral or legal emphasis that first reconstructs how a normative universal framework, such as human rights, needs to be conceived, and only afterwards concerns itself with its many different contexts in order to determine how those universal rights and values are to be implemented. Rather, I argue that the challenge (as well as potential) of cosmopolitanism consists in unearthing the agentive capabilities that allow for the reflexive distanciating of agents from their situatedness in given structures, while remaining as their connection to the ethical grounds of intersubjective cultural understanding. The transformation of globalization from an objective event into a self-reflexive project of cosmopolitan consciousness can only succeed if our account of agency remains anchored in a theory that explains how agents themselves can meaningfully and effectively participate in this process.^[1]

Yet how are we to conceive of those features of agents’ cognitive abilities which are supposed to enable this ‘anchoring’ of the normative attitudes that would define a justifiable cosmopolitan consciousness? And how can the formation of cosmopolitanism be shown to be a process that emerges from the very processes that define agents under the conditions of globalization? It is here that the concept of a cosmopolitan public sphere is required. It indicates a communicative realm in which situated agents understand their own position as well as that of others within the global context, and within which they both thematize their own uniqueness and shared concerns within it. There is no doubt that this concept implies a strong idealization vis-à-vis the actual understanding of agents, but the claim does not concern the bulk of actual values, understandings, and perspectives, but rather names the medium in which agents may express their values, understandings, and perspectives (mostly situated at the local or national level) with a view of their embeddedness in the global context, as possible resources for shared interpretations.^[2] The cosmopolitan sphere thus indicates a situated and diversified understanding of a projected global populace for which events have a certain global significance and meaning, thus transcending the merely local or national context, while remaining sensitive to social, cultural, and historical differences.^[3] It designates a realm of communicative self-understanding in which the challenges that derive from the unconstrained process of globalization are critically thematized and reflected against the backgrounds of the diverse cultures involved. The task of a critical global theory in this context is to reconstruct the bases that would make such a sphere and its shared formal features possible. We see potential for this project in our core concept of agentive capabilities, because we take these capabilities to establish the conditions for a culturally sensitive, normatively oriented, and power-critical mode of dialogical communication. As such they would ground a cosmopolitan public sphere.

The normative motivation for an agent-based cosmopolitan approach

Yet before we present a reconstruction of the agentive grounds of the desired transnational self-understanding, we must clarify the normative need for an agent-based cosmopolitan public sphere. The new medium of communication which we conceive of as expressing a cosmopolitan scope is unique in its emphasis of being emergent from the agents’ situated self-understanding.^[4] The cosmopolitan public sphere is therefore not constituted by the usual elite or expert discourses that have shaped national agendas all along, and that are now increasingly being supplanted by inter-, cross-, and trans-national institutions. Rather, the cosmopolitan medium works via the emergent understanding of subjects connected by trans-national virtual venues like the World wide Web, or other communication networks of varying informality; as such it always remains situated, defined by the newly opened-up and expanding horizons, couched in the respective individual agent who invests this new self-understanding in the concretely situated, local and national discourses in which she participates.

Now to explicate the normative roots of such a cosmopolitan attitude is not an easy task. This is because we strongly endorse the radical situatedness of all understanding, including our own. We thus cannot deduce a moral scheme from some a priori ideal realm, nor can we rely on alleged ‘universal’ intuitions which may merely be based on our own emotions and experiences. But if we similarly reject an untenable moral relativism—untenable because it would undermine the moral and ethical judgments which form an indispensable moment in a normative and critical approach to globalization—we need to find mediating ground between the universal aspiration of normative claims, on the one hand, and the contextual and cultural situatedness within which they are inevitably raised and defended, on the other. The solution, I submit, is a dialogical approach in which the fact that the Other is a communicating self is the ground of my normative approach and assessment of her claims. This approach lends itself organically to grounding a cosmopolitan public sphere defined as radicalized intercultural dialogue; furthermore it entails in nuce the features of the hermeneutic capabilities that will ultimately constitute the condition of its possibility; and it will be of crucial help in showing how such a sphere is normatively desirable as well as justifiable.

Yet how does the self involved in dialogue with the Other help us unfold the normative core of global discourse? If I am to approach the Other with the true respect owed to her, I must consider her not only as a means for my own projects and intentions, but recognize her as an invaluable subject in her own right. I have to recognize her, in the Kantian sense, as an end-in-herself, not merely as means-to-my-own-ends. It is clear that this line of reasoning already, and intuitively, provides a normative resource that runs counter to all capitalistic and power-defined approaches in inter- and trans-national affairs, inasmuch as those approaches utilize the Other as a means for personal profit-making or strategic advantage. Yet we need to be careful not to merely bolster our critique of the objectifying and instrumentalizing attitudes that define current neoliberal and neo-imperialist approaches with an equally abstract normative model. Since we base our own reflection on hermeneutic insight into the inevitable situatedness of all understanding, the structural predicament of all scientific and moral reasoning in its traditional or classic form becomes apparent.

It is this predicament of monological theory-formation that the dialogical approach aims to overcome. Scientific discourses and technologies express the problematic top-down model. This is because an accomplished ‘truth’ or ‘technological knowledge’ is seen as validated in itself and merely waiting to be applied in context. The conditions for application, furthermore, are often considered universally given; hence a culturally and contextually sensitive integration of the respective scientific or technological knowledge is missing. This predicament is not helped by the fact that the scientific-technological syndrome is accompanied by a normative frame that is equally ready-made and expressive of a top-down approach by moral-legal expert discourses. The symbolic form of a universalistic morality and rights are backed by transnational institutions like the United Nations, which can declare universal human rights and determine which particular states and governments can be ruled illegitimate. Related institutions like the International Court of Justice in The Hague similarly exemplify the unified global power, however symbolic, of a normative force which sets out a globalized outreach scenario, digging deeply into previously nationally defined territory.

We are thus witness to the global presence of economy and administration—the Marxist-Weberian twofold scenario of a power-economy complex—increasingly being accompanied by a global normative meta-structure. Institutions like the G-8 or G20, the World Bank, and the IMF now appear against a normative meta-frame which complements, justifies, transcends, but also admittedly criticizes the overwhelming political and economic powers unleashed by the (largely) Western empires. It may seem to some as if the globalization of Empire, having acquired power and money, now longs for cultural dominance as well. It seems to be reconfiguring the world on the basis of its values and norms, and in its own ‘universal’ image of human rights. Empire ceases to be nothing but money and power: It aims to ascend to become ‘universally right’ via universal human rights.^[5]

It is to counter this devaluation of the normative framework to a merely normative doubling of the Western perspective that the dialogical approach is introduced. The Kantian reconstruction of respect towards the Other as a Co-Subject has to be implemented within the hermeneutic insight of radical situatedness. This means that the normative framework that defines our substantive moral and ethical self-understanding cannot be imposed through the traditional, and necessarily culturally situated, channels of philosophical reflection. Rather, the emergence of the shared universal norms, which must include both a cultural sensibility towards the Other and an acknowledgement of the pervasive economic and political powers, must now be grounded in the very process of intercultural dialogue itself. The infrastructure of dialogue provides a new normative framework to which all parties should be committed if they seek to develop a rational and respectful self-understanding in the global era.

A further and crucial normative advantage of the dialogical over the traditionally universalist approach now becomes clear. In the dialogical approach, the Other is seen as both situated, in an inextricably complex context of cultural meanings and practices of meaning and power, and yet also capable of articulating her own vision and perspective. Thus the Kantian recognition is dialogically transformed into hermeneutic recognition of the Other as a conversation partner. Yet obviously the Other is also seen as situated, vulnerable, and contextually determined. Such an empathetic understanding may itself provide a normative source of care, but it is now prevented from becoming yet another projective construction of the Other as a weak vulnerable self in passive need of my privileged care. The point is that the dialogical approach situates the Other so as to reveal her vulnerability, without reducing the Other to a weak self in desperate need of our help and salvation. Similarly, the situatedness of the Other in trans-subjective power contexts does not entail a lack of recognition of agency on the side of the Other, just as one’s subjection to power lacks such an assumption in one’s own case. The dialogical approach situates the Other, as much as oneself, within cultural contexts, and against this background develops the dialogical approach as a normative ideal for an ultimately political self-determination.

In order to be able to address the level that could sustain a normative justifiedness for global communication, we thus need to bypass the seductive distinction between material (economic and political) versus symbolic (moral and legal) structures of globalization, which traps us at the macro-structural level of analysis, as if the task was merely to add a symbolic-normative level of rights and values to an otherwise purely material and socio-structural dimension of global exchange.^[6] What is needed instead is an account of how economies, politics, and also legal and normative structures are themselves conceived, experienced, interpreted, transformed, or challenged at the level of engaged agents. In any normative conception of the objective processes of globalization, the extent to which this process affects democratic ideals such as the conscious and collective self-rule of situated agents becomes crucial. But this means that we have to construct an approach of how agents themselves can understand and thus effectively partake in the democratic process.

To sum up our results thus far, we hold fast the following:

• To be able to function as a normative medium of globalization, the nationally grounded public sphere must be transformed such that all participants affected by the processes of globalization are (at least potentially) included;

• The new communicative process cannot be conceived along the lines of being the normative complement of economic or administrative global structures such as the UN or international human rights courts and their top-down organization;

• Rather, the democratic base requires that such a cosmopolitan public sphere be conceived as fully grounded in the agents’ self-understanding as affected subjects;

• Therefore, the possibility of a cosmopolitan public sphere hinges decisively on the capabilities of situated agents to critically reflect on and actively engage in globalization such that their own voices and wishes are heard.^[7]

The idea of agentive capabilities as grounds for intercultural communication

We thus realize the need to show how agentive capabilities must be structured so effective participation in global processes and their effects becomes possible. We understand effective participation to mean the cognitive understanding that oneself is embedded in and ‘part of’ global contexts and processes.^[8] In turn, we must ask how the new cosmopolitan public sphere should be structured so agents from the most diverse cultural, social, and political backgrounds can meaningfully participate. How are we to envision the possibility of such a newly emergent realm of trans-national communication? How can the grounds of the public sphere be reconceived so it lives up to the cosmopolitan challenge? Is it really possible to transpose the ideal of the public sphere from its historical origins, the nation-state, onto the global plane of transnational communication? Can dialogical deliberation among equals be sustained in the culturally diverse, power-differentiated, and economically stratified realm of global society? And if so, what are the new tasks and challenges and what are the obstacles as well as the opportunities for such a globally inclusive public, conceived as the shared space of reflexive agents who set out to collectively determine their common good, given their vast and irreducible differences?

Our claim is that the answers are to be found in the reconstruction of capabilities for intercultural communication, since this does not mean defining substantive standards, schemes, or values based on rich cultural traditions, but reconstructing the formal capacities to understand and critically reflect upon those in our own and in another’s context. If we can show that (a) agency needs to be conceived as being emergent from intersubjective processes, which means all epistemic agency is inextricably situated in concrete cultural and historical contexts (which as such entail a normative infra-structure of mutual recognition as rational language users), and (b) suggest that there exists the possibility of a cosmopolitan consciousness that can adequately reflect its own situatedness and define its own self-understanding, we then have to show (c) which social-cognitive resources can mediate the global situatedness of agents with the development of an adequate cosmopolitan self-understanding of the global situation. This project will involve the reconstruction of agents as both culturally context-bound and yet capable of critical reflexivity with regard to social and cultural situations.

We are thus in need of a process whereby agents come to understand themselves adequately under the conditions of globalization. Given that agency is essentially situated in specific cultural and social contexts, this reflexive self-understanding—which we define as cosmopolitan consciousness—must be understood as an emergent reflexivity of the process of globalization itself. Yet if agency is essentially socially and therefore also intersubjectively situated, it follows that the process through which such an understanding occurs can only be intersubjective communication with other epistemic subjects. Therefore, the process through which agents can understand themselves must be dialogical. The need for a dialogical account of intercultural understanding is based on two arguments.

First, since agents cannot assume any direct or unmediated access to knowledge, they require a medium in which to acquire, test, and exchange their claims to understand the very processes that define them. Their reflexive self-understanding requires a medium that can both present (darstellen) as well as challenge (herausfordern) their situated beliefs and assumptions, a medium in which practices and institutions can be thematized and reconstructed; hence an intersubjective sphere which allows for the deliberation of the values and their contextual or trans-contextual interpretation. Such a medium would be provided by the cosmopolitan public sphere, defined by an open and inclusive dialogue about the structures and processes that define globalization. Because agency is inextricably bound by concrete social and cultural contexts, any justified position requires critical dialogical exchange with other agents so it is possible to determine what is adequate and objective. Situation definitions, value-orientations, and assessments of objective reality are thus all drawn into the process of dialogical interpretation, which consists of a mutual perspective-taking that allows for substantive knowledge expansion as much as reflexive self-distanciation.

Second, any intentional content that can in principle be understood has to be understood by oneself, that is, by one’s own taken-for-granted pre-understanding. Yet such a pre-understanding is comprised of what we take to be valid and true; it encompasses our largely unquestioned yet nevertheless validity-based conceptions of reality. Now any ‘meaning’ that can be understood as presented in a symbolically mediated cultural form can only be understood if it is disclosed with a truth-assumption or what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the ‘anticipation of (rational) completeness’ and Donald Davidson refers to as the ‘principle of charity’ (Gadamer, 1960/1989; Davidson, 1984). It follows that we relate what the Other says to beliefs and assumptions that we find rationally acceptable. Now the fact that this is the precondition for even beginning to understand someone does not mean we end up meaning or agreeing with what the Other says. And yet we need these ‘bridgeheads’ to get started in order to increasingly immerse ourselves in the Other’s perspectives. This process leads to the reconstruction of the Other’s and in turn our own position, it is defined by turn-taking. It is a dialogical process within which we orient ourselves towards a shared subject matter that we increasingly disclose in similar or disintegrating perspectives, depending on how the dialogue unfolds. Thus, since the cosmopolitan public sphere is based on intercultural understanding as its premise, the process of this medium is essentially dialogical in nature.

The question is whether this sphere can be grounded in the dialogical capabilities of agents.^[9] In order to fully position the complexity of this task, we need to remind ourselves of the normative reflection of a cosmopolitan public sphere and what it implies: namely that our approach is critically positioned versus the objective and anti-normative forces of a global capitalistic economy and global imperialist powers. These capabilities thus need to be able to draw on the existing cultural and social resources in the Background of agents, and yet also thematize and reconstruct the forces that undermine any such potentials. This assumes that we have to be able to show that there are indeed cognitive structures or resources that can enable the emergence of a global self-understanding.

A hermeneutic account of intentional agency

It is at this point that hermeneutic capabilities come into play, suggesting that certain conditions for reflexive interpretation are grounded in the agents’ cognitive dispositions (Kögler, 2005, 2011). Those conditions and their reflexive unfolding would allow for the required mode of distinguishing regardless of whether inherited self-understandings are acceptable. We need to show how the capabilities to cognitively engage the complex background understanding are derivable from the basic cognitive-existential constitution of agents, that is, how agents can come to reflexively articulate those interpretive attitudes on the basis of the cognitive abilities they acquire by being human agents.

Agents have to draw reflexively on certain capabilities to hermeneutically disclose the other within a communication context, thus realizing the normative potential of mutually respectful dialogue within actual interpretive practices. In order to position ourselves adequately to participate in this medium, we need to reflexively thematize our own cultural background and its modes of cultural potential as well as power. The challenge is thus to constitute reflexive selves which define themselves, their own hermeneutics of self, as possessing and articulating these capacities such that a normative recognition across cultures and contexts becomes possible.^[10] It is in this context that a hermeneutics of self-understanding achieves a new potent urgency vis-à-vis a normative response to globalization.^[11]

Intentional agents understand themselves against the background of taken-for-granted assumptions and practices. Heidegger has convincingly analyzed this ‘fore-structure of understanding’ as consisting of a practical, symbolic, and personal-perspectival layer. The different layers relate to the ways in which these ontological dimensions shape our self-understanding. Dilthey similarly understood that on their basis, we engage in modes of ‘elementary understandings’ in which we disclose meanings as shared and self-interpreting based on the mere phenomena that are given. In this way emotional gestures, basic actions, and shared symbolic codes are representative of a pre-existing ‘meaning,’ a Sinn, or objective Geist in which the cultural context is objectified and reproduces itself. Yet the fact that these processes are equally mediated by language also means that the shared assumed ‘meanings’ can be made reflexive. Such reflexivity—the scope of which differs in relation to the different ontological layers—is needed when the background contexts, the gestures, practices, or codes, do not sufficiently overlap. Yet since intentional agency is defined by such background structures—which also means that shared knowledge, acceptable social norms, and established personal identities (as types) exist prior to reflexive interpretation—an adequate understanding of any agent necessarily involves the reconstruction of these background features. Even if the process is a shared global dialogue on issues, the resources that are brought to bear on the conversation are only accessible to all to the extent that the background meanings are sufficiently mastered so as to allow the disclosure of the meaning- and validity-constituting forces of their content. From this, it follows that agents have to be oriented towards the particular contexts and their resources in order to fully appreciate the contributions of all participants.

Yet while the contextual backgrounds are thus the insurmountable starting point for all understanding, as they provide it with its significance, richness, and binding depth, the dialogical disclosure of shared meaning is not condemned to remain at this level. Here, it is crucial that the appropriation of these background understandings works through an intersubjective socialization process that allows, in the first stage, for an empathetic perspective-taking. This process delineates the other’s self-understanding from my own background understanding and allows me to distinguish the other’s assumptions in contrast, as a virtual participant in the other’s context. Yet this playful reconstruction ultimately allows for a discourse on what is and should be shared as values, norms, and knowledges, as the perspectives may fuse in a triangulation between subject and subject and object. The shared reality comprises the intersubjective construction of shared norms to which all can agree (under the condition of rational acceptability) and objective facts (under the condition of uncontested strong evidence). The latter move is starkly established in our objectifying attitude towards nature, where it produces the productive illusion of the subjectless objectivity of nature as nature (see Latour, 1993).

Yet, such an objectifying perspective can be employed in the second step towards those social and cultural conditions which have taken on a reifying and ‘natural’ character towards the subject, thus undermining the intuitive skillful intentional agency in its lifeworld. The initial intersubjective process of recognition, which allows the subject to develop her basic capacities as an autonomous and self-confident agent, is thus advanced towards a universalizing and an objectifying approach. All three facets of our intersubjective-dialogical socialization process entail the development of the respective hermeneutic capabilities which sustain a fully developed cosmopolitan understanding.^[12]

The key to making this suggestion work as a real—normative-empirical—possibility is thus to see how human agents are essentially defined as language users.^[13] If social situatedness is accepted as an insurmountable basis, I suggest that we must take account of the fact that all self-understandings are (a) articulated and expressed in the conventional medium of particular languages and traditions, which nevertheless are translatable and therefore entail a shared universal community of speakers; (b) grounded and embedded in concrete cultural contexts with their particular customs, practices, and institutions; and (c) permeated and distorted by social power relations and structures of domination.

The self-understanding of agents is thus grounded in a cultural Background that encompasses as relevant dimensions the conventional articulation of values and norms, their groundedness in concrete cultural practices and institutions, and the permeation of normative intuitions by implicit power structures. The linguistic mediation of the Background lets us see how this linguistically mediated background can be transformed such that agents themselves become capable of actively engaging and participating in its formation.^[14]

The cognitive capabilities for a dialogical cosmopolitanism

We are now in a position to turn to three basic dimensions that constitute the building blocks of an agent-based enablement of the desired cosmopolitan public sphere. We have argued throughout that an account of agent-based capabilities allows for a truly dialogical reconstruction of the project of cosmopolitan intercultural communication. But what does this mean exactly? We suggest it means developing three interpretive attitudes, including (1) an orientation that maximally discloses the concrete cultural contexts and backgrounds in their specificity and uniqueness, (2) an orientation towards shared beliefs, assumptions, and values in order to arrive at universally valid judgments, and (3) an orientation towards a critical analysis of social practices and institutions which are geared towards undermining the self-determination of agents.

1. An agent’s situated self-understanding entails the concrete capacity to move in-between and among contexts, without aiming to reach an entirely detached or objectified level of abstraction (Mead, 1982, p. 193). Via their self-understanding, agents make use of the concretely mediated and yet general capacity of imaginative perspective-taking (Kögler, 2000, 2012; Hoffman, 2000). This basic capacity of human agents as language users can be unleashed to open up concrete life-worlds of others, even far-away others. Foregrounding this feature ensures that the empathetic concern for the situated other remains a central concern within the context of global dialogue. To understand the motivation, background, and force of the other’s perspective is a crucial cognitive dimension of transnational communication (Godrej, 2009, 2011).

2. Similarly, the universalist value-orientation is built into human agency as an indispensable feature and allows itself to be transformed in a constructive way. Intentional human agency is value-oriented and aimed at an object or goal. Since the value-orientations are always embedded in a holistic cultural background (Heidegger, 1927/1962; Weber, 1978), as our analysis of linguistically mediated agency showed, they can only be understood as projective generalizations from such concrete backgrounds. In the global scenario, the reflexive awareness of this embeddedness transforms the formerly authoritative validity- and truth-claims; their shared dialogical articulation may now reach a new level of universal values developed from the dialogical process. To be sure, to develop a reflexive sense of one’s own tradition within the context of the plural perspectives in a cosmopolitan public sphere is a major challenge. But it entails the opportunity to transform the commitment towards one’s values into a fallibilistic consciousness of universal validity as emergent from dialogue. This process thus abandons the transcendental or metaphysical hope of absolute knowledge, but without abandoning agents to the particularism of their respective contexts.

3. Yet since intentional agency draws on holistic background assumptions which are embedded in social practices, power and domination will always shape the self-understanding of agents to a certain extent. The need for a self-objectifying perspective of power and structural domination emerges. Social practices involve hierarchical relations of power and domination, which exercise their efficiency by a variety of means, including the macro-structural formation of conditions that pervasively structure, discipline, and thus constitute the self-understanding of situated agents (Foucault, 1979, 1994). Agents are able to thematize these power relations via linguistic representation. Such a reflexive self-objectification has (a) to reconstruct the objective processes of power that define its background context, and (b) to utilize the self-distanciating potential that intercultural dialogue provides to unearth the old and new forms of power that inhere in the cultural and national contexts involved.

By engaging in empathetic perspective-taking, by recognizing universal (yet situated) validity-claims, and by critically analyzing power relations, reflexive interpreters will fill the cosmopolitan public sphere with the kind of knowledge and insight that lives up to its normative promise. It will then be able to truly become a global dialogue in which agents recognize themselves as reconstructing and constructing values and the common good under conditions of globalization. The capacities to do so emerge from their nature as situated language users. But the active development of their agentive capabilities must take place in the concrete cultural contexts of their execution and education. To develop those capacities reflexively in the context of a globalized world puts certain normative constraints on this actualization.

1. The concrete cultural background contexts of all participants in public intercultural dialogue are to be included and understood, insofar as is possible in the interpretive encounters. Since we are interested here in a regulative ideal of interpretation that aims to avoid one-sided cultural assimilation and appropriation, they are to be made accessible from the first-person perspective of the respective agents.

2. Universal claims to moral rightness or value objectivity are to be seen as inextricably interwoven with conventional forms of the linguistic medium, which means that no such formulation can aspire to absolute validity. Rational commitment to justified norms and values is no longer based on any strong trans-dialogical authority deriving from the privileges of a particular tradition or culture; rather, they are maintained in light of a reflexive understanding of the cultural contextuality of concrete articulations of values and norms within shared dialogue.

3. The intersubjective dialogue about shared norms and values has to be accompanied by a structural analysis of the power relations involved. Agents are to become maximally aware that their beliefs, assumptions, and value-orientations may derive from or be correlated with relations of power and domination.

All this expresses a hermeneutic account of the care of the self. According to this approach, the self aims to reflexively develop itself so as to achieve an adequate cosmopolitan self-understanding. It is guided by a dialogical ethos which lies at the core of a democratic global politics.