Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge
- Part I Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
- Part II Rethinking Knowledge
- 6 Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality
- 7 Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History
- 8 Rule of Law and the Calling of Dharma: Colonial Encounters, Post-colonial Experiments and Beyond
- 9 Compassion and Confrontation: Dialogic Experiments with Traditions and Pathways to New Futures
- 10 Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations
- 11 The Calling of a New Critical Theory: Self-Development, Inclusion of the Other and Planetary Realizations
- Part III Aspirations and Struggles for Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations
- Afterword
- Advance Praise
10 - Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations
from Part II - Rethinking Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge
- Part I Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
- Part II Rethinking Knowledge
- 6 Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality
- 7 Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History
- 8 Rule of Law and the Calling of Dharma: Colonial Encounters, Post-colonial Experiments and Beyond
- 9 Compassion and Confrontation: Dialogic Experiments with Traditions and Pathways to New Futures
- 10 Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations
- 11 The Calling of a New Critical Theory: Self-Development, Inclusion of the Other and Planetary Realizations
- Part III Aspirations and Struggles for Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations
- Afterword
- Advance Praise
Summary
Does the collapse of “logocentrism” anchored in the cogito, really compel us to abandon every type of ‘humanism’ or commitment to humanity even when it transgresses human self-indulgence? In the political domain: does the rejection or critique of liberal universalism inevitably force us to embrace the alternative of parochialism and hateful xenophobia? Is it not possible – indeed are there not good practical and philosophical reasons to cherish cultural and ethnic diversity while at the same time opposing the blandishments of both cosmopolitanism and local narcissism?
—Fred Dallmayr, “Truth and Difference: Lessons from Herder” (1998)The very notion of human rights (or the “rights of man”) is generally presented as the gift of the West to the rest. The non-Western traditions are usually considered bereft of notions of human rights… [but] this disables any intercultural, multi-civilizational discourse on the genealogy of human rights. The originary claims concerning the invention of “human rights” in the West lead to a continuing insistence on the oft-reiterated absence of human rights traditions in the “non-West.” from this it is but a short practical step for the “West” to impart, by coercive and “persuasive” means, to others the gift of human rights. This leads to a rank denial, even in a post-colonial and post-socialist age, of equal discursive dignity to other cultures and civilizations. It also imparts a loss of reflexivity, in terms of intercultural learning, for the euro-american traditions of human rights… The future of human rights is serviced only when theory and practice develops the narrative potential to pluralize the originary metanarratives of the past of human rights beyond the time and space of european imagination, even in its critical postmodern incarnations.
—Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (2002, 24–6)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Knowledge and Human LiberationTowards Planetary Realizations, pp. 171 - 184Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013