Relativism and Cultural Relativity

Abstract

It is a truism at once baffling and reassuring that there are apt bilinguals for every known natural language. It is the corollary, of course, of an equally baffling and equally reassuring truism—namely, that a newborn child can have learned any language as their first language if they can have learned the language they eventually acquire. And yet, at the point of mature competence, everyone is aware of the deep uncertainty of understanding the speech and behavior of others belonging to the same culture as well as to another culture. In fact, we may as well admit that we are not always sure whether we understand ourselves at certain critical moments or, indeed, sure about what we may have done or said or made at some moment in our past. Plato broadly suggests in the Ion that the gods make captive the minds of poets in order to express through them their own thoughts. But the gods are notoriously difficult to understand. Furthermore, we are hardly confident about what it is we do when we understand ourselves, one another, those of our own culture, and those of another culture. No one, I think, has satisfactorily answered these questions. When we ponder these familiar puzzles, we begin to suspect that often—possibly always—what we call understanding and knowledge may not be capable of being as crisp, as univocal, or as confirmable as we should like. If, to take a compelling example, I stand before a number of Paul Klee’s enigmatic drawings, I am aware that part of their great charm rests in the fact that I can place them with assurance in an art tradition with which I am well acquainted, though I am unable to state their meaning and what their purposive structure is with a precision and assurance matching their obvious mastery. I fall back to weaker claims, and I take Klee’s works to