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Interculturalism in the Mediterranean and Asia
one of many defining aspects of the essence of this philosophy? As a result of such inquires, two fields other than philosophical hermeneutics appear to be topical: comparative philosophy and intercultural philosophy. Mall considers every opportunity for the application of comparative philosophy to be intertwined with its intercultural context. He believes there is a close connection between interculturality and the hermeneutic situation in the humanities and the ethos; i.e., our commitment to fellow human beings, which should also be reflected in philosophical historiography.4 As a result, contemporary intercultural philosophy has become a place of encounter between African, Latin American, European, American, Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and numerous other philosophies. On the other hand, the inevitable hermeneutic circle, which arises despite openness and constant inducement towards reconsidering the role of prejudices in this movement, leads to analogous and responsible hermeneutics in this ethos of intercultural philosophising. Thus, one can assert that at the beginning of the 20th century, the contemporary philosophical research had shifted from the traditional HellenisticChristian-Jewish axis - the Athens-Rome-Jerusalem triangle - through the beginnings of the Neo-Hinduistic Indian (also comparative) philosophy to as far as Indian intellectual and spiritual centres (Delhi, Varanasi) and finally Kyoto. It is at this juncture that the traditional Greek name for ‘philosophy’ and Indian philosophical systems (darshana, anvikshiki) are joined by the Japanese name for ‘philosophy’ (tetsugaku).5 With these hermeneutic shifts, the history of 20th century philosophy cleared the old debt of the Hegelian philosophy of history and mind, returning to the path that it had been committed to since the times of the first contacts between ancient civilisations and philosophers of important cultural centres. Here, in Mall’s words, the field of the contemporary intercultural-comparative philosophy comes into creation: “This attitude, this culture of interculturality, accompanies all cultures like a shadow and hinders them from absolutising themselves; this attitude is the very condition needed for the possibility of a genuine comparative philosophy.”6 Comparative philosophy presupposes the interculturality of philosophical thought. Hence, its contemporary form cannot be bound exclusively to great philosophical traditions and networks of canonised philosophers. The task of comparative philosophy is to embark on a quest for traces of intercultural encounters through history and, as expressed by G. Wohlfart, to move between the comparison as identification (xenophilia) on one hand, as well as the negative and complete absolutisation of differences on the other.7 A further inseparable task of intercultural-comparative philosophy, travelling along the traces of the history of interculturality, is to rethink the conception of philosophy - its origins and the contemporary intercultural hermeneutic situation. 2.
History of interculturalism between India and Greece
In 1952, P. Conger published a contribution on possible Indian influences on Greek philosophy. It mentions two routes from ‘India’ (in the period around the 10th century BC limited to the basin of the Indus River and today’s western India) to ‘Greece’ (a wider Mediterranean area of Greece, its islands, Asia Minor, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily). The first route ran along the coasts of the Arabian Sea while the second one crossed Mesopotamia. Moreover, Conger also indicates the possibility of a common ‘Aryan’ heritage of Ancient Indians, Iranians and Greeks, supporting it with results of comparative religiology and comparative linguistics. However, his conclusion is limited to Greek religion - “there is no doubt of foreign influences on the Greek religion or religions”8 - and not philosophy, although he also deals with Greek poets and philosophers of the Pre-Socratic period. According to him, Homer’s Odyssey (I, 22-25), for instance, reveals the poet’s supposed knowledge about Indians that refers to the thesis of the Indian origin of ‘Ethiopians’, later rejected by subsequent researchers. Karttunen’s studies of the first documented commercial contacts, taking place in the 3rd millennium BC between Indus regions, Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula (along the two routes mentioned by Conger - the more important maritime route from ports of the Indus civilisation and the land route through Iran), and his definitions of the actual contacts of the Greeks resulted in the conclusion that through neither the land route nor the maritime commercial route along the Red Sea did acknowledge India having reached Greece. He added that during the 1st millennium BC in Mesopotamia (and of course in Greece) the Vedic culture was even less known.9 After the arrival of Indo-Iranians in Iran and India in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC (concurrent with the decline of ancient Indian civilisation), the Vedic culture settled in the northern part of today’s India and moved toward its north-western part (basins of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, as far as today’s Bihar) in the following centuries. Documents bear witness to contacts between Greece (Mycenae, Crete) and Mesopotamia and even though Mediterranean seamen could already sail as far as India in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. Still, too little evidence exists to support any thesis of direct influences between the Indian and Greek cultures in this period. According to Karttunen, direct contacts between Greece and India can only be dated (on the basis of existing evidence) in the period of the Achaimenides (6th /5th century BC): the period of Persian supremacy between the Indian and Greek worlds. Due to such restraints for comparative and intercultural philosophy of ancient Vedic and ancient Greek philosophies prior to this period, the following two possibilities for comparative analyses remain: the first, along the traces of relatedness in the common Indo-European heritage; the second, with regard to forms of typological similarities of doctrines without documented contacts and with