The foreignness of a foreign culture

Dieter Lohmar

pp. 207-221

in: Dan Zahavi (ed), Self-awareness, temporality, and alterity, Deventer, Kluwer, 1998

Abstract

In this contribution I will analyze the specific experience of the foreignness of a foreign culture. I attempt to understand in which way I can experience things, actions and convictions in a foreign world "as foreign." But before we can answer this question, we have to know how the cultural sense of things is constituted in our own home-world. Thus we have to know how in our own home-world this cultural sense is familiar and known-in-advance, how it is acquired and how it is fulfilled. With this knowledge we are able to understand how and to what extent the cultural sense shows itself in a foreign world. In this respect what is most interesting is how the cultural sense shows itself as being-hidden-to-us. A hermeneutics of the cultural sense has to make clear how in the experience of foreignness this sense can show itself as precisely evading my understanding.