Dialogue as Resistance to Western Metaphysics

Behind all its cultural, political and ethnic variety, I argue, the ‘West ’ is founded on a single account of Being, according to which any being is composed of ‘form ’ and ‘matter’, with matter dominating form. The West is thus founded on a writing of domination into the nature of being itself. One way to combat that is through various kinds of dialogue that are orientated, not merely to truth, but to freedom. I sketch out the basic forms of such dialogue and suggest that there is some hope that it will come to be employed by both Westerners and non-Westerners. ‘The West ’ can of course mean many things. As I will use the term here, ‘the West ’ is the region of the world which, having been through the Renaissance and inspired by the Protestant reform of Christianity, turned gunpowder to the task of subduing the rest of the world. But that characterization of ‘the West ’ has nothing to do with geography. There is no necessary connection between the enterprise of gunpowder-driven global domination and the fact that the people who engaged in it and benefit from it now live to the west of other people. They also live, for example, to the north of othe