Abstract

At the end of a century that witnessed countless atrocities in the name of specific cultures---nationalistic, religious, ethnic, or other---the belief that cultural attachments deserve any standing at all is deeply suspect. However, concern for the oppressive and violent practices of some cultures often leads political theorists to neglect or misunderstand the value that cultures provide to their members. This dissertation argues that cultural attachment cannot be understood adequately by reference to "group rights" or "freedom of association"---it is, instead, a deeper, more existential phenomenon, logically separable from the substantive commitments of any particular culture. ;To explain why individuals often experience such deep attachments to their cultures, the dissertation turns to an understanding of the human condition shared by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Each depicts existence as fundamentally meaningless, and thus argues that the will to act requires a substantive guidance that pure reason cannot provide. Although they both take this as a reason to admire a certain aesthetic detachment from life, they also accept that it can be valuable to live within a "horizon" of posited beliefs and values. In this idea, we find a basis for empathy with the "all too human" tendency to feel attached to a culture, and thus for cultural pluralism more generally. ;The difficulty with this empathetic view is that even an intolerant and dangerous culture can provide its members with meaningful beliefs and commitments. In order to approach culture honestly, we must acknowledge the existential benefit of this phenomenon even in hard cases, and not just where this benefit sits comfortably with our moral judgments. The existential benefits of cultural attachments deserve no automatic priority over moral considerations, but moral and existential values sometimes conflict with one another in ways that no objective scale of value can hope to disentangle. As such, cultural conflicts sometimes require agonistic judgments that result in inevitable loss on one side or the other. Liberalism need not always restrain itself out of trepidation over this inevitable loss, but awareness of the depth of conflict should chasten the impulse to judge or intervene in some cases