Abstract

Never has there been a greater need for deeper listening and more open intercultural dialogue to cope with the complex problems mankind faces. This philosophical inquiry places the theme of coexistential verbal communication into a fourfold context. It discusses, firstly, the cultural problematic of dialogue as an educational condition for the possibility of creating norms of international coexistence. This section also critically focuses on the socio-psychological mentality of the Japanese as it impacts on their communicative relations with others inside and outside their country and culture. The essay then considers some chapters of the Mahāyāna Lotus Sūtra as an idealistic Eastern Buddhist philosophy of coexistence and thus as a cultural background scripture for understanding the holistic thinking of bodhisattvas or, what we would call today ‘global citizens;. The urgency to think in broader dimensions is taken up with reference to contemporary international security and development issues. The third part of the article concentrates on the communicative means of the coexistential dialogue itself understood philosophically as the art of thinking together. As examples we mention social and community theories and also highlight ancient and modern thoughts on war. With reference to Plato the final section analyses a Western philosophical reading of both the subjective conditions that underlie a conduct of dialogical coexistence but also of the dialectical structure of the development of dialogue. Although all four parts are interrelated and each contains aspects of the others, the overall progression of the narrative follows from the culturally general and specific towards more philosophically general and specific reflections on dialogue. The sobering argument that accompanies our ruminations is that in order to meet the cultural and philosophical conditions of coexistential relations among human beings and their communities for the purpose of safeguarding the well-being of mankind, we have to learn how to practice and accomplish the dialogue in the full knowledge, however, that its outcome will always be uncertain and never final. To have such a puzzling experience, yet never to despair but instead to repeat the perennial task of communicating with one another is the hallmark of humanity’s maturity.