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Review of Contemporary Philosophy Volume 13, 2014, pp. 90–102, ISSN 1841-5261

MORAL EDUCATION AND HUMANISTIC APPROACHES

TO TEACHER EDUCATION: A CONVERSATION WITH DUCK-JOO KWAK

MICHAEL A. PETERS

mpeters@waikato.ac.nz University of Waikato

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Duck-Joo Kwak

Professor, Seoul National University Duck-Joo Kwak is professor at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. Her research interests are, broadly speaking, ethics, philosophy of education, and teacher education. She has written numerous articles on civic and moral education from a post-liberal perspective, especially in relation to democratic citizenship in liberal Confucian culture. Duck-Joo Kwak has pursued the notion of moral education in teacher education for well over a decade focusing on the work of Stanley Cavell’s skepticism, political philosophy, and his perfectionist approach to citizenship, and Lukács’ Soul and Form and the essay as a pedagogical form of writing. Duck-Joo Kwak has published on values education, critical thinking as a form of ethical reflec- tion (following Bernard Williams), Rorty’s postmodern civic education and Kierke-

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gaard’s notion of subjectivity: as a basis for a new moral education. Her new book Education for Self Transformation: Essay Form as an Educational Practice (Springer, 2011) builds on these themes to recommend the essay as a revalued form of lived experience and the basis for educational transformation.

Her publications include: Kwak, D. J., & Hye-chong Han (2013), “The Issue of Determinism and Freedom as an Existential Question: a Case in the Bhagavad Gita,” Journal of Philosophy East and West 63(1): 55–72; Kwak, D. J. (2012), “Skepticism and Education: In Search of Another Filial Tie of Philosophy to Education,” Edu- cational Philosophy and Theory 44(5): 535–545; Kwak, D. J. (2012), Education for Self-transformation: Essay Form as an Educational Practice, Dordrecht-Heidelberg- London-New York: Springer; Kwak, D. J. (2011), “The Essay as a Pedagogical Form, Teacher Education and Stanley Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy,” Teachers College Record 113(8): 1733–1754; Kwak, D. J. (2010), “Teaching to Un- learn Community to Make a Claim to Community: For the Formation of a Political Subject for the Post-liberal Society,” Educational Theory 60(4): 405–417; Kwak, D. J. (2010), “Practicing Philosophy, Practice of Education: Exploring the Essay Form through Lukács’ Soul and Form,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 44(1): 61–77.

Michael Peters (MP): By way of introduction can you share with us some- thing of your background, education and growing up in South Korea. Can you say something about how you came to first acquaint yourself with the tradition of moral education and the humanistic tradition and then to write and contribute to problems in that tradition. (I see this question and the form of the conversation as indeed part of the tradition – philosophical (auto)bio- graphy in the Wittgensteinian and Foucaultian “confessional” sense). Duck-Joo: I was raised in a very traditional household of Confucian culture, patriarchal and authoritarian, just like most of children from middle-class families in the 1970’s of Korea. My father was an educated and faithful follower of the Confucian tradition, taking deep into his bones traditional Confucian values, such as filial pieties and high respect for the elderly. He was the first son of his Kwak family, so that he was supposed to fulfill all the family obligations. One of his big obligations that deeply affected my upbringing was to keep up with ancestral worship ceremonies. They were held every year on the nights of our ancestors’ death with special kinds of food prepared, usually covering four generations up ancestors. Thus, my mother needed to prepare the food for the rituals almost every month. And I was expected to help her with the preparation from the very early on in my life as her first daughter. I didn’t like the rituals very much due to the quite heavy labor I as a girl was supposed to provide. But, as I grew older, I started to notice that there was something very special and solemn about it from the way my father presided over the rituals. His moves were very formal, yet with an extreme care and whole-hearted commitment, as if his grandparents and great grandparents had come back alive and been present

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there in front of us. To think of it back, the way he carried himself in pre- siding over the rituals taught me almost everything about Confucian morals: how to conduct oneself toward one’s parents and the elderly. But there was something more in the teaching; it also left me as a child with some mys- terious intimation that there might be some mysterious dimension in life, which was so sacred that I should NEVER violate it. This intimation was so powerful that the sense of sacredness always accompanied me as I grew older, shaping my Confucian sensibility. It took long for me to be able to conceptually separate this sense of sacredness from Confucian morality as such and to view the latter just as a particular moral outlook among others, not the only one for all humankind. When I was in the primary school, the formal school curriculum consisted of modernized subject-matters, organized by the principle of western ration- ality. But the informal school culture was of the Confucian spirit through and through. I hadn’t noticed a sharp tension between the two completely distinct orders of morality until I was in the second year of the junior high school. I was a kind of student who took seriously what she learned from the lessons at a school. One day I happened to raise an innocent question toward my homerun teacher who gave us a moral instruction in Confucian spirit, which I found apparently contradictory to what we had just learned from his social studies class on democracy. Upon raising the question, I was severely beaten as punishment for my improper conduct (by a Confucian norm), i.e. making an objection to a teacher or making him or her embarrassed in front of others, I presume. (He didn’t make it explicit why I deserved the punishment, of course). Since the occasion, I learnt how to internalize a double-standard in conducting myself, i.e. doing one thing in my official words and doing another in my ordinary behaviors. The logic of western rationality seemed to make a sense and function only in words or in text- books; the way in which things actually worked in reality was governed by Confucian moral grammar. So I had to learn to secretly master two different moral languages that were quite parallel to, never mixed up with, each other. This split obviously made a huge effect on the way my moral identity was shaped, being a constant source of my inner conflicts throughout the whole period of my growing-up. MP: Thank you for being so open about your upbringing and the Confucian culture of your father’s society. Your reflections throw up so many questions for me I am not sure where to start. One aspect of your account really fascinates me from both the viewpoint of a philosopher and educator – “I had to learn secretly master two different moral languages”. Can you say more about these “parallel” languages and also the ways in which they caused inner conflicts? As a separate question I am interested in the Con-

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fucian tradition of discipline: you mention you were “severely beaten” for raising a question; is this still forbidden and punishable? Duck-Joo: Let me start with a response to your second question. Raising an objection to parents or teachers is not forbidden nor punishable anymore. It is even encouraged these days, but only in words or officially. But good students know how to behave in order to be called so. They have already internalized the double standard mentioned earlier. This means that objec- tion-raising students may not be beaten physically but considered to be impolite or distasteful; they have a psychological cost to pay. They are not supposed to raise questions that can make the elderly embarrassed or uncom- fortable, but the other way around is commonly practiced in the name of Confucian morals. But how would children know which questions are proper or not? Getting to develop a sensibility for it is the essential part of Con- fucian education. In order for children to figure this out, they are taught to be attentive to reading the psychological states of the elderly around them from early on in their lives. So, when students happen to raise some unusual questions or objections to teachers, it is often misunderstood as a deliberate gesture that is intended to challenge teachers’ authority; for students’ in- nocent questions out of their sheer curiosity sound out of context, while being perceived as irrelevant to their moral teaching. As for the first question of yours, let me give you an example. One of the most important Confucian virtues is to be able to maintain harmony in human relationships. I learned this by heart from my family education as well as from my school life. The strong emphasis on human relationship creates in me a tendency (or a virtue we would call) not to be a cause of trouble for others or the community I belong to. Thus, if you find someone around you who does some injustice to you or others, you tend to suffer or ignore the action if any reaction on my part would cause some trouble for the harmony of the whole community. Harmony can be an important virtue for the good of community when the community is just or run in a relatively just way. But when this is not the case, it greatly contributes to keeping the community status quo and reinforcing injustice. In facing numerous cases of injustice during the period of my upbringing, I tended to be “coward”, if seen from modern rationalist moral principles I learned from school textbooks. I mostly chose to follow the grammar of Confucian moral language for my self-preservation since it looked like the one that really worked with the social reality I was in. But I always have a sense of guilt deep inside me, not being proud of myself. This was a common form of my self-split or inner tension that I often suffered from the early years of my life. MP: Thank you for these insights. There are, it seems, many potential dif- ficulties both personal and professional that spring from being educated in

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the Confucian moral tradition but at the same time pursuing a career as a philosopher in the western tradition. I wondered whether you might care to comment further on these tensions and why you chose the life of a phi- losopher where the self is a work of transformation? What draws you to the tradition of education self-transformation? Perhaps you might also speak to what this tradition is in its essentials. Duck-Joo: It sounds like a huge question to answer here with a few words. This is also a kind of question I ought to keep pursuing in the future along the way with my academic career as a philosopher of education. But let me try to give you a brief description of how I see myself as an Asian intel- lectual who embarked on the path toward education as self-transformation, given that this description of my self-understanding is only tentative, cer- tainly subject to changes as time goes.

I was grown into an unhappy creature by the time when I was doing graduate work at Seoul National University in Korea. Things around me in the academia did not make sense to me. I felt my life having been drifted away from what I considered essential and important in life, and things only conventional seemed to work out as the dominant rule of game in town. As I described earlier, what I learned from school-textbooks or lecture-rooms was dead-and-frozen knowledge, useful only for exams or term-papers, having no power over the social or personal reality I was living in. But I sort of suspected that this could not be possibly the way things were as the whole story about any serious academic life. It was the time when Korea started to undergo the process of democratization that was triggered by young students’ uprising against military regimes then. A new kind of public spirit and energy was simmering on the surface of the society. But the academia seemed arrogantly untouched by the new social move, remaining deadly conventional, being culturally oppressive. I found myself helplessly submerged into the given culture (remember I was raised as a ‘good’ daughter in the Confucian sense!) where I felt from time to time unbearably suffocated spiritually as well as intellectually. This is a rough sketch of the background under which I decided to leave the country to further my study abroad. Until this time, Confucianism looked to me like a value-system that represented everything oppressive in Korea, which made me as a serious young woman, who was seeking an academic carrier, extremely unhappy.

My education at Teachers College, Columbia University, was revolu- tionary. It changed not only my understanding of what an academic life was supposed to be but also my understanding of who I was. What was so fascinating about this inner change was that it enabled me to see how the two tasks or concepts, ‘becoming a good academic’ and ‘becoming a good person’, could be interconnected; being a serious intellectual (in academia) is to be always in touch with how one is. This simple formula is in fact all

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about my idea of education as self-transformation. It is not that I didn’t know before some philosophers who said similar saying or the literal meanings of the saying. But I knew them before only in head or in abstract words. This time I came to know what it could mean to me through my own experience of self-transformation, that is, as a lived experience, while I was reading and writing. This sort of experience was the kind which I had never encountered before in my earlier education, probably except for by glimpse here and there. For the first time in my life, reading and writing for my academic work fully came to my life without alienating myself. Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I discovered the formula for myself.

I cannot say that my study at TC was always streamlined; it was not easy to cope with, especially in the beginning, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. But as getting adjusted, I started to absorb whatever was offered to me there so freshly and deeply that I felt I was being reborn intellectually. All of sudden, things appeared to make a sense to me. I was able to make what I read, think and write closely connected to the reality I was living in one way or another. My academic work and study did not alienate me anymore! It was a way of meeting myself, expanding myself, enriching myself, above all, understanding myself. Now I could even see and articulate why I was so unhappy in Korea back then. It is hard to pin down what exactly about my education at Teachers College brought this change to me. It may have been the books we read in classrooms, the people I met around campus, or even the way people interacted with each other in the settings which I was part of. It is really hard to tell. But it somehow led me into the enlightening dis- covery and allowed me to deal with my experiences and life in an intel- ligible way. We may name it as the discovery of my ‘subjectivity’, or ‘my voice’ in Stanley Cavell’s words. What is so powerful about this experience from the educational perspective is that it gradually allows me to realize the authority of my voice which I myself can claim to and take responsibility for. This was an unbelievably empowering experience AS a person. I presume this is a kind of experience that the western modern education is supposed to foster in the name of personal autonomy as one of the main aims of education. I finally felt I could and should stand on my own feet for my life as a free and responsible individual. This was the kind of inner journey that I could never even dream of having through my earlier education in Korea. MP: That is a very powerful and moving narrative of self-transformation. I suspect that many readers will identify with many of the aspects of your account and what is so important about it is the way in which the transition from a good Confucian daughter to a genuine intellectual takes place around the theme of subjectivity and responsibility. So now I understand how Stanley Cavell’s work is helpful. Can I ask to you address the main themes of your research that grows out of this experience and perhaps we can also

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discuss Cavell’s work more directly: what is it in Cavell’s writings that you think has significance for educational philosophy? Duck-Joo: Two things to be noted very briefly about the way I was drawn to Stanley Cavell, my hero philosopher. First of all, it was not that I happened to encounter him one day and fell in love with him right away. I met his work for the first time while having been struggling for a long time with young Lukács’ essay collection called Soul and Form. I was going to write on that work of Lukács’ for my doctoral thesis. It was because I thought young Lukács had raised and addressed in that small essay collection the most essential and significant questions for education as well as for a human life, such as “What is life?” “How should I live?”, “What sort of person I want to be?” and so on. He even had a very tragic sense of life in addressing those questions, which I thought was the most honest attitude toward the life we were thrown into. I can even say that young Lukács set a framework and standard for my future philosophical work in terms of philosophical questions and styles. However, when I started to make something out of his work Soul and Form for my doctoral thesis, it was extremely difficult to unpack it in such a way as to make it intelligible to our contemporaries as well as to our current educational context. I found myself desperately deadlocked without making much progress for the thesis-writing. This was the very time when Cavell’s writings came to me; it was my life-saving encounter. Cavell didn’t address all those Lukácian questions, at least not explicitly. But I immediately noticed the Lukácian spirit throughout his work. I took Cavell’s writings as his own version of responding to the exactly same Lukácian questions. For Cavell, the questions are implicit, hidden in words or between the lines. Thus, without my familiarity and long-time struggles with young Lukács’ questions and works, I would not probably have recognized Cavell’s work and the significance of his philosophical project. I somehow noticed that his very unusual, even unreadable style of philosophical writing was a token of his seriousness in attempt to respond to those important questions about the life in general and his own life in particular. And Cavell gave me a language of contemporary sensibility that I could adopt for my work, language which allowed me a philosophical formulation in which I could address the Lukácian questions.

Secondly, I was drawn to Cavell’s work because I was deeply moved by his style of writing, especially his emphasis on ‘the first person voice.’ In fact, his writing style is notorious. It is not discursive. It sometimes stops unexpectedly and other times goes on and on without endings. It is difficult to follow and understand. But it strikes us as very personal. While reading his work, if you are attentive enough to the flow of his thoughts and concerns, you would feel and hear the very sense of his world or himself. Capturing this sense is so profoundly pleasurable that I cannot help going back to his

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text again and again. Capturing this sense means getting in touch with his deep personal self, which always leads me to long for getting in touch with my deep personal self that is unfamiliar even to myself, yet seems larger than who I was. What Cavell seems to be teaching here is that knowing how to speak for ourselves in a genuine way is a way of knowing how to speak for others. These two activities or processes are not identical, yet they are internally, or probably contagiously, connected to each other. I found this idea fascinating as a model for (the practice of) good education. Knowing how to speak for oneself is a form of self-empowering, which is dialogically connected to a way of empowering others.

How do all these influences of Cavell’s ideas upon me have to do with my experiences of self-transformation as a transition from a good Confucian daughter to a genuine(?) intellectual? It is hard to tell. But one thing seems clear. Cavell’s way of doing philosophy, i.e., self-confessional way of doing philosophy, and his advocacy on this form of doing philosophy can give me a good philosophical account of and even a good educational justification of the way I was transformed from a good Confucian daughter to a genuine intellectual. MP: What is it about the “first person voice” that you find attractive and how is this style different from other approaches in philosophy? Why do you think it is particularly appropriate for philosophy of education? (I happen to agree with your preferences but I want to tease out some of the philosophical aspects of style and its importance in philosophy. Many analytical philos- ophers abhor the stream of consciousness style and think that the tradition of “subjectivity and truth”, speaking from personal experience, makes no progress that can only be based on rigorous argument). Can we use this to explore the narrative of self-transformation and its importance in education? Duck-Joo: Thanks for your question. It is really getting into the heart of my philosophical work, even if I will focus more on the kind of spirit that has driven me into the kind of work I am doing now. I think Cavell’s emphasis on “the first person voice” or “speaking for oneself” represents the most honest way of doing philosophy since this idea acknowledges that doing philosophy cannot pretend to speak for all men; it would be a big lie if philosophy pretends to do so. We can take this as Cavell’s critique of the analytic tradition of philosophy since “speaking for all men” was the original ambition of that tradition. But, for Cavell, the emphasis on “the first person voice” does not lead his kind of philosophers into subjectivism or solipsism. In trying to speak for oneself through doing philosophy we are ordinary yet honest persons who are concerned with truth about ourselves, who thereby are always attentive to the gap between what we say and what we mean. In other words, doing philosophy in the first person voice makes each of us

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care about the relation between “what I say” and “what I mean,” or the way I relate myself to what I say. The care of this self-relation does not allow us to privilege ourselves in the self-relation by being mediated by our philo- sophical self-discovery, i.e., objective discovery of the contingency of our existence or ordinariness of our language. It leads us to find something unfamiliar about ourselves, which in turn connect us to others for the reason that it is all shared by others. Thus, the more we are committed to this journey for self-relation in finding a way of speaking for oneself, i.e., our own voice, the better would the first person voice be heard or recognized as speaking for others. This journey for the self-relation can gradually affect, form, and transform the orientation of one’s life as well as the style of one’s philosophical writing. For the two activities, ‘philosophical writing’ and ‘liv- ing,’ are not separable in the practice of doing philosophy in the Cavellian sense, i.e., practice of philosophical writing as an autobiographical self-dialogue in a confessional form. As you can see now, this notion of doing philosophy is very useful in giving an account of education as a self-transformative practice. I hope this brief description helps.

By the way, I am wondering whether I am also allowed to ask you some questions in this conversation. So far, you asked and I answered. You seem to get to know more of me along the way, but I don’t feel myself the same way about you. I find this a bit tedious. I wonder what made you open this conversation with me in the first place. What is your philosophical motiva- tion? Why are you so much interested in the east-west encounter stuff? I am getting interested in the topic of the east-west encounter because I have realized that this might be the only way I could confront and explore who and how I am as a teacher and as a person, given my mixed cultural and educational backgrounds. How about your case? How does this topic affect you as a white male scholar with the full background of western civilization and education? Sorry for this abrupt turning. But your answer will give me a better sense of direction for our conversation to be followed. MP: You are most certainly allowed to ask me questions and I am happy to answer to the best of my ability. My philosophical motivation to engage with you is emblematic of a number of wider projects concerning East-West dialogue that are close to my heart: this is part of the editorial mission of Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) which attempts to renew phi- losophy of education through three principal means. First, greater inclusive- ness in order to reclaim subjugated traditions motivated by respect for cognitive diversity within the western tradition recognizing, for example, forms of humanist pedagogy in the ancient, Renaissance and modern contexts (religious, existential, phenomenological and critical pedagogies). Second, an active engagement with world classical traditions. This is a massive project which will require generations of work. Third, the attempt to work

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with and alongside indigenous philosophical traditions of world indigenous populations such as Maori and Australian Aboriginal peoples. EPAT has published several special issues that bespeak these intentions and we have issues that we are currently working on. Tina Besley and I worked on this theme publishing a special issue of Policy Futures in Education on the European Council’s White Paper on Interculturalism and an edited collection. I began by exploring the concept of intercultural philosophy in the Western tradition and the operating assumption of moral universalism of liberal cos- mopolitanism. I was interested to investigate the “politics of difference” inspired by Nietzsche and semiotic accounts of the self and culture developed by various poststructuralist philosophers as well to explore the adequacy of Rorty’s pragmatist notion of “the cultural politics of conversation” (“Western Models of Intercultural Philosophy”). We coedited Interculturalism, Education and Dialogue (Besley & Peters) for our Peter Lang books series Global Studies in Education in 2012 and tried to demonstrate this in another way at EERA 2012 with a symposium called “Cadiz as a Site for Intercultural Educational Philosophy” examining the influence of Islam on Andulsian Spain. Most recently we are working on a special issue and collection called “The End of European Multiculturalism” which is forthcoming next year. In conjunction with these efforts I began another project of using the concept of dialogue as a basis for a series of interviews with philosophers especially women from other cultures. Some of these are recorded at Addleton Academic Publishers (see for instance http://addletonacademicpublishers.com/ and http:// contemporaryscienceassociation.net/page/iishss). I also established a new journal called Knowledge Cultures that is in part design to advance these initiatives: see http://addletonacademicpublishers.com/knowledge-cultures/ journals/kc/about-the-journal.html. The interviews I have completed (some 8–9) sit within and are connected with these projects and I am about to organize a more permanent site for the interviews. That’s probably enough for now but I am happy to talk about the underlying philosophical issues as they bear on the question of the globalization of philosophy and collectively how we can expand philosophy of education as a means of promoting this kind of dialogue.

Let me end this paragraph with a question: I wonder what is the history and current state of Korean philosophy of education? What is the best way of making a bridge between KPES and PESA? Duck-Joo: Many thanks for sharing your academic interests and concerns. KPES was first established in 1964 jointly with historians of education. But in 1982, it was separated into an independent Society with philosophers of education only. Since then, it has been developed into a size of about 200-member Society, consisting mostly of university professors and graduate students. Within the Society there are three, sort of competing academic camps

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in accordance with their academic backgrounds and orientations: German, Anglo-American and East-Asian camps. As you can imagine, even if we belong to the same academic community it has not been easy for us to con- verse across the three different traditions of philosophy of education, due to their different, sometimes incommensurable philosophical languages they employ. Of course, as in the most cases with human affairs, it may not be just about intellectual incommensurability; what partly, yet essentially, underlies the incommensurability may be of political nature. Thus I am very much interested in crossing these differences among ourselves, whether the differences may be of political or intellectual nature. I hope an attempt to build a possible bridge in the future you mentioned between KPES and PESA can be a good way of crossing these differences among ourselves, more than any other things. I hope you or PESA can bring some good spirit and insight in giving us a broader, more global and inclusive perspective on education, which would, in turn, enable us to see our own Korean per- spective on education more distinctively, objectively, and self-reflectively. Do you have more specific ideas in your mind about how to make a bridge between KPES and PESA? MP: There are many academic ways of encouraging closer contact: holding joint conferences; collaborating on research at the individual and society levels; promoting academic faculty and student exchanges and so on. I think that the idea of bridging initially is for members of the two societies to meet and talk with one another and for the ideas to come from such meetings. One question that is important for philosophy of education is that of globalization. We have so far avoided this question. Thanks also for your account of Cavell. Maybe I can ask you what progress KPES has had in talking across traditions? And also: is there a Cavellian response to globalization that may be useful for philosophy of education? Duck-Joo: I am sure that KPES people would find the idea of academic ex- change with PESA people welcoming and even unavoidable given the pres- sure for globalization all around us. Yet, they would also partly find it uncomfortable due to language barriers. Some of them, especially home-grown scholars on East-Asian philosophy, tend to take it as an unfair ex- change from the beginning since we Koreans are supposed to use YOUR language, namely English, in the academic exchange. Some of them firmly stand against the move toward globalization in the academia, viewing it as a submission to a form of academic colonialism. Thus, any attempt to bridge the two Societies needs to be approached with moral and political sen- sitivity on the part of both sides. It may be a good idea to bring Rorty’s idea of philosophy as cultural politics into the level of our consciousness, treating

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it as an issue common for both Societies in seeking the exchange and col- laboration between them.

On the other hands, I dare to say that the KPES people may be described in some unique sense as more cosmopolitan than the PESA people in their intellectual exposures. Remember what I said about the three academic camps that are coexisting within the KPES: the Anglo-American, German, and East-Asian. But, often enough, we tend not to be aware of this fact, i.e., how resourceful we Korean scholars are in academic heritage. This is why I think KPES’s collaboration with PESA can be very beneficial to us KPES if it can provide us with a good chance to learn about ourselves by viewing ourselves in relation to others. But I am not sure how to initiate it as our first move. MP: I guess that any possibility of closer contact depends upon whether participants see it as desirable. I think it has to be remembered that both NZ and Australia were white settler colonies but that there are indigenous peoples- Maori in NZ, some 36 tribes and as many as 300 separate languages and 600 dialects in Australia. In NZ we have a number of Maori “wananga” or indigenous universities and theses can be presented in te reo Maori (the Maori language). Language is a difficult issue as it has been part of a colonial legacy and attitude that English emerged as a global lingua franca. The story of English from the Old Norse through Angles and Saxons to the Norman Conquest is a complex history of plunder and conquest. I understand the attitude of those in KPES who see the language issue as a barrier and I feel apologetic that I cannot speak to you in your native language. I would not want to be prescriptive about any encounter or dialogue between societies –sometimes it is best if engagements grow out of individual interests. Already within PESA we have several traditions also: analytic philosophy of education, forms of Marxism and critical theory/pedagogy, American pragmatism, in- digenous philosophy, and various forms of Eastern thought that are a product of East-West encounters and conferences held recently in Hawaii and Taiwan. Currently we are working with a Chinese speaking editorial team to produce one issue of EPAT devoted to issues in Chinese thought. These are only small beginnings I realize. One further thought about globalization and its resistance – in the West the nation-state is a recent container and one that does not always overlap exactly with culture or language. Philosophy while it purports to be universal is however very much a local product governed and determined in large measure through local traditions. While there have been attempts to work at intercultural philosophies they are not successful in my opinion. To me more critically is the question of what philosophy might play in an age of global finance capitalism, which has emerged as perhaps the most powerful global culture. One final thought, for me as I have attempt to argue on several occasion the word “cosmopolitan” is not a

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fully transparent good especially when seen in terms of the dominant form –neoliberal economic cosmopolitanism. This is a difference I acutely feel with my colleagues who embrace a form of political liberalism. Duck-Joo: I can see now much better of your concerns and perspectives in doing this interview. I agree with you in saying that philosophy is “very much a local product governed and determined in large measure through local traditions”. But I am not sure what you meant in saying that “attempts to work at intercultural philosophies” are not successful. Do you have a better idea about doing intercultural philosophies, other than what have been attempted so far? An experimental attempt to do intercultural philosophies, this may be your main motivation to do this interview with me in the first place. Is that right? That is to say, you would like to see if a better idea for doing intercultural philosophies can come up during this conversation. Right?

As for the issue of cosmopolitanism, I have one thing to tell you. One of my acquaintances from the Switzerland told me once that a person like me, who was born and grew from a local town of a small Asian country and, who then gradually had chances to move around in bigger cities and in bigger countries, such as Seoul, New York, Hong Kong and London, is the one who deserves being called “a real cosmopolitan”. For, he continues to say, she is the one who has experienced being local as well as being in the center in the world, which would allow her to see how ‘the local’ can be seen from ‘the center’ and vice versa. So a real cosmopolitan is the one who has a sense of orientation in moving freely between being local and being in the center or being culturally bound and being culturally free in her inner (trans)- formation of who she is. Here what constitutes the cosmopolitan selfhood is not the experience of physical free moves but the experience of free moves in one’s perspective in relation to oneself as well as to others. I think this may be a version of cosmopolitanism that Cavell would willingly endorse with his view of doing philosophy. It may not provide us with an explicit theoretical position to defend for cosmopolitanism, merely suggesting its direction in vague terms; these terms are those that each of us is to interpret in our own context of individual lives through everyday practice of making our constant inner little moves self-reflexively to keep us honest and balanced intellectually and spiritually as cosmopolitans. I wonder if this inner struggle within oneself may count as a way of doing intercultural philosophies in your words.

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