Is critical Western theory adequate for de-mystifying the non-Western thinker?
It would be trite to claim that there are no analytical and ethical engagements with the concept of the “other” within Western traditions of thought.[43] Of special importance in this respect are two philosophers who built upon the phenomenological tradition of continental thought (especially Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger), namely Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas. Gadamer’s work on “philosophical hermeneutics” attempts to make explicit the structure of situatedness from which one already receives meanings of the objects of investigation. Dialogue is key to this process of making visible the “horizon” of experience to the extent that it allows an expansion of this horizon to a point where it might “fuse” with differentially situated horizons of experience.[44] Here lies Gadamer’s contribution to an ethics of difference, that is, that there should be no closure of understanding of the self so that the space always exists for understanding the self in terms of an ethical rel
