Introduction

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume II, Number 01 (2019): 07-08

EditorialIntroduction
The second thematic issue of Global Conversations features articles in the areas of philosophy,
literary criticism, and interdisciplinary research. They were selected from the responses to ourcall for submissions on the broadly defined theme of “Home and Journey around the Globe,”
which falls into the general scope of interest of the journal in global philosophical thinking andcultural exchange.
The unifying idea of the issue was provisionally outlined in most general terms basedon landmark conceptual pointers from both Western and Eastern intellectual traditions,
including the originary Ancient Greek sense of ‘philosophy’, certain aspects of the thought ofthe 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger, and the key notion of the Ancient Chineseclassic of Tao Te Ching, also referred to as Laozi. As we know it, the first record of a conjoined
usage of philos and sophia is found in Herodotus’ Histories from the 5th century BC. Herodotus
uses there the verb philosopheîn (φιλοσοφεῖν) broadly in the sense of love to learn or desire tofind out and links it to ‘traveling over the world for the sake of seeing it’ (I, 30). In a similarvein, the latter Heidegger relates way (Weg) and waying (from the Alemannic-Swabian wëgenand Bewëgung) to language and thinking, as well as to the ineffable sense of the Tao of Laozi.
Heidegger has also designated the fundamental motivation for any thinking and philosophizing
with terms like the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) and homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), and he has
likewise discussed its ends in terms of home (Heim) and homecoming (Heimkehr).
In this sense, philosophy can be seen as a journey around the globe, which is at once
also homecoming. In our view, in this homecoming journey, philosophy takes essentially theform of a conversation, much like the one described by Herodotus between Solon and Croesus
in Sardis on the meaning of happiness, or like the one of exchange of differences of significanceon the level of culture. In this sense, understanding philosophy as conversation means
embracing differences of opinions that come from all levels of society and culture, as well asfrom all societies and cultures, to contribute to productive debates, insightful reflections, andpractical solutions.
The opening pair of articles focus directly on the thematic relation of philosophy andjourney. In the first one, Tomokazu Baba explores the notion of ‘philosophy as journey’drawing attention to the association of knowledge with ‘travel’ in the work of key figures ofthe intellectual culture. He brings into his discussion aspects of Plato’s allegory of the cave,
Kant’s differentiation between philosophy as system and philosophizing, Heidegger’s conceptof ‘home’, Levinas’ sense of the ‘need to escape’, as well as a number of other points comingfrom thinkers such as Aristotle, Augustine, Petrarch, Hegel, Husserl, and Ritter, to identify aclose relation of the sense of ‘philosophy’ with that of ‘journey’. A key element in Baba’s
perspective is the notion of ‘exodalgia’, which he advances – in parallel with that of ‘nostalgia’– to recapture the Levinasian ‘need to escape’ as a prerequisite for travel and thus forphilosophizing. For its part, the second article explores the aptness of the metaphorics of ‘way’,‘home’, and ‘journey’ for understanding our reflective activities of thinking and philosophizing.
It dwells over aspects of Heidegger’s ‘way’ and ‘home’ related vocabulary, the peculiar relationof Tao and Te – the basic notions of the Laozi classic, as well as the association of ‘philosophy’

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Introductionwith ‘journey’ in the work of Herodotus, to assert their interrelation, compatibility, andcomplementarity. In this way, the article also conveys an argument on behalf of the viability ofunderstanding philosophy – by way of a metaphorical apperception – as the ‘journey of waying
and homecoming’.
The thematic focus of the next pair articles is broadly on the relation of home, journey,and literature. In the first article, Fabien Durringer explores the intersections of the life andwork of the journalist and writer Lafcadio Hearn, which were marked by his remarkable journeyaround the globe – from the place of his birth on the Greek Island of Lefkada through Irelandand the United States to Japan, where he eventually settled. The author analyzes the process
leading to Hearn’s decision to make Japan his ‘home’ and links it to his ‘falling in love’ withthe culture and the people of this country. A highly significant point that Durringer makes isthat Hearn’s experience in Japan, which inspired his writings that were largely intended to makeits culture known to the Western readers by having them ‘undertake a journey’ to the country
with the means of literature, also led him to a reassessment of ‘the presumed superiority of theWestern culture over its Eastern counterpart’. In the second article, Fiona Tomkinson explores
the influences of East and Central Asian thought on the British Literature from the last century
focusing on the cases of Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell, and Ted Hughes. She sees Murdoch’s
assimilation of Anselm’s ontological argument and Plato’s idea of the Good through Katsuki
Sekida’s concept of pure cognition, Durrell’s fusion of Buddhist, Greek Apollonian, and gnostic
perspectives to convey the interconnectedness of his characters, as well as Hughes’ invocationof elements of Hindu, Buddhist, and shamanic thought in his poetry to engage with theharshness of the issues of life and death, as questioning well-established precepts of the Westernculture while searching for alternatives in the Eastern culture. One of Tomkinson’s most astuteinsights is that while these authors may have thus aimed to counter an undue puritanism of theirown culture, they do not advance an ‘opposition’ but rather an ‘intertwining’ of elements of thetwo cultural traditions, which also appears to be the more complex sense that she would like to
see in the metaphor of ‘the silk road’ as ‘the fusion of Apollo and the Buddha’, rather than thatof the road to ‘holism’.
In the final article, Nicholas Birns offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the notionof hyperlocal, its aspects of ‘elasticity’ and ‘intimacy’, as well as its complex relation to notions
like ‘place’ and ‘identity’, drawing on sources from geography, music, art, literature, philosophy,cultural and political history. Paying special attention to the period of ‘middle modernity’ (17001850), he brings into his discussion elements of the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley, themonadology of Leibniz, as well as the aesthetics of Kant among others, to differentiate thecharacter of the hyperlocal from any sense of parochialism, regionalism, nationalism, orcolonialism, furnishing numerous examples of European settlers’ experience, sense of identity,
and mutual reception with indigenous people in geographical regions like North America andAustralasia. A highly suggestive point that Birns makes is that while the resource of thehyperlocal is modest and is not to be overrelied on for purposes of ideology, its ‘elasticity’ is acapacity that enables it to ‘operate on the scale of the global’ and thus to promote democracy
and internationalism.
We hope that these articles will incite your interest and contribute to the ongoing
discussions on the philosophical thought and cultural exchange of an ever more globalized
world. Thank you for your time!
Rossen Roussev

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