ABSTRACT
Contemporary theories of multiculturalism are complex and draw on different sources. Yet they seem to suffer from a certain weakness which derives from the lack of philosophical foundation. Even though some postmodern philosophers such as Richard Rorty may applaud the gradual disappearance of foundationalism in our age, the key concepts of liberal democracy and multiculturalism such as ‘the dignity of man’, ‘human rights’ and ‘the need to respect an individual culture’ seem to need some sort of philosophical foundation. Otherwise liberal democracy and multiculturalism will be degraded into mere rhetoric of university academicians, fanatical fundamentalists, and separatists. As neither the contemporary theory of liberalism à la Rawls nor postmodernism à la Foucault, Derrida or Rorty seems to be capable of offering this foundation, 1 we should try to look for it in the rich resources of traditional philosophies and religions. An eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argued in the first chapter of his Sources of the Self that in order to make sense of our moral judgment, naturalistic explanations are not sufficient and that for this we need to retrieve what he calls ‘an ontology of the human’. 2 In other words, since contemporary philosophy seems to be incapable of offering a sufficient explanation of why we should respect each person and each culture in their own way, we should look for some help from the spiritual resources of various traditions.
