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Response by Wolfgang Welsch
I am deeply impressed by the accuracy, exhaustiveness, and fairness of the three reviews of my We Have Always Been Transcultural. I can only express my gratitude to the authors. Their broad explanations of the book’s goals, content, and methods remind me once again of what I intended and tried to achieve. The old hermeneutic maxim that one should understand an author better than the author understood him- or herself comes into play here. For me, this brings the great advantage of gaining more clarity through these reviews about my project and the strengths and weaknesses of its implementation. I am extremely grateful for this.
1. Transculturality and interculturality
I am equally grateful for the points of criticism that have been raised. They motivate me to clarify my ideas and consider new perspectives. First, there is the criticism of my sharp distinction between the concepts of transculturality and interculturality. Madalina Diaconu and Ralf Beuthan complain that I am misrepresenting the opposite side and creating a bogeyman. Yes, the distinction is sharp, and perhaps it is exaggerated. I had in mind discussions I had with representatives of interculturality in the 1990s. The point of contention was whether they view cultures as homogeneous and clearly delineated entities, or whether they concede that cultures are by no means monolithic, but internally diverse and contain elements that they share with other cultures. My warning was not to equate cultures with political entities (states, nations): states have clear boundaries, cultures do not. The discussions regularly ended with the representatives of interculturalism adhering to cultural essentialism: There may be influences and occasional similarities, but ultimately Japanese culture is different from German culture, which in turn is different from Italian culture, and so on. In my view, this essentialism disregarded intracultural diversity and extracultural interrelations. Conversely, my thesis of the inner multi-layeredness and external interconnections of cultures was dismissed as abstruse. Communication was broken off. I was declared persona non grata, and some interculturalists published malicious distortions of my position.
Do the advocates of interculturalism think differently today? I would be delighted if they did; I could only welcome that. When Beuthan points out that interculturalists today no longer deny the mixed character of cultures, and when Diaconu emphasizes that some of them have left the fiction of identity behind and recognize overlaps and analogies, that is, have taken over the essentials of the concept of transculturality, then there is no longer any difference in substance; the difference is merely terminological. But mere verbal sparring is futile—much ado about nothing.
2. ‘Culture’: a bunch of family resemblances
Diaconu feels that the concept of culture needs to be defined more precisely. I tend to agree with Pufendorf, Kroeber/Kluckhohn, and Wittgenstein. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Samuel von Pufendorf established the concept of culture as a collective singular: ‘Culture’ refers to the totality of activities through which humans shape their lives as specifically human (as opposed to merely animalistic existence).[1] The concept of culture can be that simple. In contrast, in 1952 Kroeber and Kluckhohn found no fewer than 264 different concepts of culture.[2] In such a situation, a lex parsimoniae would not be helpful. It would amount to the Procrustean method. On the contrary, a strategy of family resemblance is appropriate: In each case, one must identify and clarify the specific meaning of ‘culture’ for that case. There is no “one fits all.” I have followed the case-specific approach in the book. In doing so, I prefer to focus on the issues themselves rather than (yes, I admit it) on academic discourse. For decades, it has seemed fatal to me how discursive playfulness and self-reference push themselves in front of the objects, obscuring them and focusing mainly on their own discourse loops instead of the actual problems. But that is a broad field, and for my preference for realism, I may point to my book, Homo mundanus – Beyond the Anthropocentric Mindset of Modernity.[3]
In the midst of her stupendous presentation of the contents of We Have Always Been Transcultural, Dagmar Reichardt notes that, despite all my transcultural efforts, I have remained somewhat Eurocentric. Yes, that’s true, and I suffer from it myself and continue trying to get rid of it. Maybe I’ll fully succeed in the next life.
3. Normative questions
Occasionally it appeared confusing that I speak of transculturality not only descriptively (as I mostly do), but sometimes also normatively. While the descriptive use is unproblematic, the normative one requires explanation and justification.
I have attempted to show that, historically speaking, transculturality was not the exception, but the rule. Most cultures that we know from history exhibit transcultural elements. Of course, this does not imply that cultures should generally be transcultural in nature. I do not advocate this. I see no reason why a homogeneous culture would be inferior to a transcultural one. Only the reverse gives rise to a normative demand: if a culture is transcultural, then its transcultural elements should not be negated or suppressed, but rather recognized. The normative conviction that forms the basis for this is the nowadays widespread demand for the recognition and consideration of minorities. So, with regard to the past, the normative dimension of transculturality is solely defensive.
The situation is different when looking at the present. In view of today’s economic and cultural interdependencies and global problems such as global warming, poverty, and migration, I believe that recognizing and utilizing transculturality represents the order of the day. This is precisely where the political dimension of transculturality, which Beuthan has emphatically pointed out, comes into play. Transculturality opens up wide-ranging opportunities for understanding and communication among people with different backgrounds and affinities. And we need such communication and understanding more than ever today. “We will only be able to solve the problems of the future transculturally”—I still stand by this concluding sentence of the book.
4. Transculturality as a special case of the general feature of netting
Finally, I want to outline two complementary perspectives. First: Reichardt builds a bridge between We Have Always Been Transcultural and my latest book Die Welt als Gewebe – Vom antiken Himmelszelt zur zeitgenössischen Netzwerk-Euphorie (The World as a Netting, Amazon Kindle, 2025). She knowledgeably and precisely notes that I already used the metaphors of networking and fabric in my first publication on transculturality (1992). Indeed, interconnections, networks, and fabrics have long been at the center of my thinking. This applies to my postmodern beginnings (Unsere postmoderne Moderne, 1987), my book on reason (Vernunft – Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft, 1995), and my magnum opus Homo mundanus – Beyond the Anthropocentric Form of Thought in Modernity (2012), and also to all my more recent books, including the book on transculturality from 2024, Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Natur und Kultur (Between Nature and Culture) from the same year (where I explore the interconnections between nature and culture), and finally the book on netting from 2025.
Netting represents, in my view, a universal paradigm for understanding reality, cultures, and individuals—indeed the whole range of cases where entities are different and yet related and interwoven. Reality in the broadest sense is an extremely complex fabric. This was best exposed by Alfred N. Whitehead in his Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929). Whitehead refuted the traditional belief in autonomous substances (the biggest error of conventional ontology).[4] According to Whitehead, reality everywhere takes the form of a process, and in the course of this process everything is interwoven: the psychological affects the physical, the mental arises from the organic, individual beings feed of a multitude of other individual beings. Thus, reality is a fabric of myriad relationships and processes. Nexus (connectedness) is the deepest determination of reality.
Just as reality as a whole is a fabric, so too are smaller entities, such as cultures. Transculturality is, so to speak, the special cultural case of the general intertwined nature of reality. Just as there are no absolutely independent substances, cultures are not autonomous islands or homogeneous spheres, but thrive on connections, produce networks, are pluralistic entities in themselves.
The same can be found at the level of individuals. They are not monolithic monads, but complex characters with different sides and layers. Montaigne already saw it this way: “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”[5] In the twentieth century, philosopher Richard Rorty explained that today’s individuals are “a tissue of contingencies,” “centerless webs of beliefs and desires.”[6] According to him, one has “to think of any human life as the […] reweaving of such a web.”[7]
Reality—cultures—individuals: the list could go on. Distinction and commonality, difference and identity belong together everywhere. Netting and interconnection form the matrix of the world. By this first addition, I want to make it clear that cultures, insofar as they are determined by interconnections, do not represent a special ontological case, but are simply the cultural manifestation of what characterizes the world as a whole.
5. The emergence of cultural distinctiveness
A second complementary perspective is this: In We Have Always Been Transcultural (as in previous publications), I have not made it sufficiently clear how cultural distinctiveness can develop on the basis of transcultural influences. However, many of the examples I give in the book illustrate this very clearly. Let us take Greek sculpture as an example. For a long time, it was based on Egyptian models, but then it increasingly broke away from the rigid Egyptian scheme imposed on the bodies from outside and arrived at the free development of organic bodies—at self-articulation, movement, and self-confident freedom. This is what distinguishes classical Greek sculpture and what we still admire and appreciate about it today. The path to this achievement was based on borrowings from a foreign culture, but Greek artists turned it into something that was not found in any other culture, something that is typically Greek and characterizes the peculiarity of this culture.
This peculiarity is evident not only in the field of sculpture but also in philosophy. The first Greek philosophers sought the unity of the world—an endeavor that culminated in Parmenides’ plea for absolute unity. But soon after, Zeno destroyed this precept and made the breakthrough of the free and subtle mind. Philosophy became a matter of developing sophisticated arguments in speech and counter-speech. Finally, the self-dynamics of the mind fully unfolded in Athens. So, the evolution of Greek sculpture from static to movement and freedom has its equivalent in Greek philosophy (and, as could be shown, in literature and politics too). Greek culture has truly produced something unique that is rightly considered its hallmark.
Likewise, East Asian Buddha figures may have developed with the help of Greek and Roman models, but it cannot be denied that these models have been melted down or recast in them, which brought about a physiognomy that is peculiar and unmistakably East Asian. Here, too, something entirely specific emerged from transcultural borrowings.
Or, let us take the case of Japanese culture. It is well known that it originated from Chinese models. But then, despite all the borrowings, it developed its own, typically Japanese physiognomy. Asymmetry was introduced into architecture, and simplicity and refined naturalness became general characteristics of Japanese culture. The substance is often still Chinese, but the impression, the atmosphere, the appearance is distinctly Japanese.
These examples show how transcultural impulses can lead to cultural distinctiveness. This relativizes the difference between the transcultural and the peculiar traits of a culture, and thus opens a new path to the topic of interculturality discussed earlier. Cultures can be both: transcultural and peculiar. One must yet not stylize the peculiarity into something absolute (this was my objection to earlier versions of the concept of interculturality), but recognize its transcultural inspirations, listen to its echoes, and be allergic to the denial or suppression of inner diversity.
I owe also these two complementary perspectives to the inspiration provided by the three reviews of my book—and so I can only repeat my heartfelt thanks once again.
Wolfgang Welsch
wolfgang.welsch@uni-jena.de
Wolfgang Welsch, born in 1946, is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy (Jena University) and lives in Berlin. Visiting professorships included the Free University of Berlin, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Stanford University and Emory University. In 1992, he received the Max Planck Research Award and, in 2016, the Premio Internazionale d’Estetica. His fields of research are aesthetics, theory of evolution, epistemology, ontology, and philosophy of culture. Most recent publications are: Aesthetics and the Contemporary Comprehension of the World (Shanghai, 2018); Im Fluss – Leben in Bewegung (Berlin, 2021), Glanzmomente der Philosophie: Von Heraklit bis Julia Kristeva (Munich, 2021), Umdenken: Miniaturen zu Hegel (Berlin, 2022); We Have Always Been Transcultural: The Arts as an Example (Leiden, 2024); Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Natur und Kultur (Basel, 2024); Die Welt als Gewebe – Vom antiken Himmelszelt zur zeitgenössischen Netzwerk-Euphorie (Amazon Kindle, 2025).
Published on January 14, 2026.
Cite this article: Wolfgang Welsch, “Response by Wolfgang Welsch,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Samuel von Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium libri octo, Frankfurt/Main, 2nd edition, 1684, II. book, chap. 4, § 1.
[2] A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Harvard University Press, 1952).
[3] Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2012, 2nd edition, 2015.
[4] “There are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as elements in a system.” Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology [1929], Corrected Edition (The Free Press, 1985), 14.
[5] The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford University Press, 1965), 244 [II 11].
[6] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 32 resp. 88.
[7] Loc. cit., 43.