In general, an education in the humanities can be most useful in enabling one to move away from a paradigm in terms of which one interprets differences in others on the basis of morality and one's own emotions towards a paradigm that views differences as being necessary, irreducible, and fundamentally political.
The direction of this movement is away from positing an ideal state of unity connecting the whole of humankind, which is to be facilitated by "moral understanding", and towards an expectation that even the best friendships and relationships will have elements made up of irreducible political differences. Such differences must be understood to be as fundamental to the other's constitution as their biology in fact is.
Whereas one's morality may be based on principles of ethics, one's politics are almost always based on implicit senses of belonging or not. This means that the two facets of one's thinking are rarely ever in direct synchronisation. One can sometimes feel the effect of the two principles working at odds when a relationship with a foreigner is suddenly disrupted by a sudden certainty that each of you has a different sense of allegiance to different peoples or places.
The temptation, when this sense of differences suddenly becomes clear, is to try to solve "the problem" moralistically -- that is, by attributing the cause of the sense of disagreement to "misunderstandings" or undesirable emotional states. Often, however, no "misunderstanding" has actually taken place. Rather, the political boundaries that circumscribe the other's identity have suddenly become much more apparent. In fact, rather than considering a "misunderstanding" to have occurred, one should consider that what has occurred in such cases is "clarification".
This clarification involves understanding the 'soul' of our political nature or what Nietzsche called an element of what is "unteachable" in us.
The direction of this movement is away from positing an ideal state of unity connecting the whole of humankind, which is to be facilitated by "moral understanding", and towards an expectation that even the best friendships and relationships will have elements made up of irreducible political differences. Such differences must be understood to be as fundamental to the other's constitution as their biology in fact is.
Whereas one's morality may be based on principles of ethics, one's politics are almost always based on implicit senses of belonging or not. This means that the two facets of one's thinking are rarely ever in direct synchronisation. One can sometimes feel the effect of the two principles working at odds when a relationship with a foreigner is suddenly disrupted by a sudden certainty that each of you has a different sense of allegiance to different peoples or places.
The temptation, when this sense of differences suddenly becomes clear, is to try to solve "the problem" moralistically -- that is, by attributing the cause of the sense of disagreement to "misunderstandings" or undesirable emotional states. Often, however, no "misunderstanding" has actually taken place. Rather, the political boundaries that circumscribe the other's identity have suddenly become much more apparent. In fact, rather than considering a "misunderstanding" to have occurred, one should consider that what has occurred in such cases is "clarification".
This clarification involves understanding the 'soul' of our political nature or what Nietzsche called an element of what is "unteachable" in us.
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