The Intercultural Horizons of Johann P. Arnason's Phenomenology of the World

The paper begins to elaborate an interpretative framework that takes account of the intercultural element of the human condition in-the-world. It situates itself within an emergent and diverse current of thought that emphasises the intercultural context of the recent ‘cultural turn’. Recent developments within phenomenological – and post-phenomenological – currents that emphasise cultural articulations of the world horizon, the ‘uncanniness of the alien’ or ‘the heterogeneity of the intercultural’ offer a range of important insights into this problematic. The paper turns to Johann P. Arnason's historical phenomenological investigations of the world horizon as a promising starting point. For Arnason, interculturality is an inescapable dimension of the world and the phenomenal field; he elaborates it along relational and interactive lines as part of his emphasis on the trans-subjective – that is, cultural – level of analysis. The paper reconstructs five overlapping approaches to the problematic of the intercultural in Arnason's thought.