Religion, Philosophy and Culture by Raimon Panikkar

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Philosophy could he understood as the activity by which Man participates consciously and in a more or less critical manner, in the discovery of reality and orients himself within the latter.

Cultura anima may be one of the better definitions of philosophy (Cicero: Tusculanae disputationes. II, 13). The word means I cultivate (cura, curatio, cultus), implying honor and veneration. Culture was always culture of something. Hence has it come to mean what we still mean when we speak of a cultivated man. And it is through the intermediary of "civilization" that "culture" has come to take on the meaning that is widespread today. 7

culture is constituted by rituals, customs, opinions, dominant ideas, ways of life which characterize a certain people at a given period. If language is an essential element, history and geography are equally cultural factors.

We summarize all that in the word myth, understood as symbolizing that which we believe at such a deep level that we are not even aware that we believe it: "it is useless to say it," "it is understood," "it is obvious," "we shall not pursue the investigation any further" ... We question myth only when we already partly stand outside it: this is because it is precisely the myth which offers us the basis from which the question as question makes sense. For the myth gives us the horizon of intelligibility where we must situate any idea, any conviction or any act of consciousness so that they may be held by our mind.

Each culture, in a sense, could be described as the encompassing myth of a collectivity at a certain moment in time and space; it is what renders plausible, credible, the world in which we live, where we are. This accounts for the flexibility and mobility of myth as well as the impossibility of grasping our own myth, except when we hear it from the mouth of others because having accorded the latter a certain credibility or when it has ceased to be a myth for us.

Each culture possesses a cosmovision and reveals the world in which we live – in which we believe to be. Each culture is a galaxy which secretes its self-understanding, and with it, the criteria of truth, goodness, and beauty of all human actions.

monoculturalism is lethal and multiculturalism is impossible. Interculturality recognizes both assertions and seeks a middle way. Monoculturalism asphyxiates other cultures through oppression. Multiculturalism leads us to war of cultures (with the foreseeable routing of the weakest) or condemns us to a cultural apartheid which also in the long run, becomes stifling.

We have taken the position that cultures are mutually incompatible, but in no way have we said that they are incommunicable. The fact that the circumference and the radius are mutually incommensurable (we could have said it in a more poetic and Platonic way, of the lyre and of the bow), in no way means that they do not condition each other, nor that they can become separate.