The Anthropocosmic Perspective on Intercultural Communication: Learning To Be Global Citizens Is Learning to Be Human

Abstract

The study of intercultural communication in the 21^st century faces multiple challenges. To borrow what Byram says, “it has both practical and challenging values.” It has a particular role to play in extending the concept of national citizenship to transnational civil communities – small or large, temporary or permanent. To this end, the Confucian anthropocosmic perspective on intercultural communication is proposed in this paper as a response to the multiple challenges of increasing globalization. In this perspective, several potentially correlative, overlapping and complementary relationships are inherently grounded. One relationship is between the processes of learning to be national and intercultural/global citizens on the one hand, and the Confucian way of learning to be human on the other. A second relationship is between the concepts of communication and intercultural communication and the concepts of national society/community and intercultural/global community. A third relationship is between the concept of intercultural communicative space and the global communicative community. A fourth relationship is between the concepts of communicative competence and intercultural/global communicative competence and the concept of national citizenship and intercultural/global citizenship. All these four relationships combine to make possible the national education for national citizenship and, by extension, the intercultural education for global citizenship. The paper argues that all the communications and all the communication acts, in the 21^st century in particular, are in essence ethical issues so that a global ethics is badly needed in human interaction. The paper proposes the Confucian self and other togetherness as the global ethics. This is also called social and moral responsibility. The implementation of this ethics can be summarized as “If you want to establish yourself, you must help others to establish themselves. And if you want to make yourself outstanding, you must help others to make themselves outstanding.” As Fei Xiaotong (2007, p. 302) said, “if you better yourself, and help others to better themselves, we will all eventually better ourselves and others together, and then we will do general good to the commonwealth.” The ethics of responsibility/concern for Confucian self and other togetherness brings out co-humanity, the ideal of human relationships which do not only mark the locations of landmarks but also mark the locations of “landmind”. In the long run, the practice of this ethics that undergirds dialogic interaction is a long-term human project. It concerns the life of our global community. It concerns whether “we shall live together like brothers and sisters or perish together” in the 21^st century.

Keywords

Anthropocosmic worldview / globalization / Confucian self / co-humanity

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