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Edward Said, Jawaharlal Nehru, justice, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, modernity, Rammohun Roy, Śāntideva
In the previous post I discussed why academic philosophers have usually focused on the West, and pointed out reasons why some amount of Western focus remains valuable. Above all, I noted: “we are always already formed by some sort of philosophical tradition, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. And a great deal of what forms us is Western.” So exploring Western philosophy is important to understand our own thought better, where we are coming from.
There are at least two important objections to be made to that claim as I have phrased it. First, one might well ask, could this Western background not be an argument to study non-Western traditions more, in order to enrich ourselves with different perspectives we don’t already share? Well, yes, to a point. Part of philosophical reflection is breaking down our established certainties. But this only goes so far. The further a given philosophy is from our existing given starting point, the more likely we are to view it as a bizarre curiosity – something that might be of exotic interest in the way that animals in a zoo are of exotic interest, but not a live option, not something that can inform or make sense of our lives. To study the politics of the Indian Mīmāṃsā school often tends to feel this way: their assertions that human beings should follow the traditional ritual order of the Vedas seems wacky at best, oppressive at worst. A political philosophy course that taught Mīmāṃsā but not utilitarianism or Marxism would no longer be doing philosophy; it would be ethics studies and not ethics. To make non-Western traditions live options, there should be Western philosophy in the mix. (This was a key reason that my dissertation on Śāntideva paid so much attention to his contrast with Martha Nussbaum.)
In a different vein, one might object to the “we” I have been throwing around here. Sure, perhaps, “we” Canadians and Americans and Italians have our ideas primarily formed by Western tradition. But that does a disservice to the Indians and Koreans and Malagasy formed in a very different context – many of whom, in this age of global migration, are now enrolled in American universities. Surely a focus on Kant and Plato will be as alienating to them as a focus on Mīmāṃsā would be to a Frenchwoman?
Here is where I say: not so fast. Like it or not, the Western tradition has shaped pretty much the whole contemporary world, certainly the world of anyone able to get on a plane to the United States or study in a modern university. True, this dominance of Western ideas comes out of unfair and harmful colonial relations of military conquest, relations that are still with us and that we may well want to fight against. But that very project of fighting for subordinate groups against a dominant order is itself one with a specific Western history, one going back especially to Karl Marx, but before him to Jesus of Nazareth and earlier Jewish prophets. Nowadays, critics of Western domination in philosophy and other cultural spheres are often especially informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism. This book not only explicitly takes its subject to be the West and representations within the West, bracketing out the question of what “the Orient” was actually like, it also (just as explicitly) derives its method from the very Western thinker Michel Foucault. The attempt to find justice for the oppressed East takes us right back, intellectually, to the West.
By contrast, as I’ve argued a number of times, this project of liberating oppressed groups would have been quite alien to Indian Buddhists like Śāntideva, let alone to the Mīmāṃsakas with their views of a right and proper social hierarchy. That doesn’t mean it’s bad – far from it! But a key part of the point of studying philosophy is to know where the ideas we already think with come from – so that we know how they have already been argued for and argued against. So we could say that a Western focus is important even when we emphasize social justice – but we might do even better to say a Western focus is especially important when we emphasize social justice.
Much of the Western tradition is now deeply implicated in the way the non-Western world thinks and even acts. Consider the case of Jawaharlal Nehru, revered across modern India as the country’s founding father. Nehru and his colleagues were faced with the task of building a new constitution from the ground up. This is the sort of task that demands reflection on political philosophy: if one is building a state that will shape the lives of billions of people, one should be thinking about what exactly a good state is. In this process, Nehru paid little attention to indigenous models; he derived his ideas from Western thinkers like Harold Laski, his teacher at the London School of Economics. Nehru studied in the UK but was Indian born and bred; he was not unfamiliar with the traditions developed in his subcontinent. But he thought Western models were worth following. His predecessor Rammohun Roy, despite being an advocate for Indian philosophy and “religion” in general, similarly built his political thought entirely out of Western materials.
Roy’s and Nehru’s choices matter. These men had access to local traditions and to Western traditions, and they chose the latter. We don’t have much respect for the ideas of these Asians if we dismiss their carefully considered ideas (on the grounds of Western-derived conceptions of social justice and diversity!) by saying that they should have been learning from “their own” tradition instead. That is not only an Indian phenomenon, of course: Mao Zedong may have urged “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, but it was still self-consciously socialism, shaped more by Marx than by Confucius – and this in a country that did not have India’s experience of an education system forcibly reshaped by the British. For these Asians, Western philosophy was central to the philosophy that made sense to them. Bentham and Laski and Marx were as much “theirs” as anything from Confucius or the Upaniṣads.
So too, nowadays, a student born and raised in India or China who comes to North America for university will have imbibed local political debates which will have been fought on Nehru’s and Mao’s terms, as much as American debates are fought on Thomas Jefferson’s. And one cannot understand these Nehruist and Maoist ideas without understanding the ideas of the Western Enlightenment that shaped them almost as much as it shaped Jefferson.
The history of the West is in Asia now, not to mention the rest of the world. (European thought is as important to Latin America as it is to North America!) We can’t wish that history away. Our very reasons for wishing it were not there are themselves informed by it. Is that a bad thing? Maybe, but so is death – and Plato and the Buddha would agree that death is something the lover of wisdom must learn to deal with, and at some level accept. A Westernized world has made us who we are, and that fact is not a thing that can change. By all means let us now rediscover the oft-forgotten non-Western ideas that would enrich modern thought within the West and outside it. But to do this truthfully and productively, we – we around the world – do need to acknowledge our Western background.
Thank you for this thoughtful post! This is a fairly brave position to hold in present day academia… I might only add that the very divisions by which we determine “the west” and the “rest”, and even national divisions and identities, are also historically and politically determined. Plato, or even Roy, which advocating for a certain “Greek” or “Indian” idea may well have thought themselves concerned with ideas as such – truths, values, morals. And I wonder if we can have these sorts of conversations now, since it seems to be a requirement to identify one’s genealogy at the start, and then be forever branded by it…
Yes, absolutely: Plato and Roy were thinking about ideas and such, about the truth, as every philosopher should. The caveat is that our access to the truth, as flawed, finite, historically situated human individuals, is always shaped by that particular historical piece of human experience that we have access to; that is what provides us with our standards for what constitutes the truth. So there is a sense in which we are “forever branded” by our past – but that past is more complicated than it can appear. So too we can reject aspects of our past, but that too is historically conditioned: what brings a contemporary Dalit to reject her native traditions in favour of Christianity is very different from what brought St. Paul to reject his native traditions in favour of Christianity, and the Christianity they each have will be very different as a result. Each is still seeking a truth that is at some level trans-cultural – it’s just that their histories give them access to different aspects of it.
Amod, thank you for another thoughtful post. Am I right in understanding your objective now as probing more deeply the justification for studying Western philosophy (the content question mentioned in your previous post) and not to be challenging someone’s claim that we should not teach Western philosophy? I ask because your claim, “To make non-Western traditions live options, there must be Western philosophy in the mix,” suggests that you see some philosophers arguing that non-Western philosophy should replace Western philosophy. But as I understand it, no one advocating for the inclusion of non-Western philosophy argues that (at least not that I’ve heard). Do you see it differently? Anyway, I take Garfield and Van Norden’s main point to be that departments that have elected not to include non-Western traditions should change their names to reflect their decision, since Western philosophy is one philosophical tradition and does not stand in for all philosophy. I also understand the proponents of inclusion to be fairly thoughtful and judicious philosophers who don’t advocate teaching just any non-Western philosophy just because it’s non-Western but, rather, because they see value in its content and consider it philosophically important. Lame Deer’s writing may not strike one philosopher as philosophically important but instead as “exotic” or “wacky” (and, of course, some Western thought is considered exotic and wacky too, which is why most of us don’t teach it). But the philosophical importance of Lame Deer’s work may be abundantly clear to other philosophers, and perhaps especially resonant with their lived experiences and that of their students. Garfield and Van Norden also point out that including non-Western philosophy is increasingly important as “we” who study and teach it grow more diverse and are increasingly drawn to sources besides, not in lieu of, Western philosophy — other sources that have formed us (I think, e.g., of Martin Bernal’s argument about the African and Asiatic sources of classical Greek ideas) or that might inform us.
The “in the mix” phrasing may not have been strong enough. My point there was that even when we do study non-Western philosophy (as we should), we need to do so through the lens of Western philosophy – at least at the current and foreseeable historical moment, when the West has shaped us so strongly. That’s what allows non-Western philosophies to be live options.
What I see as problematic is the assumption, which seems to underlie Garfield and Van Norden’s article, that every philosophy is as good and as worthy of teaching as every other philosophy – that they can confidently claim that Lame Deer should be included in the canon just as much as Candrakīrti or Mencius, when they’ve never made an argument for his status as a philosopher.
Hi Amod – I again find myself agreeing with you on the importance of studying Western philosophy, around the world. However, I’d like to see you consider more the influence “the East” has had on Western thought over the centuries, such that philosophies from there are due the same place in the academy as at least some of the lesser known/influential Western philosophers.
From the Enlightenment forward in particular, “encounters” with non-European thought has shaped the views of great thinkers. So, to know them, from Hegel to Heidegger, Nietzsche to Parfit, (not to mention the growing number of philosophers in the West explicitly working on non-Western thought – Siderits, Ganeri, Priest, Goodman, Amber Carpenter, Jin Park…) etc, doesn’t it *require* some inquiry into the non-Western (and female) individuals that they were reading and thinking about?
Sure, there has been influence in both directions, and that is relevant. But (and this is one of the things that concerns me about terms like “the argument for equality”) we are not being intellectually honest if we consider the influence to be equal. Hegel put Asian thought at the beginning of his history and then left it aside to focus on the West; Nehru wrote about Western philosophy more than about Indian.
The special mention in cases like these, though, should go to Islamic philosophy. I consider it a Western tradition, but others (including Garfield and Van Norden) do not, and it has played a huge and essential role in the development of the Western philosophical tradition ever since the Western tradition was reborn in the Middle Ages. I’m not sure Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger would have thought all that much differently without Asia, but Aquinas, Ockham, and everybody after them would have thought very differently without Islam, in a way that I think is directly relevant to current concerns. I’ll be saying a bit more about this in my next couple posts.
For now, and for introductory purposes, yes we study these through “our own” lenses; but the very purpose of that is to be able to expand our horizon, to see the flaws in our own narrow lens. Again, I think we’re reading that article in different ways (and I find myself in agreement with S. Anderson above). What Garfield and Van Norden seem to be arguing is that we cannot teach an Ethics or Logic class and exclude 100% of non-Western thought on the topics – or, if we do, we should make it clear – and honest – that we’re teaching Western/Euro-American Ethics or Logic. It’s not that “anything goes,” but rather that we have a duty to be open to wisdom no matter where it comes from.
Your last sentence is one that is dear to my heart – one reflected in the title of this blog. (But I go with love instead of duty, since I’m not a Kantian like you!) :) The thing is I’ve been trying hard to think through what that actually means. Especially, in the points in two recent posts about tradition: you can love all wisdom, but not only can you not know it all, you can’t adhere to it all, since so many things that seem wise contradict each other. We have to focus our attention on the places we have found the most profound. In your case and mine, that absolutely includes Buddhism, and it also includes certain Western traditions (more Kant for you, more Aristotle for me). I would not design an ethics class that excluded non-Western ethics. (Or if I did, I would indeed label it “Western” – as I once did with a religion course I entitled “God in the West”). Most people teaching philosophy now do not yet see the value of Buddhism to their ethical reasoning the way we do. I think they should, and people like Parfit, Flanagan, Siderits, Tim Morton are doing a valuable job of making the case that they should – as does Garfield in his more sustained writing. But by homogenizing the non-West in the way that they do in the article, I think they effectively wind up undercutting that case.
No problem with the general sentiments expressed but there’s a problem with the way the point is being made. Leaving the concept of “East” and “West” and “Eastern” and “Western” (philosophy) both to one side (phew!) I’d like to leave the ideas behind the political discourse in the background and concentrate on how things might play out “on the ground”, “among the people” so to speak. In some spaces it may be rhetorical, and possibly even churlish to assume readers are unaware of the bilateral and bidirectional flow of these ideas around the world and across continents. I think this may be one of those places? Anyway, an argument in support of a philosophical course of study or practice admitted as being culturally unfair is hardly a scarcity, but to argue for it on such relative terms, (here the basis is the social reality) is a commonplace and it’s a bit banal IMO. Isn’t there a more logical reason for studying culturally marginalized literature? Yes, yes there is, and it’s not so we can somehow “un-become a westerner” and be at one with the indigenous folk – which to my mind is futile – or move in on the scene and try to fix our own philosophy to “backward” people and places – but more simply to diminish our (over)reliance on our own (almost imperceptible) yet hegemonic standards and norms found in the grand institutions of faith and learning so we might enhance our logic and flourish. “Sometimes diminishment of a capacity or function, under the right set of circumstances, could contribute to an individual’s overall wellbeing” (Earp B). This is how I see the study of texts that have become marginalized over time, it’s an opportunity for us to detach from maintaining a stale old public persona of “Competent Man” with in-depth knowledge of I dunno – Spinoza, Kant, Deleuze whoever and bask in the undeniable logic of say, Nagarjuna or Pāṇini. Someone once said… “specialization is for insects” and to that I would only want to add “philosophy is for humans”, and it especially suits those who are more eager to be wrong than they are to be merely “competent thinkers”?
I don’t have a big disagreement with this, overall. My second paragraph is pointing to it in some respects: no, we shouldn’t only study what we already agree with – though I do think we need to do a lot of the latter if we are to have a position that makes sense and is true.
You are right to call our attention to how this plays out “on the ground”. In practice, the vast majority of North American philosophy departments are too narrow and don’t have enough non-Western content. The Garfield-Van Norden piece is helpful on that count. But there’s also a flip side “on the ground” that I worry about as well: at a time when the humanities are under a more concerted attack from budget cutters than they’ve ever been, the NYT article doesn’t say anything about why we should do philosophy at all. For reasons I’ve referred to a lot, I’m concerned that their piece may (quite unintentionally) work as an attack on philosophy as such, because it never seems to indicate that the content of the philosophy being taught actually matters. That’s the performative that I worry about considerably more: it doesn’t matter what traditions philosophy department chairs think we should be teaching, once their department has ceased to exist.