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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Thales

The West is neither white nor European

16 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Asian Thought, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Place, Pre-Socratics, Western Thought

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Anaximander, Heraclitus, identity, Lothrop Stoddard, Mali, Natalie Wynn, race, Thales

In the discourse of the United States today, everything is supposed to be about race. That particular American view infects any American discussion of the West. Overt racists like Lothrop Stoddard associated Western civilization with racial whiteness. Today, the American left often seems to agree with Stoddard, viewing “the West” as code for racial whiteness – as when Natalie Wynn says “the association between whiteness and the West is always lurking beneath the surface”. But the Greek, Semitic and Latin historical roots that make the West go back much earlier than the 17th-century concept of the “white race”; Westerners thought of themselves as “Christendom” long before they thought of themselves as “white”. Anti-black and anti-native racism are the US’s original sin, but we mislead ourselves in a deeply parochial way if we think of the whole world in those American terms.

Rather, it seems to me that the important thing is to reclaim the West from that recent (and harmful) concept of whiteness. “Whiteness” never was constitutive of the West as a historical complex, and the last thing we should do is treat it that way now. For as it turns out, the history of the West is in key respects not even European.

To see why, let’s take a look at the history of the West. Philosophy forms a key part of that history, and this is a philosophy blog, so the history of Western philosophy is as good a case study as any other.

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The reasons for nondualism

21 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Reading and Recitation, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Advaita Vedānta, Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, conventional/ultimate, drugs, G.W.F. Hegel, Gārgī Vācaknavī, Muhyiddin ibn 'Arabī, mystical experience, Nathan (commenter), nondualism, pramāṇa, Roland Griffiths, Śaṅkara, Thales, Upaniṣads, Zhiyi

I said previously of nondualism, “I’m not sure I can think of any other major philosophical idea that flowered so much in so many different places, more or less independently. I think that gives us prima facie reason to think the nondualists were on to something important.” Nathan reasonably took me to task for this claim in a comment: “Amod seems to overlook that ideas can be successful without being true.”

I don’t think it’s fair to say I overlooked that point: I said the pervasiveness gave us reason prima facie – at first glance – to say think the nondualists were on to something. That doesn’t mean nondualism is true, and I didn’t say that it was. Second glances might reveal something different. And where I think Nathan is right is in asking us to take those second glances. Is nondualism widespread for a reason other than its being true?

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