More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)

(To see other recent posts on this topic, go here and here. To follow me on Facebook, go here.)

Roughly speaking, we might conceptualize the attainments of a given culture as falling into two broad categories. On the one hand, there are things like wagons, gunpowder, and telephony: cultural attainments that, once they have caught on in one society, they cannot but spread to all societies that have the means of acquiring them. There is nothing, for example, intrinsically Chinese about printing. These are things that do not have any special relationship to the context of their origin. On the other hand, there are things like the Pythagorean chromatic scale as opposed to the Indian sargam, or the unicorn motif in Indo-European art: innovations of culture that do not automatically result in global diffusion, since they are only variations on a fixed range of possibilities for the expression of elements of culture --in this instance, music and figurative art-- that are in some form always already there in every culture. In general, inventions diffuse, motifs do not (unless the motifs are from a higher-status conquering elite, which explains in part the abundance of copyright-infringing knock-offs of Disney characters in the developing world; this should probably be the subject of a different essay).

What sort of innovation is philosophy? It seems to me that there is an implicit contradiction in the way we unreflectively take philosophy to be something that is culturally distinct, like a motif in basket weaving or a style in musical composition, while at the same time being something that is, like a wheel or nuclear weapons, universally valid: something that, so to speak, rolls or explodes the same way everywhere.

We can't have it both ways, of course, and I believe it is this very inconsistency that has led to a rather uncomfortable situation for all parties with a stake in defining philosophy, wherein the history of philosophy continues to be taught as if it were the unfolding of a particular continent's Spirit, while small concessions are made to allow for the teaching of implicitly second- or third-tier traditions of 'non-Western philosophy'.

One sub-tragedy of this generally dismal organization of the discipline is that it overlooks real and serious distinctions between the different ways the different, negatively defined non-Western groups have given expression to their moral, epistemological, and ontological commitments. If the distinctions are considered at all, we generally get something like the following schema:

East Asia: Ethics and statecraft, but no metaphysics or epistemology.

South Asia: Metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, but all vitiated by so much mythology as to render the task of salvaging non-cost-effective.

The Americas: Philosophy of nature and 'environmental' philosophy, expressed through practical wisdom and (in contrast with South Asia) transparently meaningful mythology.

Sub-Saharan Africa: The ultimate residual class; philosophy here is whatever is done differently, in the way of belief or practice, that might be held up as worthy of praise.

I mean to say that 'non-Western' regions are summarily caricatured; their philosophy is measured up according to the degree of its resemblance to Western philosophy; and Africa always comes out at the very bottom in these comparisons, just as it comes out at the bottom of any standard index of social, economic, or medical well-being.

How does this happen? For a long time I myself assumed that the appearance of 'African philosophy' courses in philosophy departments around North America was a bit of misplaced reparation, as well as a compromise measure meant to de-Eurocentrize philosophy departments even as it goes against the usual insistence that philosophy is universal and so cannot be divided up into ethnic camps. I suspect that I have not been alone in thinking this. The problem with portraying Africa as 'having its own philosophy', beyond the obvious fact that there is no coherent, stable entity called 'Africa' except insofar as it is forced into existence by European concerns, is that it calls upon 'Africa' to enter into a game with Europe on a playing field that is far from level: it asks us, in the African case, to take as philosophy the implicit ontological and moral commitments that can be extracted from other spheres of cultural activity, while in the European case we are expected to continue to insist that only those products of a certain narrow, formalized, and rigorous sphere of cultural activity be categorized as philosophy.

In the Routledge volume on African philosophy edited by the late Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, we learn a great deal about oral traditions and values that may, by an outside observer, be rendered explicit and formed into something resembling a 'system'. But does anyone think that there are not similar traditions and values waiting to be systematized in a Manitoba Elks Lodge, or, for that matter, at a Nevada Tea Party rally? Would anyone dare to call these traditions and values 'philosophy'? In the volume there is also quite a bit of interest in ethnoscience; for example, there is a section on Yoruba physics, which includes a discussion of a rain-predicting hygrometer 'built' out of saliva expectorated by a Yoruba farmer into his hand and held up to the wind. This is very interesting and important stuff to study (as important, I would maintain, as the Critique of Pure Reason), but one does not have to be all that well-read to see that what it is is not philosophy as ordinarily understood, but rather (amateur) anthropology, i.e., precisely what the editors of most of the other volumes in the Routledge series likely believe philosophy must not be.

On the ordinary understanding, which I do not share, philosophy is by definition the project of decontextualizing ideas, as Jonardon Ganeri says in Philosophy in Classical India, a fine analytic reduction of, principally, the subcontinent's traditions of logic and epistemology. This means that, in effect, we are expected to make a special concession for much non-Western philosophy (though not for Indian philosophy) and to permit culture itself to be a culture's philosophy. But again, the prime directive of 'default philosophy' insists --incessantly-- that the study of philosophy is something quite distinct from the study of culture. I suspect, therefore, that anyone who participates in this incessant chant while at the same time never questioning the place of African philosophy in a philosophy programme's curriculum either has simply not thought too much about the issue, or is prudently keeping quiet.

I believe that the best way to level the field is not to come up with different rules for different continents as to what is to count as philosophy, nor yet to exaggerate the systematicity or Europeanoid 'rigor' of scattered non-European authors, but rather to drop the vain illusion that in the European case philosophy is not also a culture-bound activity. The history of the unfolding of Spirit has more to do with the history of the printing press and of the growth of global trade networks (in both cases Asian innovations) than it does with some distinctly European spark of genius. If pressed, few today would explicitly speak in terms of Spirit, but this just makes their position all the more lamentable: we are left with an implicit commitment to something to which we would never --unlike the people, Hegel and cohort, who thought it up in the first place-- willingly commit ourselves when it is made explicit.

The view I am defending places philosophy squarely on the side of unicorn motifs rather than on the side of wagons or gunpowder, and in this way absolves us of the need to explain why it does not diffuse in the same way as other universally useful innovations. It also relieves us of the need to uphold an awkward double standard for what is to count as philosophy. If we understand philosophy as inherently 'ethnophilosophical', that is, as a set of cultural variations on a range of beliefs about nature, the self, etc., which humans qua human cannot help but have, and which may be written down and systematized, but need not be, then the apparent deficiency of oral traditions dissolves. The distinguishing feature of Western philosophy, on this approach, turns out to be not some greater clarity or depth of thinking that emerged in Europe (or, better, Eurasia) but not elsewhere. It is instead a by-product of the way certain, principally Asian, technologies, above all writing and the reproduction of written texts, are incorporated into a society. The minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are exactly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine; the difference is that the pastoral people's minds have different prostheses to support and to mirror their thoughts. 

A revealing parallel case is law: does law begin with Hammurabi, and receive its first mature expression in the Roman period? Or were these milestones simply the explicitization of something that was already there, that cannot not be there wherever there is a society that is organized in some way or other according to a set of --perhaps unspoken-- rules and prohibitions? Is a written legal code the coming-into-being of a new way of thinking, or is it the transfer of a familiar way of thinking into a different, external storage medium? If we follow an anthropologist such as Jack Goody (particularly in his Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society), it is entirely the latter of these, and accepting that this is so enables us to think about, say, Roman law, in fruitful scientific comparison to, say, Hausa law (generally called Hausa 'custom'). And similarly with philosophy.

I strongly suspect that philosophers are unable to accept such a conceptual shift in the way they think of the Western philosophical tradition relative to the 'Restern' traditions because they are still implicitly attached to a quasi-Hegelian conception of philosophy as the unfolding of the European Spirit. But until they do accept this shift, it will remain entirely unclear why they act as though they are happy to see African philosophy gaining increasing representation in the discipline. Now to my mind we should be studying the history of Western philosophy in no way differently than we might approach Yoruba cosmology (and this is in large part because I think that writing is only a prosthesis to thought, and not the confirmation of the specialness or particular profundity of a literate society's style of thinking), but I believe there is a serious problem when we set out from an implicit definition of 'philosophy' according to the cultural and historical peculiarities of the European tradition, and then try to see if we can find anything in other parts of the world that approximates to this tradition. I can in fact think of nothing better for philosophers to do than to undertake a comprehensive comparative study of the different ways different peoples carve up the world, but this is a far cry from what we are doing when we permit philosophy to remain Western by default, while indulging here and there in the token representation of negatively defined 'non-Western' traditions.

Comments

[Leon Garcia G.]

Mi estimado Justin,
In his conference "Word music and translation", JL Borges pronounced the following words:

"One of the thorns in the flesh of Europeans who write or have written histories of Indian philosophy is that all philosophy is seen as contemporary by the Indians. That is to say, they are interested in the problems themselves, not in the mere biographical fact or historical, chronological fact. That So-and-So was What's-His-Name's master, that he came before, that he wrote under that influence --all those things are nothing to them. They care about the riddle of the universe."

I appreciate the fact that where Borges uses the metaphor of the riddle, you prefer the more sculptural one of "carving up the world."

As you know, my focus right now is on Mesoamerican --and particularly Nahua-- history, so your piece reminded me that some decades ago, in his celebrated doctoral thesis, Miguel León-Portilla argued that the Aztecs' ¨Tlamatiniliztli¨("That which endures-has foundation") rises to the status of "Philosophy."

Of course, I am still thinking about that.

Since it appears that our problem is largely semantic, perhaps a good way to start the "comprehensive comparative study" that you propose will be by defining our terms, viz: "Tlamatiniliztli", "Dárshana", "Philosophy", etc.

And focus always on carving up the riddle.

[Stephen Menn]

You seem to be assuming that when people talk about "African philosophy" they always mean "implicit ontological and moral commitments that can be extracted from other spheres of cultural activity," oral traditions and the like. Well, often that's what people mean, but not always. I strongly recommend Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. (I don't mean I endorse everything he says, but it's very stimulating and generally very sensible, and a welcome change from much of the field.) Hountondji is sharply against what he calls "ethnophilosophy," the project of finding implicit philosophy in oral traditions: for him, philosophy must be put in writing and made available for criticism and comparison with other views. African philosophy, as he understands it, is simply philosophy done by Africans (well, really he means black Africans, or sub-Saharan Africans, or something like that), and is to be judged by the same standards as philosophy done by anyone else, and it doesn't have to have connections with folk wisdom or indeed with any distinctively African background. So, as he says, a Sorbonne dissertation on Malebranche by a Congolese Jesuit counts as African philosophy. A centerpiece of his approach is his essay on Antonius Guilelmus Amo, trying to wrest him away from the pan-Africanists around Nkrumah, and showing that understanding Christian Wolff and the German philosophical controversies about him is much more relevant background for understanding Amo than Ghanaian tribal wisdom. (At the same time, the fact that Amo was a black African in Europe is certainly relevant for understanding his work, most obviously his law dissertation on the rights of blacks in Europe, arguing against the legality of the modern slave-trade.) I find some of what Hountondji says about Amo unconvincing--he tries to find implicit critiques of dualism or of Christianity that I don't think are there--but he admits that he isn't an expert in 17th-18th century European philosophy and is offering his interpretation only exempli gratia, and his methodological point is very well taken. So: while for some purposes it may be appropriate to define "philosophy" more broadly than usual, we can accept the existence of African philosophy without doing that, and without accepting a double standard. And a false assumption that Africans can't (until very recently) have written philosophy in the strict sense has led scholars to rush too quickly over people like Amo, whose work definitely would repay more study, even from people who think of themselves as just studying early modern European philosophy and no more.

[Leon Garcia G.]

Confining philosophy to the empire of the Written Word manifests above all a clear will to power, whether this purported imperative be true or false. (I don't know that part yet, but I suspect the latter).
In any case, if we are to assert the primacy of writing to define philosophy, how do we approach the "philosophies" produced by "other" literary systems and traditions? The Indian, Chinese, Mesoamerican, etc.
The provincialism of Western philosophy is particularly evident in the geographical schema that Justin so justly mocks. This model schema reflects at once a sort of cultural condescension, and intellectual laziness.
As a student of Mesoamerica, I am particularly baffled by the strange categorization of the Americas: "Philosophy of nature", '"environmental' philosophy expressed through practical wisdom and (in contrast with South Asia) transparently meaningful mythology." (¿...?)
Mexican tlamatiniliztli certainly lies way beyond such facile and prejudiced categorizations!
Also, I am very interested in your thoughts about the concept of Dárshana and its relationship to Philosophy.
Un saludo cordial.

[Cameron]

Here is what I take to be the basic form of your argument.

1) Western philosophy generally understands itself to produce propositional content the validity of which can be tested anywhere at any time.

2) Non-Western cultures generally don’t admit of the extraction of such propositional content from their wider sets of practices and beliefs.

3) This difference complicates the inclusion of non-Western philosophy in the curriculum – it inevitably relegates non-Western philosophy to an inferior status.

4) Thus, since we think the study of something like non-Western philosophy is desirable, in order to correct the imbalance in 3 we need to reject 1. That is, Western philosophy needs a new self-understanding whereby its content is seen as mirroring the concrete circumstances in which it has been produced, and from which it cannot be extracted and made to claim any kind of global validity.

(4) is seen as a feasible solution because “[t]he minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are exactly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine; the difference is that the pastoral people's minds have different prostheses to support and to mirror their thoughts.” I wouldn’t deny that minds are the same across the map, but I think by equating environmental conditions (broadly construed) that get reflected in whatever myth underlies a particular myth-based culture, and on the other hand the role of writing technologies in Western cultures, our appreciation of the role of those writing technologies becomes decidedly one-dimensional. An important thing to recognize in the way writing (and the reception of textual traditions) has shaped philosophy in the West is the incredible differentiation of intellectual viewpoints that are its consequence. That is, technologies of writing (potentially) unencumber thought from concrete circumstance, which I take to be very different from producing universally valid propositional content.

For Charles Taylor in 'The Secular Age' the very possibility of a secular society rests on the multiplication of diverse alternatives to a once dominant religious worldview. We can see this alternate space for understanding nature, the self, etc., as largely a phenomenon emergent from the role played by technologies of writing in the West (thus - rightly - invalidating proposition 1), and as a phenomenon without parallel in myth-based cultures (thus invalidating 4). Taylor’s Hegelianism is a moot point if you accept that the more a culture fosters the multiplication of intellectual positions the less easily identifiable those positions (or that propositional content) are with the concrete circumstances of their production.

I think this leaves me to hold something like Hountondji's position as outlined above by Stephen Menn: he does away with proposition 4 by rejecting the desirability of scrounging 'philosophy' from that which was not conceived as such.

[Cameron]

(I'm not so sure my Taylor reference is as clear as it should have been. My point is that the space opened up for admissible, alternative viewpoints sustains philosophy just as it does secularity. For him, this space is above all the result of a moral (or spiritual) reorientation, one to which scientific or technological developments are merely consequent. We might be inclined to think the opposite is the case - technological and scientific developments promote moral change - but this is beside the point: namely, that we can explain the existence of a diversity of intellectual positions within a culture by looking to the diffusion of technologies of writing within it, but that diffusion does not simultaneously explain the substance of those views. Compare this situation with, e.g., Ya̧nomamö culture, whose four-layered cosmos mirrors the stratification of the forest canopy in which they live. Here, the environment goes a lot further in explaining the actual substance of the cosmology, such that whatever propositional content is to be had is literally bound up in the forest. It’s precisely this difference that undermines collapsing philosophy into a wider set of beliefs and practices in order to dissolve the inequality in (3), but at the same time I don’t think acknowledging such a difference commits us to the self-understanding of (1).)

[edward rackley]

nice piece on a subject that continues to confound my attempts to find a satisfying, accommodating position. congratulations on the 3QD prize as well. sad to learn the fate of Eze, with whom i used to work but am now so out of touch with philosophy that i didnt know he'd passed.

i am left wondering why then we or anyone would continue to call this enterprise 'philosophy'? if i read you right it's just a cultural affectation or form of expression that may or may not find its echo across the globe's many different cultures.

your points about writing as prosthesis of mind and as external storage are helpful too. while reading this, i was waiting for teleology to raise its head -- is there something 'developmental' that the practice of philosophy, as you describe it, represents?

working as i do in countries that are, by all objective standards of measurement, under-developed and regressing further with every new bullet fired or rape committed, the burning question about writing and literacy is whether its absence has something to do with the prevalence of barbarity and the inability of these countries to turn themselves around.

of course, much barbarity has been and will continue to be practiced by highly literate, industrialized countries, so one cannot jump to conclusions. but more than any other factor, i tend to see a country's grave under-development as largely due to the fact that despite its artificial appendage of 'modern statehood' (forced upon it post-independence -- there are no severely under-developed countries that are not former colonies), the country remains lodged in its oral, non-literate mode of organizing people and resources.

without documents -- the external storage you mentioned -- a country can only be as organized as far as its leaders can shout or make themselves heard. otherwise they have to lapse into barbarity to control their territory, its people and resources. congo, somalia etc are basically this: oral societies stuck with the pretense of modern statehood but refusing to adopt the basic instruments of modern statehood, the most fundamental of which is documentation.

any thoughts?

[Greg]

Congratulations on the 3QD prize!

A couple of questions:

1. What is the evidence for your claims that _writing_ is the key causal factor in allowing (Western) philosophy to develop? (Don't lots of societies have writing but no western philosophy?)

2. Do you think science is more of an invention or motif? Why or why not? (Should we study 21st C Western cosmology in the same way we study Yoruba cosmology too? (Well, of course we could do a HISTORY of modern cosmology, but most people think there is something more to study there too.))

[Christian]

You know you're a jackass when you say "expectorated" instead of "spat".