The Conceptualization of the Non-Christian World in
Western Philosophy, 1630-1700
(This is, at present, only an idea for a future edited volume. If it generates any interest, I may transform it into a call for submissions.)
In the 16th century, the new and rapidly growing knowledge in Europe of distant and radically different cultures challenged earlier ideas about human nature and universal morality. But this challenge was a welcome one within the context of late-Renaissance skepticism. Montaigne points out that the fact that some cultures eat their parents as a sign of devotion can’t but lay waste to our belief in universally binding moral laws. All the better for Montaigne.
By the early 17th century, though, a new emphasis on timeless universal truths in philosophy brought about a corresponding demise in interest in comparative ethnography. Whether or not Stephen Toulmin is correct in describing the early 17th-century as a ‘counter-Renaissance’, in which humble curiosity about particulars --including particular cultural practices-- is replaced by an ambitious quest for an absolute and universal certainty that would not mesh well with any interest in cultural diversity, the absence of references to non-European cultures in figures such as Descartes is at least noteworthy. The world outside Europe, Descartes may well have thought, could only provide complicating and messy evidence against the universality of his claims, and, more damagingly, against the a priori method of producing claims about what sort of entity a human being is.
But the rest of the world would remain at least an implicit preoccupation for all 17th-century thinkers, and by the final decades of the century it would reappear as an explicit concern for many. Leibniz was notoriously fascinated by the intellectual attainments of Chinese civilization. The Cambridge Platonists and many of their English contemporaries were preoccupied with Islam, particularly in its Ottoman form. While they were generally sympathetic to it, Spinoza was equally, openly hostile to the Turks. Scientific societies such as the Royal Society in England --whose members were all, by 17th-century standards, philosophers-- were intensely interested in collecting data on the flora and fauna, climates and cultures, of faraway places. And Locke, returning to the same sort of ethnographic evidence to which Montaigne had appealed a century before, makes the case for the absence of universal human essence on the grounds that cultural norms are radically different throughout the world. “There is scarce that Principle of Morality to be named,” he writes in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “or Rule of Vertue to be thought on which is not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned by the general Fashion of whole Societies of Men, governed by practical Opinions, and Rules of living quite opposed to others.” And he goes on to mention inhabitants of the Caribbean who geld their children in order to fatten them up before eating them.
It would be no exaggeration to say that increased contact with the world beyond Europe’s borders, picking up rapid speed after 1492, was the single most important factor in Europe’s transition into modernity. By the 17th century, European thinkers were consumed by questions about the inhabitants of the rest of the world, and by the way in which their customs, technologies and beliefs compared with their own. This possibility of comparison with independently emerging, radically different cultures is responsible for many of the genuinely new developments in early modern philosophy. Yet most scholars remain content to treat this period’s philosophy as though it emerged in a vacuum. When non-European cultures play an indispensable theoretical role --such as that of the American savage in social-contract theory-- they are duly acknowledged. But the curiosity that European thinkers had about the attainments of other cultures in science, mathematics, and technology goes largely unacknowledged. One does not have to be all that enthusiastic about multiculturalism to find this neglect unfortunate. For to consider Europe in relation to the rest of the world in the 17th century, whether one is interested in philosophy or in the spice trade, is not necessarily to engage in cross-cultural comparative study. Such consideration is also a fundamental part of understanding early modern Europe itself.
The proposed volume of new articles by historians of philosophy and intellectual historians has as its principle concern the strategies 17th-century philosophers devised to deal with empirical facts about the world that were genuinely conceptually new in the modern period, and indeed in large part were decisive in Europe's transition to modernity. As history- of-philosophy scholarship grows increasingly open to the consideration of context as a relevant factor in coming to understand past ideas, it is certainly appropriate for us to turn our attention to those global events that scholars in other areas of early modern history widely agree to be of singular importance for the shaping of Europe's image of itself from the late 15th century on.
The papers in this volume may approach the influence of the non-European world on early modern European philosophy from a number of different perspectives. First of all, the volume will be concerned with the way in which radically foreign cultures, or cultures perceived to be radically foreign, influenced philosophical reflections on human nature. This is the part of the history of European philosophy's contact with the broader world that is best known. Scholars of political philosophy, in particular, have been interested in the conceptualization of the savage in social-contract theory and other traditions. But what has perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized is the importance of contact with 'savages' for not just political but also metaphysical reflections on the classical philosophical question, Quid sit homo? If the natives of the New World posed one sort of conceptual problem, inhabitants of the Far East, who were widely seen to be technologically, and sometimes ethically, superior to Europeans, posed quite another. A second group of articles in this volume deals with the substantive contact between China and Europe in the 17th century, and the speculation to which this contact gave rise about human origins, the sources of philosophical wisdom, and the now-questionable uniqueness of European science and philosophy. A third group of papers in this volume will treat the interest of Christian philosophers --including Descartes-- in what were described as ‘Oriental’ ideas, often pure inventions of European culture, to be sure, but nonetheless indicative of a growing awareness that this culture itself is not entirely self-contained, but emerges from a history of interaction and cross-fertilization with Asian, Middle Eastern, and African traditions. A fourth group of papers in this volume concerns the new challenges that rapidly increasing knowledge of the broader world posed for practitioners of natural science, particularly in the domain of the taxonomy
of natural kinds. Finally, a fifth group of papers will deal with the impact of the Ottoman Empire --an abstract and omnipresent threat in 17th-century Europe-- on philosophical ideas about religious toleration.
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