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| Source: https://secondnexus.com/environment/maps-that-might-make-you-rethink-how-you-see-the-world |
I’m writing this as part of my participation in the Scholar Strike for Racial Justice, taking place on Sept. 8 and 9, 2020. You can learn more about that here and here.
In writing about racism and the discipline of philosophy, there are two relevant senses of “discipline.”
One sense involves the ways that individuals are disciplined to maintain the borders of philosophy: who is and isn’t allowed to exist within those borders, and who is and isn’t allowed to be comfortable within those borders.
The other sense is the more familiar sense of philosophy as an academic discipline.
The first sense is felt by others far more than it is felt by me, so I will leave this first sense to the side in most of what follows. I recommend starting with resources such as this and this, or this excellent post by Alexus McLeod that connects the two senses.
While there are still some within the discipline of philosophy in the second sense who would deny that our discipline disciplines individuals in the first sense, I suspect most philosophers will at least admit we have some work to do when it comes to attracting more women and people of color to the discipline.
It may be more contentious among my fellow philosophers to suggest that racism has much to do with our discipline in the second sense. After all, how can race have much to do with plumbing the eternal verities? Isn’t philosophy about problems that arise for any thinking person, with solutions meant to be as general and context-free as possible? (Forgive me, continentals, I know not what I do, although I often wonder about the abstraction of things like the human condition or the Animal or the carceral state or whatever … the impulse to philosophical abstraction is maybe almost as strong even if it has a French or German accent).
But what if the very idea of “the discipline of philosophy” is itself constructed from racist assumptions?
That is just the question that Peter K. J. Park answered in his excellent book Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism and the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830. I won’t attempt to reproduce the extensive historical detail of Park’s argument, but basically he shows that in Europe before the late 18th century, histories of philosophy regularly included Africa and Asia as legitimate parts of the newly forming discipline of philosophy (sometimes Indigenous America was included, but not as often).
Yet starting with the rise of “scientific racism” (read: pseudo-scientific racism) in the mid-18th century in the work of scholars including Immanuel Kant, European philosophers came to accept the view that only white Europeans had the cognitive skills necessary to engage in real, abstract philosophy. This idea gained traction, perhaps most infamously in the work of G. W. F. Hegel. And so, by around 1830 universities in the German-speaking world almost wholeheartedly accepted the idea that philosophy itself just so happens to be a thing done exclusively by white men. Africa and Asia were erased from histories of philosophy and moved to departments of African and Oriental studies, which in turn served as the intellectual arm of European imperialism.
But of course, my philosophical colleagues might say, that’s the history of the discipline: we aren’t that racist nowadays! We’ve moved beyond Kant and Hegel!
To respond, I’d point out the huge influence that German university systems had on universities in Europe and the Western world. This influenced the very idea of philosophy as a discipline: what it studies, who it studies, and what regions are taken seriously as having produced philosophers worthy of the name.
I won’t attempt to provide a direct genealogy between early 19th century Europe and 21st century philosophy departments at anything like the level of detail in Park’s book, but here are some things that I suggest make a lot more sense if we extrapolate from Park’s narrative to the present day.
· When I first started taking philosophy classes, I wondered why there were no classes in Chinese and Indian philosophy (topics I had read about on my own). I took courses on those topics in the Religion department instead. (I was lucky to be able to learn some Africana philosophy later, but that is very unusual.)
· In almost every philosophy major in the United States, courses in ancient Greek philosophy and early modern European philosophy are required. Courses in non-Western philosophy are almost never required, and such courses are rarely even offered.
· Philosophers almost never use terms like “ancient philosophy” and “modern philosophy” to refer to figures like Gārgī or Xunzi, who are ancient, or Raghunātha or Zera Yacob, who are modern.
· Ancient Greeks are regularly credited with “inventing philosophy” or even the very idea of rational argument. Thales is often called “the first philosopher” even though ancient sources admit he drew on Babylonian ideas. This sort of casual Eurocentrism pervades much of the history of Western philosophy (indeed, for many philosophers “history of philosophy” is simply synonymous with “history of Western philosophy”).
· Philosophers and others teach the idea that ancient Greece forms part of a continuous “Western tradition” as some sort of historical natural kind instead of a narrative constructed in more recent centuries (if more philosophers read Buddhists like Dignāga they’d recognize this a clear case of conceptual construction). (Consider: Would Plato and Aristotle think of themselves are part of “the same culture” as "barbarians" in what we now call Germany or England? Or did they have more in common with their Mediterranean neighbors in places we now call Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt? Why do we not speak of “ancient Mediterranean philosophy”?)
· If you want to study Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, Indigenous philosophy, Africana philosophy, etc. at the graduate level, your options are even scanter than they are at the undergraduate level. When I wanted to study Indian philosophy, I had to seriously consider language, area studies, or religion departments because there were so few philosophy departments where one can do serious work in Indian philosophy. There are a couple more now, but still precious few.
· Much of analytic philosophy tends to be so resolutely ahistorical that non-Western philosophy is seen as yet another inessential historical interest (even though most of the problems of analytic philosophy have historical roots), while much of continental philosophy is so myopically focused on European traditions that non-Western traditions are ignored, whether unthinkingly or out of “respect for the Other.”
· John Stuart Mill and John Rawls are widely considered canonical political philosophers while W. E. B. Du Bois and Angela Y. Davis are not.
· Those who try to bring non-Western philosophy into the “mainstream” (consider the monumental efforts of philosophers like B. K. Matilal and Jonardon Ganeri in my sub-field) are presented with an impossible double-bind described eloquently by Amy Olberding: it had better be enough like Western philosophy to be comprehensible within pre-established Western categories, but not so similar as to be considered superfluous. It is always Western philosophy that sets and disciplines the borders of the discipline of philosophy.
· Many philosophers will be tempted to respond to all of the above with various “Well, actually…” exculpations.
For my part, when I enter most intimately into this discipline we call “philosophy,” I can’t make any sense of any of the above without the notion, rooted in Park’s historical narrative, that the very idea of the discipline of philosophy continues to be constituted by racist assumptions. These assumptions are buried under centuries of canons and curricula, but they are still there, ghosts of tradition disciplining our discipline, a poltergeist of prejudice.
If you think “racism” is too strong a term for all this, I am open to alternatives. But as regrettable as it is to say that something I love is racist, I personally cannot escape the conclusion that philosophy continues to be thought of, in both subtle and unsubtle ways, as something that only white people can really do, another thing that makes us better than others. I criticize philosophy because I love it, or rather, I love what philosophy could be if we recognized and began to dismantle these racist assumptions that undergird our discipline.
But, what’s the harm? Philosophy is after all a fairly minor discipline these days. We struggle to attract majors. Some colleges have done away with philosophy departments all together. When I tell people I’m a philosopher, they’re likely to stare at me in blank incomprehension. We philosophers don’t have the cultural cache we used to.
The harm, I think, is this: In many traditions, but especially in post-Enlightenment Western traditions, philosophy is associated with the idea of rationality. So when you say that only white men do philosophy, you are in effect saying that only white men are rational. (Sorry, philosophers, I’m not going to define “rationality” here; that is itself a deep philosophical question, but my concern is more about how the concept is deployed and who it is applied to).
The application of the concept of rationality sounds abstract and harmless enough, but when a Black American is killed by a white police officer, think of who is assumed to be engaging in rational consideration and who is assumed to be in need of control. When women of color are called overly emotional for expressing themselves while white men regularly express seething anger, think about who is by default considered rational. When we assume that a Western country like the USA will have a rational response to a global pandemic while a “shithole country” like Senegal will not, consider who is assumed to be rational (I should credit Peter Adamson for the insight about “shithole countries”).
I’m not saying that making philosophy a more open and inclusive discipline will fix all of that. If only!
I am saying that common associations and ideas about rationality run deep in Western cultures. And due to the history of imperialism, they run deep throughout the world as well, albeit in different ways. These associations and ideas have real effects on people’s lives.
If more humans could learn to accept that philosophy and rationality are not the exclusive province of a few white men on college syllabi, maybe, just maybe we could learn to accept that the parts of humanity that philosophy celebrates – rationality, intellectual imagination, coordinating diverse insights into coherent worldviews – are present in various forms in all human cultures on this planet. Philosophy is too big, too weird, and too beautiful to be limited by the ghosts of racists past.
Thank you for reading. Be sure to check out the hashtag #ScholarStrike on social media as well as this collection of YouTube videos.
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