On Wednesday morning this week, I had a thought that mildly amused me based on another tweet I saw, so I turned it into a tweet. See above. Or see here.
I somehow have a bunch of followers on Twitter (about 1,900), but most of my tweets are lucky to get a handful of likes. I'm actually okay with that. To be honest, I got on Twitter in 2016 unsure of why I was doing so, and I have yet to figure out what I'm doing on Twitter five years later. I don't think at the speed of Twitter, nor have I cracked the code of going viral.
Until now.
Just kidding. I hardly think getting 621 likes and 91 retweets in about 36 hours counts as "going viral." But it is a lot more attention than I'm used to on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter.
Most people seemed pretty supportive of my idea, but, as is often the case on Twitter, there were some less than enthusiastic responses, or what the kids these days call "bad takes," mainly to the effect that the Eurocentrism of philosophy departments is somehow justified.
Should I have responded to them, thus entrenching myself in a Twitter feud? I just didn't have the energy for that yesterday, nor indeed have I had the energy for that since 2016. As the kids say, "I can't even." So I set my tweet so only I can reply to it, and hid all the responses (even some that were okay -- sorry). I allowed quote retweets, partly out of a desire not to go too far but mostly because I didn't bother to figure out how to prevent them.
Because I feel bad or maybe out of some sense of duty to philosophical inquiry, I have been thinking about those bad takes, which it occurs to me were so bad I was maybe even doing the bad takers a favor by hiding them. So here is my way of something of a response, a commentary on the sūtra of my tweet so to speak.
Before I even get into it, it was fortuitous today to discover (on Helen De Cruz's Twitter feed!) an essay by author Fonda Lee called "Twitter is the Worst Reader." Of Lee's many nuanced and insightful points (far too nuanced for Twitter!), I was particularly drawn to this one.
Twitter removes the trust between writer and reader by flattening meaning to the single most offensive understanding and proliferating that version alone.
With this in mind, another reason I did not want to get into this on Twitter is that I'm skeptical that Twitter is an appropriate venue for honest debate (what Naiyāyikas would call vāda). Besides, I seriously doubt these bad takes were honest attempts at constructive dialogue. Indeed, who could imagine such a thing on Twitter!
But out of a spirit of hoping against hope that some of the bad takes are simply honest mistakes or out of genuine ignorance, let me say unequivocally that I do not think Western philosophy is bad. I don't think people are bad for studying or teaching Western philosophy. I like Western philosophy. I teach it and write about it myself.
I don't even have anything against Kant, whose work I have often found equal parts puzzling and deeply insightful. I would not deny that Kant is one of the pivotal figures in the last few hundred years of European thought. And by "Kant's metaphysics" I just mean whatever he's doing in the Prolegomena and the first Critique. Kant surely was a genius, but this fact does not eliminate the possibility of there being philosophical geniuses of equal stature outside of Königsberg, or outside of Europe!
Another thing I might clarify is that the proverbial department described in my tweet would actually be more multicultural than the vast majority of philosophy departments in North America and Europe. The norm is to have 0% non-Western content, so even a short excerpt from Mencius, early Buddhism, Akan ethics, or Aztec metaphysics in one's intro course is a sure way to put one's department above many others. I may sound facetious, but I'm 100% serious: I am thrilled when I hear of anyone making such attempts to include anything outside of the usual confines of Western thought, even if they are analytic epistemologists! (Okay that last bit is a little cheeky. I like analytic epistemologists just fine.)
I put "non-Western philosophy" in scare quotes in the tweet, because this is not a natural kind standing apart from some essence of "the West" as many philosophers seem to suppose. On the contrary, there are many, many different traditions outside of "the West" as different from each other as they are from Western philosophy. (And there may be surprising historical and conceptual connections between traditions as well. More on that in a bit).
Several takes were bad in the way that they supposed philosophy departments in other places (the Middle East, China, etc.) do not include Western philosophy, which is understandable, so therefore it is, by parity of reasoning, allegedly equally understandable that Western countries would have only or primarily Western philosophy.
The major problem is that the basic premise is wrong (and I doubt that bad takers had really bothered to check). Many philosophy departments in Asia and Africa, for example, contain a great deal of Western philosophy, in some cases perhaps even a majority of Western philosophy. For instance, I can assure readers that there have been in fact many fans of Kant (yes, that Kant!) in philosophy departments in 20th and 21st century India. And how could this be?
Let's talk about a thing called colonialism, a period of several hundred years when white Europeans decided to try their hand at ruling the globe and extracting the resources from other places to enrich themselves, a huge historical thing with effects that, to put it mildly, are still with us today. See Edward Said's groundbreaking work on Orientalism or really anything in postcolonial theory.
And if you are unclear what colonialism or the history of European racism could possibly have to do with the formative period of a pristine, a priori, apolitical scholarly discipline like philosophy, then I suggest reading Peter K. J. Park's book Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism and the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830.
Another fortuitous discovery in the last 36 hours (this one on Elisa Freschi's Twitter feed!) was this podcast interview with Jay Garfield on "The Hegemony of Western Philosophy."
I wholeheartedly recommend this podcast. Among a lot of great stuff, Garfield answers the sort of nationalist idea that it's right to only or primarily study one's own culture. He points out that this reinforces the idea that your own culture is the normal, regular, sensible one as opposed to all those deficient, irrational weirdos elsewhere. He also points out that this "silos" your own culture as shut off from other cultures, which is false and in turns leads to a false notion of cultural purity, often with the connotation that my cultural essence is superior to everyone else's.
In reality, cultures everywhere have always interacted, and we should be suspicious of notions of cultural purity, of cultural essences shut off from the rest of the world. The alleged sources of "Western philosophy" themselves, the ancient Greeks, were pretty clear about interactions with people in parts of what we'd now call the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention Persia, and through Alexander's conquest, even parts of Central and South Asia. Two of my favorite examples of ancient cross-cultural interaction are Pyrrho's travels to India and the Buddhist text Questions of King Milinda.
Attentive readers may notice that I started using scare quotes for "Western philosophy" there, because the very notion of "Western philosophy" is itself a massive ret-con job, one largely undertaken during the heyday of European colonialism, bolstered by the invention of modern pseudo-scientific race theories.
This is not to say that Plato and Aristotle did not influence the course of philosophy in Western Europe, but they also directly influenced the course of philosophy in Byzantium and the Islamic world. And as I like to quip, Plato and Aristotle would not have seen themselves at all as part of "the same Western culture" as a bunch of Germanic and Celtic peoples, who they probably would have considered more barbaric than their neighbors to the East and South in the Mediterranean.
And speaking of Aristotle, there's no reason for us in 2021 to repeat his claim that Thales was the first philosopher in "our tradition" or whatever. Seriously, I teach Ancient Greek philosophy, and some of the textbook material still to this day deals in cringe-y chestnuts about "our tradition."
I mean, texts like Egypt's Dispute Between a Man and His Ba or the Ṛg Veda in India are right there! They're both far older and make at least as much sense as the contention that everything is water. Nothing against Thales per se. I couldn't have predicted an eclipse or made all that money selling olive presses! And just as a last cherry on top of my sundae of undoing the pretensions of there being a natural kind called "Western philosophy," let's remember that Thales, the putative first Western philosopher, lived in Turkey and learned geometry in Egypt.
So, having analyzed away both "non-Western" and "Western" philosophy (perhaps in the spirit of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophers), what are we left with?
Well, how about... philosophy? Philosophy in a more expansive, less parochial, more fully human sense? Have we tried that? It's not going to be easy, but to quote an Occidental Sage from the Netherlands, "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
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