• _db
    3.6k
    Admittedly, I created my previous discussion too hastily and it ended up without a clear thesis and detouring. My bad, let's try this again. Skip to the bottom parts to see the general thesis.

    When we think about "philosophy", we think about people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, the list goes on, but the vast majority are white men from Europe, and a few from North America. A lot of these figures can also be categorized into separate "schools" or "traditions": there's the Ancients, Scholastics, Rationalists, Empiricists, (Post-)Kantians, Hegelians, phenomenologists (shout out!), logical positivists, pragmatists, structuralists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, post-post-modernists ( :-O ), etc. Many of these are thrown somewhere in analytic or continental philosophy. And there are also very specific traditions, such as the British intuitionist moral philosophers (Sidgwick, Moore, Ross, Ewing, etc), the German pessimistic Weltschmerz philosophers (Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Mainlander, etc).

    That's a mouthful. And it's fun and interesting to read about the "story" of western philosophy, how it all kind of hangs together and is inter-connected, and can make people like myself want to be a "part" of this story, and contribute to the overall dynamic.

    There are a few issues I'm somewhat concerned about, though. Not that I think they necessarily actually are issues - more like I'm just seeking clarification:

    If philosophical questions "universal", then why do we so often choose to only study the philosophy that comes out from the West, specifically Europe and North America? One answer would be that we just don't have a good reason (and we ought to change that). Clearly this must be true in some cases.

    Another answer would be that other cultures just don't offer what Western philosophy does - in this case, we decide to study Western philosophy because we think it is in some way better than what other cultures can offer. We can see this especially when we talk about, say, German Idealism: literally its core thinkers came from the German heartland. Or British intuitionist moral philosophy: all of the biggies lived in Great Britain. Or French feminism. Or American pragmatism. Or Italian aesthetics. Continental philosophy owes its name to its emphasis on a series of thinkers from the European continent. In all these cases, some group of people from a specific region on Earth are held to a higher standard than alternatives (if there are any).

    This results in the inevitable question: why is it these people? What made Germany such a great place for post-Kantian philosophy? What made Great Britain such a central hub for modern moral philosophy? Why did America have all the pragmatists? What were all the other cultures doing?

    I'm not trying to push some racist interpretation here. If you believe some tradition in philosophy, even if it's just Western philosophy in general, "has it right", why was it this tradition? The only explanation I can think of is: nobody else was doing it. So then this either ends up with an exceptionalist view on some group of people, or it's entirely accidental that these people were on the right track. Personally I'm favoring the accidentalist view here. Environmental factors play a huge role in the development of a society, as do contingent political events and technological limitations.

    Now, I'm beginning to ramble and I assume some of you are starting to roll your eyes so here's my general thesis: unless we are talking about history, we should preferably stop using terms like "Western philosophy", "German idealism", "British analytic philosophy", "American pragmatism", "continental philosophy" and the like, because they inevitably harbor ethnocentrism, as well as narrow-minded thinking in general. Philosophy is supposed to study truth, and using these regional and ethnic terms actually taints what it's supposed to be studying: truth now becomes German truth, or British truth. The same could be said about philosophical giant's names: the truth becomes "Nietzschean", or "Heideggerian", or whatever. It's not just "truth". The ideas and concepts may be given priority but the presence of their authors looms in the background and is only made worse when we insist on associating them with these authors or their regional locations.

    Really, I think it comes whether or not it's justifiable, or recommended, that we use traditions the way we do in philosophy, and how this reflects our conception of philosophy and how it should be done. It's hard to study philosophy, let alone do philosophy, without feeling compelled from around and within to associate oneself with some tradition, or start one yourself. These names for the truth are just clothes, the truth as it is naked, by itself, is nameless.
  • Jake Tarragon
    341
    why do we so often choose to only study the philosophy that comes out from the Westdarthbarracuda

    Maybe because "study" and academic traditions can be found there. Perhaps it is the nature of academic study that you are really bothered about, in your heart of hearts? Academia loves a narrative in art, literature and philosophy too. I find these narratives rather arbitrary, and I suspect they eventually change the raw material of their focus into ever more contrived shapes. But I am very biased, because I always prefer to think from first principles, or in their vicinity. Academic rigor, recall and discipline is simply something I'm not good at!
  • 0rff
    31
    Now, I'm beginning to ramble and I assume some of you are starting to roll your eyes so here's my general thesis: unless we are talking about history, we should preferably stop using terms like "Western philosophy", "German idealism", "British analytic philosophy", "American pragmatism", "continental philosophy" and the like, because they inevitably harbor ethnocentrism, as well as narrow-minded thinking in general. Philosophy is supposed to study truth, and using these regional and ethnic terms actually taints what it's supposed to be studying: truth now becomes German truth, or British truth.darthbarracuda

    I do understand your point, but do you not also see the humility implicit in this localization of truth? One might argue that the most intense ethnocentrism is that of experiencing one's own culture as the universal culture, the trans-cultural culture ('the transcendental pretense').

    Modern philosophy, particularly the modern philosophy of the self, for all its variations, may be summarized as an exposition and extrapolation of what Robert Solomon calls the "transcendental pretense." Solomon writes, "The leading theme of [the story of Continental philosophy after 1750] is the rise and fall of an extraordinary concept of the self. The self in question is no ordinary self, no individual personality, nor even one of the many heroic or mock-heroic personalities of the early nineteenth century. The self that becomes the star performer in modern European philosophy is the transcendental self, or transcendental ego, whose nature and ambitions were unprecedentedly arrogant, presumptuously cosmic, and consequently mysterious. The transcendental self was the self - timeless, universal, and in each one of us around the globe and throughout history. Distinguished from our individual idiosyncracies, this was the self we shared. In modest and ordinary terms it was called 'human nature.' In must less modest, extraordinary terminology, the transcendental self was nothing less than God, the Absolute Self, the World Soul. By about 1805 the self was no longer the mere individual human being, standing with others against a hostile world, but had become all-encompassing. The status of the world and even of God became, if not problematic, no more than aspects of human existence.

    Underlying Kant's philosophy was the presumption that in all essential matters every person everywhere is the same. When Kant's self reflected on itself, it came to know not only itself, but all selves, as well as the structure of any and every possible self. The transcendental pretense evident in Kant's philosophy helped produce "the white philosopher's burden." Kant's presumption that all selves resemble each other led some philosophers to conclude that they should be able to construct a universal human nature. Even thinkers (like Kant) who never left their hometowns should be able to make authoritative pronouncements on human nature and morality.
    — Waving or Drowning

    Waving or Drowning?: March 2004 Archives

    Along the same lines, one might argue that there's something 'imperial' in this desire for a truth that is above any particular culture, let alone beyond every particular individual. Presumably you want a truth that is authoritative for those who don't speak English, and for those not born for another few centuries. I find such truth desirable myself. But what is this desire for truth? Is this 'just' or also a desire for beauty? For authority? It's clearly not only about utility in the mundane sense.

    Really, I think it comes whether or not it's justifiable, or recommended, that we use traditions the way we do in philosophy, and how this reflects our conception of philosophy and how it should be done. It's hard to study philosophy, let alone do philosophy, without feeling compelled from around and within to associate oneself with some tradition, or start one yourself. These names for the truth are just clothes, the truth as it is naked, by itself, is nameless.darthbarracuda

    What comes to my mind is that we ourselves as individuals are 'traditions,' embedded of course in traditions proper. I understand the desire to get behind or around our own past or tradition. Indeed, this seems to be what deconstruction was originally about. Can we go back and make a different decision than we did the first time? Can we recover that choice? I think we can try, but I'd guess that there are limits to this sort of thing. I am my past in its leaping away from itself to transcend itself. I can only transcend my past in terms of the past, by playing some of what I already have from my past against the rest of it. Or is there a 'mystical' or unrecognized 'leap' possible? Am I trapped by a tradition that understands its self-transcendence in this particular, optional way? Ah, but that's exactly the kind of questioning I've been learning from books lately.

    Those books also include something like naked, nameless truth. Maybe we can and do live a sort of naked, nameless truth. We can even settle for naming it only by negation and metaphor. How long, though, till we have a rich tradition of such negations and metaphors? And what if this naked, nameless truth is the cornerstone of our own tradition in some sense?

    '[It] is'
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