Whiteness and the philosophy of the history of philosophy

It's taken me much longer than it should have, but I sent off today (the deadline) a response to a discussion of an important recent book which demonstrates that it was only about 200 years ago that western philosophers started thinking of philosophy as a western thing, as having been "born" in Greece rather than in Egypt or "the East."

The book was published in 2013, and an author-meets-critics session was dedicated to it at an American Philosophical Association meeting last year. Texts from that session, including a response from the author, are being published by the Journal of World Philosophies, and I've been asked to write a reflection on their conversation. (Other may have been asked to, too.) For me it was a chance to get to know the interesting work of three scholars I didn't know, and to weigh in on some of the issues they discussed when they came together.

I was asked, I think, because the book refers a few times to my work on Kant's contributions to the modern idea of race, so, as an erstwhile expert on the subject, I pontificated on it for two paragraphs; here are their rather incendiary final sentences;

The Popularphilosophie of Christoph Meiners, the main rival to Kant’s anthropological project, was anathema because it didn’t realize the possibility, and the moral necessity, of being truly philosophical in the practice of one’s prejudices. ... 
Kant’s philosophical accounts of “race” were an invitation to history, a call to his “white” readers and students to take up their indispensable place in what one enthusiastic follower would call the “free middle” of otherwise determined human history.

Most of my reflections were more measured, making suggestions for how one might use the historicity of the Greeks-created-philosophy story to "decolonize" philosophy (the term one of the respondents used). The two respondents, both comparative philosophers, pointed towards expanding the canon beyond western philosophers, even as they lamented how rare it is to find courses offered in non-western philosophy, and rarer still for non-western philosophy to be presented as more than an optional add-on to a degree.

Reconnected with my past work in the history of philosophy, I wound up arguing for that also marginal field. The book in question includes fascinating accounts of the often strange histories written for philosophy before the Greek story took over, as well as of debates about whether a history of philosophy was even possible. These meta-questions about the history of philosophy are not only exciting but can connect with the often existential questions that bring students to philosophy classes.

The history of the history of philosophy in fact brings us face to face with the philosophy of history. ...Why should not a history of philosophy class also be, or at least spend some time with, philosophy of history? And why should not an education in philosophy involve reflection on what it means that philosophizing happens in time, across cultures, in languages, and in concert and tension with other forms of human endeavor, enquiry and theory? This would be the most natural point at which to integrate “comparative philosophy” into our curricula. Imagine if our introduction to philosophizing included accounts of the life and times of thinking framed by Nahuatl philosophy, Zhuangzian irony or David Loy’s “studies in lack”!...

As the histories he unpacks for us show, the question of the history of philosophy is not just academic but existential. [These] late eighteenth and early nineteenth century historians of philosophy give voice to an experience of feeling the pulse of history in their own thinking – and, for some but not all, that of other people who think they are white. Our students, too, seek that pulse, especially in our time, when the past no longer seems as securely past and the future seems to have come unmoored. They seek to understand the possibility of freedom, including freedom from prejudice... 

In a way I wasn't doing much more than proposing for the history of philosophy what folks in the field of the history of the academic study of religion do, but I quite like the way it came out sounding. Perhaps, in this discussion, the ideas will be found new and helpful.

Westward

View at the end of a lovely day with friends in Ossining - we crossed the bridgeat Scarborough station just in time for sunset over the Hudson.

Most admired Americans

A friend who's just finished teaching a course on American Cultural Studies at a business college in Beijing sent this picture from his class. You'll notice Ronald Reagan is the only president named...

Summer reading

All four of my summer "broaden my horizons" books arrived today.

One of them is five years old, but the others are hot off the presses!

July

Summer's zipping by! My first gigs of the new academic year (talking about New School history to a new crop of first year fellows and new full-time faculty) are just six weeks away! Fall course book orders need to be submitted, and the Kailas volume chapters should be coming in, though not just yet. In the meantime I have a short stack of books I planned to read this summer to "broaden my horizons" as I try to define "my next big project"... all leavened with library wanders. And then there's summer in NYC! (But I confess that the never ending presidential freak show is cutting into my time on all fronts.)

Unsettled

Kisei Reigen (1403-88), describing a painted fan:



A branch of bamboo stretched over the wall

Rises and falls unpredictably in the wind.

While sparrows, trying to perch for the evening, with unsettled hearts

Flutter up to it and then away again.

David Pollack, Zen Poets of the Five Mountains (1985), 90; 

qtd in John C. Maraldo, "A Walk Through Some Zen Landscapes of the Heart,"

in Landscape and Traveling East and West: A Philosophical Journey, ed. Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew K. Whitehead  (London: Bloomsbury, 2014),  11-126, 113

Colleges and universities, oh my!

Some startling survey results from the Pew Forum's latest enquiries into how Americans regard various institutions. A majority of Republicans think "colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country." More troublingly, this is a recent trend. While always more skeptical than Democrats, a majority turned against higher education only in the last two years. We remain less feared than "the national news media," some part of which doubtless contributed to this trend.

I do find myself wondering why "the media" in such stories is usually understood as excluding Fox, and why national distrust of "the media" is interpreted as a comment on the "mainstream media" rather than Fox, the most-widely-watched-of-all, and its ilk ... but that's a topic for another day. Back to Higher Ed:

The critique of "political correctness" often targets colleges and universities, seen since the sixties to be be unpatriotic. It's had a field day with the apparently anti-intellectual implications of "micro-aggressions," "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces." Debate about these issues on campuses remains vigorous and serious (including about the appropriateness of inviting, uninviting and shouting down provocative speakers) but the right-wing media's criticisms are largely uninformed by these discussions; they quite lack the intellectual curiosity they claim to champion. But the anti-intellectualism of the land that gave us Dewey's "democratic education" nevertheless has deep roots (some religious), which have onky been strengthened by our know-nothing ruling party and its "opinion"-spewing leader.

The contrast with views of "churches and religious organizations" suggests academic religious studies is in a hot spot - or is it a sweet one?

What goes around

Amusing turn of the intercultural screw, courtesy of FaceBook. A Chinese friend, currently studying in Switzerland, posted this picture on his FaceBook page yesterday. Turns out he was inspired by a picture I proudly posted - also on FaceBook - of my first attempt at cutting a pineapple the way street sellers do in China. It looks hard but pineapples' Fibonnaci-numbered scales make it easy to cut them, preserving more of the flesh for eating than our ring cuts. (Zhuangzi might observe that knowing the pineapple's Dao makes for easy carving.)
By the way, said friend isn't just cutting pineapples in Zurich. He's studying Chinese philosophy there, in ways he says he can't back home.

Summer rain

(Actually it rarely streaks the windows like this but you get the idea.)

Fig leaves

S, an old friend came for dinner last night, one old enough that when I saw her last, thirteen years ago, it had been even longer since we'd seen each other then! We caught up on the intervening years in our lives and those of people we knew, and the years fell away like dominoes. In the time since we last spoke, she's walked the Camino de Santiago twice, putting my two circuits around Kailas to shame! In any case we connected as fellow seekers, pilgrims on the way of life.

After she left, I went back to my diary to confirm that the last time we'd spent time together had in fact been 2004. It was. Indeed, the diary includes a long description of the most memorable moment of our last visit together, an experience I've often told people about since: the ambrosial rapture, in a courtyard in Old Town, Albuquerque, of eating a sun-warmed fig right off the tree! But the full-body experience I so warmly remember every time I encounter a fig isn't quite what happened, as described in suitably purple prose in my diary:

we stumbled on a paradisal place, mainly selling folk art but also a few snacks—we had some (perhaps frozen) burritos in the yard, where the owner pointed out ripe figs, peaches and grapes on the trees. The figs were fantastic, wonderful, small, an effortless mouthful, and sweet and gently textured. The peaches weren’t ripe yet. But the grapes were a revelation—S said sacrament, I think. Individual blue-black grapes, warm from the sun, touched the tongue and bathed the whole spirit in an intoxicating sweetness and warmth unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

Sacrébleu! The solar ambrosia was from the grapes, not the figs! I can imagine how the memory slipped - figs are a rarity, and that was one of my first experiences of a sweet one. Truth to tell II'm comfortable mentioning this because the slippage was relatively minor: there were figs there, too, after all, and I didn't misremember it as Andalusia or Athens! But I mention it also because in recent weeks I've been noticing worse slippages, and even complete blanks. Some scholars (and not just scholars) remember everything they experience accurately. My erstwhile colleague J remembers the names of even minor characters in every trash detective novel she's ever read to distract her from anxiety about flying. My friend H remembers every meal we've ever had together, what we had, and what we talked about. Not me.

I suppose that's one of the reasons I became a diarist.

 

New York summer means lilies - these beauties grace our local bioswale.

Sea to shining sea

Horizon

Another California sojourn winds to a close... back to the other coast!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

My great grandfather was a journalist, who after a distinguished career in domestic politics became one of the first American journalists embedded with soldiers in WW1. My father's been researching him for the past several years, and today we set up a blog for him to share his findings. I'll let you know when the blog goes fully live: he'll be posting his grandfather's articles day by day as they were originally published, as well as letters he sent his daughter, each on its exact centenary!