Bryan W Van Norden - Western philosophy is racist
This article is an edited excerpt from Bryan W Van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017)
My goal is to broaden philosophy by
tearing down barriers, not to narrow it by building new ones. To do this is to
be more faithful to the ideals that motivate the best philosophy in every
culture. When the ancient philosopher Diogenes was asked what city he came from, he replied:
‘I am a citizen of the world.’ Contemporary philosophy in the West has lost
this perspective
Mainstream
philosophy in the so-called West is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even
xenophobic. I know I am levelling a serious charge. But how else can we explain
the fact that the rich philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are completely ignored by almost all
philosophy departments in both Europe and the English-speaking world? Western philosophy
used to be more open-minded and cosmopolitan. The first major translation into
a European language of the Analects, the saying of Confucius
(551-479 BCE), was done by Jesuits, who had extensive exposure to the
Aristotelian tradition as part of their rigorous training. They titled their
translation Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, or Confucius,
the Chinese Philosopher (1687).
One of the major
Western philosophers who read with fascination Jesuit accounts of Chinese
philosophy was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). He was stunned by the apparent
correspondence between binary arithmetic (which he invented, and which became
the mathematical basis for all computers) and the I Ching, or Book of Changes, the Chinese
classic that symbolically represents the structure of the Universe via sets of
broken and unbroken lines, essentially 0s and 1s. (In the 20th century, the
psychoanalyst Carl Jung was so impressed with the I Ching that he wrote a
philosophical foreword to a translation of it.) Leibniz also said
that, while the West has the advantage of having received Christian revelation,
and is superior to China in the natural sciences, ‘certainly they surpass us
(though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that
is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and the
use of mortals’.
The German
philosopher Christian Wolff echoed Leibniz in the title of his public
lecture Oratio de Sinarum Philosophia Practica, or Discourse
on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese(1721). Wolff argued that
Confucius showed that it was possible to have a system of morality without
basing it on either divine revelation or natural religion. Because it proposed
that ethics can be completely separated from belief in God, the lecture caused
a scandal among conservative Christians, who had Wolff relieved of his duties
and exiled from Prussia. However, his lecture made him a hero of the German
Enlightenment, and he immediately obtained a prestigious position elsewhere. In
1730, he delivered a second public lecture, De Rege Philosophante et
Philosopho Regnante, or On the Philosopher King and the Ruling
Philosopher, which praised the Chinese for consulting ‘philosophers’ such
as Confucius and his later follower Mengzi (fourth century BCE) about important
matters of state.
Chinese philosophy
was also taken very seriously in France. One of the leading reformers at the
court of Louis XV was François Quesnay (1694-1774). He praised Chinese
governmental institutions and philosophy so lavishly in his work Despotisme
de la China(1767) that he became known as ‘the Confucius of Europe’.
Quesnay was one of the originators of the concept of laissez-faire economics,
and he saw a model for this in the sage-king Shun, who was known for governing
by wúwéi (non-interference in natural processes). The
connection between the ideology of laissez-faire economics and wúwéi continues
to the present day. In his State of the Union address in
1988, the US president Ronald Reagan quoted a line describing wúwéi from
the Daodejing, which he interpreted as a warning against government
regulation of business. (Well, I didn’t say that every Chinese philosophical
idea was a good idea.)
Leibniz, Wolff and
Quesnay are illustrations of what was once a common view in European
philosophy. In fact, as Peter K J Park notes in Africa, Asia, and the
History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon (2014),
the only options taken seriously by most scholars in the 18th century were that
philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India
and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.
So why did things
change? As Park convincingly argues, Africa and Asia were excluded from the
philosophical canon by the confluence of two interrelated factors. On the one
hand, defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously
rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism
was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or
less successfully.
On the other hand,
European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white
racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop
philosophy. (Even St Augustine, who was born in northern Africa, is
typically depicted in European art as a pasty white guy.) So the
exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision,
not something that people have always believed, and it was a decision based not
on a reasoned argument, but rather on polemical considerations involving the
pro-Kantian faction in European philosophy, as well as views about race that
are both scientifically unsound and morally heinous.
Kant himself was
notoriously racist. He treated race as a scientific category (which it is not), cor-related it with the ability for abstract thought,
and – theorising on the destiny of races in lectures to
students – arranged them in a hierarchical order:
1. ‘The race of the
whites contains all talents and motives in itself.’
2. ‘The Hindus …
have a strong degree of calm, and all look like philosophers. That notwithstanding,
they are much inclined to anger and love. They thus are educable in the highest
degree, but only to the arts and not to the sciences. They will never achieve
abstract concepts. [Kant ranks the Chinese with East Indians, and claims that
they are] static … for their history books show that they do not know more now
than they have long known.’
3. ‘The race of
Negroes … [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can
be educated, but only to the education of servants, ie, they can be trained.’
4. ‘The
[Indigenous] American people are uneducable; for they lack affect and passion.
They are not amorous, and so are not fertile. They speak hardly at all, … care
for nothing and are lazy.’
Those of us who are
specialists on Chinese philosophy are particularly aware of Kant’s disdain for
Confucius: ‘Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient. … Their teacher
Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for
the princes … and offers examples of former Chinese princes. … But a concept of
virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese.’... Kant is easily one
of the four or five most influential philosophers in the Western tradition. He
asserted that the Chinese, Indians, Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the
Americas are congenitally incapable of philosophy. And contemporary Western
philosophers take it for granted that there is no Chinese, Indian, African or
Native American philosophy. If this is a coincidence, it is a stunning one... read more:
