This paper argues that the bias in Western philosophy is tied to its humanist ideology that pictures itself as central to the natural history of humanity and is historically linked to the emergence of humanism as pedagogy.
Justine E. Smith (2012) begins an opinion piece for The New York Times by posing a question about “Philosophy’s Western Bias”
There is much talk in academic philosophy about the need to open up the discipline to so-called non-Western traditions and perspectives, both through changes to the curriculum and also within the demographics of philosophy departments themselves. These two aspects are seen as connected: it is thought that greater representation of non-Western philosophy will help to bring about greater diversity among the women and men who make up the philosophical community.1
But despite intentions, the efforts at achieving a kind of diversity that reflects the contemporary globe and its different philosophical traditions have been a ‘tremendous failure’. Smith believes it has failed for two reasons; first, ‘non-Western philosophy is typically represented in philosophy curricula in a merely token way’ and is not ‘not approached on its own terms’; second, ‘non-Western philosophy, when it does appear in curricula, is treated in a methodologically and philosophically unsound way’ in part because ‘it is crudely supposed to be wholly indigenous to the cultures that produce it’. Thus, ‘non-Western philosophy remains fundamentally “other”’.
The fact is that ‘non-Western philosophy’ while crudely reductive, geographically, and historically selective, is also an exclusive Western category itself that normally means the classical philosophies of ancient civilizations, generally Indian, Chinese, and Arabic, crowding out other possible contenders including African philosophies and also indigenous philosophies. Smith draws attention to the ruses that puffs up Western philosophy—the so-called Greek miracle that establishes lineage but is really ‘only a historiographical artifact’, the inflation of ‘West’ that really only means specific parts of Europe and its American extension, roughly the size and diversity of the Indian subcontinent.
Smith is right to make these arguments and to question the way that even scholars like Derrida wants to argue for the exceptional place of the Western tradition as the proper home of philosophy and ‘humanity’ as a whole, a pint that I take up below. He further extends his critique of the Eurocentrism of Western philosophy by criticizing its a historical outlook and ‘presentism’, writing:
This stems from the fact that philosophy, modeling itself after the sciences, believes it is closer to the truth than it was in the past, and that if a theory is not true there is little reason to spend much time on it.
Not only does Western philosophy picture itself as attached to truth in a privileged way but also sees itself as autonomous from culture. Somehow it imagines itself to be free of its own cultural embodiment, preferences, and attachments and able to attain a perspective free from its own cultural institutions. This is a critical point and one that reminds me of the serious attempt made by Wittgenstein in his discussions of what is involved in understanding other cultures without collapsing into cultural relativism.2 In his view, the shared forms of life anchored in humanity’s natural history enable us to overcome conceptual differences and epistemic barriers in coming to understand another culture (Saari, 2005). Part of this natural history is that we are language using animals and language ‘conditions our nature, conditions our understanding of the world and of ourselves.’ As Hacker (2001) explains:
The humanistic disciplines investigate mankind as cultural, social and historical beings. But we are such beings only in so far as we are also language users. Our animal nature is transformed by our acquisition of, and participation in the cultural institution of, a language.3
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language shows ‘why the subject matter of the humanistic studies is not in general amenable to the forms of explanation of the natural sciences and why the forms of explanation characteristic of the humanities are different in kind from and irreducible to that of the natural sciences’ (Hacker, n.p.). Wittgenstein also shows that a language being a public, rule-governed practice that is constitutive of the form of life and culture of its speakers, ‘is essentially shareable by creatures of a like constitution’. Thus, ‘Human languages are shared by members of human linguistic communities’.
In a truly global perspective, the Western view is difficult to maintain even if we insist on the so-called autonomy of meaning. Philosophy, unlike science, in the global sense is very much still captured by culture and therefore part and parcel of the business of national identity construction. It is so in most parts of the world, as it is also in the West even if ‘we’ still insist on philosophy’s independence from culture. Referring briefly to Leibniz’s reflection that philosophy ‘always piggybacks on the commerce of goods’ Smith argues:
Europe becomes the principle locus of philosophical and scientific activity only when it comes to dominate the global economy through the conquest of the New World and the consequent shifting of the economic center of the world from Asia to Europe.
He points the global center is shifting again and with it we must expect a change in philosophy and, perhaps, also in Western philosophy’s own self-image. In this new geopolitical reality, Western academic philosophy risks becoming a parochial tradition and he recommends an alternative approach to the history of philosophy that treats ‘both Western and non-Western philosophy as the regional inflections of a global phenomenon’.
Smith’s arguments have even more force when applied to contemporary Western philosophy of education, especially the now-dominant ethical form that might be roughly described as liberal humanism springing from various historical sources. In an important sense, ‘humanism’ or ‘liberal humanism’ is often seen as the heart of the Western tradition going back to Plato and receiving different interpretations in successive ages: classical humanism, Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment humanism, liberal humanism. Humanism harbors the deep and sometimes hidden meaning of Western philosophy’s understanding of what is characteristic of or common to human beings. It is also a form of pedagogy rather than a coherent philosophy and for good reason for from the classical beginnings humanus had specific meanings linking concepts of ‘benevolent’ and ‘learned’ (though this meaning was lost in antiquity and does not form part of the middle Latin or modern derivatives of the term).
Kristeller (1961, p. 9) remarks ‘I have been unable to discover in the humanist literature any common philosophical doctrine, except a belief in the value of man and the humanities, and in the revival of ancient learning’. He clarifies that Renaissance humanism is a revival of ancient learning rather than a substantive, coherent, or consistent philosophy. Mann (1996, p. 1) in The Origins of Humanism suggests that the term ‘umanista was used, in fifteenth century Italian academic jargon to describe a teacher or student of classical literature including that of rhetoric’ and the term only surfaces in the English context nearly a hundred years later to consolidate its meaning as ‘humanism’ in the nineteenth century.
The English equivalent ‘humanist’ makes its appearance in the late sixteenth century with a similar meaning. Only in the nineteenth century, however, and probably for the first time in Germany in 1809, is the attribute transformed into a substantive: humanism, standing for devotion to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and the humane values that may be derived from them. (p. 2)
Giustiniani (1985, p. 167) provides a clear picture of the meanings of ‘humanism’:
‘Humanism’ comes from humanus which comes from homo…[Yet] Human nature is complex and contains conflicting tendencies, and cannot be defined completely or from a single point of view.
Giustiniani (1985, p. 172) details how the German-speaking world the term ‘Humanist’ takes on different meanings while retaining its specific meaning as scholar of Classical literature and later
gave birth to further derivatives, such as humanistisch for those schools which later were to be called humanistische Gymnasien, with Latin and Greek as the main subjects of teaching (1784). Finally, Humanismus was introduced to denote ’classical education in general’ (1808) and still later for the epoch and the achievements of the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century (1841). This is to say that ‘humanism’ for ‘classical learning’ appeared first in Germany, where it was once and for all sanctioned in this meaning by Georg Voigt (1859).
The bias in Western philosophy is, therefore, intimately linked with the historical emergence of humanism as a form of pedagogy and especially with the revival of the studia humanitatis that included grammatica, rhetorica, poetics, historia, and philosophia moralis. Kristeller (1990, p. 113) makes clear throughout the Renaissance humanism included the humanities and failed to include ‘theology, jurisprudence, and medicine, and the philosophical disciplines other than ethics, such as logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics’.
The bias of Western philosophy and education is historically deep structuring our understandings in different eras from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. It was not until the twentieth century that this humanist bias was fully explored as ideological in relation to associated concepts of ‘human nature’, ‘man’, and more recently ‘humanity’. It was Heidegger (1946) in ‘Letter on Humanism’4 that argued that humanism and the associated concepts should be rejected as metaphysical. Heidegger’s ‘Letter’ was written in response to Jean Beaufret’s questions that referenced Sartre’s ‘Existential is a humanism’, an address given a year earlier. Heidegger referred to humanism as a metaphysics that ascribes a universal essence to mankind privileging it above all other forms of existence but ultimately leading to a false subjectivism and idealism.5 The orientation of human beings, for Heidegger is not to itself but rather beyond itself that he regards as an open possibility.
Louis Althusser taking up Heidegger’s famously coined the notion of ‘antihumanism’ arguing that there is no essence just historical processes. For Althusser, humanism is a form of false consciousness. Structural analysis—of a scientific Marx— can reveal that we are the product of external forces outside the reach of individual rational scrutiny. Many following Althusser’s leads end up by criticizing humanism on the basis of its commitments to individuality and to individual rationality. Other critiques have based their criticisms on sexism, racism, and classism. More recently, the critique from ecology has made is mark: a crude anthropological humanism is seen as responsible for a world view that emphasizes humankind at the center of the earth’s living systems. Cosmological physics makes a similar kind of argument about the place of humanity in the cosmos only to describe Earth as one planet among one hundred billion star systems.
‘Deconstruction,’ the term most famously associated with Derrida, is a practice of reading and writing, a mode of analysis and criticism that depends deeply upon an interpretation of the question of style.6 In this, Derrida follows a Nietzschean– Heideggerian line of thought that repudiates Platonism as the source of all metaphysics in the West from St Paul to Kant, Mill, and Marx. Where Heidegger still sees in Nietzsche the last strands of an inverted Platonism, tied to the metaphysics of the will to power, and pictures himself as the first genuinely post-metaphysical thinker, Derrida, in his turn, while acknowledging his debt, detects in Heidegger’s notion of being a residual and nostalgic vestige of metaphysics. He agrees with Heidegger that the most important philosophical task is to break free from the ‘logocentrism’ of Western philosophy—the self-presence, immediacy, and univocity—that clouds our view and manifests its nihilistic impulses in Western culture. And yet ‘breaking free’ does not mean overcoming metaphysics. Deconstruction substitutes a critical practice focused upon texts for the ineffable or the inexpressible. It does so, not by trying to escape the metaphysical character of language but by exposing and undermining it: by fixing upon accidental features of the text to subvert its essential message and by playing off its rhetorical elements against its grammatical structure. Heidegger’s strategy for getting beyond ‘man’ will not do the trick: Derrida suggests that ‘a change of style’ is needed, one which will ‘speak several languages and produce several texts at once’, as he says in an early essay, ‘The Ends of Man’ (Derrida, 1982).
Derrida’s work reflects and engages with the tradition of Western metaphysics going back to Plato promoting an understanding of the critique of phallogocentrism as a response to the Western metaphysical tradition. Derrida systematically engages with the Western tradition with a humanity, passion, generosity, and with patient and stunning scholarship. Phallogocentrism, (along with logocentrism and Eurocentrism) refer to the privileging not just of European culture over all others but more deeply to the Western metaphysical tradition that holds to a hierarchy of values sustained by a binary logic that cannot do otherwise than privilege one term over another (reality/appearance, speech/writing, presence/absence, identity/difference, life/death). It is the general economy of an inherited humanism propping up all the ideological remnants of Man in his essence and all of the substitutions played out since Nietzsche that deconstruction seeks to destabilize, unmask, and undermine. Deconstruction, going beyond Abbau and Destruktion, works to undo ‘the metaphysics of presence’ which holds that thought and speech (the logos) is the privileged center through which all discourse and meaning are derived. Gott ist tot (God is dead) is the shorthand that Nietzsche uses to proclaim this deepening of humanism.
The ‘madman’ in The Gay Science pronounces:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (Section 125).
God can no longer act as a source or foundation for moral authority so what now can conceivably anchor the system of values? Nietzsche’s observation heralds a new secularism in Europe and the end of the effective history of the Church. At least, this is how Heidegger interprets it. The proposition ‘God is dead’ as he says ‘has nothing to do with the assertion of an ordinary atheism. It means: The supersensible world, more especially the world of the Christian God, has lost its effective force in history’ (Heidegger, 1985, p. 485). What would it mean to talk of Europe without God, or that the Christian God had become unbelievable, especially after the experiences of the WWI and WWII? On what could a replacement code be based? Moral law derivable from our own rationality? The beginning of liberal humanism and the turn to subjectivity with Descrates and Kant? A kind of naturalism advocated by Hume, that is, a natural sympathy for others? Or should one give up on the search for foundations altogether and deny that moral codes and beliefs have any objective foundation? Can they only be explained psychologically?
I present Derrida as a profound humanist (Peters & Biesta, 2009), who commited to the value of truth and the promise of humanity endeavors in order to steer us away from its easy ideological fabrications that ultimately only supports a very tawdry and temporary cultural image of ourselves in one particular historical period. I present him so because he stands in a tradition not only within both contemporary modern traditions influence by Nietzsche–Heidegger nexus and the immediate French tradition dating from Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel but also in terms of the immediate inheritance from Sartre and his associates as well as Levinas, Blanchot, Althusser, and his many contemporaries including Deleuze, Lyotard, Kofmann, and Foucault.
Clearly, one has to say also the modern tradition from Descartes and Kant, and, indeed, the tradition all the way back to Plato. I do not want to suggest a unity or origin of tradition but perhaps sustaining threads of a complex skein and we must then also embrace the Hebraic tradition and various modern literary movements as well as those in the European avant garde. By calling Derrida a profound humanist, I mean to indicate that Derrida engages directly and systematically with the question of humanism—what it is to be human and its limits and boundaries in technology and animality—and with its continuance by some means. Thus, a continuance through its encompassing of new extensions and mutations of rights in international law, in democracy to come, in the right to philosophize, in the author/writer/reader, in tasks for the new humanities, in an ethics of the other—of hospitality—in the changed conditions for scholarship and media, in the promise of Europe in providing an alternative vision for world institutions, and the governance of globalization.
In view of the ideological nature of humanism, Derrida has devised ways of overcoming the logocentrism he sees at the heart of the Western tradition through attention to the status of the humanities and the attempt to invent new tasks for the humanities facing globalization. There is no doubt that the humanities need new tasks, and Derrida has sought to provide a programmatic picture. That the humanities must also contextualize itself, escaping its local origins and trajectories, and broaden its account to take in the radical pluralism that exists as part of a new globalism that also recognizes the claims of local autonomy made by first peoples, indigenous peoples, sub-state cultural minorities, international religious movements, youth cultures, gender groups, and all sorts of political associations. Here, the question of self and other looms large, as do questions revolving centrally around notion of ethics and politics. Derrida provides us with the rejuvenation of ancient concepts of friendship, the ethics of hospitality, forgiveness, the gift, the invitation that outlines his account of responsibility to the other.
1. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/philosophys-western-bias/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&.
2. See particularly Wittgenstein’s (1987) Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough and the typescript early 1930s that was a prototype for the Philosophical Investigations (but eventually notes that were left out) especially his handwritten remarks about ‘metaphysics as a kind of magic’, where magic was described as ‘deep’—see Zengotita (1989).
3. My references are to the paper (that gives no page references) available at http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Humanistic%20understanding.pdf.
4. I am refering to Frank A. Capuzzi’s translation at http://pacificinstitute.org/pdf/Letter_on_%20Humanism.pdf.
5. See Peters (2001) for my treatment of Heidegger’s concept of the human being in the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ and Derrida’s reading of it in “The Ends of Man” in relation to pedagogy. See also Trifonas and Peters (2004, 2005).
6. This section draws on Peters (2007).
Derrida, J. (1982). The ends of man. In Margins of philosophy (pp. 3–27). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Giustiniani, V. R. (1985). Homo humanus, and the meaning of humanism. Journal of the History of Ideas, 46, 175.
Hacker, P. M. S. (2001). Wittgenstein and the autonomy of humanistic understanding. In R. Allen & M. Turvey (Eds.), Wittgenstein: Theory and the arts (pp. 39–74). London: Routledge. Retrieved from http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Humanistic%20understanding.pdf
Heidegger, M. (1946). “Letter on Humanism” published as Brief u¨ ber den Humanismus, in Wegmarken (1919–58). In W. McNeill (Ed.), Translated as Pathmarks (pp. 239–276). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1985). The self-assertion of the German university and the rectorate 1933/34: Facts and thoughts. Review of Metaphysics, 38, 467–502.
Kristeller, P. O. (1961). Renaissance thought: The classic, scholastic, and humanist strains. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Kristeller, P. O. (1990). Humanism. In C. B. Schmitt & Q. Skinner (Eds.), The Cambridge history of renaissance philosophy (pp. 113–114). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mann, N. (1996). The origins of humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, M. A. (2001). Humanism, Derrida, and the new humanities. In G. Biesta & D. Egea-Kuehne (Eds.), Derrida and education (pp. 209–231). London: Routledge.
Peters, M. A. (2007). The humanities in deconstruction: Raising the question of the postcolonial university. Access, 26(1), 1–11.
Peters, M. A., & Biesta, H. (2009). Derrida, politics and pedagogy: Deconstructing the humanities. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Saari, H. (2005). Wittgenstein on understanding other cultures. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 68, 139–161.
Trifonas, P., & Peters, M. A. (Eds.). (2004). Derrida, deconstruction and education. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trifonas, P., & Peters, M. A. (Eds.). (2005). Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the new humanities. New York, NY: Palgrave.
Wittgenstein, L. (1987). Remarks on Frazer’s golden bough. London: Humanities Press.
Zengotita, T. (1989). On Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer’s golden bough. Cultural Anthropology, 4, 390–398.