Providing an indigenous opinion on anything is a difficult task. To be sure, there is a multitude of possible indigenous responses to dominant Western philosophy. My aim in this paper is to assess dominant analytic Western philosophy in light of the general insistence of most indigenous authors that indigenous metaphysics is holistic, and to make some bold claims about both dominant Western philosophy in line with an indigenous metaphysics of holism. There will, of course, be different ways of expressing holism according to the indigenous group, but most of the literature states, as a most basic concern, that a general indigenous philosophy is concerned with the groundedness (or otherwise) of an individual as an entity related to and indivisible from the rest of the world.1 The consequences of any assertion about the holistic nature of metaphysics are vast, including for the interpretation of what is often perceived of as the antithesis: Western philosophy.
The theme of Western philosophy is not a recurring one in the indigenous canon. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of my paper but I suspect they may comprise the following: the urgency of other problems needing (mainly qualitative) research; relatedly, the irrelevancy of dwelling on Western philosophy; and its overwhelming hostility to indigenous thought. It will sometimes form a platform for discussion in academic indigenous works, but it will hardly ever be outlined in glowing terms, for it cannot be denied that indigenous peoples, generally speaking, have a bleak view of the Western tradition of philosophy. From its tendency since the Scientific Revolution (but more fundamentally since Plato) to obsess itself with knowledge above all else, to its almost unconscious move to oust a pursuit of anything that does not deal in a correspondence version of truth, Western philosophy, more than any other discipline, may exemplify for the indigenous mind the dominant horizon of colonizing thought. Importantly, it also lays bare a particular vulnerability that the West, from the indigenous perspective, suffers from when faced with the unknowable. Other disciplines, such as law, medicine, education and sociology and so on, draw on social and political cladding to protect themselves from, and even obscure, that underlying susceptibility. Philosophy, however, should not have recourse to this cover-up: to the indigenous person, it is the ultimate theater in which the real sway of thought, with no façade or cosmetic, must play out to its truest and most fundamental extent.
My hypothetical here is hardly new: the indigenous approach to philosophy does not lie in assessing the truth of a proposition through logic, but in how the self is located in the world. A general indigenous philosophy may look most essentially at how one is positioned in relation to another. This ‘other’ is most often nowadays a person but it needn’t have been traditionally. The other could have been a mountain or a tree, for instance, and philosophical discussions would have ranged from what allowed a thing to manifest to begin with, how one might best sit in tandem with that self-emergence of the thing, and how one might then represent the autonomous (but interrelated with the self) activity of the thing. Silence was often the best mode of interaction with the other (Smith, 2007). Utterances of knowledge or propositions of truth about things were likely secondary to the sheer initial and primordial perception of a phenomenon.
Western philosophy in its dominant form would undoubtedly suggest that this thought belongs in literature or religious studies. Here we meet one of the most entrenched biases of Western philosophy, comprising as it does the very profound and subconscious rejection of the mere possibility that non-analytical thought might belong in the discipline of philosophy. Dominant analytic philosophy and its associated domains are fortified quite staunchly against even the mention of other forms of thinking. For the indigenous thinker, this reaction is an emotional and subjective one, not one based on any particular objectivity that, ironically, this particular kind of philosophy claims. It also, again, uncovers a peculiar underbelly of Western philosophy: that, ultimately, it must revert to an emotional response rather than a thoroughgoing detached one. In this, it is likely no different to indigenous philosophy, which similarly reacts along lines of feeling in the very first instance. The difference lies in the fact that indigenous philosophy is clear that thought must be based from the very outset on one’s visceral response to a thing. Western philosophy, when viewed from the indigenous perspective, is thus gripped by the very problem that it is attempting to eradicate. Here I should note that paradoxes themselves are not a concern for indigenous thought generally but the sort that disdains feeling whilst being incapable of leaving it alone may be thought of as an unusual juxtaposition to live with.
One arm of philosophy that is allowed to remain in the realms of dominant philosophy, although even then only begrudgingly and as long as it resides on the outskirts, is metaphysics. It is towards this discipline that many of us indigenous writers tend to gravitate, because it promises to explain the very basis of orientation towards the world. Deloria and Wildcat (2001) note that Western metaphysics must be thought about in any discussions of indigenous metaphysics. Calderon (2008), Cajete (2000), and Little Bear (2000) are other indigenous writers that have found it necessary to discuss Western metaphysics. It is for many of us a political as much as an abstract problem. It is therefore directly related to the everyday world and is not, as dominant Western philosophy tends to treat it, a ‘study’. Thus, the indigenous person that undertakes empirical research, or attends a court or other judicial setting as a witness, or is compelled to fill out a census form, is informed by metaphysics as far as the indigenous thinker is concerned. As far as much indigenous philosophy is concerned, metaphysics simply must be thought of as an integral, infusing element within the world.
It may be that indigenous peoples and the West mean different things when discussing metaphysics. Adorno (2001) suggests that initial phenomena need to be theorized on in order for metaphysics as a discipline to occur. The significance in metaphysics lies in its laying forth as an object of conception. There is some need, I argue, for this approach in indigenous thought as well, because in a colonized reality it is insufficient to recite traditional ideas without a further theorizing on their significance in a counter-colonial sense (even if that counter-colonialism is not overt in that theory). But there are some downsides. To begin with, the phenomena that are to be theorized on are often entities in indigenous thought. In Maori thought, for instance, they may be both substance and non-thing (Marsden, 2003; Mika, 2012). Yet their reach is current; they cannot always (if ever) be perceived but they are simply ‘there’. A danger in theorizing on them is that they are then only valid if they are objects of thought. They are hence only ‘there’ if they are constructed that way. This shift poses a grave threat to the oft-cited metaphysics of indigenous holism. Another problem lies in what happens to the indigenous person in the process of pure thought: the self moves above those things being considered and they are removed from what Heidegger (1971) terms the Fourfold and Durie (1994) calls the ‘whare tapa wha’. To the indigenous observer, Western philosophy’s analysis and scientism—its self-sufficiency —is a dangerous outcome of this most primal of comportments.
Similarly, the construction of space and time as sheer modes of perception may not be one that indigenous peoples share with Kant. Perception for indigenous peoples is not a supporting actor to that ultimate winner—conception—but is extremely important on its own (admittedly as it was for Kant). Seen in this light, it is also essential for indigenous peoples to propose something other than Kant’s insistence that space and time are merely perceptual templates. Instead space and time are often directly entangled—even indistinguishable from—entities that, as I have noted, are both substantial and nothing. The Maori term for both space and time—wā—is intimately connected with the notion of ‘whakapapa’, which is often translated as ‘genealogy’ but, more importantly, indicates how things appear and remain concealed in their own time through ‘Papa’ (‘Earth Mother’). Things perceived are thus permanently imbued with that initial aspect of presence and absence that characterize the Earth Mother. A Maori perception of an object is colored by that continual paradox: The object is intrinsically related to it and even (to continue the paradox) affects that Maori perceiver. It is indeed the ability to perceive the object in this way, I speculate, that may dictate one’s wellbeing. If one is permitted to acknowledge the ground of perception—and hence the object—as both ultimately beyond one’s cognitive capacity and as a living entity that contains to it thoroughly unknowable and imperceptible characteristics, then one may retain wellness. If, on the other hand, the indigenous self is forced to view the object as merely a product of something originating from the self, and hence an object of thought, then a kind of violence is done as a whole.
Thus far my discussion has centered on the genre of Western philosophy that currently holds sway. It needs to be signaled—for the indigenous thinker as much as the West—that there is a great wealth of potential in the Western tradition that does not belong solely to the dominant method. That there is some striking anti-colonial thinking in some forms of Western philosophy and, moreover, even some propositions that can be drawn on to thetically assert aspects of indigenous experience, should be acknowledged by us. But for the West, the need to tap into this hidden but real form of knowledge is even more pressing. Here I allude to aspects of philosophy that have originated from ‘the Continent’. Although many Anglo-Americans take up so-called Continental philosophy with some gusto, too often in philosophy departments they remain the minority. The disagreement between Carnap and Heidegger (Friedman, 2000), focusing on Heidegger’s position on nothingness, is informally believed to herald the big division between analytic and Continental philosophy, although the schism started with Russell’s and Moore’s repudiation of Hegelian idealism (Mander, 2013), and the overall, much earlier divide between philosophy and poetry (Barfield, 2011), I suggest, fuelled the distance between these schools of thought. These arguments may explain the dearth of phenomenology and existentialism in many English-speaking philosophy departments and the obvious dominance of other disciplines of thought.
Yet for the indigenous person it is in the Continental disciplines that the West may find some respite from these problems. I am quick to give one significant disclaimer here. Kant, bringing together empiricism and rationalism, and challenging indigenous thought as I have outlined earlier, nevertheless possesses some of the traits of his contemporaries—characteristics which are seen as embodying the more orthodox ‘Continental’ philosophy. He shares the belief of the Early German Romantics, for instance, that the thing-in-itself cannot be known. Indigenous peoples, if they reflect on that, might come to that conclusion as well. But even then the thing-in-itself cannot remain unaddressed, for it is the continued impact of the thing-in-itself, despite its imperceptibility, that is important for indigeneity. It is in the possibility that the thing cannot be conceived of in its totality, but nevertheless be utterly involved in dictating how one proceeds to represent and talk about it, that is crucial. Here we return again to the atmospheric state of the thing, emerging as it does from an origin that is unknowable but affective. The thing in itself, despite not being cognitively graspable, is still hugely important for the self and the self’s orientation towards things in the world.
Kant goes some way in developing a tentative approach to knowing a thing but others manage this feat more radically. Like Kant, the Early German Romantics bring a halt to thoroughgoing rationalism; yet they go further by suggesting that a thing shows itself according to the arrangement of Being/the Absolute. For Novalis, this is also a political, not solely a philosophical, issue that humanity must be aware of. He had identified that the colonization of a people brought about metaphysical changes at an extremely profound level. The self-colonization of his community was a high priority for him, and some of its signs comprised the following: the pursuit of numbers to stand in for things (Novalis, 1960b); the idea that Being is centered in the self (he critiqued Fichte for this very belief) (Novalis, 1960c); generally, the dominant proposition that a thing has only cognitive value (and is merely a product of cognition); and the introduction of a static system of writing (Novalis, 1960a). Schelling, Hölderlin, and Schleiermacher were, like Novalis, concerned with the staticising of the world and with the suggestion that humans were somehow thoroughly self-evident. Against that view, they proposed that one had to think of the world in terms of its inherent possibilities: for Novalis, this engaged with a process of lifting a concept of things from the banal to the mysterious, which shares some commonalities with Heidegger’s (1977) ‘saving power’. Thinking of the potential of entities involved accommodating the problem of not pretending to represent them in full, as to do so has a detrimental impact on the world in some way.
In this process, they also encourage the Western thinker to philosophize away from those original thinkers’ prescribed sphere. Here I make an extremely bold and possibly very contentious observation: that Western philosophy has become too name-centric, where the great thinkers have become too pivotal to thinking. I speak tentatively here, because other indigenous writers may not share this observation. Yet, there does seem to be a marked difference between the recounting of indigenous and Western philosophy. I speculate that indigenous philosophy, as it appears in the literature, does not draw heavily on particular individuals so vehemently as Western philosophy does. Written indigenous philosophy engages instead more with, and drills deeply into, a fundamental cultural phenomenon—not through the lens of another individual, but with the writer bringing together the spheres of lived experience, intellect, and the unknown. Whilst this difference between the two could just be the result of a cultural nuance, to the indigenous thinker it may also signal a divergence in focus, where dominant (not all) Western scholarship defaults to the prized and comfortable zone of previous thinkers. If my suspicions here are credible, then thought in this vein is barred from entering into the endless possibilities that a thing offers. One just draws on the same paradigm to tell another story.
How then, if at all, can indigenous thought assist Western philosophy to acknowledge its emotional origins and, moreover, to allow for the emotional response to the mystery of a thing? Because indigenous thought has been philosophically and politically so marginalized, these questions are especially confronting. There is a social reality to the consequences of any answer that most indigenous writers will have at the forefront, comprising such problems as the misappropriation of indigenous thought, the inappropriate application of it, the warping of it and so on. Perhaps the first step involves the West resorting to the vast reservoir of its own thought, through, but not totally reliant on, some of its individuals that insist on a continued recognition of mystery. The emphasis in my suggestion is deliberate, because I want to propose that the continued thinking of mystery—the dual hiddenness and presence of an entity, the relationship of the entity to the self beyond the cognitive, the entity’s participation in Being, and so on—may best be carried out with initial recourse to a previous thinker but, most importantly, with a subsequent and wild freedom of thought. At some point, the indigenous community may then wish to engage the West in discussions on how to progress thought that acknowledges the continued ‘All’, but not before observing how the West deals with its own theoretical source.
Dominant Western philosophy is impressive in its gigantic and immovable enterprise of logic and rational thought, but to the indigenous thinker those aspects that allow it to remain so colossally solid are simultaneously its vulnerability. The solutions to its difficulties lie submerged within other, less central, modes of Western thinking that develop and encourage thought towards an approximation of a thing in all its complexity and its interdependence with all other things, including the self. Those other forms of Western thought are no less impressive. Seen in this light, thinking through the eyes, but also transcending the influence, of the philosophers who are largely overlooked in Western literature, may prove to be a step away from the blindness that Western philosophy manifests for the indigenous onlooker. To the indigenous person, this step is an important and confronting one for the West: it moves towards the dissolution of what has thus far been colossal and promises the dispersion of thought into an ongoing and mysterious relationship with things in the world.
1. See for instance: Deloria and Wildcat (2001), Calderon (2008), and Marsden (1985) for specific discussion on the nature of indigenous relationships with all things.
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