Eurocentrism in Philosophy Departments?

[Guest guest]

Rajesh Kochhar wrote: "It is not fair to comment on the motives of the

scholar. There are any number of instances of good motives producing bad

results and vice versa. In our keenness to read between the lines, we must

not forget to read the lines . In any case, in the modern age, every body,

especially a scholar, has every right to make a fool of himself. Who was it

who said something to the effect ; don't bite the finger; look where it is

pointing?"

 

COMMENT: It is precisely such dispassionate and impersonal evaluation that

we need. I shall focus here on the attitudes prevailing in US Philosophy

Departments (explicit attitudes and with no necessity to 'read between the

lines'). This is NOT concerning anyone on this list that I know of. Rather,

it is in the same sense that many men in the 1970s/1980s were not

intentionally being sexist in the jokes openly shared in offices, which

women complained about. (A more nasty example, and extreme for our

situation, would be to point out that most Germans did not explicitly

support Nazi activities, some pretended not to know, others felt it was not

their job to question.) So please allow the data below to remain impersonal.

Centrisms are about the collective sanskaras, which Jung studied and later

renamed as the collective unconscious. The whole idea of stepping back to

reflect on centrisms is that they are so pervasive that individuals no

longer see their own complicity.

 

Founded in 1696, St. John's College is amongst the most prestigious colleges

for the liberal arts, as is evidenced by an alumni that includes numerous

successful and influential leaders. I don't mean to pick on them per se, but

it was the receipt of their brochure describing their undergraduate

curriculum a couple of years ago that led me to a deeper review of

Philosophy Departments in the US. Below is what St. John's proudly announces

as their complete reading list, year by year:

 

 

Freshman Year:

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Euripides, Herodotus, Aristophanes,

Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Lucretius, Plutarch, Nicomachus, Lavoisier,

Harvey.

Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow,

Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, Thomson, Mendeleyev,

Berthollet, J.L. Proust.

 

Sophomore Year:

The Bible, Aristotle, Apollonius, Virgil, Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus,

Ptolemy, Plotinus, Augustine, St. Anselm, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Des Prez,

Machiavelli, Copernicus, Luther, Rabelais, Palestrina, Montaigne, Viète,

Bacon, Shakespeare.

Poems by: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets.

Descartes, Pascal, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Stravin, Sky

 

Junior Year:

Cervantes, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Milton, La Roche-foucauld, La

Fontaine, Pascal, Huygens, Eliot, Spinoza, Locke, Racine, Newton, Kepler,

Leibniz, Swift, Hume, Rousseau, Molière, Adam Smith, Kant, Mozart, Austen,

Dedekind.

Essays by: Young, Maxwell, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli.

 

Senior Year:

Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of USA,

Supreme Court Opinions, Hamilton, Jay and Madison, Darwin, Hegel,

Lobachevsky, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Kierkegaard, Wagner, Marx, Dostoevski,

Tolstoy, Melville, Twain, O'Connor, William James, Nietzsche, Freud, Valéry,

Washington, Booker T., DuBois, Heidegger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Millikan,

Conrad, Faulkner.

Poems by: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud.

Essays by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Mendel, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson,

Schrödinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broigle, Dreisch, Ørsted, Ampère, Boveri,

Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod,

Hardy.

 

The above changes slightly over time, but remains 100% western. It is

noteworthy that there is NOT A SINGLE non-western writer in their reading

list. Yet their stated mission is: "The St. John's curriculum seeks to

convey to students an understanding of the fundamental problems that human

beings have to face today and at all times."

 

I assumed (naively) that US Universities' Philosophy Departments would find

this troublesome, but one US university after another turned out to be

Eurocentric in its curriculum. I discovered that the Univ. of Hawaii and

U-Texas (Austin) are the only major universities where they give PhDs in

Indian Philosophy in Philosophy Departments. Also, Indian Philosophy is not

a category in the American Philosophical Association, except occasionally as

a footnote, although APA has numerous sections, many days of conferences and

hundreds of panels annually.

 

Indian Philosophy taught in other departments does not have the same

'status' as the special positioning assumed by philosophy: as the logos, the

set of universal ideas applicable beyond cultural boundaries, as the

quintessence of 'rational' thought, and often treated as the queen of

sciences. Historically, religion got positioned in the west as 'belief' (and

usually as irrational or pre-rational), and Hegel/Weber among others

positioned rational thought as the unique essence of Europeans. Because this

implicit sub-text remains largely unchallenged in philosophy departments,

non-western philosophies are contextualized as part of religions. Likewise,

anthropology is positioned as portraying exotica and culture-specific myths,

rather than universal ideas and rationality.

 

What effect does this Eurocentric teaching of philosophy, and marginalizing

of all others' thoughts into 'area' studies or 'religions', have on the

outlook of American students? Does it facilitate their success in the

globalizing era, and in multi-culturalism at home? Or does it make

(dangerous) misfits in the world of tomorrow? Are there unique ideas and

resources in the discoveries of non-westerners that should be part of every

student's "understanding of the fundamental problems that human beings have

to face today and at all times"? Are Gandhi, Buddha, Confucius, Shankara,

Dignana, Dharmakirti, Nagarjuna, Patanjali, Upanishads, Lao Tze, Tsong

Khapa, Bharthrhari, Bhaskar, Pannini, Mishra, Abhinavagupta, Aurobindo,

Ramanuja, Ramakrishna, and hundreds of other non-western philosophies mere

footnotes or ethnography in the minds of our students?

 

Relevant questions for Indologists: If Lars Martin Fosse and David Salmon

are right in saying that Indologists care deeply about the Indic, then why

is there this complicity, as Indologists are the ambassadors of the Indic

within the American academy? As the ones with linguistic access to Indic

thought, have they done their job adequately within the wider academy? Could

the over-emphasis on (false) portrayal of modern India's social problems as

being the consequence of its traditions have demonized the Indic such that

'rational' seekers would rather stay away? In doing so, have Indologists

hurt the standing and funding of their own field? By comparison, China/Japan

enjoys funding in academia many times greater. Also, Buddhism studies,

especially Tibetan, is cool and 'in'. But who would want to study or fund an

inherently abusive tradition?

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