Hamid Dabashi asks: What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical 'pedigree'?
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Why is European philosophy "philosophy", but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic - an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum [2006]), you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their cultures - they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row.
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The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blase. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is "philosophy" and their particular thinking is "thinking", and everything else is - as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying - "dancing".
The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America - counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself "the West" but happily no more.
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Logging you in...
CIP · 626 weeks ago
Philosophy is probably a dead discipline anyway, but if, say, African thought, is going to achieve the goals that this professor (at an American university) thinks it should aspire to, it really ought to try to go beyond what the European, Asian, and yes, African philosophers of the past have achieved.
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
http://xyz4000.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/the-secul...
Balu & Jakob argue that for the secular state to be religiously-neutral, it has to officially bless a theory of what religion is. And they point out the following:
"In other words, the Hindu traditions refused to accept that theirs was false ‘religion’ and that Christianity or Islam was the true one. Nor were they willing to say that Christianity or Islam was false. They merely maintained that these traditions could co-exist without competing with each other as rivals. This is the Hindu view of the matter. The Semitic religions, on the other hand, advance the claim that they and the Hindu traditions are competing or rival movements. Between these two positions, again, there is no neutral ground: (a) the Semitic religions and the Hindu traditions are competitors with respect to each other, or (b) they are not. The secular state has to choose between these two logically exclusive premises as well."
and pose the problem:
Let us now summarise the four choices the Indian secular state has to make. (a) The ‘Hindu traditions’ and the ‘Semitic religions’ are phenomena of the same kind, or they are not. (b) As such, they are religious rivals, or they are not. (c) As rivals, they compete with each other regarding truth or falsity, or they do not. (d) They can do that because some religion is false, or they cannot because no religion is false. In each of the four cases, these claims are those of the Semitic religions and the Hindu traditions respectively. Each of these assumptions carves the universe up into two exhaustive partitions, because, in each case, one statement is the logical negation of the other. So, what should a liberal state do in such a situation? What choices are open to it, if it wants to remain neutral and secular?
CIP · 626 weeks ago
One reason the line of separation is hard to draw is that religion and culture are deeply intertwined.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
In the first nation, the sports neutrality of the state requires it to uphold the exclusionary nature of the sports clubs. In the second nation, the sports neutrality of the state requires it to uphold the non-exclusionary nature of the sports club.
Then, football is introduced to the second nation (or kabaddi to the first).
How does the state uphold its sports neutrality?
It becomes even more complicated because, while I used sports in both nations, one nation has mutually exclusive spots leagues, while the second has non-exclusive music clubs, but the first nation insists that music is sports.
But deal with the simple case first.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
As to your question: yes, islam and Christianity do regard prosetylization as essential, and they do believe they have exclusive access to the truth. So what? (as long as they don't attempt to impose themselves by force, fear or compulsion).
Many countries have state religions. It looks to me as if the Hindutuva people are intent on making Hinduism the state religion of India. That's India's problem, not mine, but I'm not impressed by the smokescreen.
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
Balu is as far from Hindutva as the Pope.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
But having researched Hindutova a bit, I think I can agree with some of it.
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
Anyone for whom this is blindingly obviously true is going to find reading this blog increasingly frustrating.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
India is a much more complex problem (1200 languages, not counting dialects) and has been working this problem for millenia, so it would be nice if they could come up with a solution the world could understand.
Guest · 626 weeks ago
Launching from your peurile understanding of spoken language, you have now jumped again feet first into another deeper abyss of tomfoolery. When you don't understand something, it's better to say so, than beat about the bush.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
Insult is a pretty feeble bit of rhetoric, but the way you wield it reflects well on you. It's inept enough to suggest that you haven't had much practice.
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
Keeping to the sports analogy - what is the underlying theoretical basis for Major League Baseball to have an antitrust exemption? Why is this not granted to other industries?
It may seem strange to you and hard to understand, but "freedom of religion" in the West is the metaphorical equivalent an antitrust exemption for Major League Baseball.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
1. An academic paper has to give a context for the problem statement, and that is what is perhaps tripping you. Put aside any issue related to proselytization for now.
2. Let me explain my "major league anti-trust exemption" analogy a bit more. The conflict between the various denominations of Christianity in Europe and in America was over their truth-claims. (E.g., the conflict was not between various folks about who would head the Church. The conflict was over doctrines.) The solution was to say that the state is neutral with regard to the various religious truth-claims.
The state, however, is not neutral with respect to all truth-claims. Except for some few red-state extremists, no one says that the state should not promote another set of truth-claims, namely science. The state also promotes history, which makes truth claims.
And there is a problem in the US - the remaining religious people do see science as a threat to their truth-claims, and don't want evolution taught; and nor do they want to see science as an input to environmental policy or health policy. They argue that by using science, the state is advancing an anti-religion secularism. It is true that these people would barely be heard from, except that their agenda suits some very wealthy interests.
3. The state also promotes the arts. There is no "wall of separation" between arts and state. What kind of music, for example, does the state promote? Whatever the particular ethnic composition and interests of the people are. So it might be strong on jazz and western classical music; but there are few Indian-Americans, and so it might be much less strong on Indian classical music. Nobody considers this to be a problem.
4. Now move to a society where the native "religionists" - Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, etc., and even Christians (prior to contact with the Europeans) and long-acculturated Muslims - consider themselves more akin to be practicing forms of music than advancing truth-claims.
An attitude like "obviously my school of music is the best, and all the rest of you have tin ears, but hey, it is your music".
An attitude like that of the Dalai Lama:
"No credible understanding of the natural world or our human existence–what I am going to call in this book a worldview–can ignore the basic insights of theories as key as evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics. It may be that science will learn from an engagement with spirituality, especially in its interface with wider human issues, from ethics to society, but certainly some specific aspects of Buddhist thought—such as its old cosmological theories and its rudimentary physics— will have to be modified in the light of new scientific insights."
5. Now examine what the American theory of the secular state does when applied to such a music-playing society. It will create problems in general, even if we succeed in arguing that the proselytization issue does not fall in this class of problems. The goal here is to get some clarity of thought, once we have that we can go back to the application-of-philosophy plane.
6. Let's backtrack a little - religious neutrality might be stated as follows: the religious truth claims are undecidable, therefore the state will not attempt to decide between them. Science, mathematics, (and civil and criminal cases brought to court), etc., have effective decision procedures, and so the state is entitled to weigh in.
But we've seen that the (American) state also feels entitled to promote anything that does not make truth claims, such as the arts or sports. Maybe even Yoga? (I think there is a dispute in California over Yoga in schools, some see it as a religious system, and are suing on that basis.
But Yoga is no different from Kung-Fu or any of the other Asian martial arts, there is an underlying philosophy to them as well, that can be construed as "religious", and the Asian martial arts share the same roots as Yoga and as some traditional Indian dance forms - they were carried by Buddhists all over Asia. Meanwhile people who are aware of the "religious" roots of Yoga are promoting "Jewish Yoga" and "Christian Yoga".)
Contemplate a little the potential resulting mess because the world does not fit neatly in the categories that underlay the rise of the modern liberal state. The liberal state is going to have to face these challenges.
You may argue that it is a non-problem. But that does not hold, not in a limited way already in the US, and not in a more significant way in India. It is natural that problems with a system will likely be found when it is applied in cases more distant from the problem that it originally solved.
You may find an alternate formulation of the problem than what I have provided which has an easy solution. That would be progress.
The challenge to the liberal state does not mean that we want to abolish it. We need it to work coherently. That will require some thought, no?
CIP · 626 weeks ago
BTW, I don't accept that European religious conflicts have been mainly about doctrine, though that's always a component. Lines of authority is the big divide between Catholics and most other Christian groups. In any case, the constitution is neutral about doctrine.
Your example of the case of evolution vs. revelation is a good one, illustrating that hard choices still need to be made and will step on somebodies religious toes. I am unpersuaded, though, that the heavy doctrinal component of the Abramaic religions relative to Hinduism is especially consequential in this debate.
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
CIP · 626 weeks ago
dwc · 626 weeks ago
In your view, in order for something to be tentatively true, that something has to agree with your psychological state. For instance, look at how you think that IS-LM in economics is true, because it fits with your tastes. IS-LM is false, as shown by theorists in MMT, which is better than New Kenynsian, which agrees with your palate.
Now you come to political theory, and u call some paper 'false' (smoke and errors). Where have you learned this shallow thinking? Sure, you may have a Ph.D in physics, it does not mean anything in other domains like political theory, macro economics. Spend some time learning some basics like "what it means to explain, when some explanation is better than others, whether your psycholigical state is necessary for some explanation to be true, and so on. These questions are hardly discussed in phd quals.
CIP · 626 weeks ago
I certainly don't claim to understand Dr. B.
I don't claim to be free of prejudice, but I make a reasonable attempt to be open minded to new ideas.
dwc · 626 weeks ago
http://xyz4000.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/%E2%80%98...
macgupta 81p · 626 weeks ago
I guess there is a further level of theory-ladenness - why did I chose to make this measurement (or highlight this fact)? Why is it a fact of interest versus all the other facts out there? That our (shared) description of the world is reasonably effective is guaranteed by the fact that we have survived the winnowing process of evolution. Still individuals could be insane or have peculiar obsessions and may highlight facts that most of us would consider to be irrelevant to the situation we are in, etc.
dwc · 626 weeks ago
"The second reason has to do with the development of both science
and technology. Not only do they make ‘visible’ what was ‘unobservable’
before; not only do they make ‘perceptible’ some entities, whose existence
we did not know of until the event; but, what is more important,
the very notion of ‘observability’ also changes as our knowledge of the
world evolves. The problem of some clerical contemporaries of Galileo
with the telescope had to do with what they were ‘observing’: were they
seeing what was ‘there’ on the moon, or an illusory image projected by
the telescope which had nothing to do with the so-called mountains on
the moon?"