Why is it Important for Philosophy to Globalise?

Professor Jay L Garfield

Philosophy has been slower than other humanities disciplines to recognize that there is a world beyond Europe (broadly construed) and intellectual traditions that did not arise in classical Greece. Scholars of history, literature, music, and art no longer tolerate entirely Eurocentric approaches to research or to curriculum, but the vast majority of philosophy departments in the world are quite content to do so.  Philosophy so conceived is nothing but a sub-department of the broader field of White Studies.  I find that embarrassing.

The picture is not all bad. It is refreshing to see an uptick in recent years in attention by professional philosophers to non-European philosophy and in advertisements for positions in non-Western traditions. But even now, progress is slow, and it comes late.  And too often it reflects a kind of tokenism: a department with specialists in early ancient Western philosophy, medieval Western philosophy, rationalism, empiricism, Kant, phenomenology, contemporary Western philosophy of mind, Western ethics, and Western aesthetics opens a position for one person to cover all of non-Western philosophy.  

This approach—while better than one that ignores all non-European philosophy entirely— suggests that non-Western philosophy can  be fully comprised under a single specialty, effectively reducing it to an interesting fringe of the Western enterprise, an exotic other in which we are encouraged to take interest, but hardly the heart of the discipline. While we thereby enrich what we are doing, we do so by reinforcing a sense of center and margin that continues to marginalize and to homogenize everything non-Western.  This is hardly intellectually defensible in the long run.  (There are some departments that are notable exceptions to this approach, in which multiple appointments have been made recently. The Universities of British Columbia, Toronto, and New Mexico have worked to develop critical mass in Indian philosophy, for instance;  and both Yale-NUS College and my home department at Smith College are resolutely global in their philosophy curricula. But these are rare exceptions.)

Still, progress is progress, and we should rejoice.  I do. But I am not ready to uncork the champagne, and I would like to take this opportunity to say once more why it is so important to go much further than even the most progressive departments have gone if we are to develop our discipline with intellectual integrity. I will suggest three principal reasons why we must do so: we expose ourselves to divergent streams of thought and ways of pursuing philosophy that enrich our conceptual resources; we gain deeper insight into our own philosophical tradition; we satisfy a moral demand to treat others with respect and to repair the damage caused by colonialism.

Anyone who has allowed herself to stray intellectually beyond the bounds of the European philosophical tradition has discovered a few radically different ways of posing or addressing philosophical questions, ideas just not found in Western traditions.  This is not because the West isn’t as good as others at philosophy; far from it. It is because different people come up with different ideas. And we are better thinkers to the extent that we take more into consideration (that is an idea that any Western epistemologist would endorse). 

Daoist philosophers such as the authors of the Daodejing or the Zhuangzi challenge us to take seriously the paradoxical nature of reality, and the importance of backgrounds as opposed to foregrounds in very radical ways. They develop skeptical problems in ways very different from their Western colleagues, and they offer a radically different conception of skilled agency.  

Buddhist philosophers ask us to rethink essentialism, and to approach morality from a phenomenological, rather than an action-centered approach.  Buddhist philosophers ask us to consider an approach to knowledge that takes for granted the pervasiveness of illusion, rather than our regularly getting things right, and a logic that tolerates contradictions and truth value gaps.

The Vedānta tradition challenges the presumption of subject-object duality. The Jains reject the possibility of authoritative perspectives and present a 7-valuational discussive logic. Nyāyikas defend a radical realism that calls into question the selective approaches to metaphysics that dominate Western speculation.  Indian aestheticians place the ability to evoke mood at the center of their reflection instead of beauty, and take dance as the paradigm art instead of sculpture. The resulting aesthetic theory is profoundly different from anything we see in the West.

Native American traditions present us with radically different approaches to thinking about the relationship of humans to the rest of nature, and often challenge us to see the world as symbolic in senses quite foreign to anything we find in European philosophy. I could go on for quite a while. 

If philosophy really is, as Sellars put it so eloquently, “the attempt to understand how things—in the broadest sense of that term—hang together—in the broadest sense of that term,” if the aim of ethics is, as Aristotle correctly emphasized, “not to know what is good, but to become good,” etc…, it is simply irrational to ignore everything not written in the Eurosphere.  I compare that attitude to deciding that one will only read philosophy published on Tuesdays.  Nothing in our own tradition could justify this.

Stepping outside of our own tradition also allows us to gain greater perspective on where we started. It is hard to see one’s own prejudices and blind spots, hard to call into questions the presuppositions of inquiry that we take for granted, just as it is hard for us to sense the air we breathe or for fish to sense the water in which they swim. But the philosophical enterprise demands that we do just that: philosophy, as both Pyrrho and Plato emphasized, has the responsibility to question everything, including its own methods and foundations.  

This responsibility demands of us that we step outside what we are used to. It is when we encounter traditions in which there is no talk of a will, or of freedom from causality that we see that the common Western presupposition that morality and responsibility presuppose the freedom of the will may not be justified; it is when we encounter rasa theory in Indian aesthetics that we see that the presumption that art aims at beauty may be a mistake; it is when we see many-valuational logics deployed in India and paradox embraced in China that we see that restricting the truth values to two, and insisting on consistency as a condition of cogency might be parochial prejudices. Again, I could go on. The point is that our own intellectual commitment to question our own practice demands that we strive to adopt alternative viewpoints so as to make this questioning possible.  Our own cultural commitments drive us to multicultural practice.

So far I have been emphasizing epistemological imperatives to cross-cultural philosophy. There are also moral imperatives.  The legacy of colonialism is a tendency to presume the intellectual superiority of Western ways of acting, thinking, and organizing society, as well as the tendency to take the West as a default central position, and other cultures as exotic, or different. We see this when we valorize the so-called virtue of tolerance.

The Indian Buddhist philosopher Buddhaghosa helpfully reminds us that every virtue has not only an antinomic vice, but a near enemy, a vice that is dangerous because of its proximity to the virtue, and because it can appear itself to be virtuous, seducing us into a false sense of moral security.  So, for instance, while the virtue of friendship has a far enemy in hostility, it has a near enemy in partiality.  Cosmopolitanism—the virtue I am defending here—has a far vice in parochialism (the vice I am attacking in this essay). But it has a near enemy in tolerance, the attitude in which we support and appreciate others despite the fact—or even because of the fact—that they are weird and exotic. This attitude presupposes our own normalcy, and sets up a view of the world with ourselves at the center.  But it is precisely this view that we must reject. We live on a spherical planet, both literally and metaphorically, and the surface of a sphere has no center.

Undoing the damage of colonialism thus requires the inclusion of multiple voices in the philosophical conversation with genuine respect and open-mindedness as well as the decentering of our own tradition as the fulcrum for that conversation.   Not to do so is to violate our own moral canon that demands respect for persons, per se, and that valorizes the right to speak and to be heard. Not to do so perpetuates an unjustifiable harm and implicates us in that harm in virtue of perpetuating it.  This is why, despite the progress in opening the canon that we have witnessed in the past few years, the champagne cannot yet be opened. Too often, even when we diversify, we do so by adding margins to a heavily weighted center. We are not done until the Western tradition truly looks like one of many in an evenly balanced curriculum, and one of many represented in our professional literature and discussions.  My hope is that oxford public philosophy will move us in this direction.