Philosophy and Orientalism
In the comments section of a previous post of mine, Amarilla wrote:
About your statement: I have never been (and never harboured sympathy for) someone inclined to hippie-like celebrations of ‘eastern wisdom’ (the most repellent form of orientalism)
I’ve run into this anti-orientalism before recently and while I suppose it reacts to a certain superficiality about “eastern wisdom” I’m suspicious of the dismissive attitude I’ve noticed among philosphy bloggers towards those who appreciate eastern traditions. Are proponents of this attitude saying that it’s inauthentic for a westerner to become a Buddhist or Taoist? Was Emerson a douchebag when he had Hafiz translated into English? Isn’t there a hint of cultural miscegation in this occidental anti-orientalism? Is there something wrong with appreciating diverse traditions, not simpely because of the exoticism and novelty but because something beautiful is being offered? Help here. Most likely I have it all wrong.
Funny, the last person who I came across launching accusations of orientalism at another philospher just set sail for Thailand. Good for him. Mix it up.
I promised the detailed answer this question requires, as it touches themes that are dear to me, so here we go.
The issue at stake is to be able to approach non-Western philosophy avoiding both kind of Orientalism: the ‘romantic’ one that idealizes the ‘intellectual beauty’, the ‘gracious wisdom’ and serenity of these systems and the ‘rationalist’ one on the other, which –after having ascertained the excessive connivance of these systems with concerns of a ‘religious’ nature– dismisses them as uninteresting for serious philosophy.
Why is this so hard to do in the first place? The reasons are historical.
First reason: the 19th-century orientalists (those scholars that called themselves so) in the Anglophone tradition that studied and translated texts into European languages were rarely philosophers (this was not the case with German scholars who adopted a more romantic form of orientalism): until very recently someone dealing with, say, Chinese philosophy in a University was primarily a historian and a philologist, and did not, therefore, approach these texts qua philosophical texts to be brought into dialogue with western thought. Comparisons were frequent (Nagarjuna is a good example, who, in the history of secondary literature, has been compared with thinkers and currents as different from each other as Kant, Kant again, Wittgenstein , Pragmatism, and Derrida) but work of good comparative philosophy has been lacking.
Second, many of those ‘native informants’ that since the late 1800s started to bring their traditions to the West (as in the case of the famous first Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893 — note, of religions, not of philosophies), have often done so according to a precise political agenda, coming mostly from countries under colonial rule and desiring to –at the same time– package their tradition in a way that would be comprehensible and acceptable by the Westerners and to present it as a noble carrier of a meaning and wisdom that the West lacked, hence accepting the role of ‘eastern sages’ as a weapon in the struggle against political subalternity (see for example the whole ‘Buddhism is congruent with [quantum] physics’ issue, which arose between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the same period when quantum physics was dawning and taking over the classical picture. For an acutely skeptical take on this topic see Lopez’s excellent recent book, and on the general modernization of Buddhism see McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism). Alternatively, others desired to promote and, in the same movement, renew a philosophical tradition because of ideological reasons of nationalistic pride and reform, as in the case of D.T.Suzuki, perhaps the greatest popularizer of Zen in the west, and whose work effectively caused the whole fusion between the Beat Generation and Eastern Wisdom (for a sharp critical assessment of Suzuki’s work and political agenda, check out a dedicated chapter in Bernard Faure‘s Chan Insights and Oversights)
Third: that pervasive presupposition that only the West had operated an efficient division between theology and philosophy, so that only in the West (as opposed to ‘eastern’ countries) rational speculation was decoupled from ‘religious’ concerns, such as soteriological ones (to what degree this is actually the case, is an excellent question, and one that I intend to try and answer using Latour in a near future). How many departments of Philosophy in the West have experts in –say– Indian Philosophy? Not so many at all. If you were looking for someone like that, you’d look in a department of Study of Religions. (Here, another question could be ‘so are “religious” themes universal?’ I have spent some time on this issue, and that will also come back to it in my paper on Latour/Philosophy/Religion).
So what is the situation now? There are a small number of scholars that are engaged in proper comparative work (that is, not merely exegetical, but aimed at bringing non-western systems to bear a relevance on contemporary western philosophy) notably Mark Siderits (with his insistence on the analytic tradition, a great primer on Buddhist Philosophy for an analytically minded philosopher is this one), the aforementioned Bernard Faure (see in particular this book) and Jay Garfield (whose work of translation and interpretation is aimed at injecting classical Sanskrit and Tibetan texts with a terminology familiar to Western philosophers, without doing violence to the text itself. His translation and comment to Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamikakarika is just fantastic). Also, let me mention the wonderful work that the logician Graham Priest did with Garfield on Nagarjuna’s paradoxes, in the last chapter of this neat book of his. And there are some others (Robert Magliola) that keep uttering complete nonsense like ‘without Derrida it is difficult for a “moderner” to understand Nagarjuna!’. These are all Westerners (I don’t even try to touch here the issue of the representation of non-western scholars in the academia) that, mostly, started by studying the Eastern traditions and who are now attempting the extremely delicate task of bringing them into contemporary philosophical debate, avoiding the two orientalisms that I mentioned above. It is a recent enterprise, not more than 30 or 40 years old, and so it is only natural that we are only at a larval stage.
What is almost completely lacking –as indeed Amarilla noted– is the will (or even interest perhaps) from American and European philosophers (analytics and continentals alike) to engage with non-western thought. To confront the arguments of a Greek philosopher who lived 2500 years ago is ok (because he ostensibly belongs to our ‘own’ tradition), but to read and comment a Nagarjuna, a Dignaga or a Dogen would, to be a bit brutal, slightly ridiculous. Imagine Badiou (just to name a very popular thinker nowadays) publishing, next year, a book either dedicated to (like the St.Paul one), –or even only partially dealing with– a Chinese or Tibetan 6th-century logician, or metaphysician. Most people would start thinking of the guy having become senile, or jumping on the ‘spiritual’ bandwagon. These are prejudices that are hard to erase. And even to plan a way to do so, one fully conscious of the implicit political meaning of this work of cultural translation (which after Said’s work and after postcolonial theory we just cannot ignore), is a difficult enterprise.
I am not sure if I have fully answered the question, but I think that the issue of finding a dimension for ‘comparative philosophy’ in today’s academia is historically complex, intellectually problematic and politically delicate. And yet (or, for this very reasons) extremely timely and important.
Fabio Cunctator
Very well said, Fabio.
Thanks Ben
Really excellent post, Fabio. I confess that I’m probably an example of the type Amarilla is referring to. I often have an almost reflexive reaction of hostility to evocations of Eastern thought, and I’ve had to engage in some de-programming to begin overcoming this. Part of this, I think, is the result of the influence of Zizek in some of my earlier thinking. He has some really harsh things to say about “Eastern thought” (as if it can be generalized in this way). However, more substantially, this reaction arises from the context in which I most commonly encounter Eastern thought: Within the framework of New Age ideologies. And here, I hasten to add, I think this New Age mentality is itself a form of Orientalism. The reason my reaction to these sorts of evocations is so visceral is that inevitably they’re followed by a narrative about how Western rationality is responsible for all the woes of the world and how Eastern forms of thought, with their de-emphasis of the subject and their emphasis on harmony somehow avoid all these things. Apart from the fact that I just don’t think this does justice to Eastern thought (nor the complexity of Western thought and how varied its positions are), it’s impossible to have a genuine philosophical discussion or engagement when things are framed in this way. This is an ideology, not a philosophical position. It’s a myth or narrative. For a real discussion to take place, Eastern thought must be treated as one set of positions making claims and arguments, etc., among others. And, of course, books like The Tao of Physics don’t help matters.
Thanks Levi,
I’d say that the two things you identify are related: the ‘east’ is identified with this realm of rarefied harmonious spirituality and
therefore we shouldn’t even look for sound and rigorous philosophical arguments, because that’s evil western rationality.
Then again, to avoid this cannot just mean to assimilate ‘eastern philosophy’ to western philosophical categories either since, first, it is just another form of orientalism and second, as you say, complexity and hybridity (and here Latour would kick in) should be retained and acknowleged, starting from our own tradition, measuring how much this tradition is really so transparent to us.
Again, it is a really hard thing to do. Part of what I would like to do with my own thesis is precisely to look into this problem and try to make it relevant somehow, together with a new look at the issue of the universality of scientific rationality, one that moves past the tired ‘science wars’ opposition between postmodern ‘standpointism’ and scientific triumphalism. Again, Latour and irreductions could come in handy, just as Meillassoux’s rejction of both ‘fideistic’ and ‘totalizing’ absolutes. And at the back of it all, the mericless political question of how to actualize this exchange without making it a one-way exchange which reactivates some form of subalternity. Which, I guess, is one of the reasons why I got interested in the ‘democracy of objects’ and its ethico-political falllout.
Anyway: did you have something particular in mind regarding Zizek? I’d be interested to know more about those claims of his.
Fabio,
This is exactly right:
Here I can’t resist bringing up Deleuze’s concept of becoming. For Deleuze becoming takes place when actors enter into a relation with one another. The key point is that becoming is never imitation, but rather both terms of the relation are changed in the relation of becoming. D&G give a nice example of this, if I recall, in their chapter on “Becoming-Animal” in A Thousand Plateaus. There they talk about the man engaged in a “becoming-dog”. As he conjugates his body with dog-body he encounters all sorts of problems that involve the production of something new. For example, do you wear shoes on your hands? Okay, I know that’s silly, but the point holds. The critical resources of Eastern thought need to be brought to bear on Western thought, producing some new third thing that is neither Eastern or Western thought. The two don’t remain the same.
Part of my visceral reaction to New Age appropriations to Eastern thought is just that I sense that these appropriations know too much in advance. They already know all the conclusions they’re going to find or arrive at, the narrative is locked in place. The situation is similar with hyper-skeptics. The paradox of hyper-skepticism is that it is not a skepticism at all, but that it resides in the purported knowledge that all is opinion and no knowledge is possible, and therefore the revolutionary power of skepticism loses its dynamic edge and becomes fixated and stagnant. So oddly, maybe the question is “what would a ‘critical Eastern philosophy’ look like?” Or “what would Eastern philosophy that isn’t commodified and turned into a brand name look like?” And oddly enough, my first mentor in grad school was actually a scholar of Chinese thought, so I had to learn much of this for his classes that I was assisting and teaching. He had a good take that didn’t at all fit the bill of what I’m ranting about (though he was a Confucian primarily).
As for Zizek, you’ll find these ugly analyses during his hard Christian period, beginning, as I recall, with On Belief. Basically he reduces all Eastern thought to New Age variants of Zen Buddhism (in particular Suzuki), reducing it all to the perfect capitalist ideology. At the time, and this was about seven years ago so I feel somewhat redeemed!, I was all worked up on the Pauline Marxist kick that was coming out of Zizek and Badiou and so found these critiques of Eastern mysticism attractive. I’m rather ashamed of that now.
Great, necessary recommendations.
When we disdain things labeled as new age or orientalist, aren’t we contemptful of some kind of display of escapist self indulgence? What’s at the root of this? Maybe a recognition the self indulgence is a rejection of the hard work we intuitively know we have to do, intellectually, spiritually, to reclaim our garbage, whatever that involves. (Drawing form Zizek) There’s no easy transcendence.
Fabio, thanks for this wonderful post and also the recommendations.
Amarillo,
That’s a really terrific way of putting it. There’s a sort of paradox at the heart of these new age ideologies. On the one hand they denounce the world for its lack of harmony and balance, claiming that if only we recognized that the world is a “cybernetic machine” of harmonious interrelationships that balance themselves out, we wouldn’t have this strife, conflict, and exploitation of each other and nature. On the other hand, it makes the ontological claim that the world is already harmonious and balanced, as if now work were required to achieve these ends. As such, it gives itself in advance (harmony and balance) what is the very object of conflict, generating a sort of cavalier attitude towards real exploitation, real and irreducible antagonisms, and all the rest. When I evoke the idea of real antagonisms I’m referring to something like a conflict between wealthy industrialists and workers. Their conflict is not simply a failure to understand harmony and that we’re all connected. There is a real conflict of interests that can’t simply be metaphysically conjured away by appeals to the wisdom of nature as a self-regulating cybernetic machine tending towards balance. Really excellent and clear way of putting things, Amarilla. This puts your finger on a dis-ease that I’ve been trying very hard to articulate.
Harmony as you speak of it here seems to embody a hope to attain stasis and avoid being affected by the real, and what might seem like an attempt to find harmony with reality might actually be a wish to gain power over it, I kind of armoring against the absolute, instead of learning to enjoy its acts of friction and demands for expansion.
@ Amarilla – Well thank you for the patience. I knew I had to answer to that but I postponed it for quite some time.
I’ve just remembered an excellent vivisection of the New Age performed by Shiva Naipaul in ‘Black and White’ (1980: published in the USA as ‘Journey to Nowhere’), an attempt towards an analysis of the Jonestown murders. Pretty much concludes that the New Age is about how it’s all about Me and the delusion, solipsism, manipulation, heart-rending gullibility and greed that that implies.
In Jonestown and similarly in James Ray’s Sweatlodge the naive sought easy answers and abdicated responsibility, gave up their power to a charismatic. Odysseus tied himself to the mast so he wouldn’t fall for such enchantment.
Interesting post Fabio, I must say that these issues are rather close to my heart for a number of reasons. First, I happen to teach in a study of religions department that has fairly recently developed a philosophy programme. This programme is the creation of a small number of staff and has a rather distinctive flavour or brand (for want of a better word). Specifically, we offer a programme that is equally balanced between Western and Eastern philosophical approaches. While I am an analytic philosopher by training, albeit one who reads rather a lot of Continental and Daoist material too, four of my colleagues tend to be interested in Buddhist, Hindu, Jaina and Chinese philosophies. Consequently, our philosophy students encounter a broad mix of philosophical schools and traditions from across the globe. It would be difficult to summarise or generalise how the students deal with this – there is probably a follow up study required. They do, though, quickly discover that Eastern philosophies are just as systematic as their Western counterparts, albeit sometimes possessing different organising aims and values that can be difficult for some to understand or take seriously (e.g. philosophy as praxis or as lived is a poor comparison or translation for an emphasis that can have a notion of liberation driving or entwined with its epistemological and metaphysical frameworks). Positively, I think our students pretty soon discover that Simon Critchley’s telling phrase ‘Philosophy speaks Greek and only Greek’ is simply wrong.
Second, on another point, the blurring or conflating of New Age with Eastern philosophy is understandable; eastern thought, in many of its forms, is indeed one of the elements that was appropriated and commodified by the fuzzy cultural/religious phenomenon called the New Age movement. However, this would be a very long list of elements indeed, including everything from theories of Atlantis and Lemuria, through Western esoterica, Gnosticism, occultism, quantum theory, Theosophy, transpersonal psychology to UFOlogy. I would prefer to view New Age as simply part of what Charles Taylor termed the ‘massive subjective turn of western culture’ – in Paul Heelas’ terminology New Age is a ‘Self-Spirituality’ – and, in agreement with Michael York, I would suggest that the New Age has from the 1980s/90s onwards simply gone mainstream. It is here to stay. Simply look at how the size of the Mind-Body-Spirit section in your local bookshops dwarfs the Philosophy and Religion sections. For all those who think it is fine to partake of some acupuncture for a bad back one day, practice some meditation for relaxation on another, glance at their horoscope in the morning and/or might decide to arrange their office space with Feng shui principles, they are New Age already.
I am certainly with you in so far as I think there can be a valuable dialogue between Western and Eastern philosophies, albeit with a clear understanding of the translations and transformations that are entailed within such a conversation. It just makes me angry, and sometimes despondent, when the major philosophical divide is characterised as an Anglo-American analytic versus Continental one and the rest of the world is simply erased. I think your two types of Orientalism (‘romantic’ and ‘rationalist’) are cogent, and our second year core module in Eastern philosophy takes some time to deal with both of these problems. However, I find the dismissal or silencing of the East – or, more expansively, the rest of the world – a bigger problem.
Finally, identifying Eastern philosophy as too ‘fluffy/new agey’ and/or too ‘religious’ is an unwelcome bias, non-philosophical, typically pejorative and ought to be avoided. Only familiarity should generate such contempt and treatment. That said, though, I also do not think that the term ‘new age’ should be used in a knee-jerk or conversation finishing manner either. The term may be code for an eclectic mix of ideas, but incoherence does not follow necessarily from this. For those who like the language of memes or Latourian alliances, the ‘new age’ is a breeding ground for both. Do not assume there is nothing of intellectual value or strength swimming and spawning in this particular pool.
[...] I argued before, it is ok to discuss with Aristotle or Kant, and with their language, while it seems less ok to [...]
To Keep it Real, or Paul Ennis interviewed. « Hyper tiling said this on February 17, 2010 at 3:33 pm |
Lovely post. You point to some interesting biases that are indeed rooted in the 19th century, but probably weren’t as consequential in their own time. After all, the late 19th century was characterized by an “occult” revival that relied on the first serious meeting of east and west, philosophically and religiously speaking. Maybe rediscovering aspects of this is the only way western philosophy will thrive in a global setting. But the criticisms are swift and deep, as you say. Not sure what the future holds here, but it may be an important direction. A necessary dialectic between civilizations. Something that forces westerners to reconsider the easy dualities of romantic/rationalist, etc…
Like larval subjects, my interest in animism, vitalism, romanticism, and esotericism makes me fully guilty of “mixing mediums”, and probably suffering disdain from “serious” philosophical minds in the bargain. This isn’t so serious since, well, I’m not that serious, and more historian that philosopher. But I think if we are to understand philosophy in the west since the mid-19th century, we need to acknowledge the way eastern traditions have filtered into western thought.
It is less peripheral than many imagine…