The taming of Black thought

Listen to this essay 25 minute listen Who gets to decide what counts as philosophy? You might think that, if philosophers in the Western tradition read more Black and Asian philosophers, they would be more inclusive of other intellectual traditions. The first Black philosophy professor in Scotland, Tommy Curry, has argued that, on the contrary, consumption of minority thinkers could create devastating consequences for many fields of world philosophies, including Africana and Asian philosophy. To explain this point, Curry termed this phenomenon ‘epistemic convergence’ in a series of articles in the 2010s. The idea itself can be traced back to W E B Du Bois’s idea of ‘double consciousness’, Frantz Fanon’s ‘sociogeny’, Huey Newton’s term ‘reactionary’, Steve Biko’s ‘Black consciousness’, and Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of the ‘sociogenic principle’, to name but a few similar concepts. In line with this radical Black tradition, Curry argues that white academia has managed to integrate the same list of Black thinkers, not to critically challenge its traditional concept of humanity that has marginalised these thinkers, but rather to integrate them into the larger narrative that continues to justify and sustain its legitimacy. This creates the ‘interrogationist milieu’, where the historical works of people of African descent are constantly measured by the standards of white academia and, especially, in relation to its liberal ideology. They’re slotted into pre-existing narratives. Their radical challenge to any white-supremacist elements of the establishment is carefully redacted, revised, and integrated into the continuation of what we think of as the ‘proper’ form of philosophical thought in the history of Western philosophy. Their language – regardless of the fact that this language itself was, in many cases, forced upon them to speak about their lived experience in the process of describing their racialised (non-)being – is also paraphrased to avoid perceived offence (by, for example, not using the now archaic technical term ‘Negro’, which carried different connotations in the 1960s), softened through white analogy, or removed. This, Curry argues, creates a ‘methodological and derelictical crisis’ in our study of Black thought. We could spend pages on each of the Black thinkers I’ve mentioned and their analyses of racism, but we can see the essence of what they were trying to say in an early article of Curry’s titled ‘On Derelict and Method’ (2011). Curry argued that the recent rise of liberalism in the modern academy has allowed us to examine and cite the works of Africana philosophy insofar as they highlight the ‘inadequacies of traditional European thought’. Africana philosophy, in other words, has begun to enjoy increasing validation for its critique of the Anglo-European past. But, because it comes with tacit prejudices deeply rooted in the very tradition it criticises, which still dictates the terms of what counts as philosophical discussions, the whole process of integrating Black thinkers into the traditionally white/Western-style academy ends up validating what European philosophy thinks of as the proper form of being human (or any other major conceptions in philosophy). In other words, by reading the works of Black thinkers, our faith in the white establishment and white philosophy paradoxically increases, and the potential impact of radical philosophy is softened and turned into a kind of ‘racial therapy’ for Western philosophers. Curry suggests that we can detect this ‘European anthropological order of humanity’ in two mutually influential processes. On the one hand, we will try to avoid and soften the racist views of our past masters: Aristotle’s views on women and children; David Hume’s notorious racist footnote (and essay) about people of African descent and beyond; Immanuel Kant, G W F Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, too, all said terrible things about non-Western philosophies and their people. But we skip right over these sections as secondary to the primary importance of their rigorous philosophical thinking, regardless of the fact that these passages historically discouraged Western and Westernising people from taking non-Western philosophies and their (own) people seriously. None of these non-Western philosophers were encouraged to think about their philosophy on its own terms when reading Western philosophy. On the other hand, Africana thinkers who seriously challenged the dominant Western conception of what it means to be human or how to do philosophy are accommodated in our academic discussion in such a way that we continue this process of validating the white masters, and carry on doing philosophy in much the same way as those white masters did. It’s business as usual, and the non-Western-philosophy component gives some pretty ‘colours’ to the curriculum. Du Bois is read as the Black Hegel, and Fanon as a Black Sartre, says Curry – and I would add that Wynter is also read as a Black Beauvoir (or as a fraction of Black feminism that works in tandem with second-wave feminism). Our contemporary study of Black thinkers is conducted by a great number of white(-masked) scholars, who do not specialise in the radical Black tradition, and end up unwittingly supporting the status quo. This validation process of Black thinkers, one that removes their sting, does not articulate the totality of their lived experience, but instead incorporates them as novelties in the Eurocentric canon of philosophy. It’s highly selective. They become novelties that somehow both compensate for and justify our profound faith in the correctness of the European intellectual tradition. This intellectual integration also makes the principle of ‘how much of the content can inspire white intellectuals’ the basic condition of what we are allowed to study as Black thinking in the academy. We want to read the parts of Black philosophy that help us critique and improve our interpretations of white thinkers, but omit the parts that call for a complete overhaul of the Eurocentric philosophical tradition. How do we detect this ‘whitewashing’ in Du Boisian terms, what Fanon dubbed the ‘lactification’ of Black geniuses? Curry argues that we can see a ‘humanist inclination’ where we maintain the history of European philosophy as something that has always been the foundation of our contemporary, inclusive conception of humanity. Western philosophers, in other words, expect Black thinkers to be more or less the same as white liberals. They have to be peaceful and less antagonistic than some of their contemporaries, and they have to be willing to work with the history of white philosophers. We also expect Black thinkers not to have their own genealogy of original ideas. Just as we had to invent the new ‘race’ of Hamite to retain Black pharaohs as a (derivative) part of white humanity, Black philosophical thought was supposed not to exist apart from the history of European thought in its own right. Western philosophers inherit this tendency, in our present, by supposing that Black thinkers must be always read as if in dialogue with what is happening in white philosophy. We can read Du Bois’s double consciousness as something we can solve through Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic. Fanon’s idea of new humanism is almost always interpreted in consonance with European existentialism or postcolonial theories, for instance. Any Black thought that makes it on to the curriculum in the European academy has to be deradicalised and made tame enough for white consumption. This is particularly the case when the instructors, including myself (even though I was educated in both the non-Western and Western academy), do not represent Black perspectives through our lived experience. I am Japanese, not a Black African. The Anglo-Europeans delight in uncovering Indian thinkers who independently arrived at conclusions very similar to their own The net result of this contracted and safe study of Africana philosophy is that Black thinkers are always portrayed as serving the universalisation project of post-Enlightenment European philosophy. This is how Black thinkers become enslaved to the white academy and get presented as unthreatening to the domination of the European philosophical tradition. Even at its best, this way of approaching non-Western philosophy involves a failure to understand Africana thinkers as emerging from their own highly specific historical, cultural and linguistic contexts. This insight is certainly relevant to other colonial contexts too, including Asian philosophies. The Indian philosopher Vrinda Dalmiya, for instance, has described this colonial tendency of Anglo-European philosophy as the ‘“we have it too” approach’. The Anglo-Europeans delight in uncovering Indian thinkers who independently arrived at conclusions very similar to their own. But this delight hardly ever arrives at the fundamental critique of their own way of doing philosophy or acknowledging the possibility that contemporary Indian intellectuals had a better way of understanding their world and place within it. This simply comes from the self-referential model of Western thinking, which abstracts a culturally particular perspective of Europe as the universal model. Here, we assume that every possible particular cultural framework of thinking is reducible to this universal model, and that it makes sense for us to project our frameworks for thinking on to the traditions we find in other cultures. For instance, Asian histories exist like a massive multiverse vis-à-vis the Judaeo-Christian conception of history. When intellectuals in Asia look back on their intellectual traditions, they do not conceive of just a single chronological line of history that is divided by BC/AD, or BCE/CE, (namely, a previously religious imagination of human history), within which every other Asian intellectual tradition exists; instead, each of them has their own conception of history that does not look like the Western counterpart. This is the reason why it’s very important for an Asian philosophy specialist to know the complex genealogy of ‘dynasties’ and their conceptions of history. It is quite natural for those of us in Asia to think about how multiple religious traditions, and their various conceptions of histories, always belong to a specific place and time. In Japan, alone, we have to think about the histories of Shintoism, Confucianism and Buddhism along with geopolitical history when we consider any of the long list of philosophers who belong to the Japanese intellectual tradition. If we focus on one intellectual tradition, that of Buddhism, to make sense of philosophical thought within Buddhism, we must at least study a complex range of historical periods that belong to India, China, Korea and Japan, and the various Buddhist schools of thought that emerged within these different regions. Most importantly, this pluralistic model of Buddhist philosophy cannot represent the entirety of Japanese or Korean or Chinese philosophy. Nor can it be better than the other traditions as a completely separate system of thought. What we witness in the rest of the world does not very much affect the way we talk about philosophy However, European philosophy tends to ground the foundation of all possible ways of thinking through its projection of what it thinks of as the proper way to think. Africana and Asian thinkers refer to this as the western cogito, namely the ‘I think’ of René Descartes’s axiom ‘I think, therefore I am.’ As Africana and Asian thinkers often point out, this general concept of ‘I think’ presents a universal model of philosophical thinking, imbued with a tendency to argue that the ways Europeans think are the best way to think about the world and ourselves. It presents a singular model of subjectivity that is supposedly shared by everyone, but which only makes sense to those who have subscribed to the Judaeo-Christian conception of the world, (white) humans and their linear conception of history. It was also backed by the ethnographical assumption that whites are better than non-whites, a scientific viewpoint justifying slavery and colonialism. Obviously, with this mindset and consciousness of history, Anglo-European philosophy was presumed (by European thinkers) to be the best form of thinking, and the rest of the world’s civilisations and uncivilised savages should only learn from them as the most civilised, European(-nised) thinkers. Enrique Dussel, in Latin American philosophy, called this expansion or self-inflation of the Western cogito ‘mercantile philosophy’ in his book Philosophy of Liberation (1977). Many specialists of non-Western philosophy, including Bryan Van Norden and Jay Garfield, argue that we can find overwhelming evidence of this among specialists of Western philosophy. Mercantilism is a business arrangement whereby we sell our products to other countries in such a way that there is no reciprocal benefit from this exchange. We sell them goods for the sole purpose of making a profit. That is, to dominate their market while we buy nothing from where we drop our merchandise. Dussel is saying that we do the same with Western philosophical ideas, especially when assuming that the way we do philosophy here in Europe should apply to everyone in the rest of the majority world. This is the reason why, he says, Indigenous philosophy has been marginalised in the Americas. This is actually a common assumption in higher education in the United Kingdom. The UK Department for Education, for instance, is facing the crisis of dealing with the cost of running universities while the number of international student enrolments declines. Even assuming that this was not about reducing net migration, the moment we closed the door to international students (whose exorbitant tuition fees are definitely a financial backbone of our institutions), we immediately came up with the idea of exporting our education to other countries. This assumes that our education in the UK must be good enough to compete with other universities in their own regions, some of which have been both financially and academically successful for more than a century. (But who wants to go to UK universities that are not in the UK? There are more than 130 universities in Tokyo, alone. Some of them have been there for more than a century. How can UK universities possibly compete with them?) The same inflationary self-assessment is present in our practice of Western philosophy because a lot of us in our profession almost automatically think that everyone should buy Anglo-European ideas, but that there is nothing worth conceptually buying from the rest of the world. Through pursuing this one-way transaction of Western ideas, we end up fostering the shared bias that we should be able to find everything we need to know about the world and ourselves in the history of Western philosophy. This is the reason why many philosophers do not think they need to learn about the world and ourselves through the exterior and polemic lens of non-Western philosophies in Africa or Asia or any other parts of the Global South. We just go there to talk about Western philosophy that is to be appreciated. But what we witness in the rest of the world does not very much affect the way we talk about philosophy. When facing the vast ocean of world philosophies, the European colonial attitude was to assume that there would be nothing to be learned from the ‘natives’ and that, instead, they would have to be civilised through European ways of thinking. The Indian philosopher Daya Krishna argues that this problematic attitude towards any other intellectual traditions has survived in the form of a ‘theological hangover’ in the field of academic philosophy, and he further identifies it as a negative legacy of British colonialism in the Indian academy. Indian philosophy tries to mirror the best of European philosophy and presents its own tradition as unworthy of serious philosophical engagement. Most philosophers in India, in other words, study Western philosophy as the pinnacle of human thinking, but this perspective negatively influences their views on their own precolonial intellectual tradition as something obsolete and mystical. Curry takes a step further in his analysis of this cross-cultural and racial problem when he writes: What counts as knowledge is determined not to the extent that it accurately depicts the set of relations in the world, but to the extent that it takes up an ideological perspective from which the world is to be viewed. This argument does not necessitate that Black thought derives from European thinkers, but maintains that in order for Black thought to gain a philosophical status, it must be describable by any established European philosophical stream of thought. What is required is creating a clearing for Africana or Asian philosophy’s self-determination among intellectual traditions If we establish the ‘higher anthropological order’ of what it is like to think like a rational human being, and model it after the history of European philosophy, we are denied the possibility of talking about any other areas of world philosophies such as the long history of anatman, or ‘no-self’, in the Buddhist tradition, which usually gets a mention only when considering Hume’s experiment in introspection, or Derek Parfit’s Buddhist-like tendencies in Reasons and Persons (1984). This is less of a problem for Asian philosophers. Whether or not academics in Europe come to understand the importance of Confucianism, Daoism or Buddhism does not threaten our intellectual traditions. But we must be mindful of the fact that the situation is much more dire and hostile for African-descended thinkers, as well as for some Asian intellectual traditions that went through a devastating period of colonialism. As Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the internal sanction system, built on the ‘psycho-existential complex’, pours insecurity into the racialised subject and their communities, thereby making it impossible for them to talk about their self and world in their own terms. Even to talk about what is happening in their lives as their experience is denied. Then, the target of Curry’s criticism in ‘epistemic convergence’ cannot be just presenting a purely conceptual puzzle but calling for an existential awareness that reading Africana philosophers with an Anglo-European gaze commits what Fanon diagnosed as a major problem among ‘all colonised people’. Fanon says that they are ‘people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave’. This means that the more Africana and non-Western philosophical texts we read with this reductive, colonial reading of epistemic convergence, the less respectful or knowledgeable we become of them. Why insist that world philosophies specialists talk about the actual historical genesis of concepts developed among Africana or Asian thinkers in relation to their social, historical, linguistic and existential conditions? The answer is that understanding these thinkers’ worlds and ideas on their own terms is part of a wider battle against structural racism, a racism that constantly aims at distorting Indigenous thinkers and glorifying Anglo-European approaches. What is required to call out a sort of intellectual enslavement in this assimilative phenomenon is to conduct an ‘intellectual genealogy’, which aims at nothing but the two-fold process of checking the academic propensity towards epistemic convergence, and of creating a clearing for Africana or Asian philosophy’s self-determination among intellectual traditions. What can we do to build our cultural and methodological sensitivities for reading majority-world thinkers? How can we stem this phenomenon of epistemic convergence that is assimilating and homogenising much of non-Western thought? First, we should recognise that we may be part of the problem. We should not exempt ourselves from the possibility that we are aiding structural racism, and making it difficult for those who work on thinkers from marginalised traditions. The Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire wrote in his essay Discourse on Colonialism (1955) that Hitler wasn’t just the biggest enemy of humanism, but that his legacy lives on with the most respected humanist, the French writer Jules Romains, and his associate anthropologists and philosophers. These intellectuals presented themselves as defenders of humanism by criticising the atrocity of the German occupation and the Holocaust during the Second World War, but their views on African people and cultures were very much in line with Hitler’s. Instead of pointing our fingers at the darkest hours of modern history as something other than ourselves, Césaire’s suggestion is to recognise within each of us our self-centeredness and a hint of dangerous ideology, despite our seemingly benign humanist inclinations. It would be a great idea for a philosophy student to spend one year reading just Black thinkers When we embrace non-Western philosophical traditions, we should check if our friendliness is not motivated by our desire to validate ourselves as a part of the system that, nevertheless, continues to marginalise and dehumanise non-Western people despite a rhetoric of inclusivity. This is what Biko meant when he said the problem was not just conservative racists but the liberals who dictated the ways in which Black students could fight against racism for their self-determination in South Africa. They were effectively told to stay back in line and wait for history to choose their fate, rather than to take up arms to defend their dignity and respect. Given the current make-up of academia in Europe, which the philosopher Leonard Harris once characterised, in the 1990s, as predominantly upper-middle-class whites, embracing the same ideological aspirations as the Ku Klux Klan, it might be a good mental exercise to analyse our methodology and motivations when we talk about world philosophies. Good intentions are not enough. Second, we should spend more time with Black and Asian thinkers. I studied European philosophy for eight years in English as my second language. If you asked me to teach a course on it including any thinkers from Plato to Heidegger (in continental style), I could. I am also comfortable talking about any of them without culturally appropriating them. What allowed me to achieve this competence is the time I spent with their works and talking with many people whose intellectual development took place within this tradition. I think it would be a great idea for a philosophy student to spend one year reading just Black thinkers or any other subfields of world philosophies. (If possible, I’d also recommend them to travel to the lands in which these thinkers lived and are revered as a part of their intellectual canon.) I often recommend my students to go to a bookstore in Edinburgh, Scotland, that sells the works of only women writers. This curated space gives more room for minority writers and does something to our consciousness. In the same way, if you built a small bookshelf and spent one year filling it with books by Africana thinkers and writers, you would begin to hear their voices more clearly and might feel less tempted to read them solely as an instrument for advancing analytic or continental approaches to philosophy. Lastly, I think we should make more effort learning languages. It is unthinkable for a specialist of French philosophy in Japan not to be fluent in French. A well-respected scholar would translate dozens of books from French into Japanese and, in addition to their books and articles in Japanese, they would try to publish some articles in French. There is an imbalance between non-Western scholarly diligence over their knowledge of the West when compared with their Western counterparts studying Eastern philosophy. Western academics writing about non-Western philosophies should at least show a willingness to learn and consult the original when reading its translation. We ask students to know some Greek and Latin when studying Plato or Thomas Aquinas; we should be more open to the history and the language that describes the thinkers in reference to the target subfield of world philosophies. Epistemic convergence is a kind of unconscious assimilation of Western-like thinking into the broader canon, combined with a corresponding turning away from those elements that don’t fit neatly into a pre-existing framework. It’s time to think harder about what we do when we think about world philosophies. Turning non-Western thinkers into tame versions of ourselves is a kind of intellectual colonialism that we need to get beyond.