Challenges for a Globalizing Philosophy and a Globalizing Writer, Composing, 12/07/2018

Back in March, I published a review at SERRC of Bryan Van Norden’s book Taking Back Philosophy. I thought it was a pretty good review, and that Van Norden had written a pretty good book.

It’s a straight-up polemic – a political pamphlet for the university sector. The language is direct, but you can tell how deep the knowledge roiling in the background of this fascinating book goes. Van Norden has some of the most comprehensive knowledge of ancient and contemporary Chinese and other East Asian philosophical works as anyone I've encountered in my professional life.

When there are always too many things to read.

Only my old supervisor Barry Allen has knowledge that rivals Van Norden’s. His two recent books on Chinese philosophy, Vanishing Into Things and Striking Beauty, provide a history of the philosophical vectors of development across Chinese and Indian cultures.

Of course, I say this because I myself haven’t gotten to know very many Asian people who themselves are experts in the history of Asian traditions of philosophy. Or any, really.

My own review offered a few directions to anyone who has any expertise or experience in the Western tradition of philosophy – and no others. I gave a summary of my own knowledge of Asian philosophy, and the ideas in Chinese traditions that offers some crackling synergies with my own work.

The process-focussed ontologies and ethics of Daoist traditions offer a lot of profundity and depth to Western process thinking. Western traditions tend to keep process thinking in a minoritarian, obscured position. So a tradition where process thinking is mainstream and a subject of centuries of commentary can offer Western process thinking a lot.

I’m working now on another review for SERRC, on my colleague Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity. It’s a complex argument on behalf of communitarian approaches to economic, moral, political, and ethical matters.

A Chinese Daoist funeral service. Complex philosophies that have
grown out of thousands of years of culture, intellectual work,
religion, and engagement with the world.

I took a lot of notes on Sassower’s book, so I’ll be rolling through a few of those ideas as riffs on the blog for the next while. This is going to be a bit weird because I haven’t written the actual review yet.

I have the outline, which is based on a bunch of those notes that I took as I was reading the book. So I was of two minds for a while about whether I’d even mention Sassower’s book on the blog at all.

Ultimately, I decided that I would. Two reasons why.

First reason. The review is going to be a unified 2,000-word composition discussing a core concept of Sassower’s book – his communitarian vision of prosperity as a network of friendship.

The blog doesn’t do that. My cousin Hulk Stuart MacLean has described my blog as a profound act of improvisation, like the improvisations he plays with his colleagues as jazz musicians. He’s right. I’ve written blog posts where I haven’t even known where it was going to end, and ended in a totally different place than it began. That’s in less than 500 words.

Second reason. When I was reading The Quest For Prosperity, I had no idea what I was going to write about in this review. So I was taking notes on everything I found interesting as I was reading it. That’s what you’re going to see over the next while. Much more weird than what you’ll see at SERRC in a couple of weeks.

Follow the Causes Not the Office Walls, Research Time, 06/03/2018

There's a particular kind of academic thinker in philosophy departments that holds the discipline back from what it can be. I’m not sure how best to label them.

It would be one of those pithy, insulting but accurate labels. The kind of label that would make you chuckle when you’re reading Nietzsche. In my research circles, there aren’t too many of these people. But if you’ve had any experience in different universities’ philosophy departments, or been to a few disciplinary conferences, you’ll know the type.

The Skull of the Smoking Mirror, representation of the Aztec god
Tezcatlipoca – co-creator of the human world, god of time, and
the embodiment of change through conflict. I suppose you could
call Tezcatlipoca the god of creative destruction.
I could see an eccentric egomaniacal Silicon Valley billionaire
building a shrine to Tezcatlipoca in his home.

I could call them the over-specialist, but it’s connected to a term – specialist – that’s still complimentary. Maybe the disciplinary conservative, but that’s too clunky. Here’s a cheeky word – tell me what you think.

Mirror-skull.

Whenever they think they’re looking outside at the world, they’re actually looking at more of what they already know. Here’s their model action, what best exemplifies the way they think.

A student brings a paper to a Mirror-skull prof for comments. The prof reads it, and among his* comments are stars written next to some footnotes, reference list items, and sources throughout the paper. They’re the places where he’s marked “Not philosophy – Remove”

* While they’re often his, sometimes they’re hers as well. One of the most insufferably (and sadly unexpectedly) such academics I’ve met is a woman.

If a work isn’t part of the academic discipline of philosophy, it isn’t worth including in a philosophy paper. For example. Say I’m writing a paper about Richard Rorty, and I refer to Neil Gross’ excellent philosophical biography of Rorty. It’s a book that threads philosophical exploration of Rorty’s ideas with an argument about how his life circumstances conditioned those ideas.

What would a Mirror-skull say? Cut it all – it isn’t philosophy.

Now, there probably aren’t this many people working in academic philosophy who embody this attitude so intensely. I’ve met a few, but they’re just the purest expression of a tendency that I’m not the only one to highlight. It’s a tendency to fly away from any kind of transversal approach to knowledge.

How can people learn from research when all the new material is
locked away where no one can reach it without paying thousands
in subscriptions or tuition?

The Review and Reply Collective has recently posted some pretty brutal critiques of the state of contemporary university philosophy. Kenneth Westphal has published an artful and artistic fist of rage against a university system that has given itself over to elitism and marginalization.

It’s a complex piece, but if I can summarize the basic message in a sentence or two, it’s like this. It’s utter hypocrisy to position your institutions as the leading edge of human knowledge when original research is so heavily restricted from the general public through the enormous paywalls of academic publishing prices.

Here’s another example. The first in a round of reviews of Taking Back Philosophy by Bryan Van Norden is scheduled to post at the Review and Reply Collective next week. The book is a polemic, following up a gauntlet he threw down in the New York Times a couple of years ago.

Van Norden is an American researcher who specializes in Chinese and Indian philosophy, specifically Confucian and Buddhist strains. He writes comparative philosophy for journals. It’s a very respectable university career.

His book is a call for diversification in philosophy departments, for basically two reasons. The one he concentrates on most is, I think, the least persuasive. That reason: North America is becoming more diverse ethnically and in cultural heritage, so departments must design curriculums to speak to the positions of their students.

I don’t think this is the most persuasive because a major movement of political revanchism in the West today is turning all the power of the state machinery to holding and reversing that diversity growth. There’s nothing inevitable about the diversification and pluralism of Western countries.

Western people can no longer treat the cultures and traditions outside
our lineage as unworthy of attention. Business leaders, politicians,
and activists all understand this. Yet there are still so many in
philosophy departments that remain stuck in their minds that have
become mirror-walled prisons.

His other reason for diversifying the philosophy curriculums of the West is more compelling to me, despite Van Norden’s relative de-emphasis. Our world is globalized. As non-Western economic centres grow in power and influence, we’ll need to study their own philosophical, ideological, moral, and political traditions to deal with people from these regions as competitors, friends, and partners.

Just as a study of Western philosophy can help you understand German, French, English, or US-American cultures, a study of East Asian philosophy can help you understand Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, and Indonesian cultures.

The Review and Reply Collective itself is rooted in the global community of Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science, Social Epistemology and other sub-disciplines that – instead of narrowing their focus – expand and diversify their influences and research bases.

For about a decade now, I’ve understood that breaking through common-sensical disciplinary boundaries improves your knowledge. The causes of real phenomena don’t pay attention to the contingent structures of our university disciplines.

I got to thinking of this reading some old notes on Deleuze and Guattari, about their critique of Jacques Lacan in Anti-Œdipus. They understood how psychological states have their causes and conditions not just in the psychiatric, but in historical, social, and economic processes as well.

It seems common sense to us now, but an academic orthodoxy had fallen across French psychiatry and psychology, stating that mental health had only mental causes. Transversality often breaks with common sense – so much the worse for common sense.

The Dreamtime Is Real Places After All, Research Time, 27/02/2018

I said I wasn't going to talk much about the review I’m working on – for Bryan Van Norden’s polemic, his gauntlet throw-down, pistol-packing, Crip-walking graffiti on the university walls, Taking Back Philosophy. But I am a little bit.

There's one idea that I don’t quite have the room to fit into my review, but that actually converges with some of the research I was doing on Félix Guattari’s thinking. Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist and former colleague of Guattari’s, wrote an essay for The Guattari Effect volume about a disagreement they had over the ontology of the Warlpiri worldview.

The Pleiades, by Alma Nungarrayi

Van Norden’s book is a call to globalize university philosophy in a very literal sense – change the curriculum of degree programs to include thinkers in traditions other than the Western. Van Norden writes about the Chinese and Indian traditions in more detail because he knows them best.

But Indigenous philosophy is one – actually very, very many – traditions that need to be at the philosophical table. I feel lucky in Canada that my country’s universities host brilliant Indigenous thinkers – and that many other philosopher-activists thrive outside that system too.

The Warlpiri are an Indigenous Australian people. We often think of Indigenous Australians as all having one culture, or being one people. Generic Aboriginie. Or as they say less formally – Abos. Or the most awful one – Boong. As in, Bung. Australians call their continent’s Indigenous “Shit-people.” As in “people made of shit.” Literally.

So Australia makes me cry a little, but the Warlpiri ontology is very interesting. See, we typically think of Indigenous Australian spirituality as revolving around Dream Time – the entry into an eternal or literally time-less astral world.

The real concept is much more complicated. Not only are there many distinct Indigenous Australian cultures, languages, spiritualities, religions, and philosophies – even the Warlpiri Dream Time concept is different from this simple popular concept.

Dream Time isn’t a no-space, or an eternal reflection of the ordinary world kept mystically separate. Conceive of it more like a collapse of all space and time – past, present, future, everywhere at once – into a single location. It’s a totemic marking of territory. Northern Australia itself becomes a topographical map of totemically staked places.

Dreamtime Sisters, by Colleen Wallace Nungarrayi

When Glowczewski shared a concept she’d used to understand the Warlpiri totemic experience space with Guattari, he was less than pleased. Instead of attempting to understand the Warlpiri concepts on its own terms, she’d introduced a Western mathematical concept to them, to explain their totemic spaces.

A hypercube. Guattari was worried that Glowczewski’s topological mathematics was erasing the details of the Warlpiri concept. When they discussed and explored Dream Time, their mysticism was integrated with a complex web of ideas and practices, networked together into a multidimensional multiplicity of meanings and manifestations.

They argued over this for a while. But at the same time, the Warlpiri elders that Glowczewski had come to know had their own answer to the dispute.

That's really the best way to find your answer, honestly. When you’re arguing about some complicated philosophical issue in another culture, a thinker of roughly your own skill from that culture is the best to set you on the right course. At the least, they’ll let you know which of you is the most wrong.

It turned out to be Guattari. The Warlpiri elders and shamans were well ahead of Guattari’s own hesitation. I can see where he was coming from – the white person well aware of the eggshell walkways of post-colonial conversations. You don’t want to risk telling an Indigenous person what their worldview is “really about” because that’s exactly the kind of cultural and philosophical erasure they’ve been dealing with for centuries.

Those Warlpiri philosophers had a surprise for Guattari, at least in Glowczewski’s telling. They liked topological mathematics. They liked the hypercube concept. It worked really well to explain some important aspects of their spiritual thinking and its ontological connection with particular places and place in general.

It wasn’t complete, of course. Topological math couldn’t explain everything, but it was a useful tool to put in their own philosophical bundle. They used it well.