That much-ballyhooed crisis in the humanities? Maybe it’s not what humanities professors usually whine about—the decline of institutional support for their disciplines, the shunning of their majors by students from Generation Smartphone.
Maybe the real crisis lies in ossified canons and syllabi that ignore globalization and the engagement with everyday life expected by today’s undergraduate. Force her to read Chaucer, or sentence her to gobs of Hobbes and his archaic diction, and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for self-inflicted extinction.
A particular weakness of many humanities canons remains their scant or nonexistent attention to material outside of Europe and North America, their historical dismissal of South Asian, East Asian, and African achievement due to ignorance and condescending Orientalism. Although philosophy is probably the worst among humanities disciplines in this respect, it’s hardly alone.
History and literature departments have done the best job of updating their canons and recognizing classic works outside of Europe and North America, but as pointed out by the University of Leuven scholar Theo D’haen, editor in chief of the European Review, the story of scholarship in history and world literature reveals some absurd yet influential attitudes.
Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830
By Peter K.J. Park State University of New York Press)
In The History of British India (1817-36), D’haen notes, James Mill observed that India possessed only legends, and was “perfectly destitute of historical records.” Around the same time, no less than Thomas Macaulay opined that “a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
Similarly, D’haen has written, the first book in English about world literature as an academic subject, Richard Green Moulton’s World Literature and Its Place in General Culture (1911), included some Middle Eastern texts, but completely excluded Chinese and Japanese literature. By 1940, the Stanford literary scholar Albert Guérard, in his Preface to World Literature, acknowledged that the East was “woefully underrepresented” in the canon. Fortunately, in recent years, such standard texts as The Norton Anthology of World Literature and The Longman Anthology of World Literature have redressed the imbalance.
Now, finally, we have an excellent account of a parallel ugly history: the exclusion of Asian and African texts from the canon of world philosophy. In Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830, Peter K.J. Park, an associate professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, expertly recounts the radical change, in 18th- and early-19th-century Germany, that took place in understanding philosophy and its history. It was a shift that powerfully affected the future of both.
Park shows how Christoph Meiners (1747-1810), a philosophy professor at the University of Göttingen and prolific scholar, initiated “a successful campaign to exclude Africa and Asia from the history of philosophy.” In turn, Wilhelm Tennemann (1761-1819), the most important Kantian historian at the turn of the 19th century, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who observed that “real philosophy begins in Greece”) carried the campaign forward. They channeled elements of Meiners in almost identical language, leading to “the formation within German philosophy of an exclusionary, Eurocentric canon of philosophy.”
“Stated more simply,” Park contends, “historians of philosophy began to exclude peoples they deemed too primitive and incapable of philosophy,” noting Hegel’s belief that the African mind-set invited slavery. While it may surprise contemporary philosophers and graduate students brought up on the standard canon, Park correctly reports that from “the time of Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) to the death of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-80), the prevailing convention among historians of philosophy was to begin the history of philosophy with Adam, Noah, Moses (or the Jews), or the Egyptians. In some early modern histories of philosophy, Zoroaster, the ‘Chaldeans,’ or another ancient Oriental people appear as the first philosophers. It was in the late 18th century that historians of philosophy began to claim a Greek beginning for philosophy.”
The upshot of this German pivot became obvious as the 19th century rolled on. In 1865, Friedrich Michelis wrote in his history of philosophy, “No Asian people … has lifted itself to the heights of free human contemplation, from which philosophy issues; philosophy is the fruit of the Hellenic spirit.” Although Park describes a countertradition, energized by Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and the Frenchman Joseph-Marie de Gérando (1772-1842), that continued to include Asian thought (Schlegel wrote that “the Indians had real philosophy in both form and method”), Park provides many similar examples from 19th-century German history of philosophy of tub-thumping for the Greeks.
That approach won the day—and the future. As Park indicates through resourcefully adduced evidence from 19th-century texts, “some of these histories present no reasons for the exclusion of Asia and Africa, taking a Greek origin of philosophy for granted.” Others promoted a strictly Kantian agenda that required history of philosophy to be an a priori “autonomous field of knowledge” explorable apart from empirical data.
Park’s study is not the first to establish the racism of towering figures in the traditional philosophical canon. Many have noted such embarrassments as Hume’s footnote to his essay “Of National Characters” stating that nonwhites are inferior to whites. The Penn State philosopher Robert Bernasconi, to whom Park gives well-deserved credit, has explored Kant’s racism, as well as Hegel’s and Heidegger’s denial that Indian or Chinese philosophy counted as philosophy. Wilhelm Halbfass and Richard King are other scholars who have probed such subjects. But Park now gives us a book-length account of this ugly backdrop to arbitrariness and distortion in the discipline’s canon—an acute, critical narrative that should force philosophers to re-examine disreputable pillars of their tradition.
Park’s work also provides a perfect bookend to an earlier groundbreaking study of how German scholars rearranged philosophy’s canon toward the end of the 18th century: The Historiographical Concept ‘System of Philosophy’: Its Origin, Nature, Influence and Legitimacy (Brill, 2008), by the Danish scholar Leo Catana.
In that sedulous, comprehensive work, Catana demonstrated in exact detail how Jacob Brucker (1696-1770), the foremost German historian of philosophy of the late 18th century owing to his multivolume Historia critica philosophiae, decided that only “systematic” philosophy counted as philosophy. He urged that ideas be put forward apart from any connection to their authors’ or proponents’ lives, and suggested that including biographical details—the norm in history of philosophy since Diogenes Laertius invented the genre in the third century with his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers—amounted to vulgarization.
A humanities discipline, to borrow Richard Posner’s pointed image, is not a suicide pact. It should investigate its own past, and change in ways that keep it vibrant, challenging, and relevant. Philosophy, with its smug and static canon, is long overdue for rethinking. As its ancient hero Socrates might have put it: The unexamined canon is not worth teaching.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle, is a distinguished visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. His book, America the Philosophical (2012), is now out as a Vintage paperback.
