Professor Van Norden, Western Philosophy is Not Racist

by Paul Austin Murphy (April 2018)

Plato and Aristotle. Detail from Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, 1511, The Vatican

In late October, 2017, a professor by the name of Bryan Van Norden had an essay published in the magazine Aeon. It is called “Western Philosophy is Racist.” The piece has been debated throughout the internet. As of this writing, it has been shared 36,646 times on Facebook and generated 466 responses in the comments section.

 

Professor Van Norden himself, according to Wikipedia, is a

 

translator of Chinese philosophical texts, scholar of Chinese and comparative philosophy, and public intellectual [who] taught for twenty years at Vassar College but is currently Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Visiting Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

 

Professor Bryan Van Norden began his essay in rhetorical mode. He wrote:

 

Mainstream philosophy in the so-called West is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic.

 

*****

 

ccusing people, groups, or institutions of racism seems to be a sport (or fashion) for far too many academics nowadays. It’s almost as if it’s seen as a safe way of proving one’s anti-racist credentials before some even purer and more zealous anti-racist puts the boot in. This often means that the more racist people, groups, or institutions one can find, the more anti-racist and politically pure one becomes. Indeed, this sport of anti-racism has become so omnipresent and extreme that the anti-racist revolution has even begun to eat some of its own children. Thus, we have many and various anti-racist inquisitions on our hands.

 

It seems that Professor Bryan Van Norden himself has felt the need to add his own little bit to this pious anti-racism blood sport.

 

Academic philosophy in ‘the West’ ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China, India, and Africa. This must change.

 

The title is itself racist (or at least Westophobic) in many ways.

 

For starters, the West has been more open to other cultures, traditions, and epochs than almost any civilization in history. 

 

“only whites can be racist,” then so it may also be the case that only Western philosophy can be racist. (Perhaps non-Western cultures are “prejudiced, though not racist.”)

 

 

West exists in a very determinate and severely circumscribed form.

 

“a multicultural manifesto.”

 

In terms of another of his political positions, Van Norden writes:

 

When the ancient philosopher Diogenes was asked what city he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world.’

 

Van Norden backs up his multicultural manifesto when he says that

 

to attract an increasingly diverse student body, and to remain culturally relevant, philosophy must recover its original cosmopolitan ideal.

 

Indeed, as Norden says, all this is really about “greater diversity,” not philosophy.

 

Antonio Gramsci’s word) isn’t quite complete yet. This means that philosophy is next in line. (At least in those American departments that aren’t devoted to post-structuralism/Deconstruction, Continental Philosophy, postmodernist philosophy, etc.) And that’s Van Norden’s political purpose—both in this essay and generally in his professional life.

 

 

Professor David Cannadine:

 

Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness.

 

Thus, Van Norden quite literally blames the racism of Western philosophy on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and those he calls his “defenders.”

 

should have known that race isn’t a “scientific category.”

 

Now, for the defenders of Kant

 

consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping.

 

In terms of racism, Van Norden then tells us that

 

European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy.

 

from historians to anthropologists—have frowned upon when the victims/subjects were non-white people. However, it seems to be okay when the victims/subjects are Dead White Males who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

Van Norden does indeed move on to the early 20th century and the racism of the English philosopher, G.E. Moore.

 

Van Norden writes:

 

When the Indian philosopher Surendra Nath Dasgupta read a paper on the epistemology of Vedanta to a session of the Aristotelian Society in London, Moore’s only comment was: ‘I have nothing to offer myself. But I am sure that whatever Dasgupta says is absolutely false.’

 

This is an off-the-cuff comment from Moore. As far as I know Moore never wrote a paper dismissing Indian philosophy. He never claimed expertise when it came to this subject. Thus, what he said about it is pretty much irrelevant. If Moore had written a paper on Indian philosophy (or even discussed it in a paper), then that would have been a different matter entirely. (Incidentally, G.E. Moore had an important influence on the “progressive” Bloomsbury Group—a group which had “very modern attitudes” toward feminism, sexuality, pacifism, and economics.)

 

The Weekly Standard”).

 

Firstly Van Norden quotes D. Kyle Peone saying that

 

‘philosophy’ is a word of Greek origin, it refers only to the tradition that grows out of the ancient Greek thinkers.

 

though, obviously, not to an anti-racist like Van Norden.

 

 

or academic—stated this fact (or gave an example), then he too would be a racist?

 

Orientalism/Occidentalism

 

Orientalism. Thus Van Norden quotes Said in this way:

 

 

particularly on Heidegger.)

 

Van Norden quotes the following passage from Heidegger, which he deems to be racist:

 

The often-heard expression ‘Western-European philosophy’ is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature . . . the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold.

 

Now, what about Jacques Derrida?

 

. . . on a visit to China in 2001, Jacques Derrida stunned his hosts (who teach in Chinese philosophy departments) by announcing that ‘China does not have any philosophy, only thought.’ In response to the obvious shock of his audience, Derrida insisted that ‘Philosophy is related to some sort of particular history, some languages, and some ancient Greek invention . . .  It is something of European form.’

 

ignored non-Western philosophy/thought, then Van Norden would have classed them as “racist.” They didn’t ignore it. Yet Van Norden still believes that they had a “noble savage” (i.e.,  positive Orientalist) view of non-Western philosophy/thought. Therefore, either way, Heidegger and Derrida couldn’t win. Indeed, Van Norden has placed himself in a holier-than-thou position in which even Derrida—the Prophet of the Other—is deemed to have been a racist.

 

‘Violence and Metaphysics’) also racist?

 

This thought calls upon the ethical relationship—a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other—as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics . . .

 

Yes, the anti-racist revolution is truly eating its own children.

 

as Edward Said himself did. Perhaps only then would their comments on non-Western histories, peoples, and cultures be politically pure.

 

 

Oriental Occidentalism

 

it can easily be argued—simply added to that Occidentalist position. (As did, for example, the black “essentialist,” Franz Fanon.)

 

Occidentalism refers to dehumanizing stereotypes of the Western world, Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

 

Just to give a couple of examples.

 

according to Dr Alastair Bonnett.) In this period, then, China’s knowledge of the West was severely limited. Indeed, curiosity about—and research into—the West was frowned upon by China’s rulers until the 19^th century. Not surprisingly, Westerners were seen as “barbarians” long before the Chinese had experienced the British empire.

 

can be found in Japaneses, Chinese and Indian art.

 

Perhaps more relevantly, much of the politics of “anti-colonialist” theorists are very Occidentalist in nature. However, Marxists/left-wingers and Edward Said himself would have said that all this was an entirely reactive response to “Western imperialism.” (Can that really be said of Chinese Occidentalism, which dates back hundreds of years before British empire?) In that case, perhaps much of Western Orientalism was reactive, too.

 

Conclusion

 

He tells us that a philosophy professor (“in a mainstream philosophy department in the US Midwest”) once said:

 

This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it.

 

 

Perhaps the fact (if it is a fact) that there are only a few Philosophy departments that specialise in non-Western thought is partly because many other university departments have taken over that job. In addition, there are countless university departments that offer “studies” which advance the political causes in which Van Norden believes. (For example, Black Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Deconstruction, Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, etc.) In fact, these positions or studies rule the roost in many American university departments and even in the entire universities themselves.

 

Yet Professor Van Norden wants more!

 

He wants a multiculturalist hegemony which is much more loyal to his own “multicultural manifesto.”

 

In many respects that multiculturalist hegemony already exists and has since at at least the 1980s. However, as I said, Van Norden wants a stronger, more widespread and more complete hegemony—one that must now also include all American and British Philosophy departments.

 

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Paul Austin Murphy on Politics and Paul Austin Murphy’s Philosophy. His Twitter account can be found here.

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