Mcclellan Dissertation Final
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Poisoned Ground The Roots of Eurocentrism: Teleology, Hierarchy, and Anthropocentrism Joseph McClellan Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree Of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Joseph McClellan All rights reserved ABSTRACT Poisoned Ground: The Roots of Eurocentrism Joseph McClellan The dissertation starts with the premise that Eurocentrism, in philosophy and many other areas, continues to be a problem. It comes from the belief in teleological history, which itself rests on hierarchical, anthropocentric metaphysics. To combat the negative effects of Eurocentrism, we must establish alternatives to the metaphysics it rests on and the historical attitudes that it constructs and maintains. The dissertation is divided into three main parts, each with a number of subdivisions. Part one sketches the history of academic Eurocentrism and demonstrates that it is built on a combination of historical ignorance and certain presuppositions associated with Western religious thinking. Specifically, Eurocentrism, since the modern era, has substituted the monotheistic Deity with a peculiar notion of Reason, and has constructed a myth that Reason, and all the positive things it signifies, are uniquely European. Part two is the longest section and it examines Hegel’s influence in building the Eurocentric world. He expounds a history that is unequivocally teleological, in which non- European people and ways of thinking are stepping-stones to the more highly evolved European, Christian culture. The events of history have been the unfolding of a code, and that code, or Logos, was discovered in his Science of Logic. This underlying Logic explains both the life of the mind—described in his Phenomenology of Spirit—as well as the life of the world, described in other works, such as his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Philosophy of History. However, is the Logos truly the source-code for historical events showing them to be completely determined by a preexisting fate? Or does it merely explain the conditions of the possibility for events to arise, the way that they constantly do arise and have arisen? These are completely different alternatives and their implications are massive. I then compare diverging interpretations of Hegel that choose to focus on either his anthropocentric historical teleology, or else his more abstract and spacious metaphysics, which may undermine much of his historical theory. The thrust of these chapters is to show that anthropocentric metaphysics support beliefs in teleological history, which leads to political and social practices of inequality and injustice (e.g., Eurocentrism). To counter this tendency of Hegel’s, I consider Darwin’s insights against teleology, as well as contemporary object-oriented-ontology, which help us move beyond philosophical anthropocentrism. Rather than being absolute antipodes to these developments, Hegel’s theories are adaptable enough to be a useful resource for non- teleological, non-anthropocentric, and non-Eurocentric theories. Part three focuses on the role of language and metaphor in the Eurocentric canons of philosophy. For example, Hegel famously employs the metaphor of the master and slave to describe the dialectical process at work in both the mind and history. The metaphor has significant heuristic power, but it is still a metaphor. When taken literally, it can lead to dangerous misunderstandings about history and justifications for violence. Moreover, when Hegel writes about the Oriental and the African, those terms are hidden metaphors: they do not denote any real persons. However, what he says about them has historically been taken literally, thus leading to warped attitudes about real Asians and Africans in the world. I also analyze the role of literary style in establishing Eurocentric canons, suggesting that an important critical development against Eurocentrism would be the proliferation of alternative writing styles to the entrenched norms of the argumentative monograph and journal article. Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………5 PREFACE………………………………………………………………………………………..6 PART ONE: 1) THE SEPARATION OF EAST AND WEST: EUROCENTRISM AND CANONIZATION……………………………………………………………..13 2) THE SPECIAL CASE OF AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY………………………….38 PART TWO: 3) HEGEL AND HIS LEGACY………………………………………………………43 4) THE HISTORICAL CONFUSION OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM…………...46 5) TELEOLOGY AFTER DARWIN?..........................................................................57 6) SUBJECT AS THING, NOT KING………………………………………………74 7) NEGATIVITY AS CONDITION, NOT PROPERTY…..…………...………….82 8) THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THINGS……………...……….…………91 9) OBJECT-ORIENTED-ONTOLOGY AND NEO-EPICUREANISM…...….106 PART THREE: 10) LANGUAGE AND METAPHOR………………………………………………127 11) HEGEL’S AFRICANS AND ORIENTALS……………………………………149 12) DOXOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………163 13) STYLE WARS…………………………………………………………………….176 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………….188 i BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………….200 ii Acknowledgements I could not have finished this manuscript without the company of Ria Burgess, or the support of my mother and father. Special thanks to my advisor, Robert Thurman, who patiently let me find my own way, encouraging my ambles in new directions. Also, I would never have taken an interest in the topics I tackle in this work had I not had the opportunity to take two Hegel seminars with Mark Taylor at Columbia. He first directed me to many of the writers I address herein and his comments and writings on Hegel have been invaluable. I am also indebted to Gray Tuttle, who served as a warm and encouraging mentor in my first years as a graduate student, as well as Gil Anidjar and Jonathan C. Gold for producing inspiring work and accepting the invitation to join my defense committee. My overall graduate school experience was made richer by my colleagues at Columbia: Joe Blankholm, Chris Kelly, David Kittay, Paul Hackett, Joel Bordeaux, and Roy Tzohar. And life in general would not be nearly as good without my brothers Tyler and Matt McClellan, Caine Budelman, Christian Wells, Jeremy Doane, Jason Kohn, and Hanny Hindi, who edited the first draft of this manuscript and is responsible for whatever glimmers of sense may shine through. iii Preface This dissertation is the end of an unforeseen byway I entered when I first read Hegel in 2009. I entered Columbia’s Department of Religion in 2004 with the intention of pursuing Tibetan philosophy, Buddhism, and philology, which had been my primary personal and intellectual interests for about a decade. However, being surrounded by brilliant people and ideas at Columbia, I took the bait and waded deeper and deeper into western philosophical traditions, particularly those with some concepts in common with the comprehensive metaphysical theories and phenomenological methods of the Buddhist mādhyamaka, yogācāra, and dzogchen that were my specializations. Since I cut my teeth on Asian philosophy, the process of learning other traditions has always been one of translating terms and synthesizing ideas. Over time, it became clear that this comparative method provides certain benefits, and that Hegel could be a powerful resource for synthesizing with other thinkers. However, the comparative method also suffers from certain obstacles—some of which can be traced to Hegel. This dissertation arose from these considerations. It was not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity that led me into new domains. Right when my academic commitments demanded that I pick up the pace, an untimely, lingering depression was rendering me academically unproductive and spiritually listless. With expectations of myself to write on some Buddhist topic with spiritual and even esoteric implications, I realized I was in no position to do so at the time. Reflecting on why, I realized I had been resting on dogmas, maintaining naive expectations, and suffering when I failed to meet the ideals I had set up much earlier. To feel better, I had to loosen my grip on false certainties and imagine new ways of being and feeling. Fortunately, I had plenty of philosophical and spiritual raw material around me for building new orientations toward iv myself and the world. In academia, I was heartened when writers like Judith Butler explaining that her often-abstract work was coming from a place of personal need. In the preface to her remarkable book Gender Trouble, she writes, “Despite the dislocation of the subject that the text performs, there is a person here” who seeks to Uproot…ordinary and academic discourse on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of the desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of “real” politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. What would the world have to be like for my uncle to live in the company of family, friends, or extended kinship of some other kind? How must we rethink the ideal morphological constraints upon the human such that those who fail to approximate the norm are not condemned to death within life (xx). Her book took shape not through academic ambition but a personal need to combine her work with her personal life. She says, “At the same time that I was ensconced in the academy, I was also living a life outside of those walls, and though Gender Trouble is an academic