Unbounded Philosophy (Interview with Jay Garfield)
Philosophers are interested in two things: one is asking the right questions, the other is finding answers to those questions. For a long time — and probably for too much time — the tendency in the most well-known philosophy departments has been to engage these activities by reading texts and confronting thinkers in the Western tradition. This might sound bizarre. After all, are westerners particularly good at formulating questions and answers? That seems downright crazy. Nevertheless, this is how things have been going for many years.
Even today, most philosophy courses in ancient philosophy are, in fact, courses in ancient Western philosophy; most philosophy courses in epistemology are, in fact, courses in Western epistemology, and the list could continue for all the sub-disciplines of philosophy.
Fortunately, in the last few years, things have started to change. The merit is in great part to attribute to people like Jay Garfield — now Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Smith College — who have been putting unbelievable efforts in rescuing philosophy from unmotivated and detrimental cultural boundaries. Lucky to have had the opportunity of having a conversation with him, I asked Jay about many things: what it means to conceive philosophy in a cross-cultural way, how things have been changing in this respect through the years, and what are the difficulties and opportunities for people aiming at doing research in philosophy in a cross-cultural way. These are his thoughts.
Let me break the ice with a question you’ve probably answered hundreds of times. What, in your view, is the value of cross-cultural philosophy? Why not stay inside one’s own tradition?
Several ways to answer that question. One way is morally and politically, another is epistemologically, and a third is hermeneutically. Let me give you all three of those answers.
First of all, there’s the moral and political answer. Like it or not, those of us who grow up in a European tradition (in the broad sense that includes America, Australia, etc.) are the heirs to colonialism and orientalism. Those were traditions that systematically objectified and denigrated other intellectual traditions in the world. So, if we continue to ignore other intellectual traditions, we continue a practice that is morally impermissible. Just to write that wrong, we have a moral obligation to take those traditions seriously.
Second: an epistemological point. No one ever said that only white people can think or do philosophy (or if they did, they were morons). We know that there are deep philosophical traditions in Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Indigenous America, and so forth. To ignore those traditions would be about as irrational as saying, “I only read books published on Mondays, and I will not read anything published on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.” So since there is no good reason to ignore all these ideas and a lot of good reasons to believe that there are good ideas in other traditions, it would simply be intellectually irresponsible to ignore them.
Third reason: a hermeneutical one. Suppose that you didn’t agree with either of those reasons. You thought it was perfectly okay to continue to ignore other people — morally — and you also thought that you have good reasons to believe that there’s nothing of value in any other intellectual tradition other than the European. You might still want to learn the European tradition better. And as Gadamer has taught us, in order to really understand a text or a set of texts, you need to have a certain amount of hermeneutical distance from them. You need to be able to look at that tradition as a whole so to speak: from the outside, from a different horizon. And I can say that, for my own case, I’ve come to understand ideas in Western philosophy much better when I looked at them from the standpoint of Indian or Buddhist philosophy than when I was completely immersed in that tradition. If only because I saw what the alternatives were, or because I had enough distance to see what was being taken for granted and could be problematized and might not be taken for granted in another tradition.
So, for all those reasons, I think that cross-cultural philosophy is absolutely mandatory for any philosopher.
Some people talk about comparative philosophy instead of cross-cultural philosophy. Why cross-cultural and not comparative philosophy?
That’s a really good question, and it’s a question that has a historical context. Many people don’t know that the word ‘comparative philosophy’ was coined by an Indian philosopher, Brajendra Nath Seal, who was then professor of philosophy at Presidency University in Kolkata. And when he coined that term in 1895, what he said was that comparative philosophy was necessary because, in order to compare two things, you treat them, in his words, of “coordinate rank,” that is as meriting comparison. He advocated comparative philosophy to try to get British philosophy to take Indian philosophy seriously by putting them on the same level. And I think in 1895 that made a good deal of sense.
About fifty years later, the great Indian philosopher Anukul Chandra Mukerji said in a presidential address to the Indian Philosophical Congress that the time for comparative philosophy was over: “we’ve done that long enough.” As he put it, comparison just means placing things side by side and noting straight similarities or differences; it doesn’t really advance philosophy in either tradition.
So when I talk about cross-cultural philosophy, reflecting on the work of Mukerji (who was a great cross-cultural philosopher), I think of a philosophy that simply crosses cultural boundaries and pursues a philosophical question drawing freely from multiple philosophical traditions. Maybe a little bit from China and a little bit from Native Americans, and a little bit from India, and from Europe, picking up ideas wherever they might be in the service of deeper understanding. That doesn’t mean comparing them. That doesn’t mean, say, “Jay, are these Chinese ideas like these American ideas or not? Are these French ideas like these Indian ideas or not?” It just means treating multiple philosophical voices as though they all belong to the conversation. I think that’s a more reasonable way to go.
Would it be fair to say that in cross-cultural philosophy we treat people in other traditions as colleagues and in comparative philosophy as objects of study?
That’s exactly right. So I think there was a time when comparative philosophy made sense. But historically, it’s passed.
How has the interest in cross-cultural philosophy been changing since you started working in this way? Has there been some improvement?
There has been! Now, we are starting from a very low baseline. When I started doing this, there were very few other people doing it and very few models. There were a few, and they were quite important people — Mark Siderits, Jonardon Ganeri, etc. — but, again, not very many. And I think what we’ve seen in the past couple of decades, partly as a result of the efforts of people in the cross-cultural philosophy world and partly just as a result of a greater cosmopolitanism, is a lot more interest in cross-cultural philosophy.
You can see that in a number of different ways. One is that the percentage of non-Western papers given at international philosophy conferences has increased a lot. Then, the number of positions in philosophy departments that are asking for an area of competence or specialty in non-Western philosophy is increased significantly. (A lot of that is driven by student interest by the way. Philosophers have learned that they don’t get positions unless they have enrollments, and students really like cross-cultural philosophy.) Another is that a lot of journals that never published things on non-Western philosophy before have begun to consider papers and publish papers that address non-Western philosophical topics.
I’ve been really encouraged by this. Again, I don’t think we are anywhere near where we need to be. But we’ve come a long way from a very low baseline, and the curve seems to be steepening each year.
And this is not only a Western process, right? It’s the same thing if one looks at non-Western universities.
Exactly! That’s a wonderful thing to see. In China, it used to be that if you were in Hong Kong or Taiwan, it meant Western analytic philosophy, and if you were in the People’s Republic of China, that meant marxism. Now, there’s much more attention on classical Chinese philosophy and to Indian philosophy and Tibetan philosophy. In India, where the syllabi were all British syllabi, there’s been a lot more interest now in Indian philosophy. So I see this as a worldwide movement, and it’s kind of wonderful.
You were mentioning students. What’s your experience in teaching non-Western philosophy? Do students like it?
They absolutely love it. There is this wonderful line from an American civil-rights figure who says that racism is an adult disease. Children are not born racist; they have to be taught. And I think that intellectual parochialism is an adult disease as well. You gotta teach students that philosophy is what the Greeks and white people did in order to get them to believe that. And if you don’t, they don’t come in thinking that. And so if you offer them beautiful texts to read from different cultures and different ideas from different cultures, they just never knew philosophy could be done any differently.
In the department where I teach, where we really try to be completely cosmopolitan in our approach, students never come out thinking that philosophy is primarily a Western discipline. They never would use the word ‘ancient philosophy’ to mean ancient greek philosophy; they would never use the word ‘modern philosophy’ to mean early modern European philosophy. They always inflect the term asking what tradition and what topic we are talking about. So students naturally love this. For example, I’m now teaching a seminar in Buddhist ethics, and my students are absolutely loving reading Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva. They’re just finding this to be powerful ethical material.
Do you think there are additional difficulties in studying texts in other traditions? Maybe one has to acquire very different concepts or even to learn a language.
Yes and no. That is, in one respect, that’s right. Different philosophical traditions have different sets of technical terms, different ways of curving up the landscape and thinking about fundamental things. For instance, in the West people think of the mind as this integrated substantial thing, and in the Buddhist tradition is thought of as this complicated psychological continuum. So you got to really talk about what those words mean and what the presuppositions are.
But here’s a couple of important things to remember. It used to be that language was a gigantic barrier, that if you were gonna study Buddhist philosophy, even as a student, you had to learn Sanskrit, or Pali, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Tibetan. Now you don’t. In the last thirty years, there’s been so much translation. Not enough yet. I’m not saying we’re done. But there are enough texts to start an undergraduate curriculum with plenty of good things and reliable translations. That’s a big help.
Then, there are enough textbooks that are beginning to explicate the frameworks and the terminology that students can begin to learn their way into this. And to me, one of the really nice things about teaching students cross-culturally is that it teaches them to problematize the vocabulary in their own culture. So it teaches them that the words they use — words like ‘mind’ or ‘emotions,’ words like ‘object’ or ‘subject’ — aren’t neutral terms. They are each ideologically and theoretically charged. And they don’t notice that charge when they grow up in their native language. So when they come to a discipline or tradition with different terms, it leaves them as, “oh, is actually ideology behind what I’m saying?” and that gives the hermeneutic distance to get a deeper understanding of their own thought.
Sometimes they learn words that just got no equivalent. If we teach students about mudita, and they suddenly realize that we’ve got a term for schadenfreude in the West but don’t have a word for mudita, that tells something. It’s pretty powerful about their own tradition. Why don’t we have that word? And I think that can be really important as well. It also helps to talk about translation because it shows how difficult translation is and how you have to read through a translation to source terms. Why would somebody translate this particular term in all these different ways? What does that tell us about the family of ideas? That can be very useful.
Moreover, even if historically we have been dividing between East and West, my sense when I think about these issues is that they arise in the same way within traditions.
That’s right. There is no bigger barrier. You got barriers that are just as big within traditions as between traditions. If you try to encounter Buddhism from Mīmāṃsā, you find the same thing. Or if you are trying to work on Daoism from a Buddhist perspective, you find the same thing. So there’s really no reason to see this “Euro versus this other” as a special barrier unless you’re really enamored of colonialism.
In conclusion, a practical point. It’s great that today the number of people interested in non-Western philosophy is increasing, but for those who want to pursue an academic path, it’s still hard to find supervision and be trained. What do you think about this?
It’s still tricky. And it’s interesting that a lot of people who are in Buddhist philosophy get their training in religious studies departments where Buddhist philosophy is done, in area studies departments — East Asian or South Asian studies departments, — or in special interdisciplinary programs. I mean, some people get their training in philosophy departments, and there are now more and more philosophy departments that train (we can name about half a dozen or a dozen good places), but again, the baseline was very low.
But the nice thing is that even people who are getting their degrees in divinity schools, or in religious studies departments, or area studies departments, are starting to get hired in philosophy departments because philosophy departments need them. For instance, the University of British Columbia recently hired somebody whose degree is from a religious studies department in their philosophy department. Villanova just hired somebody whose degree was from a divinity school in Buddhist studies. These people are now competitive on the market.
So, there are places like British Columbia, the University of New Mexico, the Harvard degree in Indian philosophy that’s joint between the Sanskrit department and the philosophy department. Oxford can do degrees that address Buddhist philosophy because of the presence of people like Jan Westerhoff. And then there’re good philosophy departments in Japan and in Australia. So there are a lot of different places. But then some people go, say, to the Chicago Divinity school, or Harvard Divinity school, or Emory in Religious Studies to do these degrees. And they can still get jobs in philosophy. That’s the nice thing. So it can be done.
