If the past is a different country, are different countries in the past?

If the past is a different country, aredifferent countries in the past?On the Place of the Non-European in theHistory of Philosophy1

C. S. GOTO-JONES

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

One of the most pressing, perennial problems in the history of

philosophy is that of context. Indeed, this is a problem with a

history all of its own. To some extent, of course, this is both a prob-

lem in (and the purpose of) all history. The opening lines of L. P.

Hartley’s famous book, The Go-Between (1953), puts it perfectly:

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. If we

accept that this is true, then it pushes two important questions into

the foreground: 1) how can we know what the past was like; and 2)

why should we care? If the past is really a different country, does it

actually have anything to do with us? It is this second question that

concerns me here.

There is an obvious and added confusion for the historian of

philosophy outside of his/her own country. Not only is the past held

to be a different country, but in this case it is also the past of a dif-ferent country. This is both convenient and problematic all at once.

The European or American historian of non-European philosophy

faces a double separation from his subject matter; he is both a

foreigner and an alien. In this paper, I approach the question of how

(and why) should this historian orientate herself towards her

subject.

Whilst the arguments in this paper are largely of a general nature,

it will adopt the example of Japan as an under-privileged non-

Philosophy 80 2005 29

doi:10.1017/S0031819105000033 ©2005 The Royal Institute of Philosophy

1 This paper is based on the Daiwa Prize Lecture, 2003. The author

would like to thank the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of

Cambridge, where this was written as a visiting scholar. Japanese names

appear in the correct order: family name first, followed by given name. So,

for example, Nishida Kitarô is referred to as Nishida, since this is his

family name.

European other. The rationale for the choice of Japan is two-fold:

firstly, Japan is unusually under-represented in the field of

Philosophy, even in Asian Philosophy;2 secondly, I find within the

Japanese canon of philosophy a particularly useful example of a

school of philosophy which can shed wisdom on the question of

how to internationalize the history of philosophy.

Why should Philosophers visit Foreign Countries?

Questions of accessibility and relevance are amplified for the

historian of non-European thought; it is not infrequently that I am

challenged by colleagues in the social sciences and (especially) in

philosophy departments asking me why I am interested in Japan.

Social scientists can relatively easily be convinced with statistics:

Japan is the second largest economy in the world; it is a significant

world power; perhaps I might even suggest (in a vague and slightly

mysterious way) that it has a special, distinctive (or even unique)

system of governance from which something could (and should) be

learnt. The social scientists nod appreciatively—everything

suddenly makes sense: economics, sociology, and politics all seem to

apply to Japan too.

Philosophers, on the other hand, are not so easily convinced. In

general, they don’t care about the size of Japan’s GNP. They don’t

care about the rumblings of an emergent East Asian regionalism.

And they’re not too bothered about the possibility that Japan may

(or may not) have a unique system of governance. For many

philosophers, Japan is not merely another country, it is another

planet altogether—a planet on which philosophy simply does not

exist. When asked to name the great philosophers of world history,

not a single Japanese name might be mentioned.

There is, in other words, surprisingly little slippage between the

practices of comparative social science on the one hand, which focus

on empirical research, and the fledgling field of comparative

C. S. Goto-Jones

30

2 In their recent book, Japanese Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 2001), H.

Gene Blocker and Christopher Starling note that whilst (Western)

philosophers appear willing to concede the existence of Chinese, Indian or

even Korean philosophy, they are singularly unwilling to concede the same

for Japan (pp. 2–3). I note that Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam do not

appear to share this reticence in their monumental CompanionEncyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2001).

philosophy on the other.3 Whilst Japan, like many other nations, has

found a home in the former, it remains rather destitute in the world

of philosophy. Unfortunately, this situation has had consequences,

even for the study of politics and economics: whilst little of the

tendency to take Japan seriously has slipped through to philosophy

from social science, the tendency to see Japan merely as an empiri-

cal case study (rather than a source of theoretical insight) has

slipped back the other way—social scientists utilize explanatory

models developed in Europe and the USA to analyse Japan, often

without a hint of self-consciousness.4

One notable attempt to remedy this situation in recent years has

been the work of David Williams, who presents a passionate case for

the retrieval (sometimes even the creation5) of a corpus of Japanese

political theory; he suggests that Japan’s socio-economic achieve-

ments since the Second World War (particularly up until the 1980s)

force us to reconsider our own theoretical positions about politics

and economics because Japan appears to be behaving according to

unfamiliar rules. Williams’ defence of what he calls ‘Japan’s canon-

icity’ is compelling; his idea is that the Japanese experience

demands a new theoretical perspective.6

Williams’ strategy appears to be to blend two distinct levels of

analysis: the first being the canonicity of Japan as a historical

nation, and the second being the need for a Japanese canon that

explains it (given that the ‘Western’ canon apparently cannot). To

some extent, then, this is not a call for us to take the history of

philosophy (or even the history of political thought) in Japan seri-

ously,7 but rather Williams is observing that Japan requires expla-

nation and he is encouraging us to look for that explanation within

the national-historical boundaries of Japan itself. However, at one

If the Past is a Different Country

31

3 Hwa Yol Jung, ‘Introduction’, in Hwa Yol Jung, (ed.), ComparativePolitical Culture in the Age of Globalization, (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002).

4 J. A. A. Stockwin presents some alternative ‘theories of Japanese poli-

tics’ in the introduction to his Dictionary of Modern Japanese Politics,(London: Routledge, 2003). A recent and very impressive attempt to tack-

le forms of political theory developed in the discourse of modern Japan is

Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxianand Modernist Traditions, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

5 David Williams, Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science,

(London: Routledge, 1996), chapter 2, esp. pp. 30–1.6 Williams, Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science, p. 6.7 Williams’ position implicitly suggests that any thought in/from Japan

that does not contribute to an explanation of the economic miracle is irrel-

evant to Japan’s ‘canonicity.’

point Williams laments that we may not be able to find such a text

in Japanese history at all, and that we (as Euro-American observers

employing what he calls the ‘anthropological method’8) may have to

write it for them, in the present.9 Our (Western) experience of Japan

is a catalyst for theoretical innovation within the history of Western

philosophy, if you like—which is a pleasantly empiricist position—

rather than necessarily a call to take Japanese thinkers seriously in

the history of philosophy. This approach might suit the orientation

of social science, but it is not of use to me here.

Somewhat paradoxically, many writers who champion a more

straightforward need for a ‘Japanese canon’ of philosophy—most

recently Blocker and Starling in their book Japanese Philosophy(2001)10—appear to share a conception of the history of philosophy

with thinkers such as Skinner and Rorty, who suggest that the real

purpose of studying intellectual history is to help us understand why

we think and believe the things we now consider to be beyond ques-

tion. In other words, the history of philosophy is a process of self-

understanding; the Japanese canon is a canon about Japan. The

reason that this position is paradoxical with regard to Japan (and

other non-European communities) may not be immediately obvious,

but it is this which I hope to explain in the rest of this paper.

To briefly pre-empt my conclusions

1) History of philosophy qua search for socio-cultural

identity encourages the discipline of Philosophy to exclude

systems of thought that do not contribute to the cultural

identity of Euro-America: philosophy is consolidated as a

‘Western’ discipline. Hence, this approach to history mar-

ginalizes the non-European from the outset, permitting (at

best) the development of a separate canon of ‘Japanese

philosophy’ (or ‘Indian Philosophy’ etc.) designed to reveal

something of the character of modern Japan (India)—

possibly on the syllabus in faculties of Area Studies, but

C. S. Goto-Jones

32

8 Williams’ ‘anthropological method’ is explicitly modelled off the colo-

nial period of anthropology. He cites specifically: ‘Malinowski, Evans-

Pritchard and Lattimore’—presumably referring to their penchant for

‘participant observation’ as the preferred methodology of cultural anthro-

pology. See Williams, Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science, p.

24.9 Williams, Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science, p. 31.10 H. Gene Blocker and Christopher I. Starling, Japanese Philosophy. See

also the review article: Christopher S. Jones, ‘From Japanese Philosophy to

Philosophy in Japan,’ Japan Forum, 15:2 (2003).

certainly not in the Department of Philosophy.11 This

brings us full circle back to question of why we (as

Europeans) should care about Japanese philosophy—quite

literally, it has nothing to do with us (unless we’re

Japanese).12 Japan is a different country, but that does not

make it part of our own past.

2) The creation of contrasting monological traditions of

philosophy ignores some genuinely philosophical insights

into the nature of history—in particular, some insights

made by non-European thinkers, such as the Japanese

Kyoto School of Philosophy, into the idea of a dialogic,

world-historical standpoint. In other words, we would be

failing to take Japanese philosophy seriously if we did not

use it to question the accepted methodology and rationale

of the history of philosophy in Europe. In fact, as we will

see, the Kyoto School’s approach gives us a tremendously

good reason to study the intellectual history of different

countries (including Japan)—suggesting that in the world-

historical world (sekaishiteki sekai) of today, because of

globalization, interaction, interdependence etc., the past of

all countries is becoming our own past. The more we learn

about the ideas hidden in those multiple locations, the clos-

er we will come to understanding that most unspeakable

(and philosophical) of things … the truth (about the human

condition).


33

11 Of course, the question of discourse between these canons is impor-

tant, and we will come to it later. For an impressive and provocative dis-

cussion of the politics of knowledge associated with Area Studies, see H.

D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and theQuestion of Everyday Life, (New York: Columbia University Press,

2000).12 There is, in fact, a solid tradition of trying to understand the ‘Other’

in an attempt to overcome it. Unfortunately, this tendency has been

prevalent in Japanese Studies, especially since WWII. We might locate its

origins in Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946, reprinted

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), which was produced at the request of

the US military in order to answer strategic questions: ‘Was capitulation

possible without invasion? Should we bomb the Emperor’s palace? What

could we expect of Japanese prisoners of war? …’ (p. 3) This tradition,

which we might label ‘know thy enemy’ has, unfortunately, informed a

great deal of the literature on Japan in the postwar period—‘know thy

economic enemy’ has become the new motto.

If the Past is a Different Country, can you go on Holiday or

only look at the Pictures? A note on historical method

For many historians of philosophy, there are two broad approaches

to the subject material.13 There is what Richard Rorty calls the

‘rational reconstruction,’ in which great (dead) thinkers of ages past

are resurrected so that they might engage in a kind of supernatural

discussion with inquirers from the present.14 To some extent, this

approach forces past thinkers to engage with contemporary ques-

tions, whether or not such questions would have been recognizable

(or even comprehensible) to the thinkers in question. We might ask

Aristotle his thoughts on globalization, or Kant for his views on the

ethical impact of the world-wide web. In the words of the eminent

philosopher Charles Taylor, this approach encourages us to treat

past authors ‘as if they were contemporaries … They are not

explored as origins, but as atemporal resources.’15

This approach has the definite advantage of side-stepping the

question of relevance: the history of philosophy is relevant to us

today to the extent that past thinkers can shed light on contemporaryproblems. To some extent, however, this first approach to the history

of philosophy is not really historical at all—except in so far as there

is usually an established historical canon of ‘atemporal resources’

for today’s inquirers to mine.16 Indeed, Quentin Skinner and the so-

called ‘New Historians’ have been quite damning about this

approach—arguing that it is not only bad historical method, but

that it also does actual violence to the thinkers in question (Aristotle

could not possibly have had anything to say about globalization, so

any view that we attribute to him is entirely fictitious). There is a

better method, they suggest, which Rorty calls the ‘historical recon-

struction,’ and it is this method that concerns me today.

This second method might be anchored in Hegel’s view that

philosophy is essentially historical. For Hegel, and for many con-

temporary philosophers (including Charles Taylor) ‘it is essential to

C. S. Goto-Jones

34

13 In the discussion that follows, I will lean heavily (although not exclu-

sively) on the influential book, Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Quentin

Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1984/98) (hereafter PH). This book contains

a variety of impressive positions expounded by a number of the leading

thinkers in the field of the history of philosophy, and the articles therein

are much discussed in the wider literature.14 Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,’ in

PH, esp. pp. 49–56.15 Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in PH, p. 17.16 The question of canon creation will be discussed later.

an adequate understanding of certain problems, questions, issues,

that one understand them genetically,’ that is historically.17 For these

thinkers, the fact that philosophy is ‘inherently historical’ makes it

manifest ‘a more general truth about human life and society.’18 Before

we can even think about what Taylor means by ‘inherently historical’

we must immediately pause to ask ‘whose history’ he might be talk-

ing about. It is quickly evident that the parameters of ‘history’ are

usually distinctly European and that, therefore, this ‘general truth

about human life and society’ might actually be rather particular.

For Taylor, a significant purpose of philosophy is ‘the articula-

tion of what is initially inarticulated,’ and he is clear that such an

articulation requires (although it never reduces to) ‘recovering pre-

vious articulations which have been lost.’19 At this level of

generality, Taylor’s vision of the historical method seems rather

promising, even for those of us with an interest in non-European

thinkers (indeed, Taylor himself does not shy away from some non-

European sources in his own work): a process of comparison with

competing or alternative systems of philosophy permits us to

understand our own position more explicitly. Fair enough.

However, for reasons that will become clear, Taylor is more pre-

scriptive about the useful boundaries of the history of philosophy.

He suggests that the lost articulations for which we search should be

those that ‘we need to give an account of the origins of our present

thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, actions.’20 In other words, the

history of philosophy is part of the grand narrative of our Euro-

American cultural identity.

Taylor is by no means alone in this vision. Richard Rorty has sug-

gested that this kind of developmental narrative serves a crucial psy-

chological need within the philosophical community—providing a

sense of ‘progress’ approximating that found in the history of the

natural sciences.21 And Alisdair MacIntyre suggests that it is only

within the overarching framework of a national narrative (or

Weltanschauung) that inquirers in the present can understand that the

competing philosophies of the past were actually competing (rather

than merely existing as disconnected alternatives or Others).22


35

17 Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in PH, p. 17.18 Ibid.19 Ibid. p. 18.20 Ibid.21Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,’ in

PH, p. 51.22 Alisdair MacIntyre, ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past,’ in

PH, pp. 41–2.

It is precisely this standpoint on the value and function of the

history of philosophy that is obstructing the serious consideration

of non-European thought within the discipline of philosophy; ‘lost’

or ‘alternative’ philosophical models such as those provided in the

work of Lao Tzu or Ogyû Sorai23 simply do not help us to ‘give an

account of the origins of our present thoughts, beliefs, assumptions,

actions.’ Indeed, in a wave of political insensitivity, Rorty

dismisses the problem of Asian thinkers as ‘exotic specimens.’24

A legitimate concern about this type of ‘historical reconstruction’

might be that it encourages intellectual conservatism—if the history

of philosophy is only concerned with the story of how our own

canon of philosophy was formed, from where can we find innova-

tion? The obvious answer to this question is that innovation should

be found outside the conventional historical narrative—in creative-

inspiration in the present, for example. Before we get too excited

and suggest that innovation might also be found outside of the

European tradition, many theorists of the history of philosophy are

quick to close the airport to foreign travel.

For Taylor, for example, philosophical innovation requires a firm

grasp of the European history of philosophy. He observes that the

greatest innovators of recent times (he cites Hegel and Heidegger)

have had recourse to history. Futhermore, he suggests that this his-

torical orientation was not merely a contingent but actually a neces-

sary factor in their process of innovation. The reason for this is that

there are at least two ways in which a thinker can be innovative. The

first is inside the hegemonic model (what Taylor refers to as the

dominant ‘epistemological model’ in Western philosophy25). This

C. S. Goto-Jones

36

23 David Runciman (‘History of Political Thought: the state of the dis-

cipline,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3:1 (April

2001), pp. 84–104) notes that despite the inclusion of a number of ‘non-

European’ thinkers (including Sorai), the Cambridge University Press

Texts in the History of Political Thought, remains dominated by Western,

white, male thinkers. He also notes (p. 95) that this series is far too broad

(and presumably random) to constitute a canon in any but the loosest

sense. There appears to be little rationale behind the selection of specific

thinkers—I, for one, am rather mystified about the inclusion of Ogyû

Sorai as Japan’s ‘representative’, when there are many more original and

sophisticated thinkers in Japanese history.24 Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,’ in

PH, p. 65. Rorty is commenting on the extra problems presented by the

attempt to categorize Lao Tzu or Shankara as philosophers.25 Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in PH, p. 18—The

epistemological model has dominated Western philosophy since Descartes,

but is ‘much attacked these days (and justly attacked).’ ‘The underlying

type of innovation represents a development or refinement of the

status quo and thus does not require that this status quo itself is chal-

lenged fundamentally or even articulated. The second is to breach

the confines of the hegemonic model, and it is this second type of

innovation, which results in a fundamental challenge to the bed-

rock principles of philosophy itself, that is necessarily historical.

Taylor locates the origins of the modern philosophical model (the

‘epistemological model’) in the work of seventeenth century French

philosopher Réne Descartes. He suggests that the only way to be

radically innovative in philosophy today is to retrieve the ‘founda-

tional formulation’ of Descartes himself, to examine his work and

the alternatives with whom he competed, and to explain how

Descartes and his Cartesian dualism became the unquestionable

common-sense of European philosophy for centuries. In the seven-

teenth century, Descartes’ work was so innovative and radical that

he advised readers to spend a month thinking about his

Meditations—whereas today, ‘Cartesian dualism is immediately

understandable to undergraduates on day one.’26 It is just common

sense.

In other words, we have forgotten how we came to accept what

was once radical—the epistemological model (or the atomist model,

or ideas about human rights)—and with that forgetting we have also

forgotten that our own past is riddled with alternative philosophical

models and world-views. Using the history of philosophy as a

spring board for innovation requires us to open our minds to the

possibility of real difference, and yet it simultaneously confines that

possibility to the realm of our own cultural history—otherwise the

difference (however exciting it might seem) has nothing to do with

us. And this logic is the fundamental problem.

The case of Heidegger may help to illustrate the point.

Heidegger is widely acclaimed as one of the most original and inno-

vative thinkers of the twentieth century, predominantly because of

his attempt to overcome (or destroy) European metaphysics

(Taylor’s ‘epistemological method’). He is clearly an example of an


37

notions defining [the epistemological model] are that our awareness of the

world, whether in the organized, regimented form we call science, or in the

looser forms of common everyday awareness, is to be understood in terms

of our forming representations—be they ideas in the mind, states of the

brain, sentences we accept, or whatever—of ‘external’ reality. A corollary

of this view is that we can construe our awareness of and understanding of

each other on the same representational model.’

26 Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in PH, p. 21.

innovator of the second kind, attempting to break out of the tradi-

tions of European philosophy. Like Taylor, Lorenz Krüger argues

that Heidegger could do this because of his recourse to alternative

philosophic formulations from European history. Indeed, Krüger

suggests that Heidegger’s search for alternatives within European

history was part of a conscious attempt to locate (or place) himself

within European history despite his violent challenge to its hege-

monic discourse.27 ‘This is a reason why Heidegger does not turn to

extra-scientific wisdom of [just] any kind, say Buddhism, but to the

Pre-Socratics.’28

Heidegger provides us with a particularly interesting case since it

is not entirely clear that Krüger’s ostensibly uncontroversial

description is actually correct. There is a strong case to be made that

Heidegger did turn to extra-scientific wisdom of just any kind, say

Buddhism, but also Taoism and even the modern Japanese

philosophy of the Kyoto School.29 I would not be the first to observe

some close resonances between some of Heidegger’s innovative

ideas and fairly conventional ideas in the canon of Mahayana

Buddhism. But Heidegger refused to admit that he had consulted

non-European sources—thus permitting (even encouraging) histo-

rians of philosophy in Europe to locate Heidegger’s innovations

within the narrative of European philosophy.30 A discrete history for

a particular cultural identity is thus preserved.

Hence, there appears to be a politics of identity at work in the

history of philosophy which frustrates attempts to eradicate or

overcome the ethnocentricity of the discipline of philosophy—even

in those instances where such overcoming may have already takenplace. Because of what Graham Parkes has called Heidegger’s

‘disingenuousness’ about his sources, Heidegger must shoulder

C. S. Goto-Jones

38

27 Lorenz Krüger (‘Why do we Study the History of Philosophy?’ in PHfollows Gadamer in this, pp. 89, 97). That is, Heidegger sought to demon-

strate the contingency of European civilization without suggesting that

you had to step outside of it to demonstrate this.28 Ibid. p. 97.29 See in particular, Graham Parkes, ‘Rising Sun over Black Forest’ in

Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, (London: Routledge, 1996).

See also, Christopher S. Jones, ‘The Politics of Being: From Nishida to

Heidegger and Back Again,’ paper given at Japan Politics Colloquium,

(University of Oxford, September 2002), and expanded for a guest lecture

at the Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies, (University of Leiden,

September 2002).30 In his monumental study, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Theodore Kisiel makes

no mention of possible Japanese/Asian/non-European ‘geneses’.

responsibility for a great lost opportunity in the history of the

history of philosophy.31 However, as we will see in the next section,

this identity politics has also spilled over into inconsistent method-

ological assertions about the qualitative differences between the dif-

ferent countries of the past and those of the present.

Holiday Romance and Talking to People you Can’t

Understand.

A note on philosophical dialogue

When dealing with alternative or lost systems of philosophy from

our past, just as when we consider non-European alternatives, it is

quite probable that we will come across philosophies that put into

question the rationality (and truth) of our own beliefs and practices.

To some extent, we can withdraw into a narrative conception of

history and argue that these alternatives were false-leads that were

overcome on the path to our present level of wisdom. Of course,

this is not a tactic that we can apply to non-European alternatives,

which were not overcome on the path to the creation of the modern

West.32 Instead, we seek to exclude the non-European others with

other devices—suggesting that they are irrelevant or, with a little

more sophistication, that they are impenetrable to us. This is a mis-

take of politics.


39

31 Parkes (‘Rising Sun over Black Forest’, pp. 106–7) reports a conversa-

tion with Heidegger’s student, Gadamer, in which Gadamer suggested

that Heidegger would have been reluctant to acknowledge sources that he

could not read in their original language. Leaving aside the fact that such

issues did not prevent Leibniz or Nietzsche from writing about Asian ideas

(as Parkes points out), the question of language and the possibility of dia-

logue will be central to the next section, below.32 In some ways, this should actually indicate that non-European ideas

might be a better source of alternative visions than past-European ideas,

since they have not been overcome by the ‘epistemological model.’ That

said, ideas and models are overcome for a variety of historical reasons—not

always because of the failure of one set of ideas to stand up to another.

Considerations of material and financial power are very important. Hence,

it is conceivable that ‘better’ ideas have been overcome in European history

for extra-philosophical reasons. Conversely, the historical interactions

between non-European models and the ‘epistemological model’ have not

always been smooth or delimited by philosophical dialogue—consider the

complexities of the ‘overcoming modernity’ debates in 1940s Japan.

Survival of a model does not simply indicate its quality.

The history of philosophy makes us aware of the existence of a

series of other sets of ‘philosophical beliefs, attitudes and forms of

enquiry whose implicit claims to rational hegemony were incom-

patible with the parallel claims embodied in our own philosophical

activity, but whose claims could not be shown by rational argu-

ment.’33 MacIntyre concedes that this may well be ‘precisely the

same type of philosophical activity carried on within some alien cul-

tural tradition’ but, instead of developing this insight into a method

for interrogating non-European philosophy, MacIntyre quickly

pushes any such activity into the realms of anthropology, suggest-

ing that they are part of some other narrative of cultural identity,

and nothing to do with us after all.34

This constitutes a tragic missed opportunity. MacIntyre is quite

right to recognize some of the similarities between the practice of

analyzing philosophies from the past and analyzing those from dif-

ferent countries—the past, after all, is a different country. Indeed,

the situation is more similar than most people seem willing to con-

sider … and it is getting increasingly similar all the time.

When we are discussing the problems associated with engaging with

the philosophical systems of the past (or the foreign), we are talking

about a type of dialogue quite unlike that which takes place within the

conventional discipline of philosophy everyday. ‘The point is that the

debate is not between two propositions which are rivals in the ordinary

way that empirical hypotheses are—say, the Big Bang versus the

Steady State cosmologies. In this latter case, the truth of each is

incompatible with the truth of the other, but not with its intelligibility.

But here the clash is sharper’, since the history of philosophy in the

West (or a survey of world philosophies) provides models of thought

which are actually unintelligible in terms of the ‘epistemological

model.’35 Rather than challenging the factual accuracy of the big bang,

we find models that threaten the very foundations of physics itself—

challenging the rules that enable us to judge the accuracy of the Big

Bang or Steady State hypotheses.

In the absence of some overarching framework it becomes impos-

sible for us to assert rationally the ‘superiority of our mode of philo-

sophical activity over that of some rival period from our past,’ but

likewise this ‘will make it impossible equally to provide rational

C. S. Goto-Jones

40

33 Alisdair MacIntyre, ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past,’ in

PH, p. 34.34 Ibid. It is interesting to reflect that this marginalization may also be a

product of Williams’ ‘anthropological method.’35 Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in PH, p. 29.

warrant for preferring their claims to ours.’36 ‘If and insofar as the

concept of incommensurability has application to a choice between

rival bodies of theory, then we can have no rational grounds for

accepting any one of those rivals rather than any other.’37 As we have

seen, however, historians of philosophy have come up with some

extra-rational (even psychological) justifications for exactly this

kind of assertion: MacIntyre argues that there is an overarching

framework from which we can judge philosophical forms—the cul-

tural narrative of the European nation-state; Rorty suggests that we

can fall back on the idea of progress and simply judge that Leibniz

was wrong to believe in God or that Aristotle was confused about the

existence of real essences.38 There is a distinct tyranny of the

present at work here, but neither of these arguments find much

leverage over other countries that are not in our past.

In order for us to be able to engage with the history of philosophy

in a genuinely philosophical way, we need an account that ‘will have

to explain how one large-scale philosophical standpoint can engage

with another in cases where each standpoint embodies its own con-

ceptions of what rational superiority consists of in such a way that

there can apparently be no appeal to any neutral and independent

standard.’39 And this is also exactly the kind of account that we need

in order to take non-European philosophy seriously.

Rather disappointingly, MacIntyre, who readily acknowledges

the need for such an account, offers us very little advice on how this

kind of story might be written. Indeed, he concludes his paper with

the line: ‘And the only way to answer that question is by trying to

write it and either failing or succeeding.’40 Very helpful.

Somewhat ironically, however, I think that we find one possible

account of how to arbitrate between apparently incommensurable

positions in the work of a character who has apparently done so suc-

cessfully, Martin Heidegger, and in the work of those thinkers that

he denies having successfully interrogated, the Kyoto School.


41

36 Alisdair MacIntyre, ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past,’ in

PH, p. 35.37 Ibid. p. 41.38 For Rorty, the only reason that we are not so damning about past fig-

ures is because we still have colleagues who subscribe to their views, and

we do not wish to call our colleagues ignorant. Instead we say that they

hold ‘different philosophical perspectives,’ pp. 49–50.39 Alisdair MacIntyre, ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past,’ in

PH, p. 40.40 Ibid. p. 47.

Towards a Dialogic World History of Philosophy

If we can accept that the past is a different country, and that they do

things differently there, then we must also accept that they speak a

different language there, no matter how familiar it may seem to us

today.41 Our discourse with great thinkers from European history is

a linguistic puzzle at the same time as being a philosophical one.

Nevertheless, there appears to be a significant symbolic boundary

delimiting the European arena, as though languages outside of that

arena are so ‘exotic’ (to borrow the label from Rorty) that their com-

prehension is a challenge of an entirely new nature.

Charles Taylor laments that ‘we shall be in a quite different

predicament if we oppose two philosophical views emanating from

quite different cultures and histories … clearly we set off without

the remotest idea how even to go about arbitrating [between

them].’42 Indeed, Taylor remarks that even an extra-terrestrial from

Sirius would take flight back to his home planet if asked to engage

with both a Buddhist view of the self and a ‘Western conception of

personality’ simultaneously. The key problem for the alien, appar-

ently, is the lack of a common language shared by these two tradi-

tions. There are no points of contact. Before the alien could judge

between them, Taylor suggests that East and West ‘would have to

grow together as civilizations.’43

There are two crucial points of contention here—the first con-

cerns the assertion of radical difference between the West and the

Other; and the second concerns the question of when we might con-

sider that ‘we have grown together as civilizations.’

Regarding the first, it seems to me to be ridiculous to suggest

that, say, Japanese is so radically different from European languages

that there can be no points of contact between them. It appears to

be a false assertion (premised upon a rigid sense of a European

identity) that a English speaker can understand philosophical posi-

tions in French, German and Italian, even in ancient Greek and

Latin, but cannot make contact with positions expressed in

Japanese. Europe here is a false unity—constructed and maintained

in the established canon of philosophy.

It is interesting to reflect that, despite all of his pretensions to

C. S. Goto-Jones

42

41 Following Austin and Skinner, I note that meaning is dependent upon

(and determined by) context—hence we have to relearn the meaning of

familiar terms when encountering them in unfamiliar contexts (i.e. in

history).42 Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in PH, p. 30.43 Ibid. p. 30.

Euro-centricity, Heidegger himself did actually engage in philo-

sophical discourse with a number of the Japanese philosophers who

visited him in Freiburg during the 1930s. Indeed, Heidegger even

wrote an extended account of one such conversation, A Dialogue onLanguage between a Japanese and an Inquirer (1953/4), in which he

recalls the conversations he had with the eminent Japanese philoso-

pher Kuki Shûzô.44 Heidegger is very clear that the different lan-

guages of the conversation partners made dialogue difficult (he

protests continuously that he never understood Kuki’s use of the

term iki, for example), but he is also clear that these dialogues were

extremely profitable:45

J: … The language of the dialogue constantly destroyed thepossibility of saying what the dialogue was about.


43

44 Kuki had studied with Rickert in Heidelberg in 1923, before spending

three years in Paris (where he met Bergson and introduced Sartre to the

work of Heidegger). Returning to Germany in 1927 to study with Husserl

in Freiburg, Kuki finally met Heidegger and followed him to Marburg to

work with him. In 1933, Kuki published the first book-length study of

Heidegger in any language, Haideggâ no tetsugaku. For his part, Heidegger

also seems to have been impressed by Kuki, and he appears to have been

aware of Kuki’s connections with the Kyoto School of Philosophy, since he

has the ‘Japanese’ in his dialogue refer to workshops held by Kuki at Kyoto

Univeristy after his return from Germany. Martin Heidegger (trans. Peter

H. Hertz), ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’

in Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, (NY: Harper & Row, 1982),

p. 5. An excellent treatment of Kuki in English is Leslie Pincus,

Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shûzô and the Rise ofNational Aesthetics, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

45 Kuki developed his concept of iki in his landmark text of 1930, Iki nokôzô, which is now part of volume one of his collected works, Kuki Shûzôzenshû, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981 (12 vols). The central concept of ikihas so far deluded most translators, who prefer to leave the term in

Japanese. It refers to a particular aesthetic principle that Kuki held repre-

sented a special Japanese quality—somewhere between pride, resignation,

and sincerity. In fact, Kuki utilized the techniques of modern philosophy

(learnt in part in Germany and France) to analyse iki, and his text reflects

this analytical approach: kôzô (of iki no kôzô) is a cold, technical term

meaning ‘structure’ and the tension between this and the traditional word

iki in the title is revealing—one being a crisp (almost Western) philosoph-

ical term, and the other being a traditional (even sentimental) Japanese

term. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of this text is Tada

Michitarô & Yasuda Takeshi, ‘Iki no kôzô’ o yomu, (Tokyo: Asahi

shimbunsha, 1979).

I: Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house ofBeing. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim andcall of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirelydifferent house than Eastasian man.

J: Assuming that the languages of the two are not merely differentbut are other in nature, and radically so.

I: And so, a dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible.

J: You are right to say ‘nearly.’ For still it [Heidegger’s earlier dis-cussions with Kuki] was still a dialogue—and, I should think, anexciting one …46

Indeed, later in the conversation, Heidegger tentatively suggests

that the two houses of Being make contact on the ‘path of dialogue’

itself. He notes an ‘undefined defining something’ which permits

the dialogue to occur in the first place.47 And later still he talks about

‘the wellspring of reality from which those two fundamentally dif-

ferent languages arise.’48 This is not a wellspring that can be articu-

lated in either language (but merely hinted at in both). Indeed,

Heidegger is clear that we must resist the temptation to appropriate

this foundational location into any single language—preferring

instead to permit dialogue to hint in its direction, like the proverbial

finger pointing at the moon.49 The path of dialogue between appar-

ently incommensurable models of philosophy turns out to be the

way to locate (even if not to specify) the wellspring of reality.

What is particularly fascinating about Heidegger’s position on

this issue is that it is almost identical to that held by his eminent

Japanese contemporary, Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945), to whose work

Heidegger insisted that he had not been exposed. There is neither

the time nor the need to discuss this ‘deeply concealed kinship’ in

great detail here, but it will suit our purposes to linger at least

C. S. Goto-Jones

44

46 Martin Heidegger (trans. Peter H. Hertz), ‘A Dialogue on Language

Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’ in Martin Heidegger, On the Way toLanguage, (NY: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 5.

47 Ibid. p. 22.48 Ibid. p. 24.49 Here Heidegger’s ‘house of being’ approximates Nishida Kitarô’s mu

no basho (place of nothingness), which is the ineffable foundation of all

things, at which language and reason can only hint. In many ways, this is

a foundationalist resolution to the problem of Taylor’s ‘point of contact.’

On pp. 40–1, Heidegger talks about the ‘site’ in which the ‘deeply con-

cealed kinship in our thinking’ exists—and he states that the site is in the

‘boundlessness which is shown to us in kû’—this language suggests a

‘deeply concealed kinship’ between the ‘house of being’ and mu no basho… the site is the wellspring of reality.

briefly.50 In particular, Nishida and his Kyoto School of Philosophy

might help to shed some light on our second point of contention

with Charles Taylor—that of the way in which civilizations East

and West are growing together.

Nishida Kitarô is perhaps the most eminent name in Japanese

philosophy. Born in 1870, he was on the cusp of what Kenneth Pyle

has called the ‘Meiji generation’ of thinkers,51 schooled both in the

classics of Japanese tradition and in the ‘new’ sciences of Western

philosophy.52 This generation of thinkers has often been called the

‘bridge’ between Japan and the West and, in many ways, this

‘bridge-building’ was the explicit purpose of the school of

philosophy that was to grow up around Nishida in the University of

Kyoto after about 1911. For most recent commentators, one of the

defining characteristics of the Kyoto School was its attempt to

synthesize Japanese intellectual traditions (which may or may not

warrant the label ‘philosophy’ in their own right) with rigorous

philosophical forms. The result was the creation of a genuinely

original school of philosophy, which orbited around the central,

foundationalist concept of ‘nothingness’ (mu).53

Nishida’s experience of the rich cultural flows of early twentieth

century Japan had a profound effect on his thinking.54 Nishida was

well read in European philosophy, especially the German idealists


45

50 Heidegger has the ‘Japanese’ in his dialogue remark to the ‘Inquirer’:

‘As far as I am able to follow what you are saying, I sense a deeply con-

cealed kinship with our thinking.’ (pp. 40–41).51 Kenneth Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of

Cultural Identity, 1885–95, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969).52 The enforced end of Japan’s period of sakoku (isolationism) in 1854,

at the end of the barrels of US Commodore Perry’s famous ‘black ships,’

brought not only a flood of international trade but also a massive influx of

Western culture, including philosophy.53 One of the leading scholars of the Kyoto School in English, James

Heisig, writes: ‘Not only does this group of philosophers represent Japan’s

first sustained and original contribution to western philosophical thought,

they do so from a distinctly eastern perspective. Far from simply reuphol-

stering traditional philosophical questions in an oriental décor, theirs is a

disciplined and well-informed challenge to the definition of the history of

philosophy itself.’ James Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay onthe Kyoto School, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), p. 3.

54 There are a host of biographical studies of Nishida in Japanese, which

attempt to locate him in the spirit of his times. In English we have only

recently had anything substantial—Michiko Yusa, Zen & Philosophy: AnIntellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarô, Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press, 2002.

and neo-Kantians. He was in occasional correspondence with

Rickert and Husserl, to whom he sent a number of his best students

throughout the 1920s and 1930s.55 Of particular interest to us here is

the fact that Nishida’s philosophy of history reflected his radically

cosmopolitan intellectual world. For Nishida, the progress of world

history could be characterized by the flow of ideas and cultures

around the planet. History commenced with a fragmented and atom-

ized world, and it progressed towards greater levels of unity. In the

end, the world would be a giant syncretic whole—exhibiting the

special characteristics (tokushoku) of all previous civilizations but

being dominated by none of them.56 Even his most notorious of

essays, Sekaishinchitsujo no genri (1943), which many historians have

used to suggest his complicity with the imperialist regime, states the

dialogic nature of intellectual history very clearly.57

Nishida argued that the world of the twentieth century was enter-

ing a period of ‘compact global space’ (kinmitsu naru hitotsu nosekaiteki kûkan), thanks to developments in science, technology and

economics.58 Whilst previous centuries had been characterized by

the interaction between small groups within the nation—providing

multiple dialogues that would eventually coalesce into the mono-

logue of the nation state in the nineteenth century—the twentieth

century would be characterized by the interaction, dialogue (and

conflict) between national groups. This would provide a transna-

tional, transcultural dialogue that would hint in the direction of a

possible future unity of the globe as a world-of-worlds (sekaitekisekai): ‘this is why I call the present the age of global self-awaken-

ing for every nation.’59

C. S. Goto-Jones

46

55 Nishida’s students and junior colleagues who spent time in Germany

included: Tanabe Hajime (1922–24), Miki Kiyoshi (1922–25), Nishitani

Keiji (1936–38), and of course Kuki Shûzô (1921–24, 1927–29). Nishida

himself never left Japan.56 Nishida develops these ideas in a number of essays. Perhaps the most

explicit and accessible are Keijijôgakuteki tachiba kara mita tôzai kodai nobunka keitai (1934, now in NKZ VII) and Rekishiteki shintai (1937, now in

NKZ XIV).57 For an argument that suggests that Nishida was calling for interna-

tional intellectual dialogue rather than material and military confrontation,

see Christopher S. Jones, ‘If not a Clash, then What? Huntington, Nishida

and the Politics of Civilizations,’ International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2:2 (2002).

58 Nishida Kitarô, Sekaishinchitsujo no genri (1943, now reprinted in

NKZ XII), p.428.59 ibid. Nishida’s language here echoes the qualification offered by Kant

when asked whether the present was an enlightened age: ‘the answer is:

Crucially, this ‘age of global self-awakening’ had to take a dialog-

ic form, and Nishida’s intellectual biography is testament to his per-

sonal sincerity on this point—the influence of Kant and Hegel on

this vision, for example, is clear. For Nishida, solving the problems

of the modern age would involve ‘every nation [every agent,

kakushi] transcending itself whilst remaining completely true to

itself and together creating a world-of-worlds [sekaiteki sekai]’—that is creating a single dialogic, compact global space in which our

understanding of ‘reality’ reaches a new level of sophistication.60

Indeed, for Nishida, this historical movement towards greater lev-

els of unity is a pre-requisite for a deepening of our understanding

of the most profound philosophical questions: in the future we will

understand the world more perfectly not because we will be more

rational or better people, but simply because we will all be pooling

our collective intellectual resources. International or transnational

dialogues will always be better than national monologues, and the

latter belong to the spirit of the nineteenth century. The goal is a

dialogic ‘world historical standpoint’ (sekaishiteki tachiba), in which

no particular monologues are prioritized over any other, but which

allows for free discourse between them all and the gradual evolution

of a unified position.61

Indeed, Nishida goes one step further than this call for a cos-

mopolitan intellectual culture. At least partly in response to the

dominance of a reactionary conservative discourse in the 1930s and

1940s in Japan, Nishida neatly conflates three apparently distinct

types of dialogue: empirical connections between substantive


47

No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment. As things are at present, we

still have a long way to go.’ Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question:

What is Enlightenment,’ in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970/96), p. 58. Nishida did not

believe that the world of the twentieth century had reached his ideal, but

he thought that this dialogic nature would be the character of the age.

60 Nishida Kitarô, Sekaishinchitsujo no genri, p. 428.61 For Nishida, this final unified position will be both moral and true—

if it can ever be achieved. The phrase Sekaishiteki tachiba is associated

very strongly with the Kyoto School symposium held in 1941, Sekaishitekitachiba to Nihon (Japan and the Standpoint of World History). This sym-

posium has a hotly contested political legacy. For an interesting discussion

in English see Horio Tsutomu, ‘The Chûôkôron Discussions, Their

Background and Meaning,’ in James Heisig & John Maraldo (eds), RudeAwakenings, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). See also chap-

ter five of CS Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, theKyoto School and Co-Prosperity, (London: Routledge, 2004).

agents (people, nations etc.), intellectual progress, and moral

progress.62 The result of this conflation, which Nishida worked out

early in his career, is that the obstruction of actions that lead to

increasing levels of unity and wider dialogues is actually immoral.63

Hence, in his own terms, Nishida’s participation in an increasingly

transcontinental intellectual discourse at the start of the twentieth

century was not only in keeping with the spirit of historical

progress, it was also a moral good.

Unfortunately, whilst Nishida and his Kyoto School were willing

and eager to use their developing dialogue with the West to tran-

scend the philosophical and moral limitations of the national,

monological boundaries of a peculiarly ‘Japanese’ tradition, their

openness was not matched by their European conversation partners.

Even Heidegger, so set on his flight from the European tradition,

was not willing to acknowledge his role in this dialogue.64 To some

extent, then, the new era of transnational intellectual history and

philosophical discourse foreseen by Nishida in the early years of the

1900s was still-born because of a lack of reciprocation from the

philosophers of the imperial powers of Europe. We can only guess

C. S. Goto-Jones

48

62 In his seminal debut, Zen no kenkyû (1911), Nishida is very clear that

‘if you look at it from the outside, conduct is the movement of the body,

but … although psychologists make a distinction between the internal and

the external, all conscious phenomena have the same characteristic.’ p. 127,

130. Later in the same work (section 3, chapters 9–13), Nishida explains

how actions are only good when they related to (or move towards) the

whole—ie. a dialogic process, or ‘a coordinated harmony.’ See Nishida

Kitarô, Zen no kenkyû, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1911/97. It is presumably

this conflation that has led some commentators to argue that Nishida (and

the wider Kyoto School) was complicit in ultra-nationalism—effectively

calling on the Japanese to create the co-prosperity sphere in Asia. This

interpretation ignores the dialogic spirit of statements such as: ‘real world-

ism [sekaishugi] doesn’t mean that separate nations cease to be. It means,

rather, that each nation becomes increasingly coherent, displays their indi-

vidual characteristics [to the world] and thus contributes to world history.’

(ibid. p. 201).63 Nishida shared this vision with his eminent French contemporary,

Henri Bergson, who attempted to put the idea into practice in the League

of Nation’s Commission for Intellectual Co-operation, of which the latter

became president in 1923. For a comparison of Nishida and Bergson see

Christopher S Jones, ‘A Lost Tradition: Nishida Kitarô, Henri Bergson

and Intuition in Political Philosophy,’ Social Science Japan Journal, 5:1

(2002).64 Reinhard May admirably documents Heidegger’s continued refusal to

concede any influence from Asian sources. Reinhard May, Heidegger’sHidden Sources.

at the political (and even psychological) reasons for this failure. One

of the first tasks for the historian of philosophy in the twenty-first

century must (with moral force) be to retrieve this dialogue. As it

stands, we enforce a nineteenth century spirit on the world.

I am a Philosopher—but who am I?

Even if we accept that dialogue between the past and the present,

and between the self and the alien is possible (provided that all par-

ties can partake in the idea of dialogue itself), we are still left with

one final dilemma: a dialogic account of the history of philosophy

must overcome the question of whom we chose to regard as partic-

ipants in the dialogue. This is a problem that historians of

philosophy have wrestled with for some time, and its solution

revolves around a constellation of issues regarding the meaning of

‘philosophy’ itself.

For Rorty, one of the essential problems of the history of

philosophy is the fact that, even amongst its professional practition-

ers, there is little agreement on the question of what constitutes

‘philosophy.’ We cannot identify past philosophers by the accuracy

of their answers to specific questions, since there is little agreement

today on what would constitute a good answer and even what would

constitute a suitable question. For example, when we look at

thinkers from the past, do we consider that those who have tackled

the question of the existence of God were philosophers (or, say,

theologians) and, if so, should we only count those who decided that

God did not exist? Heidegger is famous for his spectacularly grudg-

ing attitude towards some of his predecessors—he dismissed

Kierkegaard, for example, as being a ‘religious thinker’ rather than

a proper philosopher (despite (or perhaps because of) the obvious

debt owed to Kierkegaard for Heidegger’s conception of angst). It

is at least conceivable that Heidegger could have been equally dis-

missive about the Kyoto School—reconstructing its members as

‘religious thinkers’ or simply as ‘Japanese thinkers’ and thus dis-

qualifying them from the philosophers’ club. If they were not

philosophers, then there would be no need to acknowledge a

philosophical dialogue with them—indeed, such a dialogue may be

defined out of the realms of possibility.

What is interesting for us today is the fact that the definition and

scope of ‘philosophy’ is itself a socio-historical construction: the

canon of philosophy and philosophers undergoes a continuous

process of amendment and transformation. All that is needed is for


49

a community of present practitioners to embrace a new central

problematic and thus to redefine which thinkers from the past are

important. After Heidegger, for example, historians of philosophy

went back through the conventional canon, reshuffling it to include

or emphasize aspects of the thought of the (pre-selected) great

philosophers that addressed the question of ‘Being.’ Of course,

Heidegger might well be a case of (deliberate) misdirection—since

historians ploughed back into the European canon looking for

insight into Being, when they could (and perhaps should) have seen

Heidegger as a pivot between at least two conventional canons,

including a Buddhist canon in Japan and East Asia. A history of

philosophy that culminates in Heidegger’s problematization of

Being should be a transcultural history, including figures from ‘East

and West.’

Indeed, Richard Rorty identifies a tendency for radical change in

the canon of philosophy to be ‘half-hearted,’ by which he means

that historians are happy to reorganize the established canon around

new questions (a history of Being, a history of God etc.), but that

they lack the courage to adjust the membership and composition of

the canon itself.65 The canon does not change, it is merely shuffled,

presumably because of some kind of psychological weakness that

we were discussing earlier—the need to discover the European self

in the history of philosophy. (Or perhaps because of the profession-

alization and institutionalization of philosophy in European univer-

sities?)

There is a definite need, then, for some whole-hearted reconsid-

erations of the philosophical canon, and thus the creation of a

canon that actually fits the needs and realities of our present world.

Rorty himself concedes that the established canon has fallen

behind the times, even within a national-cultural framework. We

can only imagine how far behind the times the existing canon

might be within the world-context of the twenty-first century. The

price of failure is high—perhaps the very survival of philosophy as

respectable discipline in the modern world. ‘So if things go well we

can expect continual revisions of the philosophical canon in order

to bring it into line with the present needs of high culture. If they

go badly, we can expect the stubborn perpetuation of a [European]

canon—one which will look quainter and more factitious as the

decades pass.’66

C. S. Goto-Jones

50

65 Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,’ in

PH, p. 63.66 Ibid. p. 70.

Conclusion

The call for the history of philosophy to open its doors to non-

European thinkers does not amount to a request for the creation of

competing monologues in different cultures and societies. I do not

wish to engage in the juxtaposition of Japanese philosophy against

Brazilian philosophy, against ‘European’ philosophy. That is not

what philosophy or the history of philosophy is about (although it

might be what anthropology or Area Studies are about), although it

appears to be an implication of certain approaches to intellectual

history.

Equally, however, I am not calling for the token inclusion of a

chapter at the end textbooks entitled ‘Asian philosophy’, or for the

inclusion of a random sprinkling of non-European thinkers in

undergraduate philosophy programmes, just for the sake of political

correctness.67 That said, even this would be a step forward in some

ways (to the extent that it did not consolidate the impression of

monological canons)—indicative of a more open discipline,

searching for new sources of wisdom in less artificially (or even

psychologically) circumscribed locations.

But, thankfully, there are options other than simple political cor-

rectness: what is needed is a whole-hearted reconsideration of the

philosophical canon in the light of the new demands of the increas-

ingly transcultural nature (and identity) of our time. If the history

of philosophy has to be about the enshrinement of identity, perhaps

it is time that this became a transnational identity (even if not yet a

completely global one68) rather than a national one. This new canon

will include thinkers from different countries, not only from other

parts of the world, but also some lost from our own past. The future

is also a different country, and we should do things differently there.

University of Nottingham


51

67 David Williams (Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science, p.

37) also rejects this kind of ‘political correctness,’ but finds the ‘anthropo-

logical method’ to be the best alternative.68 For Nishida, the movement towards a global world might commence

with Europe and Asia at first, expanding as other regions and nations gain

the technological means to enter the ‘compact global space’ for dialogue.

If the past is a different country, are different countries in the past?

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