The Virtual Time Garden

International Conference on Philosophy of Science in Beijing, China, October, 1994.

 

On Decolonization of

the Philosophical Culture

 

 

     China is now standing at a great historical turning point. Rapid development in economy has created radical transformations within the social organizations, and at the same time, it is making parallel changes in various cultural domains. These changes have caused some serious disorder and struggles in some parts of society. But totally speaking, they seem to be making new hopes among Chinese people. In such a situation, it is very valuable to have this conference with colleagues from many countries and to exchange opinions each other.

 

     In a broader perspective, however, not only China but also the whole world is now facing an unprecedented turning point of civilization. The twentieth century is the period of historical convulsion; enormous changes have occurred in the domains of politics, science, culture and thought. Besides, since the breakdown of the Berliner Wall in 1989 and the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, the political situation of the world has forced us to change our view of the world history. The old common sense has declined and the framework of knowledge is now in a great shift everywhere.

 

     Such a situation is both complex and complicated one. We can however distinguish some characteristics in it.

 

     First, we can say that we live in the age of "globalization".

The development of traffic system and communication technologies have unified the every part of the world. We can know all of the events occurring in any part of the world simultaneously by the communication network of satellites. The media, such as TV, radio, newspaper, telephone and computer are now connected to this large network. We live in a realized "global village", which Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 60's. The world has become a huge and single unit which consists of regions constantly interacting each other.

 

     Take the economic field for example, the world has also become a big single market. Many countries make investments over the border; Chinese products are exported to many countries, and foreign products are imported to China reciprocally. They circulate in a single market. In some cases, those products are even made by the collaboration of plural countries. Today's industrial world is getting more and more multinational and borderless. In a word, the world is now a huge economical/political complexity whose parts are mutually connected very closely.

 

     Secondly, one can point out that such a globalized and borderless world is, however, in a serious confusion in cultural domains. In other words, we live in the age of "multiculturalism". In the previous ages, the globalization meant just a domination of the world by the strong western civilization. The imperialism in nineteenth century expanded the European colonies in every part of the world and forced them to accept the western value system. The people in the colonies were divided by the dichotomy of Civilization/ Savagery, and there only those who accepted and endeavored to learn the western culture belonged to civilization and others to savagery. In such a condition, we came to wear western clothes, study western philosophy and build western-style cities. And since the Second World War, the United States of America has exerted a great influence on the world by its overwhelming capital power, and exported its popular culture and food industry, such as Coca-Cola, jeans, pop music, hollywood films and so on. You can see the great achievement of "Americanization" in the market economy in this country today.

 

     We can call this old type of globalization "Homogenization" or "Assimilation". Historically speaking, it is obvious that the precedent major civilizations always had a tendency of homogenization. The ancient civilizations of Rome and China built empires by forcing the other peoples to accept their own value system.

 

     However, today's globalization is fundamentally different from the homogenization by the western modernity or so-called "internationalization". We can point out two features of it. First, the hegemony of western modernity has lost its efficiency in and out. Various ideals, world views or historical perspectives made by the western modernity, which Jean-Francois Lyotard called "Grand Story = grand recit" of the modernity in his book "The condition of Postmodern", have totally declined now.

 

     Of course, the end of of the modernity is not only the problems of the cultural history but also a consequence of the complicated interactions between various fields such as politics, economy and society. And even if we must accept the end of the story of modernity in terms of enlightenment of the world by the name of universality, that doesn't mean the question about the West or the Modernity has lost its meaning. Rather, it is still the biggest question and will never lose its importance,for the reason that it has built the present world by its technical, industrial, military and cultural excellence, and the criticism of the modernity is to be possible only in the discursive field of the modernity itself.

 

     Another cause of the multiculturalism is the fluidity of population and the acceleration of human mobility in the current world. Globalization has increased the number of people who travels for the purpose of business or tourism. In addition, the confusion after the Second World War made a number of immigrants or refugees, and the independence of many colonies and their modernization displaced many people from their traditional community. People flew into the big cities and emigrated to the richer countries. Consequently, we can see a new type of coexistence of plural ethnic groups in many countries. Not only the nations of North and South America which were originally immigrants' nations, but also the nations of the Western Europe or Japan, have become multi-ethnic nations in fact with many foreigners living in the cities.

 

     Of course, the multi-ethnicity or the multiculturalism itself is not the rare case in history. We know, for example, that the ancient China contained various ethnic groups, and most of the old civilizations accepted the state of multi-ethnicity. But the recent multiculturalism seems to be still unique, compared with them. It has an unprecedented scale and a diversity of style in each region.

 

     There exists not only a principle of homogenization in which a dominant culture suppresses the other culture. We can also point out in many regions completely different strategies of "heterogenization" or "exoticization" in which different cultures live together maintaining their autonomy, and strategy of "hybridization" in which they melt in each other and construct some new culture. Todays' civil wars or political struggles are deeply concerned with such politics of different cultures.

 

     However, it is not to be simply reduced to the questions about so-called "nationalism" or "nation". As Benedict Anderson says in his book "Imagined Community", the concept of nation-state is just a phantom = image made by the modern industrial society. Therefore, it is the most important to put the problem of multiculturalism away from such modernistic ideas as nation or nationalism. But if so, how can we think about the philosophical culture today ?

 

     In such a view, what is philosophy and its activities? First of all, I would like to make my standpoint clear. For us, born and living in China or in Japan, "Philosophy" is nothing but western philosophy and in such a sense Philosophy belongs to a kind of colonial culture in itself.

 

     The word colonial culture here means not only that it is forced by the outside. The concept of Postmodern= Postcolonial is got only through the inside of modernity or colonialism in common. That is, like Christians in the colonies, philosophy as colonial culture encloses those who studied it, therefore inside of them is internalized by it; once internalized, this alien way of thinking becomes a new foundation which governs the subject who thinks. To overcome the modern philosophy, it is not demanded to eliminate its methods and manners, but to crush it in inside of it and break its borders away. This is the difficulty of this problem.

 

     Exaggeratively speaking, the modern philosophy is nothing but a local way of thinking of the West. It is a particular institution of thought and discourse, succeeding some of the inheritance of thinkers in ancient Greek and the Orient, but basically built on the soil of the scholastic philosophy in the Middle Age. It claims to be universal, but this universality is based on the rationalistic attitude toward the world, and on the idea of modernity itself. It parallels the universalism of natural science after Galileo and Newton. Therefore, though it was just local, by being internalized in the subject, it creates a strong field of discourse and governs those who are concerned with it.

 

     But how can we decolonize it? The question is nothing but the globalization of philosophical knowledge today. However, it cannot be achieved by raising the Eastern knowledge as an alternative against the western thought, nor by making a compromise between them. Rather, the important thing is to introduce the question of multiculturalism into our philosophical discourses themselves.

 

      There seems to be two dominant streams of western philosophy in twentieth century; one is streams of so-called continental philosophy and the other is Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. It is no use to say that the opposition between them is neither decisive nor deeply-rooted. It is derived from the longing of philosophy and human sciences for the firm identity since nineteenth century.

 

      The nineteenth century's rationalism raised up the status of so-called objective sciences. Against that, philosophy, literary studies or historical studies threw into the exigency to identify themselves by all means. The branches in the continental philosophy, for example, the Hermeneutics of Dilthey and Phenomenology of Husserl, were born in such context.

 

     On the other hand, the stream of the Logical Philosophy by Frege, Russell and Whitehead appeared in the same demand. Through early Wittgenstein and the logical positivism of Vienna Circle, it has been succeeded by the big stream of the analytic philosophy in England and in America. A characteristic of this school is that, though motivated by the same single desire to authorize philosophy as an independent subject, it tried to accomplish that project by determining the role of philosophy within "the analysis of language'.

 

     They criticized that most of the previous philosophers had made errors in usage of language, thus they fell into the metaphysics. Therefore they tended to restrict the role of philosophy within "to describe the world analytically".

 

     Here I don't want to extend this argument any more. The one thing I want to point out is that this school enclosed the project of philosophy into the study about the usage of language and logical analysis, by separating it from the history and the social realities. And it was born from historical obsessions of two domains, which are "language" and " science".

 

     It is no use to say that this view about philosophy has lost its self evidence now. It began to suicide slowly by the inconsistency within it. Wittgenstein, "Ordinary language" school or Quine attacked to the "scientific" vocabularies which logical positivist put self-evident. Besides, after Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feuerabend, the concept of science has changed its meaning from the accumulation of not-historical universal knowledge into the discursive system constructed in each age. Thus the gap between the continent philosophy and the analytic philosophy now becomes meaningless. Besides, through the evolution of the philosophical consideration about language and sciences, the old problem of identifying philosophy is totally shifted to the different stage.

 

     In such context, the twentieth century philosophy is now released from the obsession since the end of nineteenth century. At the same time, there appears the new viewpoint to grasp philosophy as critics of the organization of discourse rather than just drawing the borderline between science and metaphysics or ideologies. For example, Michel Foucault's work, derived from Nietzsche's "genealogy", is one representative. Foucault shifted the role of philosophy from the analysis of language into the domains of "discourse" -- that is, the cultural device which determine self and other, and which produce the horizon of world in each historical and cultural condition. The stage of philosophy seems to be moved from the analysis of language or logic toward the critic of discourse.

 

     Introduction of logical philosophy and philosophy of science into China was done in relatively early days. However, it seems to be the time to introduce the results of the tradition of continental philosophy, and at the same time to start moving toward the philosophy of discourse as the self-reflexive activity. Because, in this multicultural era, "deconstructing" the discourse of western philosophy means at the same time reconstructing our standpoint of thinking. It is to decolonize philosophy as one part of colonial culture which has dominated us from both inside and out.