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ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of a legitimation project for European colonialism, through to post-second world war Pan-European identity formation and white supremacist projects. Thus argues Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African public intellectual, schoolteacher, trade unionist, and activist-theorist. In his 1953 address to the Teachers’ League of South Africa, The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation, Kies became one of the first people to argue explicitly that there is no such thing as ‘Western philosophy’. In this paper, I introduce Kies as a new figure in the historiography of philosophy with important insights, relevant today. I outline his three key arguments: that ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of political mythmaking, that it is a recent, largely mid-twentieth century fabrication, and that there is an alternative to ‘Histories of Western Philosophy’, namely ‘mixed’ or entangled histories. I show that Kies’ claims are supported both by contemporary scholarship and bibliometric analysis. I thus argue that Kies is right to claim that the idea of a distinctive, hermetically sealed ‘Western Philosophy’ is a recent, political fabrication and should be abandoned. We should instead develop global, entangled historiography to make sense of philosophy and its history today.
Acknowledgements
This paper develops research for a project entitled The Myth of “Western Philosophy”, conducted with Lea Cantor, to whom I am deeply indebted and without whom this work would not exist. I would also like to thank Michael Nassen Smith, who initially introduced me to the work of Ben Kies; Peter Adamson and Jonathan Egid, who read earlier drafts of the paper; Lucy Allais, who gave valuable feedback on an earlier draft; and two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging comments. Finally, I wish to thank colleagues who gave critical and valuable feedback on numerous aspects of the paper in seminars and conferences, especially at the 2022 British Society for the History of Philosophy annual conference in Edinburgh, as well as from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, to Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, to Universität Hildesheim’s HiPhi: Histories of Philosophy in a Global Perspective group in Germany, and the Associação Latino-Americana de Filosofia Intercultural (ALAFI) in Brazil.
Notes
1 Russell being an exemplar of the former, with the latter position taken by numerous critics in so-called ‘Non-Western Philosophy’ and decolonial theory; see, for example, Grosfoguel (Epistemic Decolonial Turn).
2 In both cases, authors’ motivations may be modest and reasonable, even to ‘provincialize’ so-called ‘Western Philosophy’ and situate it as one-amongst-many.
3 In several important papers, Robert Bernasconi (e.g., Parochialism, 213; Ethnicity, 573) also casts aspersions on the term, referring for instance to the “so-called Western philosophical tradition” and using scare quotes around ‘Western Philosophy’, while making many of the crucial substantive arguments that I address in this paper. He does not, however, directly address it as a category, its genealogy, or ramifications. More generally, many scholars over the last decades have pointed to the incoherence of the very idea of ‘The West’ and ‘Western Culture’, including David Graeber, who nevertheless deploys the idea of “the Western philosophical tradition” (There Never Was a West, 338), and more recently Kwame Anthony Appiah in his well-known 2016 Reith Lectures, published as The Lies that Bind (191-211), though without focusing much on ‘Western Philosophy’ specifically.
4 Kies uses the term ‘mixed’, while contemporary global historiographical scholarship tends to speak of ‘cross-cultural’, ‘connected’, or ‘Histoire Croisée’ approaches. I have adopted ‘entangled’ largely because it points to the depth of connectedness and difficulty of separating out supposedly different ‘cultures’ or units, thereby preserving Kies’ insights, while updating the terminology to speak to contemporary scholarship.
5 Citation count from Google Scholar as of 13th April 2022. Readership estimated by Gottlieb, Anthony. “Introduction to the Collectors’ Edition”. In: History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. London: Routledge, 2009 [1945].
6 Such as those mentioned above by Russell, Gottlieb, Kenny, Garvey and Stangroom, Grayling and Baggini.
7 Kies’ three core texts are the 1943 Background of Segregation, a critique of the role of ideology in political domination and outlined the role of intellectuals in political movements; the 1945 Basis of Unity, which addressed questions of the relationship between theory and practice, political strategy and tactics, and especially how to build solidarity across difference; and the 1953 Contribution. Developing across each is a critical theory of ‘race’ and its relationship to imperialism and capitalism. Alongside are vast numbers of shorter texts, many anonymous or collectively written, published especially in the Bulletin, The Torch, and Education Journal (Soudien, Re-Reading, 194).
8 For important exceptions, see Soudien (Contribution and Re-Reading), Erasmus (Non-Racialism), and Hull (Unity Movement). As Soudien (Re-Reading, 192) points out, however, it is not just in philosophy circles: there are precious few scholarly sources that assess the work of Ben Kies specifically. Kies’ work (and that of the Unity Movement) has often been marginalized relative to the focus on activist intellectuals linked to the African National Congress (ANC) or Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Crain Soudien and a colleague are currently working on a political biography of Ben Kies (Personal Communication, 8 March 2023).
9 Roughly, ‘people from the back bush’, a term likely used to refer to rural Afrikaner farmers.
10 Even if there may have been some influence from Cārvāka-Lokāyata on thinkers in Europe from the late sixteenth century (Wojciehowski, East-West Swerves).
11 There is, after all, little consensus even on the boundaries and relationship between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy!
12 More recent scholarship has traced longer histories of race-making/racialization in Europe (see e.g., Heng, Invention; McCoskey, Race). Nevertheless, ‘race’ becomes a politically central organising principle at a world-systemic scale after the Spanish Reconquista, through the colonial conquests of the Americas, and especially in the transatlantic slave trade (although precise timings and relationships remain contentious; see e.g., Hanchard, Race, 485). Here, I maintain that Kies is correct – even if racialization was reconstituted and repurposed from earlier iterations, it was deployed as a “rationalisation of colonial plunder”, and given its global impacts, it is this process that we can call “world-historic”.
13 Cornford himself changed his mind, critiquing and ridiculing these views towards the end of his life, as recorded in his posthumously published Principium Sapientiae (1952).
14 The earliest reference at all to ‘Western Philosophy’ seems either to come from the “Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy” (c.1690s in French; see Schliesser, Origin), although this is an oblique passing reference in a disputed source, and does not correspond to any contemporary usage; or Chōei Takano’s 1835 notes in Japanese (“The Theories of Western Philosophers”, 西洋學師の説) on the history of natural philosophy from Thales to the eighteenth century (Greco, Die Begegnung, 73).
15 To complicate matters, in the early 1900s, German authors could even remain discursively ‘Anti-Western’ (referring especially to Britain, France and the US) while using ‘Okzident’ (Occident) or ‘Abdendland’ (lit. Evening Land) to describe various assemblages of geopolitical/cultural entities, which could include Germany (Bavaj & Steber, Germany, 20).
16 Except, of course, as a history of how this misleading idea emerged.
17 It is this constraint that has led to absurd tangles for some historians of philosophy, paradigmatically when the classicist Eduard Zeller claimed that it was “most natural to call Philosophy Greek, so long as there is in it a preponderance of the Hellenic element over the foreign, and whenever that proportion is reversed to abandon the name” (History, 9-10).
18 Such approaches have also flourished in other areas of history in recent decades, from Global and ‘connected histories’ (Conrad, Global History; Subrahmanyam, Connected History) and Histoire Croisée (Werner & Zimmermann, Beyond Comparison) to Global and Cross-Cultural Intellectual History (Moyn & Sartori, Global Intellectual History; Shogimen, Dialogue). However, these have yet to be widely acknowledged in the history of philosophy specifically.
19 Although entangled histories are clearly not uniquely between Europe and Elsewhere.
20 Such exclusions necessitate mental gymnastics in ‘histories of Western philosophy’, such as highlighting the four-century-long importance of ‘Latin Averroism’ in Europe from the 1200s (e.g., Sabine, 1937, History), without mentioning Ibn Rushd (1125-1198, Latinized as Averroes) or his milieu.
21 This has continued over the last century: theorising of concepts like the state, nation, citizenship, and indeed humanity in Euro-America have been reshaped by struggles of anti-colonial revolutionaries (Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire), including black women from Africa and the Americas (Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation).
22 In the history of philosophy, the closest debates are as recent as 2020 in Gordon et al (Creolizing the Canon), although this still uses the idea of ‘Western Philosophy’.