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  • Thinking with a Good Heart
  • James Maffie (bio)

“In order to weave and live a good life, a woman must ‘think with a good heart,’ ” say Wixárika (Huichol) women in western Mexico (Schaefer 2002, 39). The relevant Wixárika word iyari translates roughly as heart, soul, heart memory (2002, 306), or I suggest, as heart-mind. Guided by a good iyari, a woman who follows the “path of becoming a master weaver or artisan,” may “gain expertise in the many levels of Wixárika cosmology. She may then integrate these teachings into . . . curing patients, communicating with gods, . . . creating textiles,” and living an upright life (2002, 85). Sixteenth-century Aztec philosophy likewise claims that in order to think correctly about the cosmos, human affairs, and humans’ relationship with the cosmos, one must think with a good heart (Maffie 2000, 2005a). Finally, classical Confucianism and Daoism embrace a similar epistemological-cum-moral notion. They speak of xi, which translates roughly as “heart-mind.” Translating xi as heart-mind, according to Chad Hansen, “reflects the blending of belief and desire (thought and feeling, ideas and emotions) into a single complex dispositional potential” (1992, 20).

These four traditions refuse to bifurcate what many leading modern Northern philosophies (such as Cartesianism, Kantianism, and logical positivism) standardly insist upon bifurcating:1 rationality and emotion, head and heart, thinking and feeling, and epistemology and ethics.2 The four maintain the indissolubility of reason and emotion, thinking and feeling, epistemically good cognizing and morally good cognizing, and facts and values. None rejects reason [End Page 182] or rationality per se but only those views of reason and rationality that exclude emotion, feeling, values, and interests. They also claim that wisdom requires having a good, well-balanced heart-mind.

I begin my discussion of Sandra Harding’s Science and Social Inequality (SSI) with the notion of thinking with a good heart for three reasons. First, because I read SSI as arguing that Northern philosophers must begin “thinking with a good heart,” and second, because I regard Harding as a philosopher who thinks with a good heart. Harding’s thinking with a good heart is evident in her insisting that Northern sciences be refashioned from their current state as tools directed toward oppression, poverty, environmental destruction, “militarism, profiteering, and social injustice” into tools directed toward “progressive” ends, such as universal democratic self-determination, human emancipation, human flourishing, mutual respect, cooperation, and environmental sustainability (2006, 61–64). “The rise of new social values, interests, and the relations they direct,” Harding argues, “requires inquiry practices and principles that can support and in turn be supported by these new forms of, we hope, democratic social relations” (156). She writes that “we appear to be in the middle of [a] shift in the dominant social formation, a shift that creates opportunities for the establishment of either utopian or dystopian realities.” Those committed to advancing social justice must consequently engage in critical self-examination, cross-cultural examination, and discussion of “the best strategies for distributing justly the benefits and costs of gaining . . . knowledge” (13).

Harding also rejects Northern distinctions between epistemology and philosophy of science, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other. “Our methodological and epistemological choices,” she claims, “are always also ethical and political choices” (156). This too is consonant with thinking with a good heart. Although rarely questioned by Northern thinkers, these distinctions are, after all, neither self-evident nor universally recognized. Classical Confucianism and Daoism as well as many indigenous North American and Mesoamerican philosophies deny their very intelligibility. Thinking, reason, knowledge, truth, facts, and science are ineliminably interested and value laden, and these interests and values are always moral, economic, political, and cultural. Science, epistemology, knowledge practices, and “the search for truth” are always already implicated in concrete moral, social, political, economic, and cultural projects. Future philosophical discussion of science and knowledge systems, therefore, must assess their adequacy in terms of “how [they] and others like [them] are used to shape future social practices” (156).

I begin with the concept of thinking with a good heart for a third reason. There exists a rich body of “good-hearted” knowledge practices (involving mystical intuition, shamanic...

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