Reply to the Cowherds: Serious Philosophical Engagement with and for Whom?

In ordinary philosophical contexts, it is customary to abide by due processes. For example, we engage the particularities of arguments rather than contenting ourselves with cursory approximations of claims and positions. We reject conclusions by demonstrating that specific premises are suspect or that these premises do not offer valid support. We do not dismiss arguments against us on the basis of sentiment or through tu quoque arguments and other fallacies of diversion.

In practice, however, these due processes do not extend equally to all in our community. My point is not that we occasionally fall short of our ideals and norms, which is to be expected. Rather, I mean that explicitly denying these due processes to certain theories and theorists, and doing so in ways that reinforce our field’s narrow theoretical and demographic contours, is acceptable practice in much of our discipline (e.g., during peer review processes, on tenure-and-promotion and hiring committees, etc.). Swaths of philosophical scholarship are treated as marginal, and when obliged to engage arguments and persons situated in these marginal philosophical positions, it is permissible and even customary to refuse them due processes that prevail in ordinary philosophical contexts. When addressing them, we can make rough generalizations about their theses without engaging the particularities of their claims. We can reject their scholarship out of hand as “facile” or not worth “serious” consideration. We suffer no censure if we refuse to examine the premises or validity of their arguments. We can openly employ fallacious tu quoque arguments against them while still appearing to ourselves and others as models of ordinary philosophical seriousness and rigor! A de facto asymmetry exists between ordinary and marginal philosophical contexts, between contexts in which due processes apply and contexts in which due processes are denied, and it is partially through this asymmetry or “division of labor” that our field reinforces and preserves the privilege of a narrow subset of persons and philosophical possibilities. At its best, cross-cultural philosophy swims against such tendencies.

The Cowherds speak of my “point” and “the larger issue” I raise. But they do not engage the arguments of Spivak, Quijano, or Lugones that serve as the basis of my critique. In lieu of such engagement, they portray my point and the larger issue I raise in vague and generic terms, while implying that arguments developed by two senior figures in Latin American philosophy and a critical theorist famed for rigor are facile and not worth serious consideration. They nonetheless claim to exemplify “serious philosophical engagement.”

I do not mean these observations to be combative. Like many in our field of cross-cultural philosophy, the Cowherds lack familiarity with postcolonial and decolonial theories. Exposure to the unfamiliar can be disorienting. Reflexes sometimes emerge to dismiss the unfamiliar or to subsume it beneath familiar categories. However, such reflexes can also reinforce exclusions and asymmetries in our field. “Serious philosophical engagement” perhaps requires not only that we avoid reflexive deference, but also that we yoke reflexes of dismissal and mischaracterization that sustain a division between ordinary and marginal contexts in our discipline. Given the history of marginalization of Asian philosophers and philosophies in the academy, I would think such a project would interest some Cowherds.

I accordingly take this opportunity, which I am extremely grateful to the editors of Philosophy East and West for providing, to restate the main points of my comment and the larger issues it intends to raise. I then briefly discuss what I believe “serious philosophical engagement” in cross-cultural scholarship requires, and the extent to which habits of reflexive dismissal and of subsuming the unfamiliar beneath familiar categories can and should be corrected. Finally, I address what the Cowherds could do differently.

Spivak’s critique of “the sovereign subject of global capital” is also a critique of the subject of modern common sense philosophies (or “the folk theory of the world,” to use Lakoff’s phrase). These philosophies assume that “ordinary” subjectivities in a domain serve as standards of sense or truth in that domain. The Cowherds assert that Madhyamaka philosophies of conventional truth are...