Volume 1, No. 2:

In Praise of Ignorance
Liberal Education and Literature
Eurocentrism and Pluralism
Socrates and the Homeric Gods
Freedom and the Supersensible
On Private and Public Values
The Epistemology of Panic

Eurocentrism and Pluralism

by Joseph P. Lawrence

The thesis I would like to argue is that the "new," purportedly more radical, forms of pluralism that have arisen in the latter half of the 20^th century are decisively less pluralistic than the ancient forms of pluralism that lie at the heart of Western culture. This observation has two interesting consequences. The first one is profoundly distressing: the cultural battles that are currently being waged against "ethnocentrism" tend themselves to contribute to its perpetuation. Liberalism has indeed developed, as is most apparent within the confines of the university, a fascistic vanguard. The second observation is a more hopeful one: a reappropriation of what lies at the heart of our culture could provide a way out of our dilemma.

I have referred intentionally to a plurality of pluralisms. What this could mean with regard to the cultural heritage of the West can be made quickly apparent. Two separate, though mysteriously related, events have given shape to that culture. The first can be evoked with the name of Plato and represents the outcome of the battle between the philosophers and the poets, a battle which the philosophers won decisively enough that Western culture is distinguished by its commitment to science and rationality. The other event I have in mind is the astonishing retreat of tribal religion in the face of Christianity’s claim to worldwide legitimacy.

Both of these events can be interpreted as victories for pluralism. Consider, for instance, that strange Christian command "love thy enemy," which has as its philosophical correlate the idea that we must always strive to listen to our opponent’s argument. Or consider the striking emphasis placed upon the individual in both Aristotelian and Christian metaphysics.

This is, of course, not the whole story. One can certainly argue that power and dogmatism rather than reason and toleration represent the true spirit of Europe and the West. The subordination of reason to power is in fact made explicit in the contemporary age of technology: the reduction of nature and to a large extent of human beings themselves to the status of manipulable resources for the benefit of those with power has had devastating effects, the mutilation of nature, the industrialization of culture, and the impoverishment of the third world. From Heidegger to Derrida to radical feminism, it has become customary to blame all of this on a rational metaphysics that eradicates difference for the sake of comprehending universal forms. The theoretical project of understanding the world, we are told, serves to mask a deeper and more problematic practical aim: the world is not so much to be understood as a mechanical system as to be transformed into one. Thus science, according to Heidegger, is always already technological in nature. The construction, for instance, allegedly for theoretical purposes, of a model of the DNA molecule is the prelude to genetic engineering: the industrialization of the life process itself, an industrialization that must ultimately serve the interests of those with power.

The argument, so far as it goes, seems to be fully correct. The metaphysical identification of true reality with intelligible structure did in fact, via the Christian doctrine of creation, i.e., the denial of the self-sufficiency of nature, and the reduction of intelligibility to the Cartesian cogito, prepare the way for the industrial age. The idea of creation subordinated nature (as primordial chaos) to the will of God. With the grandiose insistence of 17^th century science that the will of God can be fathomed (by unveiling the laws of nature), man himself assumed the posture of mastery. Nature, which itself always tends to wilderness (the threatening and fear-evoking), is to be tamed and systematically exploited. The very ground of "otherness" is thereby systematically eradicated.

This is a historical "fact" that I am not about to deny. I believe, however, that this thought structure, the metaphysics of modernity, arose only through the oblivion of the more fundamental metaphysical insight that the intelligibility of what is derives from a deeper source which, taken in itself, is incomprehensible. This is what Plato called "the Good," locating it "above both knowledge and being" and what Christianity understood as Divine Love: the ecstatic, purely other-related structure of true Being. The recognition of this incomprehensibility is what alone assures the openness of the Western spirit, just as parallel insights have assured the openness of those other non-tribal, globally-oriented, religious cultures such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

I

With that, then, as my introduction, let me take up the issue at hand. When I speak of the "New Pluralism" I am referring above all to the rejection of philosophical "foundationalism" and the consequent insistence that one must think in terms of "language games," "conceptual frameworks," "semantic schemata," "provisional paradigms," "rhetorical tropes," and the like. It is this theoretical assertion that we can never advance beyond a particular perspective on the truth that motivates the political plea that we try to accommodate as many perspectives as possible. The result, of course, is the broad coalition of marginalized perspectives, the "black" perspective, the "woman’s" perspective, sundry "ethnic" perspectives, the "gay" perspective, and so forth, that are loosely allied under the slogan of "post-modernity" and represent for political conservatives the phantom of left-wing fascism, the purveyors of the "politically correct." By regarding itself as post-modern, this new pluralism understands itself as providing a radical alternative to that more conventional liberalism that grew out of the 18^th century Enlightenment, a liberalism that, according to the new pluralists, perniciously subordinated its ideal of toleration to the rule of reason, the very principle which facilitated the uncanny leveling of cultural differences that has accompanied the globalization of the West. Because the pride of the marginalized is precisely their lack of complicity in this grotesque imperialism, my attempt here to assert that their intellectual advocates are themselves agents of that imperialism may likely be construed as offensive. Like virtually all philosophers before me, and despite any claim I might make to speak as an "outsider," I will appear to be little more than a defender of the prevailing system, seemingly oblivious to what thinkers like Marx knew so well, that, in a world defined by glaring injustices, the goal must not be to understand the world, but to change it.

Now instead of focusing on the hypocrisy of the activist qua intellectual, I want to call attention to what should be readily apparent: this form of activism is itself identical with modernism, which is also to say, it is European to the core. The distance from Hobbes to Marx or even to Foucault is not terribly great; one has only to realize that the natural state of anarchy is not fully eradicated by the formation of the state: it exists implicitly in the tensions between classes and explicitly in the anarchy among nations that to this day, new world order or not, refuse to sacrifice their own sovereignty for the good of the whole. The goal of establishing a rational order by renouncing upon power undergoes, it is true, a significant revision within post-modernism: it is replaced by the goal of empowering those without power. But precisely insofar as the modern conception of reason is grounded in the understanding that reason is always established rather than given, that is to say, that it is essentially a crystallization of power, the apparent difference vanishes, and the post-modern project discloses itself as a radicalization of the modern imperative, to construct a better world than the one we have inherited. The enormous emphasis on reconstructing reality involves the denial of the relevance of the natural order, a denial that is bought at a tremendous cost: not only does it displace metaphysics by ideology, but it binds us more fully than ever into the machinery of the technological, and ultimately dissolves any possible standard by which that machinery might be directed, or left to anything but its own devices.

What is involved here can be seen in contemporary feminism, which became radical when it denied its own indebtedness to the European quest for universality. By understanding the word "men" in "all men are created equal" as gender exclusive, it eradicated the possibility of a theoretical justification of the struggle for gender inclusivity. What we are left with is the appearance of a purely political struggle, whereby the disempowered, motivated solely by the hope of realizing their own desires, seek power. The problem is that what is simply denied, that feminism is a product of the long history of Western rationality, now exerts its influence from behind, that is, blindly. The equation, for instance, of gender with a culturally rather than a naturally inscribed difference reduces one of the grounds of personhood itself to the status of something manipulable and thus controllable. In a similar way, the program of language reform, which lies at the heart of the feminist project, presupposes a denial of the natural basis of language, upon which alone cultural differences are ultimately grounded. The technological eradication of otherness can proceed unimpeded. For no culture can now be regarded as anything but a constellation of arbitrary conventions, many of which will simply have to be reconstituted.

If Japanese culture, for instance, assigns to women a subordinate status, feminism will hardly be able to acknowledge its right to continue to do so. If the Japanese language embodies different grammatical forms to be used by men and women, then that too will have to be changed. Similarly the practice by many Middle Eastern and African societies of female circumcision, the use in others of amniocentesis to facilitate the abortion of female fetuses, the total exclusion of women from one rite or the other, none of this will be excused by feminism in the name of resisting ethnocentrism - nor, of course, should it be. But because the very idea of a transcultural standard has been rejected as an imposition of a patriarchal culture, the only possible justification for fighting these injustices has to be construed in culturally immanent terms: the world is to be made Western, for no better reason than that we like the way things are done in the West. Radical feminism presents itself as a new tribalism.

In order to escape the charge that, in the dominant Western male mode, I am engaging in an abstract form of discourse that leaves myself removed and uncommitted, I will offer as my next example something from my own experience. I grew up in a pocket of Appalachian culture in rural Kentucky that was effectively destroyed by any number of forces, but certainly in part by the 1960’s War on Poverty. Hillside shacks without plumbing, sometimes without wooden floors, have given way to trailers and, even more, to brick or concrete housing projects in the towns. A diet of wild greens, of squirrel and possum and even blackbird soups and pies, has been supplanted by various mass produced starches. Homemade whiskey has given way to beer. Homemade music has largely disappeared. A visionary perspective rooted in the lay of the land and the shape of the hills has given way to the new universalized perspective afforded by television. Some of the change can be regarded as an improvement, some of it as a tragic loss. In any event, the world of my childhood has disappeared almost completely - and by forces that are in no way curbed by the appearance in the academy of a new pluralism.

To bemoan the loss of that world would, of course, be romanticism: and within the academy romanticism counts as an error, almost regardless of one’s political perspective. From the vantage point of the new pluralism, the essential error would lie in the failure to acknowledge how utterly arbitrary all of the cultural "differences" were, which, taken together, inscribed the "text" of that lost Kentucky world I could so sentimentally evoke. But from my perspective, there was strikingly little about those differences that was arbitrary: it was a world, not a text at all, and it was etched into and indeed by the land itself. What might strike the outsider as quaint convention was to the insider not convention at all, but often simple necessity, a necessity borne out of what it took to survive in that time and place. One ate blackbirds not because it was quaint to do so, but because one was hungry and blackbirds were to be had. If the women served the men dinner and then ate afterwards themselves, this was doubtlessly deplorable in some way, but just as rooted in a set of conditions that even an academic should try to respect.

While it is commendable that such pictures, and some that are considerably more exotic than the one I have so briefly sketched, are preserved and catalogued by students of culture, it should be clear that this is essentially a museum activity. Their scholarly investigation already presumes that the life forms themselves are past: to speak of what can be "learned" from them is disingenuous and patronizing. The real effect of the "new pluralistic" appropriation of such forms is that they are literally torn out of the ground that gave rise to and sustained them. They are held for restructuring and, if possible, absorption into the world that matters, something like the "women of color" who, as the Calcutta-born feminist deconstructionist Gayatri Spivak points out, are so assiduously sought after for inclusion, after their proper cleansing and "education," in the middle class world of academe. And if, as is almost universally the case, they cannot be thus "saved," their lives are chronicled for the lessons they might hold for us or, what is far worse, for their entertainment value.

Intellectual honesty, I believe, should force us to realize that there may in fact be something patronizing about that procedure, which calls upon marginalized voices to represent their exotic perspectives so that we white middle-class European-Americans might remain true to the specifically Western ideal of broadening our perspectives beyond their Eurocentric bias. Will you, we effectively ask the marginalized, limit yourselves intellectually in order to help set us free. I hope this point can be taken seriously. I am not denying that simple justice may demand affirmative hiring procedures. I am asking, however, that we try to understand those Clarence Thomas types who refuse to play the roles that are assigned to them. To dismiss them as a priori inauthentic is to forget the authenticity of the drive for transcendence and freedom that can catapult one far from one’s origins. The very earnestness with which we ourselves endeavor to transcend our own race, gender, and class determined biases, should make us rebel at the notion that intellectuals are needed who, for our sakes, will "represent" rather than expand their own perspectives.

We might also pause and consider the violence we exercise, when we tear works out of their own linguistic and cultural contexts in order to translate them into European languages and incorporate them, for our own edification, into world literature textbooks - or what happens when we then submit them to discussions guided by the assumption that the problems they depict somehow overlap with our own problems. I recall the irritation expressed by some of my Japanese friends over the way, in the United States, "Buddhism" is taught in the framework of "oriental philosophy" courses. They pointed out that in Japan itself, philosophy is taught as a peculiarly Western tradition that is separated by an abyss from their own cultural forms. To understand Buddhism as philosophy is to deny its own integral nature and to subsume it under categories utterly foreign to it. In the same vein, I remember the comment made by the Japanese philosopher Tezuka in the 1950’s that it is impossible to grasp anything Japanese through the medium of movies, for movies are themselves a peculiarly Western mode of objectifying and thereby Europeanizing whatever they depict. Movies are, after all, rife with images. The Japanese stage, in contrast, is empty of all props. The emptiness of that stage belongs to the unique essence of Japanese culture. If we can listen to what these Japanese voices are saying, we have to acknowledge the fact that because cross-cultural studies rely upon European media, they may very well accomplish precisely the opposite of what they intend to accomplish. We have a very European need to respect differences, but seem to be tragically ensnared in the dialectic of European imperialism.

I do not want to question anyone’s motives and intentions. In the majority of cases, the investigator turns to a foreign culture, motivated by the explicit recognition of the deficiencies of our own culture. But insofar as his concern will be one of translation, he will be caught fast: what is "other" gets expressed in our own terms. While a form of knowing does indeed exist that does not make what is known immanent to the knower, it is an exceedingly difficult form to perfect, and one whose very possibility clashes with the deepest presuppositions of the new pluralism.

I want now to turn my attention to this alternative form of knowing. I do not present it as anything new. It is in fact the oldest of the old. Its spirit is more profoundly pluralistic than is the spiritlessness of the new pluralism. Its foundation lies deeper than any arbitrary conceptual or linguistic scheme: ultimately it is rooted in nature itself, not in the objectified nature studied by the contemporary sciences, but in that inscrutable nature that, ever anew, draws forth from darkness the possibility of life.

II

In order to effectively distinguish that oldest of pluralisms from the new, I must comment quickly upon a key passage in Jacques Derrida’s essay on Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus. What I find remarkable about Derrida’s essay is first of all that he quite correctly refrains from interpreting Plato as a Platonist, that is, as the inventor of dogmatic metaphysical "universalism." He understands that Plato wrote dialogues because he made no claim to possess absolute knowledge - and he understands that these dialogues require no deconstructive ploy to have their profound ambiguities laid bare. In other words, Derrida concedes throughout his essay the astonishingly "pluralistic" implications of Plato’s Phaedrus. Yet he takes issue with the fact that Plato’s pluralism wants to anchor itself in the depths of the "heart," the forgotten regions of the soul. He rejects the idea that the highest form of writing must be written into the soul itself, that the "lived" word, the spirited word, should be privileged above words written in a text.

Such Platonic writing is, according to Derrida, at best "a dis-covering, a writing of aletheia" (or truth) and thus capable of "sustaining itself in living dialogue, capable most of all of properly teaching the true, as it is already constituted." Derrida balks above all at this "already," and the entire image of midwifery, of philosophy as a dialogue that enables us to give birth to the wisdom buried deeply within our hearts. Over against this, Derrida unfolds the structuralist conception that written words themselves give rise to other written words, that texts generate new texts. Linguistic signs he regards not as expressions of an inner spirit, but as arbitrary marks that are granted a provisional kind of meaning by virtue of the relationships they have with other equally arbitrary marks. Writing, for Derrida, is the generation of meaning, not its discovery. By rejecting the notion that there is a meaning to be discovered, he effectively denies the reality of nature, of the always "already was" that, in its fullness, seeks articulation in the understanding. To maintain meaning in its provisional fluidity, Derrida resorts to his constant deconstructions. This would be commendable if done in the name of a purification of the soul that would prepare it for a Divine inscription, but, by declaring that words can never mean anything except more words, Derrida trades that potential purification, that potential "silencing," for its opposite, the garrulousness of the modern theoretician who is afraid ever to stop talking.

My purpose here is not to provide any kind of commentary on texts of Derrida or of Plato. But I do want to call attention to something that I find enormously ironic. Derrida identifies his rejection of "meaning in nature" with a rejection of the father, and the father’s claim to authority. If the father, slumbering wisdom of nature, knows more than I do, he may assert his "authority." He may attempt to subjugate me by insisting upon the obscurity of the good, which he thereby holds above me. Through his attempt to disinflate such a hierarchical relationship, Derrida reveals himself as a child of the European Enlightenment, seeking to free himself and others by claiming equal access to truth, insofar as truth can still be said to exist. In other words, Derrida, the last great "debunker" of the Platonic conception of universality, turns out in one way to be more Platonic than Plato. For he effectively denies the very earth upon which we stand and delivers us before the field of what he calls differance, externally marked forms that both negate and replicate themselves into infinity; he delivers us, in other words, before a realm of "pure form," a realm that even Plato - or rather precisely Plato - denied could ever be fully ours.

The reason Plato himself refrained from fully embracing his own "theory of forms" was that he realized the impossibility of thinking away the earth, the ground of our erotic rather than purely intellectual constitutions. His battle against the sophists, the "relativists" or "deconstructionists" of his own time, was carried out not in the name of a dogmatic and difference-obliterating super Reason, but rather in the name of our erotic natures. This point, by the way, will please contemporary political conservatives as little as it will please the new pluralists. The opposition is not one between the modern principle of spontaneity and the classical principle of nature as a reservoir of fixed truths. For nature, as thought by the ancients, was the source of spontaneity, not its limit. It is impossible to read Plato’s "erotic" dialogues in any other way. Plato himself always remained true to the Socratic dictum that the highest knowledge we human beings can attain is the knowledge of our finitude, the awareness f how painfully little we can really know. Within this dictum we can find the distinction between the two forms of knowledge that I referred to earlier. The knowledge that is disclaimed is the knowledge that would deliver the determinate and thus intelligible structure of what is over to our minds, the knowledge that would enable us to assume "command" over the world. It is a knowledge that we often want to claim as our own on the basis of the sophistic assertion that we ourselves create the order of the world, an assertion that completes itself, paradoxically perhaps, simultaneously in modern technology and the new "post-modern" pluralism, we find so often discussed today. Yet Plato was aware of what we so frequently forget; even the models that we ourselves construct are based ultimately on principles and methods that we did not invent, but had given to us. Given not, as conservatives would have it, by the unchanging luminosity of self-evident truth, but given instead out of an origin that cannot be rendered intelligible and thereby made our own, given, that is to say, as a "gift." What is to be "dis-covered" through that other alternative form of knowledge, which Plato tells us is the closest that we humans can ever come to wisdom, is first and foremost our own essential poverty of spirit and, in unpredictable and divine moments, that gratuitous inflow of meaning that is not ours by "right," but, to use Plato’s word, by Love.

True knowledge does not disclose the world as an articulation of our own inborn or spontaneously constructed rationality. Let us be thankful for that, for if this were true knowledge, then its realization would be an awakening into solipsism. We would find ourselves utterly alone. Not alone in an alien world, but, what is infinitely worse, alone in ourselves. True knowledge is instead ecstatic in structure, realized only as a gift of our constant dying. Spirit lives not through the self-assertion of the Word, but through its Calvary, its death and surrender, theologically construed, to the authority of the invisible Father; philosophically construed, to the nurturing womb of earth, the eternal Mother.

I touch here the dimension of myth. This is precisely where Derrida fails most dramatically in his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus. He asserts that Plato is as indifferent to myth itself as to sophistic deconstructions of mythical claims, that he simply sets myth aside in order to carry out the rational project of "understanding himself." What he ignores thereby is that in order to understand the self, for Plato the soul, the Phaedrus makes it clear that only myth will suffice. The entire central part of Plato’s dialogue is in fact devoted to the elaboration of such a mythical account. Moreover, this is the case precisely because Plato does not understand the origin of the word in a patriarchal way as the subjugation of matter by pure form, but instead he understands the origin itself as earth-bound, as Eros. The gods themselves he does not identify with form; he depicts them as journeying forth towards the ecstatic vision of form from a home to which they always return, the earth. Eros itself, and that, by the way, is to say the soul itself, is, Plato emphasizes again and again, androgynous; it incorporates the female as fully as the male.

Derrida’s mistake is also the mistake of a radical feminism like that of Mary Daly, which creates the myth of a purely male-centered hierarchy in order to debunk it in the name of the liberated. It expels the feminine from the heart of the European essence in order to reject that essence for its bias. The irony is also visible here. For in thus expelling the feminine from thought itself, feminism, with rare exceptions like Camille Paglia, binds itself into the genuinely patriarchal form of the non-philosophical, that is to say, non-erotic European Enlightenment. It turns its back on nature and lauds the liberated self as the autonomous agent of cultural creation.

The new pluralism is a pluralism without roots, without that erotic determinacy that is the true source of the staggering multiplicity of cultural meaning. It is Eurocentric insofar as it, through its denial of metaphysics, dispenses with the depth dimension of reality and delivers us over to a flood of information about competing cultural practices. It overlooks the fact that each of those different cultures is alive only to the degree that it is rooted in whatever reflective mode it has been granted for savoring and recollecting the depth dimension itself. The implicit anti-intellectualism of the new pluralism is therefore its greatest weakness. We can’t deny the legitimacy of trying to think as profoundly and comprehensively as possible and then expect to understand anything essential about other cultures, cultures that are themselves invariably grounded in a thinking that is profound and comprehensive. In other words, the denial of metaphysics is the denial of culture itself, its systematic reduction to exteriority.

To complete my argument, I shall very briefly turn from the "erotic" Plato to the more systematic Aristotle. While recognizing that Aristotle already betrays something of the narrow rationalism of the tradition that follows, he is still important to my theme, insofar as his identification of substance with concrete individuals represents the origin of traditional forms of Western pluralism. It is a form of pluralism that grew directly out of Aristotle’s quest for unity. That quest was completed in his Metaphysics, a work that has at its heart the idea that, to understand reality, one needs recourse not to one, but to four different kinds of principles. An understanding of this doctrine makes it clear that Aristotle accommodated the fundamental metaphysical alternatives by reducing them to separate principles that complement, rather than exclude one another. While purely mechanical systems can only be understood via efficient causality, organic systems can be understood either mechanically or teleologically. This idea of complementary principles is nothing foreign to the thinking of science; one thinks, for instance, of the reconciliation through complementarity of classical, quantum, and relativistic physics.

Without developing this idea, I want to suggest that a similar complementarity can be understood to lie behind the dramatic division between the "erotic" and the "rational" that has torn the modern academy into the competing and apparently mutually exclusive worlds of the "arts" and the "sciences." The same sun both in fact "rises" and "only appears" to rise as the earth turns. One perspective is truer to the phenomenon, while the other affords a simpler way of modeling the motions of the other planets. Both perspectives in fact have a claim to truth. An understanding of this complementarity is, however, because it is a complementarity of foundational perspective, impossible for that pluralism which rejects a priori any form of foundational thinking.

After establishing this, I want to conclude by suggesting that the different complementary worldviews do, however, follow one another in a definite sequence. The "rising" sun is both logically and ontologically prior to the sun that appears to rise. The reality of its rising forth displays itself only for those who are willing to set aside all "schematizing perspectives" in order simply to see. Because of the sheer primacy of what there unfolds, all desire to know and order will be silenced. Into this pure seeing, the vision of the open mind, the inexplicable and the Divine will pour itself. Enraptured, let us give ourselves over to that event until, like Socrates, we might say our prayer to Apollo and then quietly retreat to attend our private affairs.