Rethinking the ‘Western Tradition’

2004

Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of " the West " at the heart of contemporary social sciences and humanities, the authority of this notion has never been so strong, and the West appears today to belong to a " natural order " of thinking and speaking about our current reality. Having pointed out the limits of the postcolonial critique of the West, this study then individuates and connects several lines of research to a common epistemological basis in order to map the contours of an emerging field: " the politics of imagining the West ". From this perspective, the West is no longer conceived of as a subject of history but as a historically determined narrative articulated by individuals and social groups with strategic aims in the context of wider discourses.

A Panel on Decolonisation & Desuperiorisation On the Dangers of Western Thought as part of the 14th Annual International Conference on Philosophy 27-30 May 2019, Athens, Greece Sponsored by the Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts The Philosophy Unit of ATINER is organizing a Panel on “Decolonisation & Desuperiorisation: On the Dangers of Western Thought”, 27-30 May 2019, Athens, Greece as part of the 14th Annual International Conference on Philosophy sponsored by the Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts. It seems that western thinking, most notably since the beginning of the Enlightenment, has been permeated by the sense that it is the standard bearer of thought. With unprecedented strength, western philosophy asserted itself as the one right way to peace, prosperity and happiness for all human beings. Within the framework of philosophy, contributions beyond the so-called western traditions have been largely ignored. African philosophy for example, even though developing rapidly, seems to be ignored almost completely by mainstream western philosophy. If we look closely at many of the important thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Kant or Voltaire, we find vile testimonies of racism or sexism, of, in a word: superiorisms. The superioristic thinking asserts itself above the “other” and makes itself decisive for the “other.” The superiorisms of the Enlightenment result in the fact that a multiplicity of human beings are excluded from the project of the Enlightenment, even if this is rarely acknowledged explicitly. The persistent claim of the Enlightenment thinkers to address the needs of all human beings seems in sharp contradiction with, for example, the exclusion of non-white people from the Enlightenment. It seems until today not clear how this could happen: Did the thinkers of the Enlightenment manage to be humanists and racists at the same time? Or did they dehumanize those excluded from the Enlightenment so that the contradiction just dissolved? It is of urgent importance to understand this, because we need to find out if we in the contemporary context have implicitly, inadvertently received and transferred this superioristic heritage. Are the values of the Enlightenment like democracy, autonomy, freedom contaminated by the superiorism of some of their architects? Might this sense of superiority be an explanation for the fact that western thinking remains deeply convinced of its own rightness? The outcome of this pervasive and unexamined conviction of superiority in western thought, with its genesis in the Enlightenment, is a humanistic self-understanding which presumes its ethical rightness based on its selective rhetorical memory and, thus, is oblivious to its culpability in horrible actions, like the colonization of the African continent. Today, African thought is continuing the process of freeing itself from colonial usurpation, however Western thought has never consciously released the African thought. Western thought did not itself recognise its own injustice, and, even worse, it did not want to recognise this injustice as an injustice. We find again this strange testimonial for Western thought. It was the same thought that brought forth the idea of human rights and equality before the law and yet committed a genocide of continental proportions. How could the western thinkers fail so radically? And if they could, can we still? It seems Western thought, to this day, has not sufficiently recognised its superioristic danger as the danger that it is! When we take a look around in contemporary contexts, this danger remains real. The foreign, the other, is (re)stigmatised. Western thought is and remains dangerous. We must finally take this seriously and critically evaluate our value as a normative authority. In this panel we want to stimulate the discussion that Western thought must understand that its central task must be its desuperiorisation. Desuperiorisation has to be the part of the process of decolonisation form the West. We are looking for contributions that help to stimulate this discussion, either by working on some of the named questions, by presenting examples how non-western thinking handles the western superiorism, by showing how to practice desuperiorisation e.g. in educational, academic or social environments of different kinds. Of course, other contributions vital to these fields of research are also most welcome. You may participate as presenter of one paper or as an observer.

The central argument of this paper stems from the growing discussion whether postcolonial critics should adopt western inspired theories in the discourse. While insisting that as far as Africans look towards Europe for knowledge in our discourse especially in postcolonialism we are experiencing a form of neo-colonialism, the paper contends that Africa had established, well before the dawn of colonialism, a form of home-grown political and educational systems, governance process and generally acceptable institutional rule-making arrangement, such that there was progression in the pace of civilisation of Africa and potential measure of technological development. Some scholars have suggested that although most countries have gained independence from their colonisers, they are still indirectly subjected in one way or another to the forms of neo-colonial domination. The critical nature of postcolonial theory entails destabilizing the western way of thinking, therefore creating space for the marginalized groups to speak and produce alternatives to dominant discourse. The paper talks of how a colonized person's knowledge was used against him in serving colonizer's interests, and how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, circulated repetitively and finally legitimatized in view of imperial interests. It argues that western theories are the quest of westernizing the world. The paper further submits that the growing elites in Africa can look back into the history of Africa and retrieve a great deal of workable knowledge to challenge or match up to western ideas. The paper analyzes the literary works of postcolonial creative writers Ayi Kwei Armah and Chinua Achebe to drive home this point. It points out that western educational systems, language, political, cultural and religious ideas control the thinking pattern and culture of Africans.

This volume concludes the trilogy in which I redefine world politics as an evolving composite of modes of foreign relations. Foreign relations are about communities occupying separate social spaces and considering each other as outsiders. Occupation, its protection, and the regulation of exchange with others are universal attributes of human communities; they date back to the dawn of anthropogenesis and have evolved with the ongoing transformation of nature. Hence, as we have seen in Volume II, all human groups, communities and societies rely on mythologies and religious imaginaries to make sense of the foreign encounter. They originate in the tribal and empire/nomad modes and continue to run through contemporary foreign relations. Indeed in our contemporary epoch, such primordial imaginaries are resurgent on a grand scale.

2004