It is obligatory to mention in any discussion of Utopias that the literal meaning of the word, etymologically speaking, is no-place. This is of much more than passing interest when talking about the epistemological utopia of Western philosophy because this is a tradition that overtly strives for an objectivity that transcends any particular time or place. This is especially true of the Anglophone branch that traces its history through pre-twentieth-century European philosophy back to Ancient Greece, conveniently bypassing the Islamic thinkers who helped bridge this gap. This branch has grown in a different direction from the European phenomenological tradition since around the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 1
Courses in seventeenth-century rationalism, for example, too often pay scant attention to the historical or biographical background. The implicit assumption is that to do timeless, universal philosophy you must think as little as possible about the time and place in which it is done.
Yet of course this universal philosophy turns out to be remarkably parochial. As Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden recently pointed out on The New York Times’s philosophy blog, The Stone (11 May 2016), in Western universities, the departments of philosophy are actually almost entirely departments of Western philosophy. The Asian, Indian, African and first people versions are to be found elsewhere in area studies, religion or anthropology.
The parochialism runs deeper than this, since even in those departments of philosophy – unqualified – local variants lurk unlabelled. Most obviously, departments will be predominantly or entirely Analytic or Continental. In a part of Europe smaller than some Chinese provinces, philosophers who officially pay no heed to geographical distinctions ignore philosophy from a mere few hundred miles away. And even the way analytic philosophy is done can differ whether you are in Oxford, Cambridge or Boston, or even across the street. When I lived in Manchester I would attend senior seminars at the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University. Since the former was analytic and the latter continental, I was the only one to be seen at both.
Any philosophy which aspires to universality is caught in a perennial tension: the attempt to transcend the particularities of the individual thinker and her time and place can only be made by specific individuals in specific times and places. Anglophone philosophy deals with this tension by ignoring it.
The result of the failure to face this is a mode of philosophizing that fails to join up with the ‘great conversation’ of humanity. This is also reflected in the sociology of Anglophone philosophy, which shows that its practitioners are relatively uninterested in other global traditions and do not participate fully in gatherings such as the World Congress of Philosophy. Even at the quinquennial East–West Philosophers’ Conference in 2016, I noticed that there were Indian philosophers doing Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophers doing Chinese philosophy, Japanese philosophers doing Japanese philosophy, and so on, all there to learn from each other. There were far fewer Western philosophers doing Western philosophy coming to extend their knowledge. For Western academics, East–West Philosophy generally means philosophers from the West doing Eastern philosophy, not practitioners of Western philosophy seeking dialogue with the East.
The Universalist Aspiration
To understand the problem it would help to start by thinking about the extent to which the aspiration for placeless universality is legitimate. It might seem that this is simply part and parcel of the quest for objective truth. But it is worth nothing that the placeless universalist aspiration is not universal in traditions than nonetheless aspire to objectivity. Shintō, for instance, is understood as a specifically Japanese religion and it is widely assumed that it would have no significance to people from other lands. Similarly, Judaism is a faith of a chosen people which has no interest in conversion. Note, however, that in both Judaism and Shintō, this particularism does not imply a relativism. Those inside the faith really do believe they have access to objective truth. So we have here absolute, objective truth without any concomitant placeless universalism.
In the European tradition, it took Christianity to forge objectivity and placeless universalism together. The Promised Land of the Hebrews morphed into the Kingdom of God for all. In the Gospels, the good side of this is emphasized. Instead of division into tribes and sects there would be just one family of man. History would show the darker side of the idea, as in the name of the one truth, Christian kingdoms conquered and subjugated those who followed supposedly lesser falsehoods. This history provides a kind of parable for the pros and cons of the universalist aspiration, whose warm universal embrace can easily descend into a crushing hegemonic iron grip.
This universalism also had pre-Christian roots, with Christendom soon finding itself nurturing a child born of Platonism. Plato's theory of forms set the template for much of what was to follow in European philosophy. Plato established an ideal for knowledge which was timeless, placeless, eternal and unchanging. Thereafter, knowledge that approximated to this would be held up as the highest.
I think this is so deeply ingrained that even those who officially reject the Platonic standard – perhaps the majority of philosophers – nonetheless implicitly defend their positions against it. Admirers of Aristotle like myself constantly have to address the charge that his ethics is too vague, too imprecise. And even though the pragmatist tradition is very strong in America, it does not seem to have erased the universalist disposition. Think, for instance, of how Richard Rorty was basically disowned by the mainstream when he dared to suggest that philosophy had been working on a false assumption that it was holding up a perspicacious mirror to nature.Footnote 2 Pragmatism may define truth as what works, but what works best is assumed to be what works timelessly and placelessly.
Before dismissing the quest for placeless, objective knowledge, however, we need to acknowledge that there are indeed some spheres of human knowledge where we really have done very well at reaching universal truths. In mathematics, physics and chemistry, we have bodies of knowledge that truly transcend boundaries of time and space. There is no American or Chinese science, just science. Ancient science is either history or absorbed into today's science. The last vestiges of geographical specificity, such as those traced to Copenhagen, are found in the philosophical interpretation of quantum physics, not in physics itself.
These successes show that the dream of utopian knowledge was not a foolish one. The problem is that most human knowledge has not achieved and cannot achieve this level of universality. In fact, not even all the hard sciences are as purely universal as is often believed. For example, although there are many basic principles of biology which are universal, there is much which can only be known with knowledge of specific ecosystems. Predicting what will happen in the absence of this knowledge is often impossible, and ecologically disastrous.
Outside the sciences, however, we are not even close to the Platonic idea, especially in philosophy. Yet the Platonic yardstick remains implicit in how Western cultures rank their disciplines. Social science is a lesser science because it does not achieve the universality of hard science, and the humanities are barely counted as sources of knowledge at all. When non-sciences are praised it is usually for their utility, not as sources of knowledge. That or they are sources of knowledge about culture, practically useful for understanding the contingencies of the world.
Philosophy's own failure to meet the aspiration it set for itself has not undermined the appeal of the ideal as much as might be expected. The scientific paradigm is built into the way in which philosophy is conducted. Consider, for instance, how the institution of the paper is itself borrowed from natural science, as is the discourse of ‘research’. This is nonsense: I do research for my papers, but I don't think any of my papers are research.
Science envy is also rife in the profession, though like much envy it is often denied. Philosophers yearn to be recognized as rigorous, both logical and empirical as required. They seek comparison with scientists, not sociologists or – God forbid – anthropologists. Placeless objectivity remains the ideal, with knowledge claims judged according to how closely they match it.
Objectivity Reconsidered
The problem is not that we don't know placeless objectivity is impossible. Thomas Nagel's influential 1986 book The View From Nowhere not only captured the problem in its paradoxical title but set out the solution.Footnote 3 Objectivity, argued Nagel, is a matter of degree. Our understanding becomes more objective the less it depends on the idiosyncrasies of our specific viewpoints, sense organs or conceptual schema. But, of course, it can never be purely objective since nothing can be understood from no perspective at all. Nagel thus set out a means of retaining the value of objectivity without placelessness.
There are in fact two ways in which we might gain this more objective understanding. One is to take a more universal singular perspective, meaning one we can share with more people than we can our more particular ones. Nagel illustrates this with the image of concentric circles, the smallest at the middle the most subjective, the largest at the outside the most objective. Circles become larger as more people are able to share the same perspective.
This is, I think, the post-Nagelian compromise that most have settled for. However, this is not such a radical break with placelessness because it still assumes a singular perspective that in some sense rises above particular points of view.
The other way of revising our idea of objectivity is to get a more complete view by taking multiple perspectives. The metaphor of views helps here. Rather than trying to create a comprehensive, single map, we can view a terrain from various places: from within it, from the sky, from a distance, and so on. Rather than a view from nowhere, we seek a view from everywhere, or at least everywhere that is accessible. Western philosophy's mistake has been to keep looking for the view from nowhere and so ended up depriving itself of many clear views, confining itself to a single vantage point which, no matter how well situated, inevitably has its blind spots.
We can see how this works with the example of feminist philosophy. There are versions of this which are overtly relativist or which deny that anyone other than women can take the feminist perspective. But at its best, I contend, feminist philosophy does not challenge the aspiration of philosophy for objectivity. It does not insist that there are male or female truths. Rather, it contends that by depriving itself of perspectives rooted in female experience it is mainstream philosophy which ends up taking a partial perspective, relative in the sense that it only sees things relative to the experience of generally white men. What feminist philosophy does is reveal the blind spots of the philosophy of which it is a part, not an alternative, helping it to free itself from its patriarchal and parochial assumptions.
The same logic applies to perspectives rooted in locality. It is only by attending to the locatedness of thought that we can see just how far our own point of view limits our intellectual horizons. Only by appreciating the contingencies of place can philosophy hope to reach truths that transcend it.
The debate about free will exemplifies this clearly in a slightly different way. In Anglophone philosophy, the argument is about whether we have free will and whether it is compatible with purposeless natural cause and effect. What is not noticed is that this debate is a demonstrably local one, and that the central concept in dispute is not shared either historically or globally today. For instance, the contemporary concept of free will is not found in either Buddhist or Ancient Greek philosophy. Furthermore, the assumption that we are only responsible for actions over which we have control is not found to hold in many cultures around the world.
It is only by understanding why the notion of free will they debate is one specific to their local tradition that Anglophone philosophers can take the insights they have gained so as to contribute to a more objective understanding of human freedom and its limits. This objective understanding sees that there are numerous ways of conceiving human freedom, autonomy and responsibility and that to reduce the debate to just one risks missing out on other important dimensions. That, sadly, is how the current debate in Anglophone philosophy looks to me. It has ceased to be an inquiry into human freedom and has instead become an argument about whether one very specific conception of free will adds up.
Pluralism
A more objective view, therefore, is often also one which acknowledges more difference and variation than we acknowledge when working on a universalist assumption. This variety can take at least three forms, of which we have so far considered two. One, illustrated by the example of feminist philosophy, is when we see that the most complete picture cannot be captured from one angle alone. Call this cubist objective. The second is when, as with free will, we see that there is more than one phenomenon to be examined. Call this disaggregating objectivity. The third is when we realize that there is more than one legitimate way of either understanding the world or constructing norms. Call this pluralist objectivity.
When it comes to ethical and political norms, an objective view inevitably leads to pluralism, as attending to the myriad differences we find in different places we find a one-size-fits-all approach cannot work. This is not relativism, as Isaiah Berlin argued.Footnote 4 It is rather a matter of objective truth that circumstances differ according to time and place; and also, arguably, that there is more than one way for humans to flourish.
Resistance to this idea is rooted in an assumption that knowledge is knowledge, no matter what it is of, and that therefore knowledge of politics and ethics is of the same kind as knowledge in science and mathematics. Since the latter does not admit of geographic variation, neither should the former. Viewed with this lens, place appears to be an arbitrary difference, just as it does not matter where a mathematical proof is worked out or a scientific experiment is conducted (as long as conditions are the same).
To challenge this universality we have to show why differences of place are not philosophically arbitrary. In some fields, such as epistemology, metaphysics and logic, perhaps they are. But the same cannot be said for ethics and political philosophy. Both concern the social world and the social world is not an abstract given, the same for everyone regardless of time or place. From this it follows that no concepts concerning the social world can be taken as given either, which means that morality and politics are not given.
One objection is that we can have an ideal of the social world, a kind of Platonic ideal, and this could be universal. There are two reasons to doubt this is of much use. First of all, the very idea of the ideal society appears to be one which only a detached philosopher could come up with. What the ideal society looks like must depend on its geography, its climate, its population, the economic and technological conditions. What is ideal in rural India two thousand years ago is very different from what would be ideal in urban India today, and this might be very different from the ideal in urban Stockholm.
But even if such a singular ideal of the social world were conceivable, it would serve little use in a world in which contingencies shape the world we live in. Following Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice,Footnote 5 I would suggest the method of starting with an ideal and then trying to get the world to approximate to it is like trying to power a diesel car with solar panels. The abstract ideal society is a kind of philosophical indulgence, worth thinking about a little, perhaps, but to dwell in it would be to take an irresponsibly long holiday from the world we actually live in.
In this sense, then, the utopian ideal society is both an imaginary no-place and one-place, when ethics and politics should concern the multiplicity of real places
Conclusion
Anglophone philosophy's neglect of place reveals its mistake in confusing the admirable aspiration for greater objectivity with a misguided ideal of placeless universality. On the contrary, if we truly aspire to a maximally objective understanding of the world, we have to make use of the advantages occupying different intellectual places bring, which are at least three. First, cubist objectivity enables us to see the whole, single picture better by taking a variety of views of it. Second, disaggregating objectivity enables us to see that what we assume was a single picture is in fact made up of several distinct ones. Third, pluralist objectivity enables to see that when it comes to ethics and politics, no one master value or set of values can fit every time and place. In short, Anglophone Western philosophy should give up its singular, placeless utopia for multiple eutopias (good places).
