On Linguistic Narrowness in Philosophy

If you want to read most philosophical classics it is sufficient to master Middle Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arabic,  Aramaic, French, German, English, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Korean, Japanese,  and maybe a dozen more languages that contain multiple written philosophical classics.* A few such languages are not really living anymore. Because I am ignorant of most philosophical traditions, I am happy to revise that number upwards (for my Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and Italian friends), and to let you, my dear reader, decide what "philosophy'' and "classics" mean. Allowing for partisan voting, I bet we end up with around 50-100 languages, or so. Regular readers know I am a partisan of the claims by those that profess rustic wisdom (and here) so I am not suggesting that being written down is a mark of philosophical distinction or any other sign of moral excellence.

Now consider that "of the currently listed 7,099 living languages, 3,866 have a developed writing system." Let's stipulate that the vast majority of the writings in these writing systems involves accounting and mating/family matters. Even so, that's a lot of living writing systems in which people can muse about, say, reality, the point of it all, the nature of value, or social order, or beauty, etc. I feel extremely confident in saying that these writing systems and the non-living ones pretty much go un-surveyed by the vast majority of most professional philosophers (for some quantitative evidence see this work by Eric Schwitzgebel, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Andrew Higgins, and Ivan Gonzales-Cabrera). In addition, there exist many oral philosophical cultures (and many more that are presumably extinct). That is to say, we behave, by and large, as if we are operating in an efficient market in philosophical ideas, insights, and arguments. This state of affairs is, while intelligible and even rational in some sense, just bizarre. 

Before I continue, a qualification: of course, my use of 'we' in the previous paragraph is problematic (it always is). Not everybody is really fooled by the state of affairs least of all, one presumes, those working in or on philosophical traditions not well represented in today's scholarly lingua franca(e).  There are times, when even thinkers in the politically (economically, etc.) dominant cultures are aware that they lack access to crucial texts.  For example, Ibn Rushd, writing in what we would call Islamic Spain, notes the significance of his lack of access to (a translation of) Aristotle's Politics. (It influences his decision, he says, to write on Plato's Republic instead.) Of course, lack of access to a text is not only a linguistic issue: Ibn Rushd's mentor, Ibn Tufayl, who is self-aware that he is writing in the periphery, and who knows that not all texts of his own intellectual tradition -- he mentions Al-Farabi's amongst others -- have circulated to his (Western) part of the Islamic world. Even today, in an age of Google, books and journal articles are expensive and not easy to acquire for those on, say, academic salaries and working in underfunded institutions in many parts of the world. 

When I started drafting the first sentence, I consulted, as the first note below shows, a few experts because it dawned upon me that I had literally no idea in what language some of the Buddhist and Dao (etc.) classics, whose names I was familiar with, were originally written in. It was a moment I allowed myself to recognize my own ignorance about pretty basic facts. And this alerted me that my normal state of affairs is that my own ignorance about my ignorance is my ordinary state of affairs. Now, obviously, -- time is short -- it's okay to be ignorant of lots of non-salient facts. It is clear that the would-be-salience of the very wide linguistic diversity to philosophical thought is not something  I contemplate much, despite the fact that in my scholarly life I bump up against my linguistic limitations all the time. If we allow -- following Samuelson -- that mathematics is a language, then this is, I say this without pride, a near daily occurrence. 

A few days ago I noted that without translator-advocates even superb philosophical texts written in small languages can become, as it were, cul-de-sacs. My use of 'markets' above makes it tempting, if one were to model this, to treat translator-advocates as sources or agents of arbitrage.** The relative lack of translator-advocates, and the relative lack of interest in their significance, suggests that our profession does not incentivize the sometimes onerous efforts of translation and advocacy, and the even more laborious efforts to seek out wisdom and insight in linguistically hard to get to places. This is why one often hears, about translations, that they are a labor of love.  

In earlier times, in the philosophical traditions of European early moderns, the search for occult or hidden knowledge also involved the seeking out of linguistically and temporally distant works. Sometimes (Newton, Locke, etc.) this is relatively narrowly centered on original Hebrew sources that may illuminate the pristine true religion, sometimes (Newton, Locke), this is narrowly focused on esoteric, alchemical wisdom (which involves purpose-made codes), but sometimes -- Leibniz and Bayle come to mind -- one senses an omnivorous hunger that is fueled by an awareness there is always more to learn. (The previous does not mean to suggest that the motives of the omnivore are pure.) This omnivorous hunger is not part of our professional DNA, because for every Leibniz, there is a Descartes or a Carnap, alas, who proudly announces that other traditions are irrelevant and -- this is what I find so remarkable -- the temptation they offer, of willed self-ignorance, is at bottom more seductive and alluring.*** 

 

 

*I thank Dan Arnold, Bryce Huebner, Chike Jeffers, Michael Onyebuchi Eze, and Aaron Tugendhaft for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

 **One need not be naive about the philosophically complex nature of translation. But that's not the present subject.

***Our practices and institutional incentives reflect this fact. Contemporary drug companies have discovered that medical botany requires a willingness to seek out many previously discarded or overlooked medical traditions.

Comments

[Matt]

As someone with a long-standing interest in Russian philosophy (see, for a not especially deep and pretty old overview, this: https://www.academia.edu/1757103/Philosophy_in_Russia ) I can say that there are not many things that are properly "philosophical classics" in Russian that are not available in English or other languages. (You have to take a modestly, but not unreasonably, wide, reading of "philosophical" to get many classics in Russian at all, for various reasons, even if we're thinking of ones available in other languages.) Now, this doesn't mean that there's not a lot of philosophically interesting work in Russian traditions - there is - but the pay-off to work ratio for most people, unless they have some special interest in the topic, or some historically interesting problems, is such that I'd think it unreasonable to criticize anyone for spending time on projects that are of more interest to them.

[Jonathan Surovell]

Where did Carnap say that other traditions are irrelevant? In his intellectual autobiography he is dismissive of medieval and modern European arguments for the existence of God. But I read that as him having read the stuff and been unimpressed (rightly or wrongly). That's prima facie different than being uninterested in hidden knowledge or culturally distant work per se.

[Eric Schliesser]

Jonathan, in the passage you remember, he is attacking what he calls "historical neutralism"--the engagement with the earlier existence of God arguments are an example of that.