/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13403117]

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/western-philosophy-as-white-supremacism/

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AS WHITE SUPREMACISM

[Anonymous No.13403124]

>>13403117
Not that surprising. Most philosophers were racist. Also the concept of the "west" is dubious anyway.

[Anonymous No.13403131]

>>13403117
I mean, it kinda is. 100% white guys and white-perspective.

the mistake would be to throw it all out, but a healthy injection of a more diversified canon of all races and genders would go a long ways in helping to cultivate people's perspective beyond what the top 1% of white dudes thought for the last millennium

[Anonymous No.13403135]

>>13403124
Dubious in what sense? Do you doubt it’s existance?

[Anonymous No.13403146]

>>13403135

What do you mean by „The West“? And what are it‘s boundaries? What criteria do you use to decide if something does or does not belong to „The West“

[Anonymous No.13403156]

>>13403135
I think it's pretty obviously just a codeword for "white".

[Anonymous No.13403161]

>>13403156
It’s not obviously a code word for the societies descended from the levant? You dumb lefty haters are so irritating and stupid.

[Anonymous No.13403162]

>>13403146
>>13403156
I can't give you the boundary because its in many ways a fluid concept. Giving examples is easier. Does France and England belong to the West, and does China & India belong to the west? Unless you are wilfully stubborn you will see there are clear cultural differences that helps you categorize these countries into "west and east". You could just aswell have said "yellow and blue don't exist because they dont have a clear boundary"

[Anonymous No.13403180]

>>13403117
By now it's clear that they label everything as racist, supremacist and evil when it relates to a white person.
>>13403146
Countries who were originally (in the medieval era) catholic and are still dominated in thought and act by catholicism or other religions that emerged out of catholicism.

[Anonymous No.13403231]

>>13403117
pff, the Greco-German alliance and the French federation of philosophy have nothing but contempt for the 'anglo,' who can only think in such troglodytic concepts as white, black, while the philosophic supremacy is much more narrow.

[Anonymous No.13403263]

I'm okay with that, but how is it a bad thing ?

[Anonymous No.13403265]

>>13403117
just ignore them, they will go away at some point and everything will magically go back to normal

[Anonymous No.13403269]

>>13403124
is Laurence Fishburne european?

[Anonymous No.13403271]

>>13403124
"supremacy" is a dubious concept too

[Anonymous No.13403273]

>>13403117
what does supremacy mean in this context?

[Anonymous No.13403291]

>Modern philosophy was characterized above all by its dualisms, which have their origins, like Western philosophy, in the Greeks
is this real? is modernity specially dual?

[Anonymous No.13403858]

>>13403291
Some people have argued that modernity, by basing itself in a purely self referential appeal to liberty and capitalism, independent of any big Other from which it gains a raison d’eater, is the first civilization to transcend duality.
But saying the word “dualisms” makes academic opinion peddlers seem profound— like a magic incantation casting a veil of superiority around your crushing debt and creeping self awareness.
>Sub-Saharan African peoples, as well as the indigenous peoples of the Americas, were pictured relentlessly, even in the Enlightenment philosophical texts themselves, as sheer bodies
For example... Englightenment texts loved acting out their profound philosophical speculation through Amerindians, Arabs, and Africans. Rousseau based his whole concept of rights off his misconceptions about Amerindian society, and wasn’t it Voltaire who wrote an entire book from the point of view of a Muslim commenting on the absurdity of French society? Say ‘bodies’ and everything takes on a certain depth of understanding that only the initiated (and agreeing) can appreciate or claim to understand. You just don’t get it. It’s way over your head. This author is very smart.
To be fair he is American, so racial degregation mingled with stupidity is a given.

[Anonymous No.13403926]

>>13403858
in addition to what you said, doesn't everybody do that all the time? i mean i see the point, but painting outside cultures in simple and wrong terms seems a very normal thing to do.

like i'm sure Greeks didn't have a super-sophisticated view of Thracians. Most of these cultural studies sounds like taking something people do and try to make it sound very special and like only white people do it. Or deconstruct concepts but being very careful to only deconstruct whatever is tactically convenient to deconstruct

[Anonymous No.13404093]

>>13403926
The implicate assumption is that brown people are simply too simple to be capable of wrongdoing, cunning, or self-serving behaviour. They’re a bunch of childlike savages existing in a state of total innocence until the evil white man (in terms of Christian theology, the only true humans by way of the fall from Eden) came along and ruined everything.
Obviously this is a vast simplification, but this tendency is very noticeable. Try implying that Jews are self serving towards their own ethnic interests, or that Arabs and blacks were complicit in the slave trade and even benefited from it, or that SJW movements today are capable of having ulterior motives towards their ingroup, and watch the cognitive dissonance of even most ‘moderate’ PC liberal types.

[Anonymous No.13404179]

>>13404093
yes, i get the same vibe from pro-migration groups: progressives can't "integrate" western workers and right wingers, but somehow they expect to import a new proletarian from the third world from a culture they know nothing about and "integrate" them into the progressive project. the only explanation is that they think they are dumb enough to fall for their brainwashing where it failed to affect western workers. i think they'll be surprised when it turns out brown people have their own culture and legacy and are not dumb enough to be just brainwashed into the progressive project

[Anonymous No.13404212]

Western philosophy is the manifestation of white supremacy, I agree completely.

[Anonymous No.13404334]

>>13404093
Except that if you read actual historical research, these simple narratives are always superseded by analysis that shows more complex historical realities. Studies into the encounter between peoples in the America's since 1492 in the past couple of decades have exactly been constructing a narrative how the Europeans entered into a world already filled with cleavages, enmity, wars and so on. And how they were one player in a region that had been through ravaging civil war earlier, that the American and European players were in shifting constellations of alliances, rivalry. A key word like 'negotiating' is common throughout, emphasizing how the binaries of Europe - The Other, colonized - colonized and so on with all the moral load they carry are ideological themselves and do not have a simple correspondence to historical reality.

Similar with for example researching how in African societies islamic notions of civilization and barbarity operated, how racial thinking was active in these societies and so on.
Read any study on the Trans atlantic slave trade along the Gulf of Benin to see how African rulers and bandit groups were or were not active in it. Europeans didn't catch the slaves in West Africa they were brought to the shores mainly by way of war booty, plunder and raids by bandits. If you read any historical research on these topics you'll get these kinds of stories.

The difference lies in jumping from the complexity of this historical reality to denying that the foundations of e.g. the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, colonial projects weren't by themselves ethically reprehensible, denying the inequalities in the relations of power that puts the responsibility more on certain players than others, falling into an unwarranted relativism. Or downplaying the atrocities, the violence of certain phenomena. and so on

[Anonymous No.13404367]

>>13403162
But you can give an acceptably clear boundaries between colors using wave fenquency, and it won't be too contestable or ambiguous.

The West is a different beast entirely. Does Argentina and the rest of South America belong to the West? Ethnically they're mixed but with lot of European admixture and many pure or almost pure Europeans. Linguistically they speak European languages, culturally there is a lot of overlap. In almost all respects they're almost as European as the US. Yet it's not clear whether they are Western. Same problem with Meditterean people. Is North Africa Western? It's been colonized repeatedly by the Roman Empire and then the Europeans, it has a lot of whites (but who often aren't of European descent, though there has also been a lot of mixing with Europeans), some major culture of European civilization lived there (see St Augustine). Yet they are hardly considered Western.

Or consider Greece, supposedly the cradle of Western Civilisation. In many respect (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, geographic) it's closer, depending on how you look, to some parts of Turkey or the Middle East than, say, Germany or England. And certainly the Ancient Greeks wouldn"t have considered the Germans and the Celts part of "the West" or part of their own civilization.

Heck there was a time when people considered Spain to be almost an African country because its history of conquest and intermingling with African Muslims. Nowadays this would be laughable. But the influence of the Muslim world on Spain is very real to this day.

So as you see, while all categories offer boundaries problems, the seriousness and breadth of the problem is not the same for all categories. The West is indeed a sketchy concept, it might make sense in some contexts and not others.

[Anonymous No.13404376]

>>13403180
So the US isn't Western? That would probably leave out a part of Eastern Europe as well.
Still your definition is better than most I've seen here but there are problems with it.

[Anonymous No.13404389]

>>13403858
>and wasn’t it Voltaire who wrote an entire book from the point of view of a Muslim commenting on the absurdity of French society

That Montesquieu and the book is very funny and based btw. Worth noting still that the Persian in Montesquieu is a rhetorical device, Montesquieu didn't know much about Persian civilization.

I won't click OP's link because I like my mind cancer-free.

[Anonymous No.13404416]

>>13403146
This is some Sargon of Akkad "what is white" shit. Western philosophy is everything derived from the Greco-Roman tradition which is clearly distinguished from eastern philosophies. There's no need to overthink it

[Anonymous No.13404490]

>>13404367
>But you can give an acceptably clear boundaries between colors using wave fenquency
color boundaries are socially constructed too, just like the west or countries
>Ao (hiragana あお; kanji 青; adjective form aoi (青い)) is a Japanese color word that includes what English-speakers would call blue and green. For example, in Japan, blue skies are described as aozora (青空), and green traffic lights are described as ao-shingō (青信号).

[Anonymous No.13404633]

>>13404367
Well really you're just making the argument for me. You will never find an acceptable boundary for colour. Is turquoise blue or green? You could say it is simply turquoise and leave it at that, but it helps to categorize things, since it is clearly much closer to both blue and green than say red. As for the countries/regions you mention, yes, that is where I would personally draw the line. Africa is not western, japanese are not western. But between mainland Europe and these regions you will find many different degrees of western. The thing with Greece for example is that it was occupied for a long time by the Ottomans. Clearly that will have a cultural impact. That doens't mean they lose all western qualities, there are certainly many still there. But they also gained some other traits would not be considered western.

Really it would be a shame to drop the categorization because it lacks clear boundaries. If you get nitpicky you could discard it if you want but when analyzing for example the western canon you won't have much of a say there, for good or worse

[Anonymous No.13404862]

>>13404334
That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make though. History is a complex web of power relations, attempting to attach a moral narrative to it is absurd. If you read Tolqueville’s writings on the colonialist project in Algeria, not even words like colonialization have maintained the same meaning, which makes it doubly hard to analyze. The slave trade had existed for a long time before Europeans rose to promenance, and their role there was a changing one from victim to perpetrator.
The attempts to treat this historical discourse as anything objective, and not a modern ideological struggle, is stupid, because of the vast complexity of it all. Placing ‘responsibility’ is likewise dumb, because many of the worst attrocities attributed to colonialism happened AFTER colonialism. It was the war of independence that unshackled the US (for example, the same is even more true in South America) from its historical and moral obligations, treaties, etc. And allowed it to peruse a policy of mass immigration, settlement, and genocide— however, at this point the project was one of land based conquest not one of colonial struggle. The tendency to attribute all ills to colonialism, at frame it as a moral issue, with “good” and “bad” actors (rather than the more difficult reality of ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’ actors) creates a narrative which is useful politically, but historically counterfactual and simultaneously condescending towards brown peoples while hostile to white ones.

[Anonymous No.13404883]

>>13404416
Except western thought has a massive christian component, which derives from judaism, and in that sense the middle east and north africa are part of the west.

[Anonymous No.13404892]

>>13404633
North Africa has an older tradition of Christianity than most of Europe, while Islam is firmly rooted in Greco-Roman thinking

[Anonymous No.13404894]

>>13404883
There is no "except." Christianity is part of the Greco-Roman tradition. You must have went to college in order to get so confused.

[Anonymous No.13404920]

>>13404894
Islam is moreso part of Greco Roman tradition, and North Africa was LITERALLY Roman— most influential Christian thinkers and church fathers were born, raised, and died in Africa.

[Anonymous No.13404938]

>>13404920
Yes. So what? What is the good of this sort of pedantry? You're always going to find exceptions to any generalization. The sky is blue, but aha! Sometimes it's red!

[Anonymous No.13404953]

>>13403162
You'd have to be an idiot to think that China and India are somehow objectively un-Western

[Anonymous No.13404956]

>>13404367
Pinpoint the exact moment yellow ends and blue begins on this picture

[Anonymous No.13405047]

>>13403117
>if any person, even René Descartes, considers himself “nothing but a thinking thing,” he is profoundly self-deluded, and other people are probably servicing his physical needs.
He didn't mean you're not supposed to wipe yourself.

[Anonymous No.13405218]

>>13404956

[Anonymous No.13405392]

>>13404367
>a blurry concept has to stay the same over the course of 5000+ years

You have done nothing but well poisoning, and you intended to do so. This is after all a trained response

[Anonymous No.13405537]

>>13404892
lol no, the greco-roman attributes are clearly superficial and mangled

[Anonymous No.13405839]

>>13405218
kek

[Anonymous No.13406412]

>>13403117
communism was invented by white people.
communism/socialism is white supremacy.

communists/socialists/antifa/Democrats BTFO

[Anonymous No.13406708]

>>13405537
And that’s not the case with France or the USA?

[Anonymous No.13406834]

>>13404920
>Islam is moreso part of Greco Roman tradition
I'm interested in hearing your explanation for why you think this.

[Anonymous No.13406843]

>>13403117
Didn't Hegel romanticize the Haitian revolution? Race is kind of irrelevant for spirit

[Anonymous No.13406851]

this crap is straight out of 1985

[Anonymous No.13406858]

>>13406412
Jokes on you, Marx wasn't white: https://publicautonomy.org/2015/06/16/karl-marx-white/

[Anonymous No.13406861]

>>13403117
I hate this world.

[Anonymous No.13406865]

"western" really is just a polite way of saying "white"

[Anonymous No.13406948]

>>13404920
>Islam is moreso part of Greco Roman tradition
ultra-brainlet

[Anonymous No.13407037]

>>13406858
Yes he was. Being less than 1/8th Ashkenazi (sicilian) doesn't mean you aren't white

[Anonymous No.13407627]

>>13403161
right wingers don't even know what levant is lmao, admit it you dweeb

[Anonymous No.13407629]

>>13404416
>no need to work your brainies just accept it senpai we whiteys are kangz

[Anonymous No.13407635]

>>13405218
literally all "white power" people are mongrels and americans (same thing) with no roots because of global capitalism and instead of realizing that they display their impotence online

[Anonymous No.13407642]

>>13407635
The idea that the 'white races' are superior to other people is older than America. I suppose it became tenable around when western Europe started conquering most of the world 500 years ago.

Modern white nationalists are generally low status people because the taboo is so incredibly strong against it that for the most part only people with nothing to lose would openly espouse it.

[Anonymous No.13407648]

>>13403265
says increasingly nervous man

[Anonymous No.13407684]

>>13407642
high effort retort to low effort eurobait

[Anonymous No.13407700]

>>13407684
that line of thought has traveled through my mind so many times that it spills out like a kneejerk in response, the effort being decidedly low. I'm not even a white nationalist, white people are decidely disappointing as fuck, either by suicide or by destruction by frugal bagel purveyors they have let themselves be overtaken and lost their will. I might have been a white nationalist 200 years ago but not now. It's mostly just an impulse to attack smug redditors who have to find themselves defending positions impossible to defend, like certain uncomfortable facts about relentless disparities in outcomes between populations, to lessen their smugness just a bit and make the ones more reeking of faggotry maybe just abandon the board in general. It's kind of pointless because the board's purpose is actually literature discussion and there are many antiracist types with lots to offer on that front but the sheer smuggery, the expectation that there will be no response because on any other platform the response is deleted and the poster banned, it just fucking irks me.

[Anonymous No.13407728]

>>13406858
But Engels, Bakunin and Proudhon were.

[Anonymous No.13408051]

>>13407635
>with no roots because of global capitalism
that's literally everybody today

[Anonymous No.13408071]

>>13407728
all meme writers