The Multicultural West: Ethnicity and the Intellectual Foundations of Western Civilization

Transcription

1 Michael W. Tkacz The Multicultural West: Ethnicity and the Intellectual Foundations of Western Civilization Recently, an Arabic Christian friend and I were discussing an article critical of the required liberal arts core curriculum at the university where we both used to teach. Like many such curricula in American universities, this was based on the great books of the Western intellectual tradition. The author of the article called for its replacement by a multicultural curriculum designed to expose the student to different ideas and cultures. The article claimed that the Western great books curriculum must be abandoned because it is biased and ignores the contributions of non-europeans to the intellectual life. Only those who are Eurocentric can accept the intellectual outlook promoted by such a curriculum. To require students who are not of European descent to read the writings of Western intellectuals, said the article s author, is to force upon them an alien worldview and to deny them their true heritage. In addition, to limit students who are of European descent to the study of Western writers is to prejudice them against thinkers who are not European and do not look like them. My friend, who was born in Syria and grew up in Lebanon and whose outlook and looks are hardly European commented that this author knows nothing of his (that is, my friend s) intellectual heritage. Moreover, my friend continued, this author has simply declared that the Western tradition belongs to Europeans more than it does to my people. Perhaps [this] author does not know that my ancestors were reading the great works of Western thought in their own language centuries before Western Europeans read them. It has been a decade since Jesse Jackson led Stanford University students in a rally denouncing the Western civilization requirement found in many colleges and universities around the country. Since then the conception of the Western intellectual tradition expressed in the article discussed by my Arabic friend and me has become an estabished orthodoxy. As a result, many required undergraduate core programs focusing on the Western tradition have been abandoned in favor of more multicultural curricula. Perhaps the most frequently given reason for such sweeping curricular changes is that the Western tradition is Eurocentric and excludes non-white peoples. Stanford classicist Gregson Davis, for example, supported the curriculum change at his institution because of the Eurocentrism of the Western tradition which arises out of a deeply pernicious distortion of history that is endemic among Western intellectuals. Michael W. Tkacz is a professor in the philosophy department at Gonzaga University. 10 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall 1997

2 Behind this challenge to the dominance of the Western tradition in American education are many assumptions concerning the definition of this tradition, how scholars of the tradition have delineated its ethnic and linguistic boundries, and which peoples have historically considered themselves the heirs of the tradition. Very little, however, seems to be offered in evidence for such assumptions. Indeed, few have even raised the question as to whether these assumptions are correct. Even defenders of the Western tradition often seem to accept the claims of their critics that the tradition is historically white and European. In other words, few have questioned the assumption that the Western intellectual tradition is not a multicultural tradition. Certainly, after ten or more years of intensive efforts on the part of educational reformers to erase the dominance of Western thought in our colleges and universities, it is time to give some attention to these assumptions. Is the Western intellectual tradition exclusively or even predominently a European tradition? Has it historically been considered the intellectual culture of white people alone whatever is meant by white people? Have there ever been non-europeans who have considered themselves as sharing the same intellectual heritage as Europeans? An investigation of these questions suggests that the charges of Eurocentrism and ethnic exclusivity are misplaced and overlook the actual historical development of the tradition. Such an investigation, in fact, will reveal just the opposite: the Western tradition is not an exclusively European tradition. Indeed, it is the most multicultural of all the intellectual traditions of human history. Three great civilizations developed historically continuous intellectual traditions. They are all about equally ancient and, for the most part, developed independently from each other. One of these is the tradition of East Asia which had its origins in ancient China. While this tradition influenced the civilization of medieval Korea and Japan, it flourished primarily within the boundries of the Chinese Empire from ancient times well into the modern period. The second intellectual tradition is that which developed from the ancient civilization of the Indus valley. It spread throughout south Asia and eventually, largely through the vehicle of Buddhism, influenced ancient Chinese culture. The third tradition is what is commonly today called the Western tradition. This tradition had its origins among the ancient Greeks and, by late antiquity and the Middle Ages, spread to many non-greek peoples. If one is going to use this brief taxonomy of intellectual traditions to help define the Western tradition, a few clarifications are in order. At first glance, it seems that much of human history is arbitrarily excluded by these classifications. What about African cultures or ancient American civilizations, for instance? It is true that this taxonomy includes no mention of these peoples nor of many others. The taxonomy, however, is not arbitrary, as can be seen once we investigate the meaning of the term intellectual tradition. Borrowing a distinction from Aristotle, we can pick out the intellectual from the multitude of human activities with some clarity. Human knowledge can be broadly classified as either practical or theoretical. Practical knowledge is that directed at performing an action or producing a product. It is a skill or art. Knowledge of carpentery is sought so that we might produce wooden products. Knowledge of engineering or any other kind of technical knowledge is sought so that we might be able to build computers, bridges, telescopes, clocks, and so on. Even where the product is somewhat less physical and more abstract, we might still THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall

3 seek knowledge for the sake of producing something. For example, knowledge of accountency is acquired so that we might have a clear account of what happened to our money, and medical knowledge is aimed at producing health. Practical knowledge is not limited to particular productive actions, but also includes action in general. Knowing the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice is necessary in order to bring about the good through our actions. Thus, moral knowledge is a kind of practical knowledge. Theoretical knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge sought for its own sake. It is the satisfaction of the natural curiosty that comes from being human. Knowing the number of stars in the Milky Way, the nature of black holes, the mating behaviors of polar bears, or why maple leaves change color in the fall may or may not have practical application. Nonetheless, we can seek to know these things simply because we love to know. It will be useful to express this in terms of our modern division of the disciplines. Natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and their many branches represent types of theoretical knowledge. This is also true of pure mathematics, philosophy, history, and the social sciences. On the other hand, legal studies, medicine and its allied disciplines, applied mathematics, engineering and the other technological disciplines, the trades, various skills and arts are all types of practical knowledge. All human societies require a certain amount of practical knowledge to continue to exist. Many civilizations have indeed developed sophisticated technologies as well as moral and legal systems. Not every human society, however, has developed an historically continuous tradition of intellectual activity that is, an on-going tradition of seeking theoretical knowledge. It is certainly true that some ancient American civilizations, for instance, possessed well-developed technologies of time measurment, building construction, and so on. At the same time, this is not the same as saying that they developed traditions of natural science, pure mathematics, or philosophy. Undoubtedly some intellectual activity was carried on in such societies, but we have no evidence of continuous historical traditions of theoretical knowledge among these peoples. Such traditions are limited to the three great civilizations mentioned above. Now it is clear that Aristotle s distinction is not intended as absolute. The theoretical and the practical clearly overlap. Seeking knowledge for its own sake is, after all, something human beings do and it can be done well or badly. One can be a good or poor theoretical physicist. Moreover, knowledge sought for its own sake in one context might be practical knowledge in another, as when we find a technological application for what is discovered by pure mathematicians or when we use a theoretical understanding of human nature as a guide to moral decision-making. Significantly, in the three great intellectual traditions of China, India, and the West, the practical was often systematically grounded in theoretical knowledge in a way it never was in other civilizations. Moreover, a conception of the value of intellectual activity for a complete human life is found only in these three traditions. In light of these considerations, it is clear that there is something distinctive about these three civilizations to which the term intellectual tradition refers. How, then, do we distinguish the Western tradition from the other two great intellectual traditions? As already noted, the Western tradition had its origins in ancient Greek civilization. While the Greeks were influenced by the various ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and the fertile 12 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall 1997

4 crescent, it is clear that they developed an historically continuous intellectual tradition from the seventh century before Christ onwards that is distinct from the traditions and practices of other ancient peoples. Indeed, the Greeks have a long unbroken history of mathematical studies, scientific research, and philosophical speculation, not only in antiquity, but throughout the medieval and modern periods. These disciplines have been continuously taught from the earliest Ionian natural philosophers to our own day. The documentation of the Greek intellectual achievement dates from every period of history since Thales. What makes the ancient Greek achievement an intellectual tradition is that, virtually from the beginning, it possessed an historical continuity. This is manifested in the awareness of individual thinkers that they were part of an ongoing enterprise. The early Pythgoreans of Greek-speaking Southern Italy in the fifth century before Christ knew that their mathematical and philosophical work was not the only intellectual activity in the Greek world. By the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, intellectuals realized that they had to take into account work done before them. This consciousness of working within an established tradition continues unbroken throughout antiquity and beyond. It is this awareness of past intellectual efforts, the knowledge that it does not all start with oneself, that constitutes working within a tradition. As Bernard of Chartres said in the twelfth century, We are standing on the shoulders of giants. Even where a Greek thinker made an original contribution to the intellectual life, this was done in the context of a continuous development of thought. Indeed, his very originality could not be articulated without reference to the tradition. An intellectual tradition is like a great conversation on matters of significance to human beings and such a conversation took place in ancient Greece. It is this self-conscious historical continuity found in ancient Greek civilization and the later civilizations intellectually influenced by the Greeks that constitute the Western intellectual tradition. A canon of classical Greek literature developed even in antiquity and was studied by succeeding generations to our own day. Moreover, education took a certain shape with the in- Socrates ception of a liberal arts tradition among the Greeks which continued to provide the foundation for the intellectual life long after the tradition was no longer exclusively Greek. The continuity of this tradition is also manifest in the persistent importance of the Greek language. Not only in antiquity, but also in later periods, the Greek tongue was understood as foundational to Western thought. Even in periods and places where Greek was no longer commonly spoken, educated people were aware that the classics they read in their own language were translations from the Greek and that Greek terms were important to the development of their disciplines. All of this is so well documented THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall

5 that there is little room for serious doubt as to the nature and reality of the Western tradition as an historical phenomenon. The ancient Roman writer Horace famously observed that, while Rome captured Greece, it was the Greeks who conquered Rome. He was, of course, referring to the fact that Roman society was intellectually Greek despite the fact that the Romans militarily and politically dominated the Greek city-states. The spread of Greek intellectual culture did not, however, have to wait on the growth of Roman power in the Mediterranean. Already in the fourth century before Christ, Greek thought spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia in the wake of the invading Macedonian armies of Alexander the Great. Alexander was a tireless founder of cities and he populated his many Alexandrias not only with retired soldiers, artisans, and traders, but also with Greek philosophers. Some of these cities, such as Alexandria in Egypt, became great centers of Greek intellectual activity outside of traditional Greek lands. The ancient Greeks were a gregarious people and great sea-going traders. Long before the Romans dominated the Mediterranean world, the Greeks had brought their language and intellectual culture to much of what was to become the Roman Empire and beyond. By the time of Christ, libraries full of the Greek classics were to be found in Greek cities from Spain to India and from Egypt to the Crimea. Access to these books was already not confined to people who were ethnically Greek, for Greek had become the lingua franca of the ancient world and many non-greeks spoke it as a second language. During the Roman period, several of these cities became great centers of learning and research, something like university towns. Most of these centers were outside of traditionally Greek lands. Athens retained its importance as a center for philosophy, largely because of the presence of the Platonic Academy. Equally important, however, was Alexandria in Egypt, home to the most famous library in the ancient world and many famous philosophers and mathematicians. Also important was Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria, Pergamum in Asia Minor, and of course Rome itself. In addition, there were many minor sites in both the Western and Eastern halves of the Empire where Greek schools were located. Thus, by the time of Christ, people of many different ethnic backgrounds were exposed to the riches of Greek thought. Most of these people still read and studied the Greek classics in the Greek language. During the later Roman period (the fourth through sixth centuries) this began to change. At the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Diocletian reorganized the Empire, splitting it into two halves. This not only represented a new administrative organization, but also recognized an existing cultural distinction. In the Eastern part of the Empire, Greek was the commonly spoken language, while Latin was commonly used in the West. In the early centuries of the Empire, educated people in Rome and the western provinces learned to speak Greek. In the later period, however, fluency in Greek became increasingly rare in the West, with the result that the classics of Greek philosophy, literature, and science had to be translated into Latin. No less an intellect than St. Augustine, a native of the Western Empire, read his Aristotle and Plotinus in Latin. A generation later, the Roman Senator Boethius, observing that knowledge of Greek had practically disappeared from the Western Empire, undertook to translate all of Plato, Aristotle, and Greek mathematics into Latin. He did not get very far before fate, and politics, caught up with him. Nonetheless, he did manage to 14 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall 1997

6 translate some of Aristotle s logical works as well as the treatises of Nicomachus of Gerasa and other Greek mathematicians. A similar process took place in the eastern provinces where works of Greek philosophy and science were translated into Syriac, For Church Fathers such as Augustine, Christianity was a catholic religion, that is, a religion for all peoples. Therefore, if the Greek intellectual tradition is useful for spreading the Gospel, then it too is for all peoples. a semitic language spoken by many people living in Roman Syria and Mesopotamia. From this time on, then, the spread of Greek thought no longer took the form of simply a dissemination of books, but also of translation. Throughout late antiquity, Christian writers came more and more to use Greek philosophy and science to articulate their faith. Writing from his episcopal see in Roman Africa, St. Augustine noted that Christians are free to dispoil the Egyptians. That is, Christians may take from pagan Greek science what is helpful in understanding the truth, just as Moses allowed the ancient Hebrews to carry off the gold and precious vessels of the Egyptians in their exodus from that land of bondage. An angel visits Mohammed. Such was the precedent when much of the Christian Roman East fell to invading Islamic armies in the seventh century. The Arabic tribes, having been politically and spiritually united by Mohammed, embarked on their great wars of conquest with the result that many important centers of Greek civilization came under Islamic rule. What had happened with Christianity now occurred in the Islamic world. Pagan Greek thought was used to articulate the Islamic faith and this occasioned a new manner in which many non-greek peoples became heirs of the Western tradition and made it their own. Even before the Islamic invasions, Nestorian Christian scholars from Edessa in Roman Mesopotamia had migrated to Persia and set up philosophical schools at THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall

7 Nisibis and Jundishapur. When the Persian Empire fell to the Arabs, these schools became centers for the translation of the Greek classics into Arabic. Eventually, these translation efforts were moved to Baghdad, the new capital of the Arabic Caliphate. Here virtually all of Greek thought became available in Arabic: the works of Plato and Aristotle and their Neoplatonic commentators, Greek medical and mathematical treatises, works on grammar, logic, rhetoric, and natural science. In the centuries that followed, Baghdad evolved into one of the great intellectual centers of the medieval world. It was there that Alkindi, the first Islamic Aristotelian, worked in the early tenth century. It was also at Baghdad that the Turkestani philosopher Alfarabi came into contact with the Christian Aristotelianism of Nestorian scholars. This resulted in his monumental effort to harmonize the views of Plato and Aristotle. The greatest member of the school of Baghdad is the eleventh-century Persian thinker Avicenna. His contributions to metaphysics, logic, natural science, and medicine rank among the best in the Western tradition and his thought was extremely influential, especially in Western Europe. At the western end of the medieval Islamic world, Greek philosophy and science in Arabic translation spread from Egypt to Spain where the Islamic Moors had established themselves in the eighth century. Here, at centers such as Cordova, the works of the Greek astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers were studied in Arabic. The best known of these Moorish scholars is Averroes who wrote long detailed commentaries on all of the philosophical and scientific books of Aristotle. Cordova was also the birthplace, in 1135, of the most famous of medieval Jewish philosophers, Moses Maimonides. Writing in both Hebrew and Arabic, he and other Jewish scholars made significant contributions to the understanding of Greek philosophy. The Islamic Moors of Spain lived side by side with the Christian peoples they had conquered. Most of the Christian population was Latin-speaking, but Mozarabic Christians spoke Arabic and served as a link between their Latin Christian brothers and the Arabic-speaking Moors. Thanks to this link, Spain became the site of much translation activity in the twelfth century. At centers such as Cordova and Toledo, the biological works of Aristotle, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the medical works of Galen, the geometry of Euclid, and many other Greek works were translated from Arabic into Latin, making this material available in Western Europe for the first time in many centuries. During this same period, Venetian and Genoese traders from Italy were increasing contact with the Greek-speaking peoples of the Eastern Roman Empire. As a result, Greek scholars came from Constantinople to Italy where they translated many philosophical and medical works from Greek into Latin. With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, there was an even greater influx of Greek scholars into the Latin West and a great revival of the study of the Greek language in European schools during the Renaissance. In these ways, the Greek intellectual heritage was passed on, interpreted, applied, and developed. The recovery of so much Greek science and philosophy in the Latin West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries began a process which eventually led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the scientific culture of our own day. Moreover, it is clear that, before the full riches of Greek thought became available to the various peoples of Western Europe, many ethnically non-european peoples had already inherited it, incorporated it into their own cultures, and contributed to it significantly. Indeed, 16 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall 1997

8 it is fair to say that the great revival of philosophy and natural science in the Latin West during the High Middle Ages owes as much to the Persian Avicenna and the Moorish Averroes as it does to the Greek Aristotle. This survey of the ethnic diversity of the Western tradition is necessarily brief and sketchy. In fact, only one slice of its history is offered here. The focus might have been on the Armenian reception of Greek thought and its spread among Caucasian peoples, or on the education of the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe by Sts. Cyril and Methodius, or on the history of Greek thought in Christian Egypt or in the Asiatic regions of Bactria, Sogdiana, and India. Nonetheless, enough has been said to demonstrate the multiculturalism of the tradition. Clearly, European peoples were not the only heirs to Western civilization. Moreover, it is worth noting that, even within Europe, the tradition was inherited by a wide variety of ethnically diverse peoples. Greek culture became the basis for the intellectual development of the Romans and other Italic peoples, the Iberians of the Western Mediterranean, the Celtic peoples of Western Europe and the British Isles, the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, as well as the many Asiatic peoples who migrated into Europe. To this list must be added the many non-european peoples who received the tradition and made it their own, including the Hamitic peoples of North Africa, the Semitic peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian peoples of Western Asia, Indians of Southern Asia, Turkic peoples of Central Asia, as well as the ancient nations of the Caucasus region. Neither the Chinese nor Indian traditions can claim such ethnic and linguistic diversity. Today this multicultural character of Western civilization is often ignored in our public discussions. Yet it is not hidden or surpressed by contemporary scholars. It can be found in the standard histories. This should make us think twice before we accept the assessment of such critics of the Western tradition as Gregson Davis. Teaching the tradition does not represent a Eurocentricsm arising out of a deeply pernicious distortion of history that is endemic among Western intellectuals. History demonstrates that, if anything is endemic among Western intellectuals both European and non-european it is a tendency to extend the intellectual riches of Western civilization across and beyond ethnic boundries, allowing diverse peoples to receive it and make it their own. Selected Bibliography Armstrong, A. H. The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Bolgar, R. R. The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries from the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Boyer, Carl B. A History of Mathematics. New York: John Wiley, Gilson, Etienne. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. London: Sheed and Ward, Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927; and Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; and ed. Science in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, O Leary, De Lacy. How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Pedersen, Olaf and Mogens Pihl. Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction. New York: Science History Publications, Peters, F. E. Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam. New York: New York University Press, Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. NY: Columbia University Press, THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall