Posted on 07/12/2015 3:05:42 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
A philosophy and religion professor at Syracuse University gave an interview to The New York Times Thursday in which he critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a “white male Euro-Christian construction.”
Prof. John Caputo was being interviewed by fellow philosophy professor George Yancy for the 13th installment of an interview series Yancy conducts with philosophers regarding racial topics.
Given its emphasis on first principles and abstract thought, it may be tempting to view academic philosophy as a turf where the race of participants matters little, but Caputo says that’s entirely untrue. In fact, race is of central importance, and it’s proven by the mundane phrases philosophers use.
“‘White’ is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why,” Caputo says in the interview. “I was once criticized for using the expression ‘true north.’It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say ‘we’ and to assume who ‘we’ are, which once simply meant ‘we white male Euro-Christians.’
The end result of critiquing whiteness, Caputo suggests, is the realization that the supposed “reason” underlying philosophy is just another form of white privilege … or something of that nature.
“I think that what modern philosophers call ‘pure’ reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction,” he says. “White is not ‘neutral.’ ‘Pure’ reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is ‘colored.’ Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and ‘white’ is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by ‘reason’ — and ‘we’ white philosophers cannot ignore it.”
What does this all mean for regular people, such as the Times’ readers? Beneath all of the postmodern philosophical rhetoric, it’s not easy to tell, but much like the litany of recent academics hurrying to comment on “white privilege,” Caputo takes time to stick his finger in the eyes of the “Christian right” and, of all things, freedom — as if those two are the major arbiters behind all the woes America faces.
“The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty,” he says. “But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it … The popularity of such cruel ideas, their success in the ballot box, is terrifying to me. The trigger-happy practices of the police … on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality. The scandal is that the Christian right has too often been complicit with a politics of greed and hatred of the other.”
Ted and Trump are nowhere near each other on immigration
Last week Trump said illegals who stole jobs from Americans and work hard should be allowed to stay.
Ted wants strong national e-verify and to cut off the benefits.
These are not similar positions.
As are forks.
I can understand why a leftist would believe that reason is incomprehensible.
They not only don’t understand it, they actively reject reason. They’re incapable of thinking, only endlessly repeating what they’ve been taught, by rote, simply vomiting it back, force feeding it to the next generation of useful idiots.
Mark
It really does seem as though what I read, day in and day out, was written by Ayn Rand.
It’s almost as if the left and their masters have read “Atlas Shrugged” and thought that the end, where everything falls apart, is their “happily ever after.”
Once the system and society has crumbled, and all the producers have been driven off, then they can finally build their utopia, without those pesky “builders.” After all, they didn’t build “that.”
Mark
I’m not particularly a fan or Rand, nor her writing, per say. I wasn’t particularly fond or Orwell either. The key is that both were able to accurately predict exactly what the left has done, and are doing.
You know, Hitler telegraphed exactly what he wanted to do in Mein Kampf. On the other hand, Rand and Orwell are predicting the direction of the left.
Mark
bump
Leftists have always despised logic. Magical thinking undergirds their entire world view. Emotions and belief are all that is required to change a man to a women, make man the author of weather, equate barbarism with civilization, elevate animals to sapience, and slaughter children with no more thought than killing a roach.
Insanity has always partnered with evil. Whether one is Christian or not, the devil’s lie hasn’t changed since Eden: “You can be like God.”
True, but he has a voice and a bull horn that no other candidate has. He may be the best thing that could happen to Cruz, who has not been in the top in the polls. If, like me, you want a Ted or at minimum a Walker, you should be happy about what Trump is doing.
I wish people would stop assuming white liberals have any “guilt”; they can personally intervene to make a difference with their own money/property to rectify “injustice”, and THEY DON’T.
They are simply poverty profiteers - it is an industry unto itself.
The dumbing down and shaming of White America.
What have we let the liberal/progressive do(rhetorical question)?
Without the philosophers of the past, America would not exist. Without the philosophers of the past civilized man would not exist.
Without the philosophers of the past culture, society, art, music, ....there would be no meaning to life.
They are extinguishing every aspect of the American historical past. As surely as ISIS or the Taliban blows-up and destroys the markers of societal past, so too does the progressive.
Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power. They have destroyed the knowledge base.
Hey, compasses are racist and insensitive to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere!
Who knew?
And why does there have to be? Whether life has any “meaning” (itself a meaningless concept) does not change the reality that life IS. We can choose to live it any way we want, recognizing that there are consequences that accrue as the result of our choices. The consequences may or may not have any “meaning,” but I venture to say that some are decidedly less pleasant than others.
“The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty,”The "great scandal" of the United States is that it has produced the gradual elimination of actual poverty - as it was intended to do - and yet the politics of envy survives to this day.
The point I would make in response is that even if he is correct (and I would argue he isn't) it doesn't neccesarily invalidate the products of reason. Two plus two IS four, it doesn't really whether a caucasion male or an hispanic female was the one who postulated it.
What's happening is an attack on objective verifiable truths. For some of these whacked out environments, the priorities are interactions and self esteem and acceptance of feelings.
As a retired math teacher, I believe in a body of knowledge that starts from a few basic understandable premises and then follows logically from them. It's gotten a little better in that it's gone back to kids are learning their basic facts again. But for knowledge as a whole, we're getting away from a commonly accepted body of knowledge that's where we all start in agreement.
So I worry if rational thought becomes a white man's bias. What we're ending up with is a culture that is not the one we're used to. People are swayed by emotion and group behavior. They don't have a filter that considers fact or rational conclusions.
Someone tell the professor that race itself is a construct.
Don't you mean "white" on rice??
This leftist professor is actually correct.
Part of me wants to agree with this one.
White may be the traditional term. It may make more sense. I like the physical activity involved in the fly pouncing on the food source.
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