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.”
This is the heart of his argument. And it doesnt make any sense at all. As far as I can make out, he is mixing allusions and associations and assuming one influences the other, but even if that were true it doesn't alter the underlying arguments that philosophy is making.
so I’m an example of a reasonable person and all the others are unreasonable and I’m the racist? I got it.
I said she pegged the bad guys but her good guys weren’t so good.
A feminist “philosopher” once wrote a book that said that science was inherently sexist.
We used to call people like this “lunatics.”
Reason? Yes, it’s call civilization.
Well, when the race war starts, and this “cream” stain comes a knockin’ on my door for safety, I’ll kindly turn him away and ask him to “reason” with his blood thirsty subculture adherents, after all, their human too, and well, since he’s one of “them” at least in his own twisted mind, they won’t hurt him, will they? Stands to “reason” doesn’t it? I’ll send him a copy of “Camp of the Saints” maybe he’ll get the hint of the prophecy made 40 years ago on the death of the West....
Pure readon is best demonstrated through math.
The universe follows math...to a degree that physicists have expressed wonder at the morphism between pure math and the natural philosophy (known now known as physics). This clown can spew lib-o-crap all he wants, but nothing worthy can come of his useless pie hole.
This “Professor” is a joke.
The kind of a joke permitted only by silly little philosophy and lib arts departments.
You know those...the ones whose grads serve you at Starbucks.
Actually that is a correct reading so far as it goes but is not complete. The Greeks who got into reason pretty deeply in at least one strand of their philosophizing predated white male Christian Europeans by a few centuries and their philosophy informed white European Male reason to a large extent. I guess they could be white male European pre-Christians
It is why white male Europeans developed Western Civilization and made it rich in a historically very short time. No other demographic has accomplished anything close to that.
Civilization is a white, male construct and yet these non-white people live in and partake of a civilization that they put no work into building.
They are the parasites of civilization, who will suck it dry until it dies.
How’s that for white, male reasoning?
Reason is a capability of the mind. Unfortunately some ethnicities have allowed their animal instincts to dominate their reason.
And our taxes support these commie indoctrinationalists.
ohmygosh
To her Reagan was a “bad guy”. If it turns out that you’re not an Ayn Rand fan, I welcome you to the small (but hopefully growing) number of FReepers who aren’t enthralled by the atheistic abortionist. And, truth be told, she ain’t all that great of a writer — unless compelling characterization consists of one-dimensional beings who are motor-mouthed chain smokers bordering on anorexia. There are far better Conservative heroes than Ayn Rand.
The silly member of the “Academented” under discussion, clearly never understood the relationship between ‘true north’ and ‘magnetic north’.
Like many of the “Academented”, he likely would have difficulty reading a map, much less being able to steer without a copy of Navigation For Dummies.
Such a value for the money.
Umm...I don’t think its time to give up the day job yet...
Yes it is.
So, for you blacks, you Latinos, you Islamists, y'all can go back to living in caves and chasing wildebeasts with clubs, because to use ANY of our reason, ANY of our technology, is a racist act on your part.
Plumbing is a white male construct.
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