Wouldn't it be grand, it is thought, if we had courses which included classical Chinese and Indian philosophers? Surely, that would not only lead to more fertile philosophizing by students, given the intellectual cross-pollination, but it would also encourage more students of Asian heritage to enroll in such classes.
Noble imaginations like these result, however, in disappointing results. The expected outcomes fail to materialize because the multiculturalists who call for such academic programming do not know, understand, or realize what such study, if done properly, would entail. To engage in such study is to encounter sophisticated and complex texts which require analytical parsing by the student.
Perhaps motivated by pithy quotes from Confucius, and short aphoristic excerpts from koans, the multiculturalists envision a lively classroom engagement, in which students delve into riddles and - in the case of Asian and Indian students - find connections with their heritage.
In reality, students will encounter brilliant thought, but it will be encountered only after rigorous compilation of definitions of technical terms, and lots of close reading. Intellectually challenging and philosophically fruitful, yes, it certainly will be, but not an Oprah-like exploration of life's meaning and getting to one's genealogical roots.
Justin Smith, professor of philosophy, expresses it this way:
There is much talk in academic philosophy about the need to open up the discipline to so-called non-Western traditions and perspectives, both through changes to the curriculum and also within the demographics of philosophy departments themselves. These two aspects are seen as connected: it is thought that greater representation of non-Western philosophy will help to bring about greater diversity among the women and men who make up the philosophical community.
Smith identifies two typical mistakes of multiculturalism. One mistake is the notion that first-person involvement with subject matter must be maximized; a student will, so it is thought, work better and have a better experience, if he identifies with the content being studied; the multiculturalist doesn't believe that a student might be interested in, and motivated to study, that which is culturally other. If you want more Chinese students to enroll, include an overview of Chinese philosophy in one of your classes; if you want more Indian students to enroll, include a survey of Upanishads and Vedas. The multiculturalist is thus actually a chauvinist: he assumes that students of non-Western heritage of xenophobes and nativists, and won't take a class unless you've stocked it with Indian and Chinese philosophers.
The second mistake, also typical of multiculturalism, is the sacrifice of rigor. It is assumed that one can simply "add in" a few token non-Western thoughts into humanities syllabus or a philosophy course. This ignores the meticulous research which creates a respectable academic discipline. It would be a parallel if one said, "science fiction is really popular; throw some quantum mechanics into your Euclidian Geometry course." As Justin Smith puts it:
When I teach classical Indian philosophy, or advocate teaching it, for example, I often hear in response that doing so provides a service to the university community, and to the student body, insofar as it enhances the diversity of the philosophy curriculum, and makes the curriculum representative of a wider portion of the student body. But what I'm teaching are topics such as 5th-century Indian theories of logical inference, or the concept of qualitative atomism in classical Buddhism: material that is sufficiently obscure that no student, of any background, should be expected at the outset to recognize him or herself in it.
What is true of non-Western thought is equally true of Western thought: one would not expect a student, merely because his last name is Schmidt, to form an emotional connection with the writings of Gottlob Frege; one would not expect a student, simply because his last name is MacGregor, to have an immediate affection for the texts of Thomas Reid.
The goal of reflecting the diversity of our own society by expanding the curriculum to include non-European traditions has so far been a tremendous failure. And it has failed for at least two reasons. One is that non-Western philosophy is typically represented in philosophy curricula in a merely token way. Western philosophy is always the unmarked category, the standard in relation to which non-Western philosophy provides a useful contrast. Non-Western philosophy is not approached on its own terms, and thus philosophy remains, implicitly and by default, Western. Second, non-Western philosophy, when it does appear in curricula, is treated in a methodologically and philosophically unsound way: it is crudely supposed to be wholly indigenous to the cultures that produce it and to be fundamentally different than Western philosophy in areas like its valuation of reason or its dependence on myth and religion. In this way, non-Western philosophy remains fundamentally “other.”
Professor Smith is pointing out that it is absurd to assume that a student whose grandparents came from China will have some innate connection with Confucius, and naturally embrace Confucian views as some explicit expression of what the student already believes by virtue of his heritage. This fallacy is so crude that it constitutes an insult, and this fallacy is delivered by the multiculturalists who wear the badge of sensitivity as their highest honor. In any society, the link between philosophy and culture is often distant and tenuous, if it exists at all. Do we take Kierkegaard as an expression of Danish culture? Is Spinoza an organic outgrowth of Dutch culture?
In philosophy, more than in any other discipline, one encounters nuanced distinctions maintained with precision. Yet the multiculturalist barges in, assuming that all Chinamen give a priori assent to Confucianism, that all Indians are in intellectual harmony with the Upanishads, and that these questions can be treated with broad generalizations about culture, rather than with close textual study earned by carefully crafted documents arising from honed philosophical traditions.
In fact, scholars who have little to do with multicultural trendiness are those most likely to give non-Western philosophers their due. A philosopher whose specialty is Aristotle finds his skills put to good use in studying the Analects. A specialist in Schopenhauer and Hegel finds excellent engagement in Sanskrit texts. It is telling that thorough studies of such philosophies are found outside of, and temporally prior to, the multiculturalist takeover.
Outside of philosophy, an example comes from the related discipline of philology: the study of Ge'ez, an ancient form of Ethiopian Amharic, and the study of Nubian dialects, were more wide-spread among American and European universities a century ago than they are today, despite - or perhaps because of - the rise of multiculturalism. Why? Such academic work requires rigor and analysis: real intellectual work. That's not what the multiculturalists are seeking.
