Mark Peterson Selbstbestimmung and Begriffsbestimmung:

The History of Philosophy Begins Again

Begriffsbestimmung, "conceptual determination"

is the articulation of what thought comes to be. Selbstbestimmung, "self-determination" is the unfolding of what something already may become. This bit of English grammatical aikido is the attempt to grasp what Hegel says, more richly in German, when he says "Wesen ist gewesen." This is a useful concept and a powerful tool for unpacking underlying structural features within the outward development of concepts. I have always liked to misstate this phrase as "Wesen ißt gewesen", essence eats, consumes, or ruminates upon its having been—an appropriate Nietzschean comment on cows perhaps.

It is possible to treat the unfolding development of philosophy as a sort of Gordian knot, seemingly impossible to untie, offering too much treasure simply to ignore, and to which we must address ourselves as Alexander did—sword in hand. But it is not necessary to approach this knot with a final, ultimate stroke of method or worldview. All that is required is patience and a little poking and prodding. The question is not whether philosophy is self-determining, but in what manner it will unfold.

And unfold, it does. Every new philosophic methodology, every new philosophic point of view, is met with enthusiasm and the hope that now we’ve finally got it right, that we have finally found a method and perspective that ends the history of philosophy, that slices through the Gordian knot of philosophy’s development. There are Hegelians who believe Hegel’s system is the final word, just as there are Marxists who remain true believers—and lately among the followers of post-modernist philosophy and deconstruction one detects the aftertaste of certainty with regard to the finality and supremacy of their world view.

History shows that one thing, at least seems certain and that is that so long as philosophers set their minds to work, the history of philosophy begins again every day and that each new beginning grows from the seeds planted the day before.

In our brief time I would like to untie one part of this knot, or show how it may unravel. As one example of self-determination in the conceptual determination of philosophy, an example of philosophy’s unfolding, consider the case of exclusionary and inclusive worldviews in some feminist and deconstructive critiques of curricula in university’s and philosophy departments, in North America where such arguments have occupied a good portion of the past 10 years.

Today the political reality of this self-determination depends on eradicating a demonized perspective called ‘exclusivity’ in favour of the now politically correct code-word for an inclusive worldview—‘diversity.’ This is taking place not only within departments of philosophy, but within entire universities. While I tend to side with diversity as a better ground for the future development of philosophy, I am compelled to side with the truth first—and the truth is that you cannot eliminate exclusion simply by including everything else.

Exclusion is, of course, the very thing for which we may now criticize our social institutions, governments, and economic structures. They carry exclusion along with them as mosquitoes carry malaria. If you have the mosquitoes, you’ll have the malaria. Since philosophy is, academically speaking, a social institution, it too must have malaria.

The argument states that because University philosophy departments emphasize Western philosophy they implicitly exclude the hierarchically disenfranchised ‘others’, ‘othered’ by the structural impediments of European and North American culture. These "others" are non-Western and aboriginal philosophical traditions. Departments of Philosophy have rushed forward to embrace the idea of a more diverse curriculum: including elements like Buddhist logic or Native American philosophical traditions, but also expanding more mainstream examples of inclusion, like feminist, gay, and gender studies. Since we are philosophers here we can all perhaps recognize the rush to include other traditions as an effort to mediate our exclusion of the Other—or I suppose I should say, our othering of the Other.

This rush toward di-versity away from , presumably, uni-versity has required, by the directives of legislatures and regents, that philosophy embrace the philosophic work of all cultures, not only European and North American, and that these other traditions be accepted as equally valid philosophical efforts. Any failure to eradicate exclusivity in the curriculum can mean "budgetary response" and censure. Any voices that speak up for the western tradition in Philosophy, or other departments, risk the accusation of being ‘exclusionary’ or non-inclusive.

In fact, it is preferable under these conditions to exclude western views on the basis of their exclusivity. All exclusive sentiments and statements, or worldviews which bear even the patina of exclusion are to be rooted out by the most deliberate and thorough surgeries. To be inclusive of other worldviews is not enough. Logic dictates, goes the argument, that any exclusionary views must themselves be excluded.

This is all very interesting.

The argument for inclusion is a reasonably strong argument, and sufficiently compelling to have set legislation in motion. All I wish to point out is that if we allow this point of view to unfold, display the self-determination of its concept, as a small example within the greater unfolding of philosophy as a whole, it will show us its contradictions and, at the end, a truth we must take to heart.

There is no mistaking why inclusion has been seen as a good thing and exclusion as bad. Exclusion limits our world view, it occludes the light from spheres forbidden by what we presuppose—and most directly, it is unjust to those excluded others whether they are women, in my country African-Americans, Jews under the Nazis, Latvians and other national minorities under the Soviets, or perhaps now even in Latvia there is a disenfranchised other being excluded? [This was a veiled reference to the fact that the Latvians, in control of their country for the first time in about 60 years, promptly disenfranchised the sizable (45%!) Russian minority.]

It is reasonable to exclude hate literature from university libraries on the grounds that hate literature is exclusive of minority worldviews. It is reasonable also to exclude from university courses the views of the lunatic right wing fringe who claim that the Holocaust never happened or, in the States, not allowing racist organizations to speak on campuses with a dominant minority presence—not giving the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, equal time to speak on traditionally black university campuses.

The critiques which have addressed themselves to this issue have discovered that much of the Western cultural paradigm is built on the grounds of exclusion and that, consequently, our understanding of the world is, implicitly and innately, one that excludes other cultures, other thoughts. This is clearly an inadequate way to live—how much more so then is it an inadequate way of conducting philosophy.

The critique suggests an obvious solution to this inadequacy— eliminate exclusive worldviews from departmental and university curricula in favour of diverse ones. Diversity, they say, drives out exclusionary thought and exclusionary social ills like racism, sexism, and the other traditional exclusionary tendencies linked with western patriarchy and its hierarchical tendencies.

On the surface, excluding exclusionary courses from the curriculum seems like a good, like an obvious, idea—but it has had some unforeseen circumstances. Not only the curriculum, but the behaviour of faculty and students is being affected. Speech that can be characterized as exclusionary or hierarchical is being banned on some US campuses. And more: speech or writing which address traditional points of the western philosophic tradition can now be characterized as exclusionary of other worldviews, as hierarchical, patriarchal, logocentric, and therefore, as exclusionary, oppressive, and dismissive of other worldviews. Any failure to be non-exclusionary can consequently be described as exclusionary.

Banning speech of any kind in the States is, as you may know, both illegal and culturally unacceptable.

It is also philosophically and logically inconsistent—and for obvious reasons. Failure to include exclusiveness results in a paradox that simple, two valued, truth-functional logic cannot resolve. Inclusiveness which excludes exclusive views is itself, finally, an exclusive view—one that excludes the exclusive.

Any worldview that claims to be truly inclusive must also include exclusive worldviews—even worldviews that may threaten it. We must even be willing to include views which would, themselves, exclude us.

This is easier to say than to do.

It is particularly difficult for those scholars or administrators who recognize that certain exclusionary worldviews have created injustice—the oppression of minorities or women for instance—and have set themselves to remedy these injustices by eradicating the worldviews which were culpable in them. Why should we wish to include views that have excluded and dismissed the views of others?

This approach, and this critique, has a clear grasp of exclusivity but does not demonstrate an adequate grasp of inclusiveness. Excluding exclusion falls short of articulating what is truly required of inclusiveness—that inclusiveness is not simply the negation of exclusivity. It must, in fact, embrace the very things it finds most repellent, assimilate and in that way overcome (aufheben) the very inadequacies it was created to resolve and complete (make adequate) in the first place.

If our inclusiveness is to be adequate, then it must pay this terrible price. It cannot be a point of view as inadequate as the point of view it replaces. Exclusiveness is limited and limiting because it fails to account for the whole truth—the truth about what is excluded. The differences among peoples, cultures, races, or genders, were used to impose hierarchical social and economic structures (which then have an effect on justice and arete in a society). Nonetheless, some of these differences are still true. To deny their truth simply because they were exploited by an exclusive point of view is to deny their truth and this, ironically, is the very thing of which we accuse the exclusive point of view.

Exclusive points of view deny the truth about what difference can mean and use those differences in a hierarchically subjugating manner. But when we deny exclusivity its status as ‘most adequate way of looking at things’ it is the status we deny, not the truths contained in it.

And so, inclusiveness recognizes explicitly that exclusivity is not the wholly truthful way of looking at things it pretends to be, but implicitly must still acknowledge the existence of difference that can be made use of, even in unjust ways, by exclusivity. To fail in this is to fall back into untruth.

Not a good outcome.

In practical terms, this means we must include even those who would exclude us. We must ask our enemies to sit at the table with us. If we exclude them from public discourse we do not eliminate them. We only drive them more deeply underground. When we ban hate speech from public discourse we do not eliminate it, but drive it into basements where it will breed. It means environmentalists must sit down with the logging industry and the president of Exxon Corp. and that in Northern Ireland the British must invite the IRA to their talks. We must embrace, in other words, the very people whose exclusiveness and promulgation of exclusivity has damaged and harmed us the most.

Interesting.

To return to our Gordian knot and away from praxis, we may now note that a determination of inclusion which excludes exclusion remains exclusive and that a determination of inclusion which includes exclusivity is inclusive.

This shows that even within smaller pieces of the conceptual determination of philosophy, philosophy’s own self-determination finds and sublates its own internal negation to display a fuller more adequate determination of what it is in truth.