Is Thinking Beyond Theory Possible?

The short answer is, yes. Thinking beyond “Theory” has been going on long before the Greeks called their way of thinking “Philosophy” and the modern Western academy claimed “a” way of thinking as “the” way of thinking. The history of epistemology from a non-European perspective — a perspective that is informed not only by the presumptuous knowledge of “the rest” constructed in the “natural languages of Philosophy,” but also by diverse forms of thinking in languages in which the capital “P” of philosophy doesn’t find its epistemic allies — is much like a magic trick, a powerful yet invisible sleight of hand.

The forced naturalization of the European way of thinking, innocently packaged as the “love of wisdom” and achieved while piggybacking on global imperial expansion, is not tantamount to universality, despite what the modern academy would have us believe. It is something that we have been tricked to buy into, to accept, without question, as a given.

There is a unique epistemological mechanism at work here, which allows certain institutional actors to assume a moral high ground based on contrived narratives of civilizational superiority. The consequence of assumed superiority is a tendency to classify modes of knowing, seeing, and thinking as either legitimate or illegitimate, believable or less believable. As Walter Mignolo points out, the project of “love of wisdom,” often known as Philosophy, masks a deeper issue of “epistemic racism.”[1] It entails a complex system of organizing knowledge and ranking approaches to map the world, wherein classifications and hierarchies of other ways of thinking are carried out by actors installed in institutions they have themselves created or inherited. Giambattista Vico’s dictum that man understands truth only in what he himself has shaped (verum factum) serves as a poignant indicator of this particular European epistemic condition, which shapes its objects of analysis only to construct them as its others.[2] 

The implicit question within the question of this blogpost is whether those who do not think within the frameworks of modern Western theory are admissible in the modern humanities. Put differently, is “thinking” done without any reference to the conceptual vocabulary of the Anglo-European canon of theoretical thinking admissible in the institutions of modern higher learning?

Scholars working on non-European and Indigenous traditions regularly confront modes of thinking for which modern universities rarely offer any effective conceptual training. Whatever does not fit the Heideggerian notion of Dasein is not considered a worthy subject of ontological inquiry. Indigenous languages without grammar-books are not teachable.[3] The story-thinking and wisdom traditions of Indigenous and non-Western societies do not qualify as Philosophy. And whatever is not Western classical music is “otherised” in the disciplinary category of ethnomusicology. Indeed, ethnomusicology is itself “the other” of Western classical music, which unbeknownst to the grand conductors of the modern academy is heavily influenced by the diverse heritage of world music. Just think of Bach’s Sarabande from the Sixth Suite, which was inspired by the Bedouin women’s dance in premodern Morocco.

The dominance of the Western theoretical way of thinking, which is practiced in a large number of disciplines in the modern humanities, places scholars working in other thinking traditions in a double-bind of sorts: either those non-Western thinking traditions are so similar to European traditions that they make no distinctive contribution to knowledge and effectively disappear; or they are so different that their credentials to be “genuine philosophy/thinking” will always be in doubt. One only has to look toward the kind of knowledge that is produced thus far in the modern academy to witness the impact of these erasures.

Histories of the concept of love in the fields of History of Emotions and Literary Studies, for example, continually seek theoretical inspiration from the mediaeval European tradition of amor courtois (or “courtly love”), despite the well-documented fact (in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English language scholarship) that the supposedly universal ideal of courtly love was actually inspired by the ninth-century Udhri poets. In Europe, the cultural fantasy of courtly love was practiced as a response to very specific socio-cultural conditions, which emerged within the framework of pietistic celibacy laws in the twelfth-century Catholic church.[4] In other words, Guinevere and Lancelot (fig. 1) does not represent a universal ideal of feeling, have nothing on Layla and Majnun (fig. 2). Similarly, the tradition of Tristan and Isolde (fig. 3) was very much influenced by classical Persian romance, especially Fakhraddin Gurgani’s eleventh-century poem, which features the fascinating inner landscape between lovers Vis and Ramin (fig. 4).[5]

While in the modern cultural histories the French are credited for “inventing love” as a universal paradigm of feeling, the challenge facing the historian of emotions, working on the non-European traditions of feeling, is not of dismantling the hegemony of European exceptionalism, but of dismissing it in the act of epistemic disobedience. It is what Rodolfo Kusch calls the act of delinking, or pensamiento propio, by which he means fearless thinking on one’s own, with the gravitational force of one’s own language.[6] And echoing Franz Fanon’s memorable work, language here does not refer to just an acquired cluster of grammar and vocabulary, but to the epistemic weight of civilization of which one is heir. 

Although I recognize the presence of these double-binds and the ongoing challenges for scholars working in non-Western traditions, I find myself not entirely aligned with Mignolo’s concept of border thinking.[7] Border thinking urges non-European thinkers to explore the epistemic potential of residing and contemplating within borders. This thinking style seems indifferent to the privileges and hubris often prevalent in “zero-point epistemology” within modern humanistic disciplines, which renders it virtually impossible to make borders in the first place because power works interdependently. The zero-point here refers to the central epistemological location that places a privileged knowing body as occupying a “detached and neutral” point of observation, and from this neutral place “maps the world and its problems, classifies people, and projects into what is good for them.”[8] With the pretention of neutrality, the zero-point epistemology advances the agenda of systematic suppression of non-Western ways of knowing and the marginalization of local knowledge(s). The concept of border-thinking that Mignolo proposes does not consider how this zero-point continually insinuates itself and perpetuates the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge production by keeping the non-European models of thinking and knowing subordinate to its own vocabulary. Translation here is not so much a bridge or dialogue but a cooptation in the inferno of European sameness. 

Instead of advocating for indifference, an impractical stance given our shared reality with European counterparts and the fact that half of humanity still carries the psychic wounds imprinted by its colonial past, I advocate for what I term “epistemic reconstruction from the ground up.” 

In reconstructing non-Western and Indigenous epistemologies from the ground up, I hope to steer my colleagues at the Global Past Research Initiative (GPRI) away from challenging European theoretical modes by dwelling on dismantling them — an entire generation of postcolonial theorists did that in the eighties. As a GPRI participant, I believe in reconstructing modes of thinking from the ground up and developing effective conceptual vocabulary to articulate them and make them teachable. If our goal is to propose a truly global and diverse model of humanistic inquiry and humanistic pedagogy, it is not enough simply to study different cultures and languages but to articulate their unique logics of thought.

NOTES

1. Mignolo, Walter. Foreword. Can Non-Europeans Think?, by Hamid Dabashi, 2015, Zed Books Ltd., pp. xi-x1ii. 

2. For more on the concept of verum factum, see: Giambattista Vico, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/.   

3. For a fascinating discussion on the teaching of Indigenous languages, see: Julie Sedivy’s, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self, Belknap Press, 2021.  

4. For an in-depth study of fantasy and cultural politics see: Geraldine Heng’s, Empire of Magic. Columbia University Press, 2003. 

5. Davis, Dick. Introduction. Vis and Ramin, by Fakhraddin Gurgani. Mage Publishers, 2008. 

6. Kusch, Rodolfo. Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America. Translated by María Lugones and Joshua Price, Duke University Press, 2010. 

7. Mignolo, Walter. Foreword. Can Non-Europeans Think?, by Hamid Dabashi, 2015, Zed Books Ltd., pp. Xxxiii. 

8. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press, 2011, p. 118.