Jonathan Egid has a series of interviews called Philosophising in…:
‘Philosophising in…’ is an interview series devoted to exploring the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world. Despite recent acknowledgement of the global nature of philosophical thought, an overwhelming majority of work focuses on philosophy written in either classical languages (Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese) or contemporary European languages (German, French, English etc.). Although covering a hugely diverse body of literary philosophy, this focus nevertheless reflects the thought of only a small portion of humanity. This series aims to rectify this narrowness by examining the philosophical ideas of peoples the world over, especially those expressed in the languages, of Africa, Asia and the Americas. […] Interviews are conducted with philosophers who are experts in the chosen language, and explore some philosophical ideas distinctive of that linguistic culture, the history of their production and the methodology by which these insights are discovered, often in spaces at the interface of literacy and orality.
I don’t have a great deal of interest in philosophy as an academic study, although I do enjoy reading the more literary philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche), but I am intensely interested in different ways of seeing the world, so I’m eager to investigate the series, and the first one I looked at was Philosophy in… Sakha, an interview with Justin Smith-Ruiu: “In this interview on philosophising in Sakha, we discuss Olonkho poetry, the distinctive position of Sakha in the diverse linguistic landscape of North Asia, and its fate under the Soviet Union, as well as ‘hyperactive intentionality detection devices’, the philosophical significance of animism, and living in the coldest inhabited regions of the world.” I’ll quote some chunks, but the whole thing is worth reading, and there are some gorgeous photos.
I wanted us to get started today by talking a little bit about Sakha itself, a language which is sometimes also called Yakut, and about the people that speak it.
Okay, where to start? Sakha is a Turkic language, the north-eastern most language in the Turkic family, which extends from the west of the Black Sea in southeastern Europe. […] The Sakha people or the Yakuts as there are sometimes called – I don’t have any strong preference for the one or the other – seem to have been based around the area of Lake Baikal in heavy synthesis with Buryat and Mongol groups, until the rise of Genghis Khan and the expansion of the Mongol Empire when they seem to have, for various reasons which I think we can all understand, wished to live somewhere further from the centre of the empire; to avoid taxation or conscription or torture or any number of possibilities. They fled northward into the Lena River Valley, which is one of the coldest places on earth, so cold that the Mongols seem to have thought it was not any longer worth their trouble to pursue these people in flight from them, and over the course of the following centuries, say, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, they developed a distinct culture, not just in the Lena River Valley, but also even further to the north into the Arctic where they met Paleo-Siberian people like the Yukaghir and Tungusic people like the Evenk and naturally had a very culturally productive encounter with these different groups, all while retaining a kind of vague, almost mythological memory of their origins further to the south.
One interesting feature of their oral epic tradition is that the figure of Genghis Khan, often comes up, but he comes up as a divinity, which is to say that he’s been literally apotheosized into something more than a historical figure, and this could be because their information deteriorates as it passes from generation to generation, but there could be other more kind of logical internal reasons for this. So retaining some kind of shared cultural memory of a time when they were further to the south, but also significantly hybridizing with other more distinctly circumpolar cultures, and this lasts until the 17th century when the Russians arrive. […]
Since 1990, the Sakha people have been more or less floating on their own without centralized state support from Moscow and naturally this, together with the rise of new information technologies, has very significant implications for the integrity and the quality of the language, both as spoken in an everyday context but also as a literary language and overall the consequences of, let’s say, going solo or losing state support have not been good.
That said, some people imagine that it’s a much more endangered language than it is. There are about 450,000 speakers of Sakha, which means that probably on the list of languages spoken in the world, it’s among the top. I mean, I know that’s hard for us to understand as English speakers! But in the region, Sakha is actually a kind of lingua franca, subordinate to Russian of course, but still if you are a native speaker of say Yukaghir, which is spoken by only a few hundred people, you’re likely to speak both Sakha and Russian as you come into contact with other people in your broader region.
So it’s not dying out tomorrow, but especially in urban settings, it’s in crisis. And so I think part of my interest is trying to do what I can to kind of bring this linguistic world into contact with English and so to speak circumventing the Russian middleman that has been responsible for almost all exposure that Sakha has had in the outside world, just like you can’t really imagine accessing the Quechua language without Spanish or circumventing Spanish. Similarly, Russian is the point of access to the Sakha language, even though the languages have nothing in common historically, Sakha today involves a lot of Russian vocabulary and for young, urban, post-Soviet Sakha people, there’s also massive code switching comparable to, say, New York City ‘Spanglish’ or something like that. […]
I also wanted to mention in, to the north west in the actual administrative division of Siberia, not Yakutia, there’s another group called the Dolgan, who are almost like a creolized product of the encounter of three groups, the Yakuts moving to the northwest, Tungusic groups, but also Russian arctic boatsmen who settled there, probably in the late Middle Ages. And so some of these people are as descended from Russians, ethnically Russian, people as they are from Mongolic or Tungusic people.
And, you know, while they look very Russian, their form of life is solidly north Asian and their language Tungusic and Turkic. So it’s really a fascinating world of hybrid identities and a place where the old distinction between, ‘Russian’, ‘White’, ‘Western’, ‘European’ versus ‘Mongolic’, ‘Turkic’, ‘Tungusic’, ‘Asian’, just collapses in that massive grey area of North Asia.
I suppose one thing that unites all these very different groups of people is the utter extremity of the climate, leading them to live very particular kinds of social and cultural lives. I’m interested in how this is reflected in their art and their ideas. Your project at the moment, as I understand, is to translate the Olonkho, the national epic of the Sakha. And so I wanted to ask you first of all to tell us a little bit about this national epic and about your project in translating it? And then, to turn us towards philosophising in Sakha, whether we should, and if so, how we should understand works like the Olonkho to be a source of philosophical insight.
Okay, where should I start? A few words about Olonkho and what it is and then we can move on to questions of philosophy. Olonkho is often mistakenly referred to as a single work, like you would refer to ‘the Olonkho’ and the way you refer to ‘the Odyssey’. This isn’t quite correct. Olonkho is rather a genre that has several versions: more than I at present know about, and I’ve been studying it for seven years now. Several different legend motifs keep returning again and again and that are as wide as medieval ‘knights errant’ tales in Europe. So it’s a tradition of epic oral recitation by a special member of society known as the Olonkhosut or Olonkhohut, depending on your dialect. And this might be translated as ‘bard’. That’s one way to think of the social role of the Olonkhohut, as a bard who travels and is invited into a home in a village upon arrival to recite for the whole night. The recitation lasts an entire night and ends at dawn and so might go on for eight or nine hours and the longer he recites and the more they like it, the more he gets paid. […]
Now, a very brief word about the content and then we can turn to the question of philosophy. I mentioned knights-errant tales. I would say the supernatural element is a lot more present here, somewhat as in Greek mythology you have a lot of intercourse between the different planes of reality in particular, the plane of the gods and the plane of the humans. Curiously, I think in ways that echo features or let’s say cosmological representations that we see across a wide swath of Eurasia in Sakha culture, you have a tripartite cosmic scheme, which is to say the Upper World, the Middle World and the Lower World, ordinarily human beings, which is to say Sakha people inhabit the Middle World, the so-called aïyy [айыы], the good spirits typically inhabit the Upper World and the so-called abаasy [абаасы], inhabit the Lower World as you would expect: the bad guys are underground and the good guys are in the clouds.
That’s a familiar way to lay things out, but there is a lot of back and forth and there are a lot of encounters between humans and abаasy and even indeed marriages and hybrid children, much like you find heroes in Greek mythology who are half divine. Most of the epics relate the deeds of a hero and a lot of really delirious supernatural encounters along the way with the Upper World, the Lower World. All of this is represented by the world tree, the so-called Aal Luuk Mas of the sort, mas [мас] means tree, it’s comparable to Yggdrasil of the Norse. The tree is the cosmos in its epitome and it connects all three of the realms and facilitates interchange between them. […]
Let me now move to philosophy. […] In general, I’m of the view that philosophy should, to some extent, concern itself with cultural traditions that as I put it in a number of different places, pack philosophical commitments into cultural expressions where these commitments are not defended in an argumentative way. Again, as I put it in a number of different places, philosophy should take an interest in expressions of philosophy in the ‘ore’ form: you’ve got iron, but it’s packed into a rock, right? You’ve got iron ore, and you can get the iron out by doing some metallurgy. Similarly, for complicated reasons and certainly not as any kind of mark of cultural inferiority, some human cultures have philosophical commitments about who we are, what our place in the world is that are, so to speak, packed into this ‘ore’. And I don’t see any reason why we should stay away from these commitments as philosophers, simply because you have to do a bit of ‘metallurgy’ in order to get them out, if that makes sense. […]
One important thing that isn’t distinctly Sakha, or even distinctly Siberian – I think we will certainly find comparable representations in traditional cultures of the Americas in particular – but is still something important that I think any philosopher should take an interest in or should spend some time understanding, are those groups of people that have a broadly animistic conception of nature. Why should we spend time doing this? Well, because I would say it’s the default relationship to nature in most times and places in human history and prehistory. It’s the way human beings have generally related to the world around them. Humans view a world that is teeming with spirits or animate forces that have wills of their own that need to be placated and most human energy goes into managing the relationship with these forces. These forces include wild animals, bears and so on but also of course natural phenomena like lightning and so on. I would go so far as to say that this relationship to the world is our ‘factory setting’ so to speak – that’s the way our brains were configured and to appreciate it, to work your way into it really helps to get a clearer understanding of how the human mind works. Some cognitive scientists like to talk about the idea of the brain as a ‘hyperactive intentionality detection device’ – think of the question ‘why do we feel like we’re being watched if we walk down a forest path in the middle of the night?’. I can think of two ways to respond: you could say ‘oh that’s just superstition, get over your superstition you fools!’; but we might also see it as telling us something about how our minds work. So that’s one general point I feel might be useful for philosophers: I feel like I have a much better understanding of what it is to to really respect bears and lightning and other parts of reality in a way that I did not before. […]
We tend to shy away from the term ‘shaman’, but if it applies anywhere, it applies in north Asia. That’s where the term was first used, where it was first described as a distinct religious representation and model of how nature works, of how you channel nature’s forces. You find all of this most clearly in north Asia, and the Sakha people traditionally are shamanists.
I mean, you know, we also we also use the term ‘Tengrist’ sometimes to describe that’s a Turkic term that describes also the religion of pre-Islamic Turkic people all the way into Anatolia. Tangara in Sakha, tengri in Turkish mean either ‘sky’ or ‘god’ depending on context. So you’ve got broadly speaking Tengrist or shamanist representations and associated practices and I think this is significant because one question that keeps returning for me concerns the social role of a shaman. The shaman is a figure who is kind of priestly but also kind of sketchy, right? A shaman is often a weird dude who should be kept at a distance, you know, he’s kind of like a beggar, kind of like someone you can’t easily welcome into your home and stuff like that. But he’s also someone who has very special powers.
I should also mention an interesting fact about North Asia. Different languages from different linguistic groups have different words for the male shaman. ‘Shamaness’ by contrast is the same word across several different Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Paleo-Siberian languages, which strongly suggests that there is an ancient matriarchal form of shamanism that dominated in the region prior to the point that came much later when people started saying, ‘hey, wait a minute, men can be shamans too!’. That’s a late-coming idea and there’s a substratum of matriarchy across North Asia.
Both these are representations that I think key to understanding human experience ‘on its factory settings’ – we ditched our factory settings and added a bunch of weird extra bells and whistles when we started practicing monotheism and going to giant cathedrals and later valuing secular modernity and stuff like that. If you want to understand what it was like before we traded out our factory settings, then you’ve got to pay attention to cultures like the one I’m attempting to. It might not be the best representative for this sort of lesson, but it’s still pretty important. […]
A final example that I really love and that I’ve written about a little bit is that is that traditionally Sakha people have a sort of tripartite theory of soul. It’s not the vegetative, the sensitive and the rational that we recognise from Greek philosophy, it’s something quite different. You’ve got salgyn-kut [салгын-кут] which is to say the air soul which is what facilitates your ability to engage in conceptual and abstract thought. You’ve got buor-kut [буор-кут] which is to say earth soul which is your body. And so this is weird because you know ordinarily you would think well my body is not my soul but here it is understood to be just one manifestation of your soul. But the one that interests me most is iïe-kut [ийэ-кут] which translates literally as mother soul. And that is to say your culture: the motifs you weave and the recipes you cook and the games you engage in at the summer solstice festival, things like that. That’s one third of your soul right there!
He goes on to talk about translations of Hegel and other philosophers into Sakha (“what’s interesting about these is that these attempts are heavily reliant on borrowings from Russian which are in turn often borrowings from Latin or German”); I love the idea of culture as the “mother soul,” and I find it fascinating that ‘shamaness’ seems to be more basic than ‘shaman.’ I look forward to checking out Philosophy in… Amharic (I – Philosophical Trilingualism in Addis Ababa II – Epistemological Anarchism the Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob School of Philosophy), Philosophy in… Wolof (I – The Ink of the Scholars II – Orality, Critique and The Problem of Unanimity III – Wolof Philosophical Wordlist), and the rest. If you’re curious, you can listen to forty minutes or so of an Olonkho performance here; we’ve talked a fair amount about both Sakha and Dolgan.
Calling other culture’s worldviews “philosophy” seems to me rather like using the word “religion” as a category to be unthinkingly fitted over the range of ideas of other cultures, many of which just don’t divide up the world is such a way at all.
If anything, more so. Unless the word “philosophy” is meant so vaguely that all it’s supposed to convey at all is “worldview.” Maybe it’s being used as a surrogate for “religion” – in the imposing-Western-categories sense I was complaining of, in the belief that the term is less loaded.
Traditionally, Kusaasi say that a human being consists of a body, life (in the same sense that a living animal has life), win “spiritual individuality” (what makes you, you, and not someone else: possessed also by many other things beside human beings) and siig “life force”, which is associated with and in some sense to be identified with, three or four (depending on sex) kikiris (a word helpfully used to render “demons” in the current Bible translation.)
Calling this a “religious belief” is to read our own preconceptions into the culture. Calling it “philosophy” is well-intentioned, I suppose, but even more inappropriate. It just isn’t that kind of thing at all. You might as well say that in “Western Philosophy”, people have arms and legs.
“Philosophy” is a characteristically Western construct. It is appropriate, in varying degrees, as a label for parts of the worldviews of some other cultures, especially those like Islam which actually spring from the same cultural roots, and also for the metaphysics of India. But it isn’t some sort of universal human cultural attribute by any stretch of the imagination – unless you empty the word of all significant content.
I understand your point, but it seems to me you’re being unnecessarily captious. For one thing, we all know what he means even if it’s not the most accurate term, and for another he goes into all that in a part of the interview I didn’t quote.
it seems to me you’re being unnecessarily captious
Possible …
I have occasionally been known to do this. Very rarely, of course.
[Eppur, si muove … grumble …]
we all know what he means even if it’s not the most accurate term
He’s hitching a ride on a Big Word. The effect is to grab the attention of thinking people. Nothing wrong with that. It’s of no importance what he means. Entscheidend ist, was hinten rauskommt.
Let forbearance be the hallmark of your creed.
“Come into my parlor!”,
Said the spider to the flea.
“There’s much here that will interest you –
It’s called philosophy.”
The flea replied: “My life is short,
My attention span much shorter.
It would not suit to shorten both
By taking your kind offer”.
@de
I think it is useful to consider widespread trends/tropes (not necessarily coherent) in a culture’s expression and presumably thought as a valid object of study, whether you call it “philosophy” or not. I also think this can be done without oversystematising, stereotyping or straitjacketing. I would say a lot of received Western philosophy was generated by (disciples of) eccentrics/marginal people like the shamans or prophets, so this might be a good place to start, especially if the broader culture has preserved or internalised their teachings, rituals, or ideas.
I would say a lot of received Western philosophy was generated by (disciples of) eccentrics/marginal people like the shamans or prophets
A lot of rejected Western philosophy too ! There’s just no pleasing some peoples.
I agree that Great Man Theory did not succeed in covering all bases. Unfortunately, Great Eccentrics Theory does not seem to be effectively different.
… so this might be a good place to start, especially if the broader culture has preserved or internalised their teachings, rituals, or ideas.
Where else could you start ? Hardly with things that were not preserved or internalised. On the other hand, that would be a novel, biodegradable approach. Just as ephemeral as its subject. I’d call it light entertainment.
There’s no law requiring us to be heavy-handed and stately about the past. I take it that that is what Egid is on about.
I think it is useful to consider widespread trends/tropes (not necessarily coherent) in a culture’s expression and presumably thought as a valid object of study
Sure. Very much so. That’s what ethnologists/anthropologists do (among other things.) It is certainly worthwhile, and indeed may well have implications for philosophy. And for religion, come to that.
It’s calling what they are studying in those cultures “philosophy” that I was objecting to. That is (usually*) an error, like a particle physicist talking about the “philosophy of electrons.” Modern physics does indeed have implications for philosophy, but it’s not what particle physicists are actually looking at in their experiments.
* There is certainly also a worthwhile activity of cross-cultural comparative philosophy; several cultures beside our own really do include activities which are so analogous to Western philosophy that to use the same term seems entirely reasonable. But it is not appropriate to call every aspect of an arbitrary culture “philosophy” just because Western philosophy happens to have taken an interest in some (perhaps, perhaps not) analogous Western concept (like “soul”, for example.) Doing that is liable to seriously impair real understanding by prematurely assuming similarities that may very well not actually exist at all.
Leaving aside the possibility that all cultures’ worldviews are some kind of philosophy, are there instances that almost everyone would agree are big-P Philosophy, like that belong in a more expansive edition of Scharfstein’s Comparative History, but are far away from Axial Age cultures or whatever we think the well-known ones have in common?
I would say a lot of received Western philosophy was generated by (disciples of) eccentrics/marginal people
Descartes? David Hume? John Locke? J.S. Mill? Bertrand Russell?
They’re unusual in the sense the man on the Clapham Omnibus didn’t publish tomes on Philosophy — didn’t publish tomes on anything, in fact. But eccentric?
Your “received” is doing a lot of work there. I’m not sure Wittgenstein counts as ‘received’, though certainly as ‘eccentric’. Which particular Wittgenstein? There’s at least three Ludwigs?
Egid isn’t using “Philosophy” in that narrow sense. And I wish there was another word (or v.v.). ” trends/tropes (not necessarily coherent) ” rather rules it out of being Philosophy in the narrow sense. And the “not coherent” rules it out of being wisdom IMO (the σοφία).
are there instances that almost everyone would agree are big-P Philosophy
As DE said, that’s a peculiarly Western phenomena. So no, not everyone worldwide.
are there instances that almost everyone would agree are big-P Philosophy, like that belong in a more expansive edition of Scharfstein’s Comparative History, but are far away from Axial Age cultures or whatever we think the well-known ones have in common?
Well, there’s xkcd and SMBC. Almost every episode is an entertaining, instructive riff on big-P Philosophy. If you’re paying attention, that is – which apparently many people are doing. Gotta start somewhere.
I’m not sure Wittgenstein counts as ‘received’
Oh, come on. Wittgenstein is surely the most received philosopher of the twentieth century. You’re just being silly.
peculiarly Western phenomena
But at least I think everyone includes strains of Indian and Chinese thought in there, without an unreasonable amount of mutatis mutandis.
So no, not everyone worldwide.
Right. I mean that everyone from the perspective of Western Philosophy, would say, “yeah, that counts.” Even though it doesn’t usually make the list because of where / when it comes from.
Yes: Egid seems to be using “philosophy” in much the same sense as in “crackerbarrel philosophy” at one point, and then segueing into things which really are not only analogous to Western big-P Philosophy but are actually of the same origin (as with Syriac, even. I mean …)
While the English language does permit this, I think it’s a pretty serious conceptual confusion.
In the same way, it would be entirely proper to talk about “Syriac Religion”; but to talk about (say) “Kusaasi Religion” is to impose a highly question-begging conceptual framework on the data. To talk about “Kusaasi Philosophy” is the exact same mistake. Et sic de similibus.
I suspect the misuse of the word “philosophy” in this way is being done with the entirely laudable aim of implying that (say) traditional shamanic ideas about how things are and how things work are just as worthy of serious consideration as our own big-P Philosophy enterprise. I agree (with the reservation that this is comparing apples and oranges); but the way to express one’s respect is not to pretend that such a world view is the same kind of thing as big-P Philosophy. It isn’t, so that is a dangerously fragile basis for respect.
Respect is merited: and it should be based on what is truly there. Things don’t have to resemble European ways to be worthy of respect, any more than the Egyptians had to have “really” been black for African cultures to be beautiful, complex and valuable expressions of the human spirit. It’s Eurocentric.
Wittgenstein is surely the most received philosopher of the twentieth century.
We are perhaps being ‘captious’ about ‘received’. W is the most discussed/argued about philosopher of C20th. That doesn’t count as ‘received’.
The later W asked a lot of questions. Answers not so much — which is why there’s so much to discuss. Then what (Wisdom) did anybody ‘receive’ from W? Isn’t it his disciples that produced what’s received, if anything? Which comes back to PP’s point.
Yes: Wittgenstein would probably have maintained that there wasn’t anything to be received. Though that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been very influential, of course. But influence takes many forms, including provoking the kind of serious disagreement which can lead people to their own discoveries.
It’s certainly easy enough to reel off lists of philosophers who were … personally unusual.
But then, they would be, wouldn’t they? Mind you, I can think of a few who do seem to have been party people …
Come to that, it’s not difficult to make similar lists of poets, novelists, fine artists … physicists* … linguists … With a proper control group, philosophers might even come out as fairly normal. Without even including mathematicians in the control group (that would be cheating, I feel.)
* Paul Dirac, surely the greatest 20th-century Brit physicist, was Very Odd Indeed, for example.
@David Eddyshaw: If you count all British physicists who lived into the twentieth century (that is, long enough to win Nobel prizes), Dirac might have some competition. However, Rayleigh and J. J. Thomson both did the vast majority of their important work in the nineteenth century.
@DE
“traditional shamanic ideas about how things are and how things work are just as worthy of serious consideration as our own big-P Philosophy enterprise.”
Or we could go meta: the implicit assumption that traditional shamanic practices are just illustrations of some core shamanic ideas demonstrates the weakness of our framework, in which the only true existence is that which is in our heads. And reduces shamanic practice by ignoring its essence (which isn’t generally “ideas”).
This goes back to comment #1 in this thread. Excuse me now while I look up the word “captious”.
Captious are those multiple-choice photo recognition tests to detect whether you’re a robot.
They are used in training APEs* how to avoid detection.
*Automated Plagiarism Engines
pace DE, Egid is pretty clear what the series is meaning by ‘philosophising’ — the Humpty Dumpty usage. “not … in an argumentative way” rules out that it’s big-P Philosophy. I’d call it ‘metaphysics’ — a branch that big-P Philosophy has long sidelined. But even so
Does ‘philosophising’ inhere in a language? Does each language come with a distinct worldview? This seems to be Whorfianism. Big-P Philosophising regards itself as discovering Universal Truths, not particular to a language — indeed for some needing expressing in some artificial logic-language, because natural language is so treacherous.
It seems particularly hard to reconcile with “Sakha is actually a kind of lingua franca, subordinate to Russian of course, …” So Sakha speakers can somehow compartmentalise their minds between Sakha-philosophising vs Russian-pragmatising(?)
Or we could go meta: the implicit assumption that traditional shamanic practices are just illustrations of some core shamanic ideas demonstrates the weakness of our framework, in which the only true existence is that which is in our heads. And reduces shamanic practice by ignoring its essence (which isn’t generally “ideas”)
Yes indeed: and another reason why a term like “shamanic religion” is liable to seriously mislead.
“Shamanic philosophy” is worse in this regard, making an even less justifiable overgeneralisation.
For all that it seems rather social-workery, “world view” seems a much better choice to me than either “philosophy” or “religion” here. Substituting that for “philosophy” in
makes it clear, too, that the claim involved is. as AntC points out, naive Sapir-Whorfism.
“Animist” is a danger sign too. There is no “animism.” Peter Metcalf’s The Anthropology of Religion, which Jack Morava recently recommended, is very good on points like these (it actually caused me to expunge the word “animism” from my Kusaal grammar: not because it’s rude – though it is a much more loaded word than I had appreciated – but because it’s misleading. All This is not That.)
DE will be further disenchanted with the ‘Philosophy in… Wolof’, wherein I find “ethnophilosophy”; and a more-or-less admission that they’re sliding into Sapir-Whorf relativism.
There’s a lot of talk about Greek philosophical influence via Arabic; the Sahara is not so much of a barrier as Europeans suppose. But it’s all meta-talk about languages, rather than any substance.
This is what (to use a big-P Philosophical term) I’d call ‘bollox’. (That Being and Nothingness is restricted to Europeans.)
Wolof (and presumably Kusaal likewise) has no word for ‘being’? It doesn’t transparently incorporate ‘be’? It doesn’t have infinitives or gerunds?
So, sorry @Hat, I did try.
I am intensely interested in different ways of seeing the world …
I got barely a glimpse of any different seeing of the world. I think Egat has an agenda, and he’s steering the conversation rather than letting any world reveal itself.
he’s steering the conversation rather than letting any world reveal itself.
♫ “And you can leave your hat on” ♬
The Wolof one seems to be mostly about how Islamic scholarship has long been established in the Sahel, and how West Africa has never been isolated culturally, all of which is perfectly true; though what it consequently ends up talking about is really the same philosophical tradition as ours, going back to Plato and Aristotle. The diffusion (via Islam) of Mediterranean cultural ideas in Africa is indeed fascinating*, but that is nothing to do with any “African Philosophy” being radically different from our own tradition: quite the opposite.
The way Islam has interacted with previous indigenous traditions in Africa (themselves very far from uniform) is also very interesting; despite its age and a bit (though not much, considering) of a colonialist mindset, Spencer Trimingham’s Islam in West Africa is still a worthwhile read on this.
The thing about “be” verbs and philosophy is a long-established trope, and it’s basically nonsense, as you say.
Kusaal (as you ask) has two “be” verbs, bɛ “be somewhere/exist” and aen “be something/somehow.” (There is no formal distinction in the negative: “not be” is ka’/kae, where the variants are basically just a matter of clause position.) Much the same as Spanish or Irish: I look forward to an article on the distinctive Spanish approach to ontology that reflects this. (Welsh does this too, but only in the negative or in questions: the philosophical implications of that, are of course, tremendous, and it gives me an insight into these matters which is much more profound than any mere Anglophone could ever achieve.)
Both Kusaal “be” verbs form gerunds/verbal nouns (as does “not be”), and the “be something” verb actually has a derived agent noun: “one who is something/somehow.” Both verbs are also freely usable in direct commands.
* The Pardoner’s Tale turns up as a Kusaasi folk story (one of the texts in my grammar, in fact.) It really is the same story: it’s widespread in Africa (and not just West Africa), having got there (and to Europe) via Islam, and is ultimately a Buddhist Jātaka tale (though the Thus-Gone Himself has actually dropped out of the Kusaal version along the way, he has representatives in some other African variants.)
The way existence is expressed in different languages actually is quite interesting, even though I doubt whether it is at all legitimate to draw any deep philosophical conclusions from it.
Kusaal bɛ “exist” actually functions rather like a “passive” of mɔr “have”; for “I have a child” you could equally well say
M mɔr biig.
I have child
or
M biig bɛ.
my child exist
(Whereas, with the article, M biig la bɛ just means “My child is there.”)
This is what we have …
Mandarin uses its “have” verb 有 yǒu “presentatively” (basically, impersonally) for “exist.”
(And of course, lots of languages don’t have a “have” verb at all, but routinely use existential constructions instead. No doubt someone has done a grand typological study proving, by Bayesian methods, that people who speak languages of that kind are less materialistic. If not, I want a credit on the paper when it appears in Nature.)
Predication, on the other hand, has a lot in common with focus cross-linguistically. I recently discovered that there is a considerable literature on this (with Mandarin as a prime exhibit, again.)
So, sorry @Hat, I did try.
No, no, you’re quite right in your animadversions — I hadn’t checked out any of the others when I wrote my post, and (as often happens) I seem to have let my first impressions carry me away into excessive enthusiasm. Oh well, there’s still some interesting stuff in there… but yes, naive Sapir-Whorfism. Bah.
Just for the record… like most such “we” statements, this is not universal. I’m perfectly capable of being afraid in that situation, but I don’t feel watched.
This immediately strikes me as requiring the opposite interpretation: all these cultures had their own male shamans for millennia, and then suddenly the idea that women can do it (or something similar?) spread across all of them, taking the word with it no different than sugar or chocolate.
German doesn’t have gerunds; the English ones are a pretty recent reinterpretation of a nominalizing procedure that was much, much less productive (and still is in German).
That’s beside the point; “Being” is das Sein, very simple. But how Chinese does it (the Mandarin copula isn’t even a verb), I have no idea; I guess with a completely separate noun for “existence”…
Like French (il y a) and Swiss German (es hat).
What gives? It. The rest of German goes for es gibt; that, too, puts that which exists into the accusative.
Mandarin expresses “be something” differently from “exist/be there.”
It’s probably true enough that this is a lot more common cross-linguistically than conflating the two synactically, like much (though by no means all) Indo-European.
Of course, you’re absolutely right in pointing out that whether there are morphologically derived gerunds or infinitives is completely irrelevant to the question of how languages express existence and predication. (Kusaal happens to have no agent noun derived from bɛ “exist”*, but there is nothing at all to stop you saying onɛ bɛ “one who exists.” Come to that, English doesn’t actually use “be-er” or even, really “exister.” Yet the concepts do seem to be comprehensible to English speakers … it’s a mystery.)
* This is more surprising that it may seem: as I say, even “be something” does, and informants happily create “agent nouns” from almost all verbs, including those where the subject is not actually an agent semantically. It’s all but flexional in productivity and regularity. The only group of verbs that don’t seem to do this at all are the “quality” verbs, which have predicative adjectival meanings like “be tall”, “be difficult” etc. Those are probably all originally morphologically derived from the corresponding adjectives, and any “agent noun” derived from such a verb would presumably just be synonymous with the underlying adjective anyway, so it would be redundant. They are also unusual in that they can’t be used in direct commands at all, but that may be just pragmatics.
The Philosophy in Dholuo interview discusses this objection to some extent:
“Justus Mbae, for instance, argued that several scholars in African philosophy were in fact simply documenting and synchronising the various African worldviews. He goes on to warn ethno-philosophers that their works “…do not rise to the level of philosophy… [that] their works may be of interest to students of sociology, comparative religion or theology but they have no place in philosophy.””
Fair point – but not exhaustive, and not just for the “sage philosophy” reasons the essay not very convincingly outlines. Since Wittgenstein, much of the activity of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world has consisted of “bring[ing] words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” and hence writing detailed investigations of exactly when ordinary folks call something “good” or say “should” or whatever. Personally I’m inclined to think they should just join linguistics departments if that’s what they want to work on. But if you accept that as legitimate philosophy when done in English, a fortiori it should be equally legitimate to do the same thing while focusing on words in other languages. And, even in other approaches to philosophy, I don’t see why the possibility that a given language’s lexical structure could mislead careless philosophers should be dismissed out of hand (that was indeed an important argument of Gellner’s against analytic philosophy.)
The way existence is expressed in different languages actually is quite interesting
There was a fun series of monographs in the late ’60s.
On drawing wrong conclusion from shared vocabulary: Kusaal sɔen “witch” has cognates all over Oti-Volta, and as far as I can make out, the actual concept expressed is pretty similar throughout.
However, the word is probably cognate with proto-Bantu *-cábɪ́ “witch”; and although the word is glossed the same in English and French, the actual concept of witchcraft in the Bantu-speaking societies I’ve seen data for seems to be be quite different. Bantu “witches” seem to be malevolent sorcerers, rather along the same lines as European witches, whereas Kusaasi witches are more like vampires, and relatively sympathetic vampires at that. You don’t choose to be one, may not even be aware that you are one, and need have no actual desire to hurt anybody.
In a folk story, the protagonist is basically saved from disaster by his wife, who, unknown to him, is a witch, and the moral of the story (helpfully spelt out at the end) is that he ought to have listened to her advice all along, even though she was a – woman.
Azande witches (as described by Evans-Pritchard) seem to be more the Oti-Volta type, though Azande traditional culture in general is very different.
Since Wittgenstein, much of the activity of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world has consisted of “bring[ing] words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” and hence writing detailed investigations of exactly when ordinary folks call something “good” or say “should” or whatever
Abundantly true of e.g. Austin, though I think W is mostly concerned with much more abstract issues, not tied to any particular language at all.
I think the Austinite approach basically ran into the sand quite some time back, though there are Hatters who know a lot more about it than I do who may know better. Parts of it may well be felt ti be not so much obsolete as acquis communautaire, I guess.
It’s certainly true in principle that the specific quirks of a particular language’s semantics or syntax could lead to significant philosophical confusion, but I think the idea that such things explain a significant amount of supposedly-erroneous Western philosophy was never really plausible in the first place, and no very good case was ever made for it. Piling up specimens of the usage of particular words in the Austin manner doesn’t actually reveal anything apart from fine details of English semantics which may or may not be interesting in their own right, but are never going to provide fundamental insights into How Things Are.
I think academic philosophers of that stripe were too willing to attribute unthinking linguistic naivety to the Unwashed (indeed, that’s Wittgenstein’s actual point: language is not misleading at all when used in its normal context.) Language is far too flexible to be a prison for thought, and is not to be blamed as the cause of our conceptual confusions.
I’ve seen attempts to attribute supposed ancient Chinese problems with logic to unhelpful properties of the Chinese language itself. I don’t know nearly enough about it to know either how valid such ideas were or whether they ever commanded significant support, but they struck me as question-begging (for what little it’s worth.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-logic-language/#MohiLingTurn
However, the philosophical importance of beer has been explored in detail.
Heidegger, the other major exponent of phenomenology from Wittgenstein’s generation, was very particular about distinguishing to two senses of being that have been mentioned above. However, I don’t think his diagnosis of the problems this could create in discussions of the eidetic domain of Dasein’s being-in-the-world was necessarily that useful, nor were his proposed linguistic solutions illuminating.
an interview with Justin Smith-Ruiu
Previously known as Justin E. H. Smith, featured several times previously at Language Hat, most relevantly as the translator of Sakha Lessons to English.
I don’t think Smith-Ruiu is guilty of naive Sapir-Whorfism in the interview (Egid is another story); after all, if he thought Sakha concepts could only be expressed in Sakha, he wouldn’t be spending all that effort on translating it into English. However, I didn’t like how quick he was to describe Olonkho in terms of parallels in Greek and Norse mythology. Can’t we let it have space to be itself without universalizing?
Trinidadian Creole (which I know only through Naipaul) has it have. I don’t know where if that came from somewhere or was made from scratch.
“There is a house in New Orleans” (etc) in Standard English is the same kind of animal. “Where?” is not an appropriate response.
At a pinch, I suppose you could try to make this all into philosophy by saying ‘in many languages, existence is expressed by terms used to imply location in a place, or in relation to a person such as a possessor. This reveals that “existence” in the abstract is an illegitimate generalisation of a necessarily relational concept, based on mistakenly abstracting away necessary particulars by false analogy.’
Indeed, I wouldn’t be be surprised to learn that someone has actually tried that one on. (Interestingly, this particular conflation of “be” verbs is by no means confined to Indo-European, so it wouldn’t go well with the narrative about the Greeks having been, uniquely, fatally misled philosophically by their language. To name only the most important, the Kusaasi would have been, too …)
The usual refutation of St Anselm’s Ontological Proof of the existence of God involves saying that it illegitimately treats existence as a predicate (i.e. confuses a different pair of the three senses of English “be.”) However, this seems to be contentious; and even if it weren’t, I don’t think that the “proof” is exactly central to Western philosophy (not least because from the outset, a lot of people felt that there had to be something wrong with it, even if they couldn’t quite put a finger on what, exactly.)
Trinidadian Creole
I believe some of Trinidadian English Creole is believed to be a relexification of the earlier Trinidadian French Creole.
“There is a house in New Orleans” (etc) in Standard English is the same kind of animal.
I see, as the kids say, what you did there.
It’s good to be appreciated.
I’ve always thought of Dasein as a somewhat desperate attempt to replace Existenz that hasn’t been very successful.
I do think what’s wrong with it is something linguistic – but something completely different: it conflates senses of “great” and reifies the result, as shown by Gaunilo’s Island in Anselm’s lifetime. (Anselm even got to react; his reply seems to have been that God is an exception…)
Philosophising in Oromo was interesting to read – not so much for the rather blurry philosophical generalisations as for the life history. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the ideological trajectory from Communism to a sort of liberal NGOism; I wonder whether it resonates with Eastern Europeans too.
@DM:
I think that’s right: I was just thinking how to put Anselm’s argument into Kusaal (as one does), and I can’t actually see any particular difficulty in doing so; certainly none arising from the fact that the language has different verbs for “be something” and “exist.”
The crunch point comes when you say that something that exists is “greater” than something which does not exist, leading to the reductio ad absurdum that the “proof” turns on. On reflection, that begs the question: you’ve already covertly adopted a definition of “great” by which that statement has to be valid. Even if existence were a predicate, that would invalidate the argument.
i’m interested to read more of these, but partly as examples of what i think is a quite common thing in (euro-colonial world) academic disciplines: responding to being accurately critiqued as bound to a specific cultural and social location (and not very useful or even relevant beyond it) by refusing to question the premises and priorities of the discipline*, and instead trying to absorb various things that look vaguely like its subject matter into it through terminological slippage and conceptual sleight-of-hand. (i think that’s another way to look at some of what we’ve talked about in discussing the boundaries of Literature, as well.)
.
* or other productive responses: acknowledging the critique and continue using the existing discipline to address the material it was built to address; seeking frameworks that might include some or all of the discipline’s material along with other things; looking at the discipline’s material through the lens of frameworks from other places/times/social locations; questioning the received model of disciplines; etc.
[continuing to bash poor Anselm]
I don’t think it’s even a linguistic mistake, in fact: it’s a logical fault. I suppose missing the fact that “something that actually exists is greater than something which does not” is smuggling in a covert assumption, depends on you speaking a language in which the statement sounds like a harmless truism; but you could certainly say that in Kusaal, and I would think in pretty much any language, with much the same effect.
Actually, in Kusaal, “be great” in the Anselm argument would probably be most naturally expressed by something like mɔr girima “has greatness/importance”, which would make the statement seem even more self-evident. Obviously something that exists is more important than something that doesn’t …
refusing to question the premises and priorities of the discipline*, and instead trying to absorb various things that look vaguely like its subject matter into it through terminological slippage and conceptual sleight-of-hand
Hah! I wish I‘d said that. Exactly what I mean. Only expressed better.
I think what’s lumped as “philosophy” here used to be lumped as “superstition”; recognizing that “superstition” is a counterproductive value judgment, people looked for a replacement and settled on “philosophy”, but that hasn’t solved the underlying problem, which is the lumping.
Of course, the underlying problem might be (he said cautiously) the very idea of philosophy-as-a-discipline…
@DM:
Yes, I get that impression too. “Philosophy” is being deployed like a euphemism; the more irritating, as no euphemisms are actually called for, just the avoidance of derogatory terms which ought to be avoided even if they were not derogatory, on the grounds of serious inaccuracy.
This does very much remind me of Peter Metcalf’s book, which goes into a lot of the background to the intellectual construction of “animism”, as a catch-all universal term for “Primitive Religion.” Egid et al are far too erudite, cultured and polite to even think of talking about “Primitive Philosophy”, but the potential for similar errors is uncomfortably present, I reckon.
If you are determined to interpret (say) Kusaasi worldviews as “philosophy”, whether you like it or not, you will end up as presenting it as something inferior to big-P Philosophy. This is like calling Olympic swimming, “motor racing.” Swimming is much slower … Ultimately, this is a condescending approach to other cultures, despite the evident good intentions.
David Eddyshaw: It’s good to be appreciated.
Your intentions are good. We won’t let you be misunderstood.
As to the ontological argument, it is so obviously wrong, and in so many different ways, that it almost makes it harder to refute, because it feels like it should require more subtlety to refute than it actually does. Formally, Wittgenstein’s refutation (that existence is not a predicate) is inarguably correct, even if Wittgenstein himself found it esthetically unsatisfying. However, even within Anselm’s lifetime, Abelard had given absolutely compelling but less formal arguments that Anselm’s reasoning was utterly spurious.
There are still apparently some hardy souls who insist that Anselm’s argument is valid, or at least that the various objections are not insuperable. Some of them seem to attribute views to Anselm that he would probably have been surprised to find himself lumbered with.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#PlaOntArg
“something that actually exists is greater than something which does not”
[I’m just listening to Adam Schiff speaking in Congress; but also having watched this week Jon Stewart on both-sides corruption in Congress more generally. And observed last week the vile Natalie Elphicke being welcomed into a Party (which I used to be a member of) that seems to have abandoned any principles.]
A democracy in which the elected are corrupt — criminally in many cases — “is greater than” a democracy with honest and law-abiding representatives. Whether or not that’s smuggling in assumptions about existence; is just wrong on its face.
And observed last week the vile Natalie Elphicke being welcomed into a Party (which I used to be a member of) that seems to have abandoned any principles
Preach it, Brother!
What kind of party has room for Natalie Elphicke but not Diane Abbott?
(Answer: one running scared of the fucking* Daily Mail. Basta!)
Still, if we all leave the Party, who’ll be left to push back against all this?**
* Marxist technical term. I forget the German original.
** Where are all those Trotskyite entryists when they’re needed, eh? Neo-Nazi racists can be bothered to join the Tories: where is that enterprising spirit on the Left? For shame!
Still, if we all leave the Party, who’ll be left to push back against all this?
Just as I was emigrating to NZ, the electorate rose up in utter disgust at a whole series of similar vilenesses from both parties; and overthrew first-past-the-post in favour of Proportional Representation. Like what Brits would regard as untouchably European, I suppose. The first few elections were rocky (chiefly for the pollies, who had to listen to the electorate, so breaking a habit of decades); and I fear that by now neither the Brit nor American electorates would have enough patience to ride through it.
But nowadays, even when the party I violently disagree with is in power, there is an active consensus not to be total shits. When it comes to a crisis (like Covid) they do pull together for the good of the country.
Most Labour Party members actually favour Proportional Representation now (I’ve changed my own mind on this.) Interesting that this shift has happened just the Party looks increasingly on course to pulverise the Tories on FPP.
It may be to do with well-founded fears that the Tories will become outright fascists in opposition (possibly even led by Farage), and that the hope that the electorate would never return such an abomination to power under FPP may prove too sanguine. One only has to look across the Atlantic …
the Party looks increasingly on course to pulverise the Tories on FPP.
I was in the country when Neil Kinnock prematurely made what felt very like a victory speech. The electorate rapidly sobered up.
Starmer has plenty of time to cock it up. (Another Natalie Elphicke will make a lot of voters think again. There was a very funny sketch [in the Guardian? I can’t find it] suggesting Starmer had been approached by Liz Truss.) Rishi might be able to pull some miracle out of a hat. Not an actual miracle, but something he can trumpet as such to fool enough of the voters for a week or so. Who’s to say another Galtieri won’t sail a gunboat up to some far-flung shard of the Sceptred Isle? Death of Kate M after a brave fight, leading to a resurgence of Monarchism …
@AntC
The idea that someone would make political capital out of a young person dying in her prime, and with young children, and having to do it very publicly, is depressing. Quite another thing from Obama smothering his granny with a pillow, in order to obtain the ‘sympathy vote’.
make political capital out of …
Aww I’m not suggesting anyone would “make” anything out of a tragedy. You know Brits. Nothing would be actually _said_. Time for National Unity. Cling to the establishment.
Case in point: in Christchurch there was a Council election due. The incumbent Mayor was a useless show-pony. Only got the job because he’d been on TV (compering ‘This is Your Life’). An experienced national politician was standing, and riding high in the polls.
There was an earthquake, extensive structural damage, a few severe injuries but no deaths. Campaigning was suspended. The show-pony went about appearing on TV at all the tipped-over buildings. Assuring everybody he was in charge. Promising all sorts of miraculous recovery. As useless as he’d been before. Not campaigning. Won the election handsomely. Proved to be useless. There was a much more severe quake. Still useless. There’s still tipped-over buildings around the city. Still we don’t have a rugby stadium. (The quakes were 2010~2011.)
Oh yes! I was outright angry when I noticed that.
scheiß
(An odd morpheme. Either a bizarrely unstressed prefix or a bizarrely undeclinable adjective. There’s another like it: riesen “giant”.)
For me, St. Anselm is right behind St. Monica in my list of saints that ought never to have existed. But I’m not as contemptuous of the logical perversion of the Ontological Argument as I am of the moral perversion of his theory of the Atonement.
Wasn’t he sent to England after Becket’s murder with a mission to get the church out from under royal control? And we know how that worked out.
right behind St. Monica in my list of saints that ought never to have existed
Without St. Monica there would have been no Santa Monica, which would mean it was outright impossible to walk in L.A instead of merely very difficult.
@Rodger C: Anselm’s satisfaction argument for atonement is indeed much grosser than the ontological argument. It is, however, an actual theological argument, in spite of its repugnancy.
The English King Anselm tangled with was actually Henry’s great uncle William Rufus. The conflict was partially about power of the state over the church, but there was also an internal church power struggle as well. At the time, it was contested whether the archbishop of Canterbury (Anselm) was superior to the archbishop of York, particularly in regards to authority over the Welsh churches. I don’t think the matter was definitively settled in favor of Canterbury until the time of Thomas Beckett’s predecessor, Theobald of Bec.