Dag Herbjornsrud, in an essay in aeon, offers a remarkable synopsis of how thousands of years of philosophical scholarship by women and non-Europeans (that is, anyone not white or male enough), was systematically, and quite recently, erased from ‘the canon’:
The female-inclusive and non-European perspective on the history of philosophy carried on in Europe for hundreds of years. The philosophical canon, such as it is, was not always so European and male, even by the lights of European men. In Phaedrus, Plato states that letters and the sciences originated in Egypt. Clement of Alexandria (c150-215 CE) asserted that philosophy was universal, originally stemming from the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians and Indians, before the discipline ‘eventually penetrated into Greece’.
The historian Diogenes Laërtius (c180-240 CE) included a chapter on the woman Hipparchia in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. And when Laërtius’ history of philosophy was published in Amsterdam in 1758, in French, it had a woman on the title page. To this edition, a third volume was added, written by the little-known philosopher De Chaufepied par Quérard, which contained 100 pages on ancient female philosophers, such as Julia Domna of Damascus and the Neoplatonist Theodora of Alexandria. He also wrote more than 90 pages on Confucius from China. In the 17th and 18th century, European thinkers such as G W Leibniz and François Quesnay likewise proudly found inspiration from China.
But this millennium-old understanding of the diversity of philosophy was erased from Europe. As Peter J K Park of Dallas University argues in Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830 (2013), curriculum lists from the early 19th century onwards began to be emptied of women and non-European thinkers. Leading European scholars chose to create a canon based on a new Eurocentric version – better suited to their imperial, racialised and patriarchal era. Early among these was Christoph Meiners, a professor in Göttingen and a proponent for white supremacy, who in his influential work History of the Origin, Progress and Decay of the Sciences in Greece and Rome(1781) began to define philosophy as a product solely of the European man. His ideology was carried on by the German historian Wilhelm Tennemann who helped to redefine the history of philosophy in his mammoth Geschichte der Philosophie (1798).
As Park demonstrates, the tipping point came when G W F Hegel, in 1825, declared that ‘Oriental’ works should be excluded from philosophy in accordance with the new Kantian faction (who thought that Kantianism was a sort of culmination of philosophy) since it was not ‘thought, true philosophy’. Ironically, Hegel had been attacked himself by Christian polemicists for presenting a ‘pantheistic’ and ‘Oriental’ thought system. Hegel answered by joining the Kantian faction as a defensive manoeuvre – presenting Hegelianism as a synthesis, a true philosophical development. ‘Within one generation,’ Park concludes, ‘academic philosophers succeeded in excluding the non-European world and in consolidating a canon of philosophy that powerfully legitimised their discipline.’
White males continue to hold themselves to be both the standard for who may be taken seriously, and the arbiters of what is taken seriously in scholarly and political discourse. Chavella T. Pittman, in an article appearing in the journal Teaching Sociology, describes this dynamic:
One of the main ways whites and men maintain dominance over people of color and women is through their control of hegemonic ideology and knowledge (e.g., Jackman 1994). That is,due to white males’ location in the social and power hierarchy, they usually have the power to deem what is and what is not knowledge.Therefore, it is not surprising that white male students were perceived as frequently contesting the ability of women faculty of color to have, create,and share knowledge. In line with this view on the importance of ideology and knowledge to dominance,these professors perceived that the intersection of their race and gender identities resulted in white male students’ devaluing their scholarly achievements and expertise. (pg. 193)
White males, to this day, by virtue of their position atop the socioeconomic hierarchy, hold the privilege of determining who is deemed fit to speak, in any forum, on any subject— the hallmark of white male privilege, as clearly delineated by Barbara Appelbaum in the journal Philosophy of Education:
Privilege is not only a matter of receiving benefits but consists also in traits of character, certain outlooks, and ways of moving. Sara Ahmed identifies a phenomenology of whiteness, and illustrates this by the tendency of white people to “take back the center,” often without realizing it.15 Shannon Sullivan also exemplifies white privilege as an unconscious habit of “white expansiveness” or the tendency of whites to assume that they can act and think as if all spaces are or should be at their disposal as they desire.16 Adrienne Rich refers to “white solipsism” as whites’tendency “to speak, imagine and think as if whiteness described the world,” and Alice McIntyre notes the “privileged affect” expressed in whites’ exclusive focus on their own need to feel good.17 White solipsism is often implicated in white desire to do and be good. Even when well-intentioned whites decide not to live in all white neighborhoods, the very choice assumes and reinforces the “privileged choice” they have.18 Privilege is something white people tend to assert even as they seek to challenge it. Ahmed draws attention to how white moral agency can be problematic and involves solipsism:to respond to accounts of institutional whiteness with the question “what can white people do?” is not only to return to the place of the white subject, but it is also to locate agency in this place. It is also to re-position the white subject somewhere other than implicated in the critique.19 White moral agency may function to reinscribe rather than dismantle systems of privilege by presuming that white people are the central agents, and also by implying that the white moral agent’s innocence can be preserved. (pg. 294)
No where is this white male privilege more evident, perhaps, than in the complaints of white males that a conscious program of recruiting and supporting women and Persons of Color for political office is discriminatory against them.