Why Don't We Study More Indian Philosophy?

The place of Indian thought in the Western world and why we cover so little of it in our philosophy departments

I am excited to be teaching a new class on classical Indian philosophy at Lincoln University in the coming semester. This is not a new topic for me. I first encountered Indian philosophy a decade ago, during an implausible business trip to Dharamsala— I had been employed to help run an educational project for the Dalai Lama, and we were in town to receive His Holiness’s instructions. But the process of preparing the class has led me to rethink the place of Indian thought in the Western world and, in particular, why we cover so little of it in our philosophy departments.

In his 2017 book, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, the great scholar of Chinese philosophy, Bryan Van Norden puts forward the obvious explanation: the exclusion of non-Western philosophy from our university curricula results form chauvinism. You can read an excerpt form Van Norden’s book in this temperately titled Aeon Magazine article.

Indian Philosophy. Image by Saheba Saxena, Associate Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Lincoln

There is clearly some truth to Van Norden’s claim. But I don’t think it tells the whole story.

For one thing, we should not attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness. And it seems to me that a proximate explanation as to why most academic philosophers in the West do not engage with non-Western philosophy is simply that it would take a lot of effort. These are people who are already attempting to keep up with the thousands of new articles that come out every year in their sub-sub-sub-fields. That’s enough to keep anyone busy.

Even Van Norden’s Aeon article on the topic shows signs of this pressure:

“Readers of this essay might be disappointed that my examples (both positive and negative) have focused on Chinese philosophy. This is simply because Chinese philosophy is the area in non-Western philosophy that I know best.”

Van Noorden might reply that we need to ask why it is that academic philosophers in the West have not been trained to engage with non-Western traditions. And the answer to this question is clearly in part pro-Western bias among the people who have shaped our academic institutions.

Van Norden illustrates the kind of attitude he has in mind by the following quotation from Martin Heidegger:

“The often-heard expression ‘Western-European philosophy’ is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature; … the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold.”

It is ironic that Heidegger should have been willing to question the status of non-Western traditions as philosophy, given that his own work has often received the same treatment in the English-speaking world. But this was not, after all, Heidegger’s biggest flaw.

Having spent a long time studying philosophy, and a fairly long time studying non-Western philosophy, however, I suspect that there exist other important reasons why our departments focus on the Western tradition. Here I’ll mention three interlocking explanations respecting the Indian philosophical tradition.¹

One factor worth exploring appears in Thomas McEvilly’s mammoth book The Shape of Ancient Thought. (McEvilly compares Ancient Greek and Ancient Indian philosophical traditions. The entire thing is fascinating and bears reading cover to cover if you have a lot of time.)

An Indo-Greek column capital, depicting the Buddha. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

McEvilly p. 177 quotes the eminent Indian Scholar T. V. R. Murti expressing the view that Western philosophical systems tend to be purely speculative, involving no spiritual discipline, while an Indian system is never merely speculative but is also “a path of perfection and cessation of pain.” McEvilly comments that this difference, though exaggerated, is recognised by both Western and Indian scholars, with each tending to accept the superiority of their own culture’s approach.

If McEvilly and Murti are right, this gives us one reason for doubting that the exclusion of Indian traditions from our philosophy programmes is wholly a matter of pro-Western bias.

It is generally understood that our universities have a role in imparting knowledge and intellectual skills, but that they have no role in imparting spiritual discipline or religious instruction. This is not necessarily because we do not value spiritual discipline or religious instruction. It is just that they are not what universities are for. (At least, it is not what we think they are for these days. In past centuries it was, of course, another matter!)

Insofar as the difference between Western and Indian philosophical traditions indicated by McEvilly and Murti really exists, therefore, it is no surprise that Western philosophy should be given a more central place in Western universities.²

This would hardly justify excluding Indian philosophy entirely (as many faculties effectively do). But it would justify according it a peripheral position, comparable to that of Neoplatonism or the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages. We cover a fair amount of stuff that falls in this category. But it tends to be treated as much less central to academic philosophy than more paradigmatically intellectual-speculation-focussed material.

Of course, it may be questioned whether there should exist universities that give greater weight to intellectual speculation than to spiritual instruction. But so long as we have such institutions, it makes perfect sense that their philosophy departments should give limited attention to works that are mainly oriented towards the latter—even if those works are, in a broad sense, philosophical.

Shaivism. Image by Saheba Saxena, Associate Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Lincoln

While I think this first proposal has some genuine explanatory power, I do not think we should take it too far. McEvilly goes on to quote another Indian scholar, Daya Kishna who opposes the stereotype of Indian philosophy as more spiritual than speculative, and there is much to be said for this view. Indeed Kishna’s words (quoted by McEvilly), ring true: practitioners of every skill in India customarily claim that it will lead to moksha (enlightenment), but this is not to be taken at face value. How can “the author of the Vaisheshishka sutra… be taken seriously when he asks us to believe that the knowledge of his various categories, such as dravya (substance), guna (quality), karma (activity), samanya (generic qualities), etc., would lead to moksha?”.

The Vaisheshika sutra is written in a culture where it is customary for philosophical works to promise spiritual liberation. But you only have to read the text to see that its real focus is intellectual theorising of a sort reminiscent of Aristotle’s Categories.

My guess would be that Kishna is right, and that to a significant degree Western philosophers have been put off Indian philosophy by a bias against anything that purports to be ultimately aimed at a religious purpose, even when its content is in fact of the utmost relevance to their own interests and pursuits.

So, here we have a second explanation of why Western departments do not do much Indian philosophy. And in this case, the explanatory factor is a kind of bias. But it is a secular rather than a pro-Western. This also explains why many of our departments cover barely more Western medieval philosophy than we do non-Western traditions.

A third explanation shares a common source with the previous two. The preeminent influence on Western philosophy since the second world war has been its relationship to natural science. (The only comparably important influence, in my judgement, is the moral consensus that emerged out of the defeat of fascism and the fall of the European empires. I will write about that another time.)

For many Western philosophers over the last eighty or so years, philosophy—especially “theoretical” as opposed to “normative” philosophy, essentially meaning metaphysics and epistemology—has been of interest largely insofar as it is continuous with natural science. As a result, a massive influence on which traditions we do and do not study is the degree to which they can be woven into a story that leads up to the emergence of modern science and scientifically minded philosophy.

Because modern science is generally taken to have emerged in early modern Europe, all the Western traditions up to that point get a kind of free pass. Even Aristotelian Scholasticism is guaranteed a passing mention, if only in the negative light of the laughably backward tradition against which the pioneers of modern science rebelled.

Non-Western traditions, by contrast, do not secure a place in the intellectual outlook of contemporary Western philosophers on this basis. Vaisheshika metaphysics and Vedanta theology are probably no more or less relevant to the preoccupations of contemporary Western philosophers than Aristotelian metaphysics or Neoplatonic theology. But the latter traditions can expect at least a grudging acknowledgement as important (miss)steps on the road to modern, scientifically oriented philosophy. This helps them to maintain a place in our departments.

It is essentially because my philosophical preoccupations are not principally shaped by the guiding ideal of natural science that I have ended up spending a significant amount of time thinking about non-Western philosophy. (That and a chance encounter with the Dalai Lama’s ghostwriter in the pub, resulting in the the above-mentioned visit to India.) I am motivated partly by the humanistic (or frivolous or hubristic) desire to know about all intellectual cultures, and partly by the conviction that there is more to the word than the scientific naturalism that dominates contemporary Western philosophy can accommodate.

Of course, I think my motivations are excellent and noble, and I would like more people to share them. But insofar as my colleagues are principally motivated by the goal of developing a philosophical tradition that is continuous with modern science, the tendency to focus on Western traditions might make some sense.

1. Some of what follows applies to Chinese philosophy. But with the obvious exception of Chinese Buddhism, only very imperfectly.

2. There is another story to tell about those universities in the West that continue to regard the spiritual development of students as central to their mission.