Objective Humanities, Reflexive Humanities

Abstract

METAMODERNISM: THE FUTURE OF THEORYBy Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021 Pp. xiii +328. Hardcover, $63.80, Paper $26.68. Metamodernism launches a movement to restart the scholarly enterprise by calling for “a new model for producing humble knowledge that is capable of tracing the unfolding of de-essentialized master categories in their full complexity” (ix). What is at stake is none other than the future of human sciences. Storm's project to save the human sciences is ambitious and expansive. Rather than merely using reflexivity to explode fundamental concepts such as religion, science, and society, he goes further. Throughout the chapters, he maps out a few of the next steps in several new directions toward doing reflexive humanities: a process social ontology, hylosemiotics, and an alternative to the entrenched dualistic myth of realism vis-à-vis anti-realism. There are many reasons to praise Storm's work. It is rich, complex, and often witty. I chuckled along when he lays out time-honored “strategies for demolition” (65-77). Humor aside, Metamodernism carefully explains various forces at work in producing the sorry state of all human sciences in which scholars find themselves today. Chief among them is an enduring faith in the idea of “objective” scholarship1 and the ensuing deconstructive scholarship that calls everything into question, which, according to some critics, is corrosive and has ushered in the post-truth era. Other than the concrete steps to build new models, Storm's methodological solution to get out of this quandary is reflexivity,2 which I understand to be a classic Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka move—“to be skeptical about skepticism itself” (211). I could continue to sing many praises for Storm's courageous moves to incorporate Buddhist philosophical toolboxes into the Euroatlantic-centric field of critical theory. But, if we were to get serious about saving human sciences, I suggest that, at the bare minimum, we ought to start asking what philosophers in the Global South, past and present, have to say on these crucial issues about human knowledge that matter to everyone on this lonely planet. Or, extending Charles Hallisey's provocative question, I posit that reflexive humanities, instead of merely asking “what we can learn about others,” must sincerely ask “what can we learn from cultures in the Global South?”3 Let me share two Yogācāra insights that shed crucial light on the unexamined ontological presumptions underpinning all “objective” research. As a living tradition, Yogācāra traces its origin to the founders of 4th and 5th century India, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, and posits that everything perceptible is mere conscious processes. For those who instinctively see Yogācāra as absurd, I beg you to give me two more minutes. At the risk of stating the obvious, all forms of knowledge (past, present, and foreseeable future) are mediated and produced by human consciousness, collectively or individually. Therefore, all forms of knowledge, especially those produced by disciplinary studies such as math, physics, biology, literary critique, religion, critical theory, and so on, are human knowledge and can never be mind-independent. At the very least, those committed to the epistemological framework that objectivity involves cognizing or perceiving self-evident or mind-independent “objects” or “principles” should bear the burden of proof.4 They must provide convincing evidence to refute the following Yogācāra counterargument: the conception of “an objective world outside human consciousness” is merely a convenient fiction conjured up by human consciousness for the interests of specific persons or groups.5 Scholars familiar with the Buddhist philosophy of no-self would immediately recognize the parallel philosophical move to dismantle a constellation of entrenched, seemingly natural concepts such as “self,” “ego,” “subjectivity,” or “inner psyche” as convenient fictions.6 Seeing through the colonial myth of objectivity is crucial not only for the future of the human sciences but also for the survival of humanity. Generations of scholars have incisively pointed out how the enterprise of “objective” knowledge production had instigated, validated, or at least been implicated in the colonial obliteration of the native populations of South America, North America, and Australia, the Atlantic Slave trade that halved the African population, and the defilement of the Chinese population who were drugged into submission by the violent Opium Wars and the ensuing destructive “free trade” of opium. From Frantz Fanon's 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Edward Said's 1979 Orientalism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to the ongoing discussions in feminist theory, critical race theory, and critical caste theory, generations of scholars have exposed the untenability of “objective” research and repeatedly offered viable alternatives. And yet, the myth of “objective” human knowledge keeps reproducing and proliferating. Most recently, Marco Armiero lamented that “so-called objective research is so entrenched in mainstream discourse that we cannot even detect how biased it is” (Armiero 2022). Why? I do not know for sure. But I know that keeping the scholarly conversations enclosed within the Global North and for the Global North will not help. It is time to open up, let the subaltern speak, and listen with care. When I looked into a similar discussion about human knowledge production in early twentieth-century China, when the misguided debate about the dualism between religion and science was imported, I found a more informative meta-question: what sort of social ontology could both accommodate the scientific enterprise and enable a better understanding of different collectivities and social dynamics (Zu 2021). Of course, the potential answers to this meta question are many. Two decades ago, the feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger pointed out one, that is, distinguishing the descriptive (finding out the objective truths) versus the ameliorative (finding out what we value and how to enact those human values) projects (Haslanger 2005). Storm's answer is social process philosophy, a new philosophy that drew crucially from the Buddhist Madhyamaka concept of niḥsvabhāva, lack of self-nature or interdependence (94). Similarly, a century ago, in 1920s China, the modern Yogācārins pointed out another path: having rejected the problematic ontological dualism of the object and the subject and the false account of knowledge as mind-independent, impartial representations of an “objective” reality, they argued that scientific findings could be established and systematically distinguished from pseudo-scientific claims if we follow the Yogācāra epistemology first articulated by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. The core premise of their non-dualist épistémè is that knowledge is always mediated and produced by a conditioned human mind that exists in a state of interdependence with the world. Complementing the incisive post-colonial analysis of how “objectivity” has been wielded as a weapon for colonial domination,7 the 1920s Chinese Yogācāra critique pierced right into the heart of the philosophical untenability of the colonial épistémè. More crucially, this modern interpretation of Yogācāra epistemology showcases the second Yogācāra insight that could help us further the project of metamodernism: after abandoning the imported, misguided conception of objectivity as the gold standard of scholarship, the future is not a chaotic, post-truth era of “anything goes.” Instead, these modern Yogācārins reformulated Vasubandhu's critiques of realism in Twenty Verses (Viṃśikākārikā). They further argued that what we conceived as objective reality and valid scientific findings could be systematically distinguished from false claims by three epistemic standards of intersubjective corroboration,8 coherence, and causal efficacy (or karmic efficacy), in short—the three C's. Significantly, more than recycling the premodern methods such as the Prāsaṅgika move of being skeptical of skepticism, these modern Yogācārins also drew from Asaṅga's instructions on how to engage in intersubjective conversation and invented something akin to the modern scientific practice of organized skepticism (Asaṅga 2000, 251-2). Borrowing Naomi Oreskes's eloquent explanation, scientists practice organized skepticism because (1) they do it collectively and (2) they do it from the position of distrust, that is, the burden of proof is on the person with a new claim.9 This way, the modern Yogācāra epistemology calls on all scholars to practice organized skepticism grounded in the three C's. What is radically different in the Yogācāra form of organized skepticism is the conviction that scholarly conversation and knowledge production must begin with an honest acknowledgment of two basic facts about human experience: (1) its intersubjective and interdependent nature and (2) its limitedness and conditionality. With this honest starting point in sight, the goal of knowledge production is not merely about knowing a world out there but also crucially about enriching humanity by recognizing and learning from genuine human and inter-species differences. Indeed, this century-old Chinese Yogācāra project finds many resonances in Storm's “revolutionary happiness” (265). To enact this revolutionary happiness, Storm draws from a well-known Confucian adage, “I focus on those who are good and seek to emulate them, and focus on those who are bad in order to be reminded of what needs to be changed in myself” (263). To gain a fuller picture of this Confucian way of being reflexive and of cultivating empathy, readers can benefit from Paul Goldin's insight, that is, paying attention to the core concept of shu in the Confucian golden rule of “doing unto others as you would have others do unto you if you had the same social role as they” (2020, 38). As a way of life, reflexivity requires one to adopt a developmental concept of personhood, be it underpinned by the Buddhist no-self or Confucian ideals of human becoming. Under this developmental paradigm of being human, reflexivity necessitates clear comprehension of both one's own social role (or positionality) and that of others. We emulate others' good behaviors or avoid others' bad behaviors when we are positioned similarly in society as they. This rational assessment of each other's social positionalities enables one to cultivate a radical empathy that allows us to be morally alive and to make proper decisions under different circumstances.10 When applied to the scholarly enterprise, the rule of thumb is that we ought to study others in the same way as we would like to be studied. Without this radical empathy, we risk producing the same kind of rubbish knowledge as exemplified in Umberto Eco's parodies, such as “Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society” (1993, 69-94).11 I doubt any scholar today will disagree with me on this in principle. That said, I want to alert readers to a gaping double standard in mainstream scholarly practice. On the one hand, in studying canonical Western thinkers or texts such as Locke's or Hume's empiricism, or Balzac's literature, there's an entrenched reluctance to contextualize ideas, philosophies, or literary productions within the larger socio-political milieu (e.g., the thinkers' ideological justifications for monarchism, slavery, or racial theory) and an equally entrenched investment in the “inherent” merit of these theories or texts (Said 2003, 13).12 This sort of collective hermeneutics of trust regarding Western traditions and ideas is termed by Charles Mills as “epistemology of ignorance” (1997, 93). On the other hand, when studying thinkers or texts in the Global South, using Sinology as an example, the prevailing practice is a hermeneutics of suspicion that rejects the idea that “a text was produced because the authors of the past were inherently interested in the ideas embodied therein,” but rather unwaveringly remains vigilant against ideologies or hidden agendas that are somehow “sedimented throughout tradition” because it must have advanced “the interest of the individual or an institution” (Xiang 2018, 26-7). Although Mills did not explicitly comment on Sinological practices, I think he would agree that hermeneutics of suspicion regarding non-Western traditions constitutes the other face of the mainstream epistemology of ignorance. However, what happens if we follow the instructions from the modern Yogācāra epistemology? In that case, it seems that the best practices in reflexive humanities should incorporate both hermeneutics of trust and hermeneutics of suspicion and equally apply them to both the objects of study and the studying subjects. This rational and empathetic reflexivity, as seen in both the Buddhist and Confucian cases, is crucial, especially when we know that facts are infinitely malleable according to perspectives imposed on them by interpreters. More than getting things right, reflexivity is vital for us to learn how to take back our human freedom to envision and enact other forms of becoming human and other ways of living together. If we could take back this basic human freedom, maybe human dwellers on this lonely planet could summon enough political will to motivate effective strategies to deal with the climate crisis and save ourselves from ourselves.13