Viren Murthy
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Madison
Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work probes the historical conditions for the possibility of philosophy and politics in the modern world and in China, Japan and India. He studies the attempts of intellectuals to resist modernity through reviving premodern philosophies and religions. He places the history of nationalism and transnationalism in the larger trajectory of global capitalism to examine how pan-Asianists, Third Worldists, Marxists and postcolonialists theorize resistance to imperialism and capitalism and posit a different future. Pan-Asianists and Third Worldists believed that the nation-form would be able to combine anti-imperialism with a politics of socialism. He delves into the conditions for the possibility of such theories in the early postwar period and the ask whether their categories and politics continue to be germane to our neo-liberal and populist present.
Reflections Upon “Civilizationisms”
It is impossible to utter the term civilization without thinking about history. Scholars from around the world use the concept of civilization to place certain regions temporally behind others. As a result, people often chastise the term “civilization” for being an Eurocentric ideological veneer that produces global hierarchies and support colonial endeavors. For many, the German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel exemplifies the Eurocentric narrative progress, especially in his popular lecture courses, such as the Philosophy of History, where he notoriously contends that non-Western regions are civilizationally behind their Western counterparts. In Hegel’s view, civilizations informed by Christianity express subjectivity and freedom, which is a standard for progress. In our contemporary pluralistic context, Hegelian philosophy would appear to be a thing of the past. However, since the early twentieth century, as Martin Heidegger and others were challenging Hegelian metaphysics, scholars in East Asia drew on Hegel to construct an alternative narrative of civilization, freedom and subjectivity. The Kyoto School philosophers of world-history such as Koyama Iwao (1905-1993) and Kosaka Masaaki (1900-1969) attempted to rethink the progress of world history from an Asian perspective. Consequently, they anticipate the current discourses of “new civilizations”, which both draw on and resist earlier Enlightenment version of civilization. I am interested in how various Asian intellectuals attempt to overcome or sublate the Enlightenment. It is not surprising that Hegel was a key figure among Kyoto School philosophers because, although he is often misunderstood as an Enlightenment thinker who promoted capitalism, his goal was to sublate Enlightenment ideas of freedom into a more communal vision. Consequently, although he argued for the supremacy of Western civilization, non-Western readers could easily read him as expressing resistance to core elements of Western political thought, including the centrality of the abstract self-interested individual. From this perspective, Marx clearly followed Hegel by making explicit the incompatibility freedom and capitalism. The tragedy of the twentieth century has been that most attempts to overcome Western hegemony and capitalism have largely ended up reconstituting forms of both imperialism and authoritarian capitalism. Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of such failures, we continue to hear voices of resistance in Asia. The recent Chinese discourses around tianxia [All under Heaven] echo arguments of the 1930s and 1940s Japan in calling for a new world order beyond Western imperialism and capitalism. Although contemporary tianxia theorists usually draw on Kant and Rawls, they often describe an unfolding of history similar to Hegel. Through reading Hegel and critical receptions of his work in Asia, I plan to formulate a framework to go beyond the antinomy between Eurocentric civilization and authoritarian populism and to do this we must rethink the normative ground of categories such as civilization.