I have been arguing with myself and testing the hypothesis, which I have held for quite some time, that philosophy is a human universal.  I came to this thesis by a fairly straightforward path.  As a young person I became fascinated with philosophy and read everything I could find.  I took degrees in the subject and, through long study and the opportunity to teach (and therefore learn even more), my curiosity wandered out of Western lands to all parts of the globe.  I began studying sources from India, China, Africa, South America, also studying ideas emerging in indigenous cultures of the American Southwest – e.g. from the Hopi nation and the Navajo people.  I also became familiar with the debates in Africa, for example, between thinkers who draw parallels between indigenous thoughtfulness and Greek models of thoughtfulness, and those who deny that there is any parallel and who insist instead that African thoughtfulness is sui generis and need not try to explain itself by referring to Western categories such as philosophy.  It seemed to me that it was not important what we called this thing – the X factor – critical interrogation emerging in a culture – it is not important that we call this ‘philosophy’ – but it also seemed to me that it was important to see that it is going on everywhere and in every period of history – thus not to make the mistake of thinking that this is something reserved for a privileged few.  This is more like a human universal, like dance, for example, or drawing – a kind of spontaneous expressiveness – rather than being reserved for a elite of Brahmins. 

Now I am questioning my simple-minded extension from The Republic to the I Ching to Black Elk Speaks and so forth.  M. Manjali’s argument suggests: words used in different languages, normally translated with the word ‘philosophy’ when the discussion is taking place in English, have radically different histories.  It is fine if we translate them from one language to another – there is nothing wrong with the translation.  But since the histories are so different, so are the practices that are described in these different words.  Perhaps, for example, this practice is reserved in some societies for people with a special pedigree or social standing.  Only people of an exalted sort are permitted to engage in it.  But in another culture it is considered completely ordinary and there are no social barriers to worry about.  If the social conditions that support or restrict what look like examples of a ‘similar’ practice in societies A, B, C are very different from society to society, then so, arguably, are these practices themselves.  We may call them by the same name, but this probably conceals as much as it reveals. 

This means that it is much more difficult to establish the validity of cultural invariants – practices that appear in many (if not all) cultures and which have the same basic significance in all of them.  As M. Manjali argues, these historical-cultural-political stories may look innocuous but they are not.  Lots is going on behind the scenes.

I fight against this idea because somehow it sounds to me like a return to the assertion of diverse very specific sui generis cultural traditions that we have inherited from the past and that we hang onto neurotically – instead of taking it all in and going on – going on in the project of constructing a common future for all people.

Then I argue against this naïve hope in a common future because it does not address the insane inequality that exists among cultures as they exist today – e.g. as constructed by economic history. 

Philosophy in some cases amounts to ideology used to preserve the authority of a ruling power (the power has to be maintained because God commands it or because the Founders established it&so on).  Philosophy in another case is a cry of protest against an existing power.  Philosophy in another example tries to produces a synthesis of what is known up to a certain point in history.  And philosophy in a further case may have no bearing on temporal affairs at all.

Also: capitalism (some argue) has already become global and has established an order that applies to everyone on the planet – we are all consumers and potential customers for businesses.  Thus it may be that when we talk about common humanity and the universality of the project of thought, of criticism and questioning, we are only carrying out a process (one step further) that the underlying economic order has inscribed in us. 

When we are doing metaphilosophy, we have to worry about the following:

Are we addressing the past?  Or are we addressing the future?  Are we ignoring the inequities that underlie and perpetuate the current economic order?  Are we taking them into consideration and trying to adjust for them, address them, surmount them?  Are we working on the project of a common humanity?  Are we unwitting collaborators of a unjust order? 

What are the political and ethical implications of metaphilosophy, and how do philosophers go about the work of metaphilosophy in an ethical and politically astute manner?  Do political affiliations shape the way we construct the problems of metaphilosophy – or is metaphilosophy a field that we can explore without worrying about political-historical-cultural issues?