old dead white dudes

Philosophy is full of irrelevant old dead white dudes. They’re all just conservative white males who write to further the ideological aims of a repressive Anglo-hegemony. Anything they say should be disregarded because they were so far removed from the societies they lived in and/or the contemporary society we live in now.

I wanted to write about this because there undoubtedly exists a (sometimes subconscious) underlying element of literary criticism that the beliefs, writings, and creations of these artists are inherently invalid due to their narrow cultural view. Artists, of course, I define as someone who creates art piece(s) – be it a tangible craft, or intangible idea (e.g. novels, music, architecture, philosophy).

I sat for a long moment thinking about this. I’ve talked to nearly a dozen close friends to understand their interpretation. It’s not false, honestly. It’s not totally true though, either. It is important, nonetheless, to question our own motives, be careful not to dominate the conversation, and take criticism seriously.

Western literary canon is split up into several time periods (e.g. The Theocratic Age, The Aristocratic Age (Dante–1800), The Chaotic Age, etc.) but is generally comprised of wealthy, white, european males. This trend was shattered in the 18th century with writers like revolutionary writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

However, this trend of revolutionary writers goes beyond race or gender, it is more importantly about those who advocate for the freedom of individual thought. After writing The Elements of Law Hobbes fled to Paris, but was forced to flee back to England a decade later. Locke decided to anonymously publish his Two Treatises of Government because of his insurrectionary thesis that legitimate government rests on the will of the people. The French Revolution was influenced by the radical anti-Catholic texts of Rousseau and Voltaire, but also artists like Jean-Paul Marat. While Mill was campaigning for women’s rights in Victorian England, Marx fled to Paris, Prussia and Germany for writing so many banned texts. Each of these artists, although white and male, were unconventional thinkers, although (ironically) their works are now the conventional status-quo of today. They were exiled, shunned, and repressed, yet unwavered in their passion for rhetoric and literary criticism continued to write. Similar attributes can be applied to the other unconventional authors (e.g. women) of this era, in that no matter how suppressed their ideas would be, they continued to write. Wollstonecraft, and therefore a non-zero percentage of the woman populus, is aware of it. She writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe, that all writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they otherwise have been; and consequently, more useless members of society”. This rebellious (sometimes anarchist) challenging of authority figures, be it the theories & ideals produced by old dead white men, women, minorities or organizations, is in the service of the new forms of freedom and education sought by proponents of Enlightenment reason and revolutionary change.

This questioning of authority (or status-quo) can be traced even further back to the (humanist) questioning the motives of the Catholic Church with movements like the Protestant Reformation and heretic art like Bosch and Pieter The Elder Bruegel’s hellscapes. These thinkers are not limited to the traditional categories of art, these artists can come from any discipline, like Galileo and Copernicus or Descartes and later Darwin.

Yet, even these artists are still all white European men. The line gets blurred between revolutionary thinkers and commonplace/majority ideals as we head even further back in history to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Meaning, at a certain point, the revolutionary thinkers become/are the leaders of their time. After reading Plato and Aristotle in this class I noticed how truly distant their viewpoints and ‘understanding’ of society was compared to the contemporary world we live in now. In the Republic, Book X, Plato discusses how feeling emotions (specifically pleasure) are threats to the rational brain. He condemns women for this, praises men for their rationality (later known as objectivity or disinterestedness). To quote him, “However, you can also appreciate that when we are afflicted by trouble in our own lives, we take pride in the opposite – in our ability to endure pain without being upset we think this is manly behavior and that only women behave in the way we were sanctioning [pleasure/ emotional] earlier.

Plato, much like the Stoic Romans that came after him, the Catholic church after that, the colonial epoch and so on, undoubtedly are to blame for the oppression and biases that manifest in the (old dead) white male’s subjective stance on feminist theory and ethnic studies (e.g. Eve’s perspective in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst; God is thy law, thou mine, to know no more”, views of minorities during the colonialist/slavery, epch etc). The vast majority of antipathy and reluctance to accept these artists into literary canon (and thereafter teaching the cannon to adolescents/youths) is rooted in the problem that each of these authors, because they have at least one moral inconsistency with contemporary life as we know it, should be discarded.

This gets complicated. Although it is absolutely true that these artists had misogynistic and racist ways of living –– we can often see it written clearly in their art, but also can be inferred from the historical culture they are raised in –– their work still isn’t worthless. Although they were complacent in their society with regards to past evils, they still provided sustenance to ethics/mathematics/music/biology/philosophy/etc through radical new thought. They can be wrong, sure, but they moved the ball. The world is emerging from the Dark Ages, and Plato’s cave.

With that comes the implication that there exists some articles of worthwhile reasoning, be it Aristotelian syllogistic logic or the Scientific Method, that can be interpreted and adapted for today. It is important that we approach these texts with a, as Matthew Arnold puts it, “disinterested” perspective. Coming into these literary theories, it is important to uphold objectivity and the elimination of any bias in criticizing and commenting on works of the past and purely interpreting the abstract notions that can be applicable to today.
Granted, we have biases today just as there were hundreds of years ago. If we were to look at 2020 retrospectively from a date 300 years in the future, would we not appear as repulsively as we today see the witch trials? It was only (exactly!) 100 years ago when (white) American women were granted the power to vote and 55 years ago when African Americans were granted the ability to vote, yet there are still very few celebrated female artists or black philosophers compared to the amount of white equivalents in the world. There are still few celebrated scientists of minority groups –– basically, this applies to all fields.
Yes, looking retrospectively at The Arrow of Time, we see this is obviously on a new trajectory. We see, year by year, the changes that are being made societally to increase accessibility and awareness for minority groups to have equal opportunities and respect. For example, although it is slow, we can see the upward trend of minority groups enrolling in STEM education. Moreover, this is just a testament that the cultural ramifications of these monumental moments in history have still not fully been fledged out. To this day, there still exists a gender pay-gap. To this day, there still exists racial profiling, and so on and so on.
Point being, just because we currently live in a disjointed unequal world and culture, does that mean any opinion we create today is just as invalid as those used (albeit less extreme) in the ethnic profiling process of the Spanish Inquisition, or Nazi Germany? Even if it is not as radical, it is non-zero. Should we invalidate everything until everyone – of every background in every corner of the globe – is truly, quantitatively, equal?

My answer is no. Our opinions are not invalid and are not worthless. We should not be discredited just as we are quick to discredit the old dead white dudes of times past. We presently live in a society that is ever-growing its ethics, just as the aforementioned revolutionaries also lived in an ancient (un)ethical blurb of history, just as future generations will have their (hopefully less) tumultuous, disgraceful ethical problems as well. If we discredit past artists (in any discipline, for any reason), we must also discredit ourselves.

It is in literary and theoretical criticism that we can extract the thought process of artists and thereafter deconstruct or debunk it with modern methods (e.g. the Scientific Method, computer simulations of economic models, etc.) or attempt to implement ethical theories within modern constraints – subjective to 2020’s biases – (e.g. China’s Authoritarian Capitalism, or transhumanist hedonist groups like the Humanity+, Inc. that want to use biotech to upgrade humans from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective). It is important to extract and apply overarching abstractions like Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, rather than disregarding the value of understanding this dynamic because it is based in racism. It is only this way that we can continue on the trajectory of time’s arrow. The second we stop, we will find ourselves right back in the cave. Old dead white dudes, no matter how wrong or right, can provide some util(s). Censoring, banning, condemning and discrediting art of the past, no matter how scandalous, is language and behavior of the extremist groups (shown in Mao’s China, 9/11, Library of Alexandria… the list goes on), and has never ended well. Alternatively, look at what Le Salon des Refusés did for Édouard Manet/Société des Artistes Indépendants/the arrow of time.