>> For the benefit of those who might want to reject Spivak's book
>> because of the very poor kind of "bolekaja" reading offered by
>> Agozino (and Terry Eagleton before him in Times Literary Supplement)
>> I would suggest that a more careful attention be paid to that book
>> which calls Kant, Hegel, and Marx--just to name three dead white
>> philosophers--as postcolonial thinkers. Spivak challenges us to
>> consider the fact that othering mechanisms have been the major means
>> of apprehending the world and charting it for domination and
>> liberation since the 18th century. Postcolonial "reason" (i)
>> miseducates itself by downplaying the ignorance that makes its claims
>> possible (ii) spends little to no effort in trying to understand what
>> it does not know (iii) when challenged, reinscribes otherwise ignored
>> knowledge as belonging to others. Spivak calls these processes
>> "sanctioned ignorance", "foreclosure of the Native Informant", and
>> "benevolent appropriation and reinscription of the third world as an
>> Other." In postcolonial reason one line of reason is called superior
>> and all the others are tagged unreasonable. Spivak also argues that
>> anticolonial work often uses the protocols of postcolonial reason!
>> The question Spivak tries to answer is Can the wholly other be
>> embraced ethically? She thinks it is possible because being called by
>> the other is the basic condition of being human. However, embracing
>> the other requires that the hug begins with the knowledge of bounds
>> and limits between the subject and the other. Turning to others
>> should not degenerate into a redemption project that views their
>> condition as a sort of sinfulness from which assimilation into a
>> privileged ideology will necessarily rescue them.
It's not true that Kant, Hegel and Marx elaborate the idea of "reason" dominant since the 18th century.
What has dominated is "reason" as "antihumanism" i.e. an ontology conceiving self and other as "fragmented" and excluding any role for self-determination and final causation. This has "solipsism of the present moment" - i.e. the "other" as unknowable - as its epistemological implication. It's also closely associated with splitting the fragmented other into the idealized and the demonized.
Hume's is the 18th century mind most closely associated with antihumanism in this sense. In the Treatise (published ten years after his psychotic breakdown) he writes:
"Of Personal Identity
There are some philosophers. who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. The strongest sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of distracting us from this view, only fix it the more intensely, and make us consider their influence on self either by their pain or pleasure. To attempt a farther proof of this were to weaken its evidence; since no proof can be deriv'd from any fact, of which we are so intimately conscious; nor is there any thing, of which we can be certain, if we doubt of this.
"Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain'd. For from what impression cou'd this idea be deriv'd? This question 'tis impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity; and yet 'tis a question, which must necessarily be answer'd, if we wou'd have the idea of self pass for clear and intelligible, It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos'd to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, thro' the whole course of our lives; since self is suppos'd to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore., be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv'd; and consequently there is no such idea.'
"But farther, what must become of all our particular perceptions upon this hypothesis? All these are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately consider'd, and may exist separately, and have no Deed of tiny thing to support their existence. After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self; and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov'd by death, and cou'd I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou'd be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I call reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.
"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind,. I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a .kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos'd." (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition, pp. 251-3)
Whitehead (Adventures of Ideas, chap. III, "The Humanitarian Ideal") points to this idea (along with Smith's political economy and Malthus's theory of population") as the starting point of the antihumanism (the rejection of the "humanitarian ideal" derived from Plato's conception of the "soul") that became dominant in the nineteenth century. He also associates it with the idea that "the will to power is acted out in all that happens," with the "concept of a Divine Despot and a slavish Universe, each with the morals of its kind" (as in Newton's deism). p. 26
"Hume's flux of impressions and of reactions to impressions, each impression a distinct, self-sufficient existence, was very different to the Platonic soul. The status of man in the universe required re-considering. 'What is man that thou are mindful of him?' The brotherhood of man at the top of creation ceased to be the well-defined foundation for moral principles. There seems no very obvious reason why one flux of impressions should not be related to another flux of impressions in the relative status of master to slave." pp. 29-30
It's misleading to describe these ideas in the form they take in "postcolonial," "poststructuralist" antihumanism as "postmodern." Some thought should also be given to the possibility they're the master's bath water.
Ted