My experience of philosophy and my practice of philosophy is very international and so
it's global in that sense.
I've taught philosophy in I guess at least three continents and three languages, four
languages: Hebrew, German, French, and English, and I've taught it also in Japan but that
was mostly in English.
My Japanese is very poor.
My education in philosophy was in Jerusalem and at Oxford and I've had visiting appointments
in France for a number of years and in Germany.
In Finland, other places in Scandinavia, so the practice of philosophy is global for me
in that I practice it in different places and learn from the different cultures different
orientations toward philosophical problems and one of the interesting things that I've
discovered through the very good fortune of having a lot of my books translated, is the
way you need to contextualize even philosophical thought which has often pretensions of being
totally universal.
The way you need to contextualize it to a local setting because universal as certain
experiences may be, they're always inflected by cultural and social traditions and I've
made it a practice for every translation of a book of mine into a foreign language to
try to contextualize my writing to the particular cultural background, philosophical and generally
cultural of the country or the linguistic tradition into which the book is translated.
And that has been also an impetus to learn about those cultures because in order to contextualize
my writing I need to find some connection to the philosophical traditions of the culture
into which the text is to be translated and that has been a fantastically enriching experience
because my own work becomes an opportunity for learning about others and sometimes tremendous
vistas of parallel ideas and complimentary ideas open up and it's very exciting.
You also make through these global exchanges interesting friendships in which you learn
a great deal.
The lack of deep roots is very essential to American consciousness and it's also, I think,
part of the impetus of American philosophy and part of the attraction of how you create
Weltanschauung, a worldview, when a long tradition hasn't given you one that's rooted and pre-packaged
and America is obviously a country of immigrants.
But it's also a country that because of it's emphasis on the new and because of the mixed
nature of the backgrounds of the people here and maybe because of some dark sides in its
history, like genocide, for instance, has wanted to not wipe out the past but not make
it so prominent, so I think a lot of Americans, especially before the recent wave of identity
politics are comfortable with the fact that they're American, but not very involved with
the complexity of what that means and how that American is always hyphenated to something,
whether it's Italian-American, African-American, Indian-American, Jewish-American, whatever,
the hyphen was for a very long time ignored and I think one of the interesting things
about the wave of identity politics is that it's brought it to the fore but one of the
unfortunate things is that it's only been connected with as it were victimized or oppressed
groups and that leaves so many of the complex multiple dimensions of an individual American
who is, let's say, classified now as white, the complexity just gets ignored and they
become a kind of standard or stereotype, so yeah, I think part of the reason for my nomadic
proclivities probably was a basic sense that I was a newcomer here, I mean, neither of
my parents spoke with an accent, but my grandparents did.
I knew that I was Jewish which was different from, you know, the norm, and I was a witness
to racial prejudice against black friends of mine and I didn't feel comfortable and
I felt maybe vulnerable because I knew that I was one step away from that, from being
a victim of that prejudice myself, so, yeah, American society is complex, mobile, the roots
and also the knowledge of its actual history is not very strong.
I mean we have an expression in America, you're history.
That's taken as a pejorative, it means you're over, you're finished.
What's important is the new.
In other places, "you're history" would be a congratulatory remark.
It means you're part of something that's established.
So America has to really, American culture, that's one of the jobs of philosophy, to show
the importance of a historical tradition, and the historical tradition of American philosophy,
so I guess we can let the reel end on that.
There's a kind of comfort and privilege in being an American philosopher now.
It wasn't always the case where since because America is so important simply by being an
American philosopher you're important because you're where the power is.
I remember when William James gave the Gifford Lectures it was at the turn of the century
and I remember he prefaced his remarks by saying that it's very unusual in his experience
for an American to speak and have the English or European professors listen.
It's usually the case where the Europeans lectured to the American audiences and he
wanted to make sure that it's not an impertinence for an American to lecture to I guess the
cultural patriarchs of American culture.
By now things have shifted because of a hundred years of the American century and we feel
it's our natural right to lecture to the world about philosophy, about democracy, to impose
our ideas of democracy wherever we think fit and our American philosophical community is
very good in general at criticizing our politicians for hubris and imperialism and not taking
the rest of the world seriously and not being true to our own American, democratic values
of dialogue.
Sometimes we American philosophers aren't sensitive enough to the philosophical, cultural
hubris that we ourselves exemplify in promoting American philosophy, which is fine, but also
not recognizing that we should learn as much as we can from the other philosophical traditions
and try to engage them in their language and in their interests which go beyond the interests
that are expressed in terms of let's say continental philosophy in this culture, which is in many
ways very different from continental philosophy as practiced on the continent.
It's its own sort of homegrown variation, which is fine.
What I would argue for is more integration into what's actually happening on the continent
and for that there's an effort that needs to be made in linguistic outreach.