BHRIGUPATI SINGHterms such asglobalizationandterrorism). Surrounded by such blurry, opinionated terms,
the first question would be: How can one set oneself a topic? Keep in mind that thinkers
as different as Thoreau, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Gandhi all warn against read-
ing the newspaper every day. The first step might be to listen: Is philosophy even being
referred to, anywhere at all?
In fact, it is, both within the academy and outside. In recent years a request for
philosophical perspective has begun to be heard from people from a wide spectrum of
political leanings and denominations, and conceptual inquiry seems vaguely relevant
again, even in the public domain. Charitably worded, many people are of the opinion:
‘‘After the events of September 11 and the return of religion, it has become increasingly
crucial to reconsider (to revise/reject/reinforce) the heritage of the Enlightenment.’’ For
all its well-intentioned self-reflexivity (or not), the violence of this correlation immedi-
ately erases all differences internal to cultures and selves, wholly obscuring the constitutive
heterogeneity of the Enlightenment itself, falsely bridging the Atlantic gap between
America and Europe, a move that fantastically places Immanuel Kant and George W.
Bush in the same camp, even as it sustains, in however harsh or mild a form, the perni-
cious thesis of the ‘‘clash of civilizations.’’ Such a thesis, with its concomitantly false call to
philosophy, is equally upheld by many of those who claim to speak with some intellectual
authority on the ‘‘non-West,’’ conceived as such only through poor, negative, and resent-
ful conceptions of identity and difference. A note for progressives and for conservatives:
what seems like a battle against a single Goliath can also yield a harvest of false Davids.
In a discussion framed as such (‘‘Enlightenment versus the non-West,’’ or ‘‘religion in the
post-9/11 era,’’ or the ‘‘return’’ of religion—where had it gone?), it might be bolder to
remain silent. This is not to deny the importance of such discussions, but rather to re-
examine our angle of participation in them. In other words, the terms on which we accept
this urgency, since to think again, in crisis, is indeed to reexamine the ways in which we
are both joined and separate, to others and to ourselves.
This last sentence takes us toward the domain of ethics, which we might count as
another step, since this is one of the few terms from academic philosophy that still seems
to resonate in the public domain. Not that there is any kind of monopoly even here. In
the ‘‘real world’’ (as they often call it nowadays; a christening that should itself be cause
for sociological inquiry, or for philosophical wonderment), the cumulative pressure of all
manner of claimants exerts itself—economists, scientists, environmentalists, journalists,
marketing professionals—all have something to say on the topic of ethics. If these do-
mains are somewhat specialized, there is also the more holistic theological claim on mo-
rality, or the religious dictation of a way of life (and the wide range of variations possible,
internal to a set of norms, for instance, in sectarian, or social, or individual differences,
or in adaptation to technological changes). Philosophy, inasmuch as it is separate from
these domains, still has a crucial stake in such a conversation—that is, it earns its right to
speak. With this confidence the argument that follows will revisit or begin to freshly map
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