Third World || Azfar Hussain

The English classical scholar and literary critic Frank Laurence Lucas--in his famous study of tragedy in relation to Aristotle's influential work called _Poetics_--boldly contended that a field of inquiry and investigation like "poetics" could have only emerged in ancient Greece, given the fact that among all the nations in the world, the Greeks alone had the utmost intellectual ability to raise questions about the nature of the world and the nature of things. Mark Lucas's words then: "Other races have fashioned into art and story dreams as lovely; but it is from Greeks that Europe has learnt, so far as it has learnt, to question as well as to dream, to take nothing on earth, or in heaven, for granted." Of course, Lucas held that "the other ancient nations" didn't question the very world they lived in; rather, according to him, they "loved, as most men do still, certainty better than truth."

But I think the Chinese scholar Zhang Longxi rightly underlined Lucas's arrogance and ignorance by calling attention to the great poet of ancient China, Qu Yuan (339?--277 BCE), who began his "Heavenly Questions" thus: "Who passed down the story of the far-off, ancient beginning of things?" In fact, Qu Yuan exemplarily followed--as Zhang Longxi further tells us--with "nearly 180 questions to inquire consecutively about the why and how of the universe, about ancient myths and human history." One can surely add to this account the story of ancient Indian philosophy.

Significantly, Lucas himself could not question his goddamn Greece-centric certainty and his "truth," otherwise taken for granted. Indeed, even today, the so-called "multiculturalist" moves in the field of philosophy notwithstanding, many metropolitan philosophers remain variously possessed by the ghost of Eurocentrism (taking Greece as an integral part of Europe), while producing knowledge that reinforces, among other things, unequal power relations between what's called "West" and those peripheral formations that are grosso modo called the "Third World."