Selfhood, tradition and power

Part 4 · Knowledge, freedom and a changing world

How others describe us can affect both how we understand ourselves and what we are able to do. The readings in this module ask who can reinterpret a tradition, challenge an account of communal life or sustain a way of living.

We begin with racial order, caste and reform, then turn to efforts to rethink traditions in modern Chinese, Japanese and Muslim thought. Arguments about communal philosophy, life at the margins and land then ask what participation and continuity require. Each setting has its own history, and questions from earlier modules help us read across them. The next module brings readings together around particular philosophical problems.

Time, place and approach. These African diasporic, South Asian, East Asian, Muslim, African, Latin American and Indigenous conversations unfold alongside those of the preceding modern modules and belong to the same wider history, each with its own questions and disagreements. No completed European story supplies the standard against which all the others must be measured.

After these lessons

• Explain how an account of selfhood relates to a particular arrangement of power.
• Distinguish repeating a tradition’s terms from changing what those terms ask of people.
• Ask what makes participation or the continuation of a community possible in practice.

Useful preparation

The lessons on freedom within circumstances and on interpreting inherited texts offer useful comparisons. Use them to open questions, not as the source or standard of every argument here. Each reading introduces its own setting and evidence.

• Review: Freedom in a situation one did not choose
• Review: Understanding is not reading without assumptions