1. Milan Kundera has described a utopia pervaded by rationality(3) as the "paradise of individuals" envisaged by the European novel. I discuss Kundera's conception of the role of the novel in the context of East-West cultural comparison in my "Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens", in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 3-20, and reprinted in my Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). I sketch a version of this paradise as "an intricately-textured collage of private narcissism and public pragmatism", a "bazaar surrounded by lots and lots of exclusive private clubs", at the end of my "On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz", reprinted in my Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

2. Roger Garaudy, "Foreword", in Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.x.

3. This goes along with a tendency to try for a "theory of oppression", an attempt which seems to me as likely to be fruitless as are theories of evil, or of power. I think that abstraction and generalization have, in such attempts, gone one step too far, and that we need to get back to the rough ground.

4. John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924, vol.3, Essays on the New Empiricism, 1903-1906, ed. Patricia R. Baysinger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), p.208.

5. Ibid., p. 203.

6. On the role of religious tolerance in Rawl's account of liberal justice, see my "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy", reprinted in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth.

7. Dewey's attitude toward the idea that philosophers might provide foundations for social practices resembled that of Wittgenstein, who said, in reference to the Frege-Russell notion that the foundations of mathematics can be found in logic: "The mathematical problems of what is called foundations are no more the foundations of mathematics for us than the painted rock is the support of the painted tower" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H. Von Wright and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. Anscombe/Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978; rev. ed., 1983/, vol. 8, p.16). In other words, the philosophy of X (where X is something like mathematics, art, science, class struggle, or postcolonialism) is just more X, and cannot support X - although it may expand, clarify, or improve X.

8. Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, p. xvi.

9. Ibid., pp. 129-130.

10. John Dewey, A Common Faith, (New Haven, 1934), p.25.

11. Ibid., p. 53.

12. See ibid., p. 33.

13. Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, p. 9.

14. Nandy mentions this strain in Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias (pp. 82 ff.), but he seems to think that it cannot be reconciled, as Dewey tried to reconcile it, with an enthusiasm for technology. So he sees Thoreau, Ruskin, and Tolstoy as the true heirs of Wordsworth and Blake. He thus resembles the so-called "Young American" critics of Dewey - Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, and Randolph Bourne - who had many of the same heroes. See the discussion of the hostility of these four men toward Dewey’s technologism in Casey Blake, Beloved Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

15. Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, p. 22.

16. Ibid., p. 111.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 110.

19. Ibid., p. 106.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 45.

22. Ibid., p. 110.

23. For an account of the West as the former sort of culture prior to the late Middle Ages and as the latter sort of culture thereafter, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, ed. Tom McCarthy, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983). Blumenberg argues that at a certain point (thanks to Ockhamite themes developed by Francis Bacon) the West switched from pinning its hope on another world to the chance that future generations might be happier and freer than their ancestors.

24. On the Heidegger-Dewey contrast, see the first two essays in my Essays on Heidegger and Others.

25. See, for an example of the attitude and the practice that I have in mind here, Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Post-Modernism the Post- in Post-Colonial?" Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter1991): 336-357. On p. 354, Appiah says:

If there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous echt-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists (just as there is, of course, no American culture without African roots). And there is a clear sense in some postcolonial writing that the postulation of a unitary Africa over against a monolithic West - the binarism of Self and Other - is the last of the shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without.

On p. 356, Appiah quotes Suleri as saying that she is tired of being an "otherness machine" and notes that one effect of colonialism has been to force postcolonial intellectuals to have "the manufacture of alterity as our principal role". Appiah takes as the emblem of his essay a recent wooden Yoruba sculpture called Man with a Bicycle, which, Appiah says,

is produced by someone who does not care that the bicycle is the white man's invention; it is not there to be Other to the Yoruba Self; it is there because someone cared for its solidity; it is there because it will take us further than our feet will takeus; it is there because machines are now as African as novelists... and as fabricated as the kingdom of Nakem.(p. 357)

For another example of fruitful contamination, consider the kind of America we may have in the middle of the next century, a period when American yuppies may need not only to learn Japanese, but to know a lot about traditional Japanese culture, in order to get a promotion within an American economy owned and directed by Americanized Japanese.

26. Do we have a few centuries? Perhaps not. The possibility of nuclear holocaust or environmental catastrophe will not go away, if it ever does, for a long time - and if either happens, it will be fair, although a bit pointless, to blame "the West". But short odds seems no reason to stop constructing utopias.