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248 STANFORD M LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

history,^ Such an inter-orientational discussion is very like the discussions
between members of different disciplines or different ethnicities.
Finally, let me ask myself what philosophy as a uni-discipline might
itself get out of reflecting on Ethnic Studies. I have abready addressed the
question of what phenomenological philosophy can get from using the
cultural disciplines in an obhque way in order to learn about and act
within cultural worlds,^ so this amounts to a specification. Here we can
proceed from an outside point of view established when the functions
that philosophy might have within the multi-discipline are suspended. The
questions of whether philosophy is affected by unexamined assumptions
relating to class, gender, and modern Western "Enhghtenment" civilization
are already ahve in my field. What needs further to be asked is to what
extent philosophy has also had an unexamined ethnic aspect to its life as
lived thus far. After all, we easily speak of American, English, French,
German, and other national traditions in the history of philosophy. In
particular, to what extent is the fact that Husserl is a Jew converted to
Protestantism in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fact that
Heidegger is a Southern Catholic German, the fact that Sartre is a
French intellectual of Protestant background, etc. reflected in their
positions? Here emerges the possibility, always lurking in the background,
that philosophy might be reduced to ideology, which is say relativism. In
contrast to that is the question of how philosophy, like other discipUnes,
might arrive at positions that are culturally non-relative. This question
cannot be answered by ignoring it. Ethnic Studies can help the phenome-
nological philosopher face it.
Finally, to summarize all this a bit more explicitly, I see Ethnic Studies
as able to be related to phenomenologically in four ways. In disciplines
of the sort that would make up this multi-discipUne, (1) there can be a
reflective-descriptive component that can be recognized and perhaps
enhanced through explication, systematization, and refinement of
expression and, (2) when such disciplines combine into a multi-discipline,
phenomenological philosophy might be included for reflective and critical
questioning of the benefits derived therefrom. As philosophy of Ethnic
Studies, Phenomenology can (3) attempt from an outside perspective to
understand both how disciplines in a multi-discipline might work together
and how, correlatively, one subject matter, here race and ethnicity, might
present itself differently in different disciplinary perspectives and (4) it

^ See Kenneth Bock, Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 61-88.
^ Lester Embree, "Reflection on the Cultural Disciplines," this volume.