Monthly Archives: May 2017

The Rhetoric of Analytic Philosophy

The inimitable Bernard Williams:

A question that intrigues me and to which I do not know the answer is the relation between a scientistic view of philosophy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the well-known and highly typical style of many texts in analytic philosophy which seeks precision by total mind control, through issuing continuous and rigid interpretive directions. In a way that will be familiar to any reader of analytic philosophy, and is only too familiar to all of us who perpetrate it, this style tries to remove in advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or to the clinically literal-minded. This activity itself is often rather mournfully equated with the boasted clarity and rigor of analytic philosophy…..

There is no doubt more than one force that tends to encourage this style. One is the teaching of philosophy by eristic argument, which tends to implant in philosophers an intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their most impressive teachers and their most competitive colleagues, which guides their writing by means of constant anticipations of guilt and shame. Another is the requirements of the PhD as an academic exercise, which involves the production of a quite peculiar text, which can be too easily mistaken for a book. There are demands of academic promotion, which can encourage one to make as many published pages as possible out of whatever modest idea one may have.

Now none of these influences is necessarily connected with a scientistic view of philosophy, and many people who go in for this style would certainly and correctly reject any suggestion that they had that view. Indeed, an obvious example of this is a philosopher who perhaps did more than anyone else to encourage this style, G. E. Moore. However, for all that, I do not think that we should reject too quickly the thought that, when scientism is around, this style can be co-opted in the scientistic spirit. It can serve as a mimicry of scrupulous scientific procedures. People can perhaps persuade themselves that if they fuss around enough with qualification and counter-examples, they are conducting the philosophical equivalent of a biochemical protocol.
(Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”)

Method, Social Ontology, and Decolonizing Knowledge: The Limits of conceptual ethno-analysis in African Philosophy

Contemporary African philosophy has long left behind the cleavage that pitted professional philosophers (that is, those who identified strongly with the disciplinary form it has historically taken in the North Atlantic world) against ethnophilosophers (that is, those who were keen to recuperate the worldviews of precolonial epistemes). This opposition has now been abandoned in favor of the conceptual analysis of key metaphysical, epistemic, or ethical terms that make up the linguistic worldviews of various communal or ethnic groups. Thus, for example, Kwasi Wiredu has analyzed conceptions of the person among the Akan; Dismas Masolo has engaged with Luo notions of time; and Sophie Oluwole has written on Yoruba accounts of rationality. The limning out of the conceptual contours of African languages constitutes a rapprochement of sorts between professional philosophy and ethnophilosophy. If conceptual analysis draws from one of the mainstays of analytic philosophy – namely, ordinary language philosophy –, an attentiveness to the semantic and lexical content of African languages and groups engages with knowledges that were previously thought to be of interest only to ethnophilosophers.

If these developments have come with undoubted gains, they have also wrought distinct losses. For one, conceptual analysis provides a thin account of social reality. What it fails to do is proffer a thick account of the social ontology – histories, structures, contexts, power/ideology, relationships, bodies, habitus – that constitutes and is turn constituted by language. Such a social ontology would have revealed the embeddedness of social groups in history and the entanglement of particular languages in larger webs of structure and meaning.

Conceptual ethno-analysis may thus be misleading in at least two ways. First, it provides a far more singular and absolutist account of meaning than is warranted by the always contested, shifting terrain within which language is used and deployed. The debate between Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye on the Akan concept of the “person” is strikingly revealing of this contestation. But second, conceptual ethno-analysis – insofar as it claims to proffer an account of how certain concepts are understood within particular ethnic groups – may reify these ethnic groups; that is, it may fail to account for their historical, entangled, and often radically protean figurations.

The upshot is that what is often hailed as a methodological maneuver to decolonize African knowledges may end up inventing a deeply reactionary vision of the African future.

African Philosophy Is Not A Country or How Not To Compare African Thought with Western Thought (Kwasi Wiredu)

Some years ago, I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) workshop on grant writing. The moderator of the workshop asked me what my project was about, and as I started to reply, “My project is on conceptions of the good life in African philosophy…,” he interjected: “Well, Africa is such a big continent. We can’t really speak of African philosophy for such a diverse continent, can we?”

I was sure that the moderator couldn’t possibly have read a single book on African philosophy from cover to cover, so I got to thinking why that response had come so easily, so confidently to his tongue. To put it differently: what does the discovery by a U.S. academic that Africa is not a country say about his views of African philosophy?

Had I said, “My project is on conceptions of the good life in Western philosophy…” I’m quite sure his immediate response wouldn’t have been, “Well, ‘the West’ is such a huge region. We can’t really speak of Western philosophy for such a diverse region, can we?” And yet such a response would have been just as fitting. So why not? Why wasn’t such a response available to him?

Because for this academic — and many others in the United States — “African philosophy” names the doxa of various African “tribes” or “nationalities.” Unlike “Western philosophy,” which he takes to be a distinctive discourse responsive to a discrete set of texts, “African philosophy” is reduced to the identitarian emanations of African “tribal” groups.

African Philosophy as an intellectual formation

What is African philosophy? It is not an intellectual tradition demarcated by a racial or geographic or ethnic identity, as some ethnophilosophers would have it, otherwise it would mean that Anke Graness, Bruce Janz, or Gail Presbey would not count as African philosophers. But nor is it a discipline defined by the possession of a Ph.D. from a philosophy department, as professional phiosophers would have it, otherwise it would mean that Zera Yacob, Okemba Simiyu Chaungo, or Sheikh Abdilahi would not feature in accounts of African philosophy.

What then is African philosophy? Call it an intellectual formation – a complex of practices that are articulated toward the end of imagining, constituting, delimiting, and contesting particular intellectual forms and ensembles; historical and spatial narratives; institutional powers; relational networks; subjectivities and persons; dispositional postures, phenomenologies, and sensibilities; and artifacts, performances, and events.

An intellectual formation seeks to be more explanatorily robust than Michel Foucault’s discursive formation. Though the notion of an intellectual formation is resonant with Foucault’s account of how knowledge is constituted in and through power, it goes beyond Foucault in taking seriously the irreducibly normative quality of particular utterances and texts. That is, rather than taking the effects of power as exhausting the vitality of scholarly inquiry into the constitution of utterances, texts, and subjectivities, the critique of an intellectual formation delves into the political horizons of select philosophical texts; the ethical attunement of particular theoretical interventions; the empirical depth and breadth of certain methodological commitments; the argumentative validity of specific propositional statements; the aesthetic imagination of distinctive performances and events; and on and so on.

But if Foucault’s “discursive formation” isn’t adequate, neither is Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice. Foucault’s discursive formation is, at best, indifferent to, at worst hostile to normativity. MacIntyre’s account of practice, on the other hand, is altogether too invested in an inflationary form of normativity. By practice, MacIntyre means a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” MacIntyre’s characterization of practices as “coherent” follows from the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical essentialism that is the cornerstone of his philosophy. For all its invocation of “tradition,” then, it conceives of actually existing history as the manifest sign of a deeper eschatologial logic.

“How is this philosophy?” and other fables of analytic philosophy

Purity is arguably the most enduring desire in a certain strain of philosophy: Plato (the Forms); Kant (noumenon); Rawls (ideal theory). But as creaturely life is embedded and embodied, philosophical reason consists in a furious litany of disavowals. As Kristie Dotson has pointed out, analytic philosophy’s master question really is, “How is this philosophy?” Hence the Kantian “What can I know?” is a disavowal of embodiment; “What must I do?” is a repudiation of the social; “What may I hope?” is a recoil from the ordinary.

The jouissance of analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy’s conceit is that it is inherently and necessarily meta-philosophy. It may be instructive to examine the rhetorical ruses by which the field immures itself from self-examination: the assemblage of a canon of hierophants strung together by a theogonic historiography; an idealist epistemology motivated by a will to purity; and an intellectual habitus and style that constructs loutish belligerence as truth-seeking.

Analytic philosophy’s self-conception is conjured from a myth of origin that plots “real philosophy” as a patrilineal succession of fathers — from Plato to Parfit. It isn’t a coincidence that it can conveniently fold this narrative into a curriculum, a syllabus, and a bibliography. This myth of origin also functions to render history closed. If you want one explanation for analytic philosophy’s notorious ahistoricism, look to the myth it has substituted for history. In place of history (or even of historical metaphysics), analytic philosophy is deeply cathected in what I shall call – sincerely, for lack of any better term – a conceptual/logological metaphysics.

By stipulating that introspective psychology is the irreducible starting point of inquiry, analytic philosophy at once legitimates its “epistemology first” doctrine and at the same time declares itself foundational to the disciplines. Judging itself privileged to its intuitions, fantastical thought experiments, and a bleached symbolic mathematical logic, it takes pride in being one of the sciences – or even, to the bemusement of scientists, the first of the sciences – while announcing its contempt for the critical humanities and the critical social sciences.

The desire for and the performance of genius is the jouissance of analytic philosophy. On the one hand, this entails the cultivation of disciples, fanzine academic journals, hero-worshippers, and sycophants. But on the other hand, it also normalizes a brutal hazing of graduate students, a ruthless reputation economy bolstered by cargo cult rankings, and a rebarbative, slashing interactive style.

African Philosophy as a Missed Opportunity

“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.”
— (Adorno, Negative Dialectics)

Early post-colonial African philosophy was a missed opportunity. Though the vigorous debates that roiled the field were ostensibly over the existence of “African philosophy,” it was the modifier “African” that drew the most concentrated venom. Whatever the beliefs of various participants to the debates, it was often taken for granted that [North Atlantic] “philosophy” was itself known and settled. But what if African philosophers had refused to grant North Atlantic philosophy its claim to self-definition, self-knowledge, self-transcendence, and self-fulfillment? What if, instead of stampeding to answer the question, “What is African philosophy?”, African philosophers had instead responded: “No, what is philosophy?”

This issue may be pressed with just as much justice to contemporary African philosophers. Latter-day African philosophers are fond of expressing their impatience with the early post-independence debates on the existence of African philosophy. For many of these philosophers, African philosophers should just get on with doing “real” philosophy rather than dilate on its existence. According to this way of thinking, “real philosophy” is self-evident. As with their teachers, then, second-generation African philosophers have largely engaged philosophy on North Atlantic terms. But what if the task of post-colonial African philosophy had been to take the existence of philosophy as such as an open question? What if meta-philosophy were not seen as a fruitless, unproductive distraction but instead was an opening, an invitation, to a searching critique of philosophy’s conditions of possibility?

After Philosophy, Thought

Philosophy’s imperial claim to thought as such, it should never be forgotten, is a profoundly modern achievement. Its proprietorship of thought has been accomplished in part by designating the “philosopher” as an honorific for any thinker of repute. If we are to refuse philosophy’s sleight of hand in making itself coterminous with all forms of speculative thought, we could begin by listening whenever a thinker spurns the philosophical laurel. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, identified herself as an author (as opposed to a philosopher). Her interpreters have often waved away her refusal of the philosophical mantle as nothing more than mistaken modesty and have vociferously fought for her inclusion in the canon of Proper Philosophical Names. But what if philosophy is not automatically taken to be the only possible sign for thought as such? Albert Camus also famously insisted he wasn’t a philosopher, arguing that he “did not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system.” Camus, in his notebooks, identified himself as an artist rather than a philosopher, writing by way of explanation that he thought “according to words and not according to ideas.” Even if we are now inclined to trouble Camus’s opposition of words to ideas, his designation of philosophy as a specific discourse – one moreover, that has historically made a cult of reason and fetishized the idea over and against language – ought to be taken seriously. Hannah Arendt, for her part, was quick to point out that her work was in “political theory,” not philosophy. Few modern thinkers, of course, have offered as sustained a critique of philosophy’s parochialism as the Caribbean polymath, Sylvia Wynter. Rejecting philosophy as altogether too parochial, Wynter instead conceived of what she was engaged in as contribution to “thought.”

A refusal of philosophy, as Wynter’s thought brilliantly demonstrates, thus cuts deeper than present efforts to provincialize and periodize it. It also demonstrates that speculative thought transgresses the outer limits imposed on it by philosophy.

On Refusing Philosophy

What would be at stake in refusing the appellation “philosopher”? Why ought we be uneasy with the claims of “philosophy”? The most compelling reason would be to carve out a space for speculative thought that rejects enfoldment within the discourse that has historically laid a claim to the name “philosophy” – that is to say, the discourse that has appropriated for itself such proper names as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Kripke. Even if philosophy’s genealogical claim to ancient Greece were granted, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Platonic thought was only one of many schools with a stake in speculative thought. Moreover, from Plato through to Hegel, a case can be made that the greater weight of much of what has come to be identified as “philosophy” has been precisely anti-speculative – that is, absolutist, theological, and hierarchical.