In many ways, there are few philosophers who seem better placed than Kwame Anthony Appiah to stretch, perhaps even radically reconfigure, our intellectual imaginations. Though a scion of the conjoined Asante and Gloucestershire aristocracies, his upbringing at the intersection of Ghanaian and English political and cultural worlds promised a sui generis sensibility. Though educated in some of the most formidably wealthy, powerful schools in the world, his subjectivity as a black, gay man afforded him opportunities to see his privileged world aslant. Though steeped in analytic philosophy, the grand Academy of Lagado in the humanities, his training as a medical student in biochemistry and physiology, his deep reading in Africana intellectual history, his abilities as novelist and critic, gave him entry into far more richly textured actually-existing worlds than the possible heavens and earths dreamed of by analytic metaphysics.

And yet few African philosophers have been as frustratingly conventional, as banally predictable. Elsewhere, in my book The Intellectual Imagination, I sought to sketch how Appiah’s philosophical work offers an angle into what remains potent and what is, alas, etiolated in the bourgeois imaginary — and I used the term “bourgeois” in a precisely descriptive, historical sense, not as an epithet. But I just now ran across an interview of Appiah that allowed me a second look into his conventionality. We are prone, no doubt from our Romantic inheritances, to thinking of the imagination as a form of flight, such that we think of its limits in terms of what it bumps up against, what cages it in. But this excerpt stands out to me for the way it shows the obverse of that problematic. The problem isn’t that Appiah is conventional; rather it is that he cannot think the conventional. His banality, in other words, is not so much a symptom as a generator of that very banality. We shouldn’t look, then, in the manner of a transgressive reading, to the limits of his imagination, nor should we look, in the manner of a paranoid reading, to what his conventionality symptomizes. We shouldn’t look to where his mind cannot go, to what prevents it from soaring; rather, we should look to how his mind cannot not soar. Below, an excerpt of the interview:

Robert S. Boynton: Another way to proceed might be to analyze different aspects of identity; to do for, say, your sexual identity what you’ve done for your racial identity. Is that an interest for you?
Kwame Anthony Appiah: People have asked me why, given that I’ve written so much about race, I haven’t written about sexuality in, say, the mode of queer studies. The answer I’ve given is that I did think philosophically about sexuality when I was starting out, and what struck me is that most of what one has to say was just responding to terribly bad arguments, and this did not seem very interesting to me.
Robert S. Boynton: But how is this different from the critical philosophical work you’ve done in the case of race, which also required that you respond to terribly bad arguments?
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Part of it is that I was better equipped to deal with bad arguments concerning the case of race because I had had a rather substantial education in biology. And evolutionary theory was one of the topics I was most interested in, so I actually know a lot about genetics and evolutionary biology.
In the case of race, I mostly concentrated on criticizing the best form of the wrong theory. The bad science in the case of homosexuality has mostly been psychoanalytic and, partly because I came to psychoanalysis through reading critiques of it, I’ve never had any time for it. Probably to an inappropriate degree, it makes me want to barf. It is just not a sensible way of thinking about sexuality. So disentangling my general skepticism about all explanations of homosexuality from my skepticism of these particular explanations would be difficult.
There is a separate problem, which has to do with the nature of ethics. Clearly attitudes toward homosexuals have a lot to do with views about the proper use of sex – the role of sex in pleasure, etc. And I must say that it is unclear to me why those are topics on which one ought to have any intrinsic moral thoughts. Sex is important because it produces pleasure, because it produces relationships, because it produces children, and all of these are of intrinsic moral importance. But sex itself is like, say, eating – it produces pleasure, it produces sociality, etc. – but we don’t have the sense that we should take eating seriously as a moral topic. I don’t feel as if I have anything special to say about sexuality, nor do I feel that it is my obligation to do so.
There is another difference between sex and race as philosophical topics. I am not a radical constructivist about sexual identity. I think there is something biologically there in the sexual sense. I think there is less there than most people think, but I don’t believe there is nothing. Whereas with race, I don’t think it is at all interesting from the biological point of view.
— Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert S. Boynton. “On Philosophy, Race, Sex &c.” Daedalus 132, no. 3 (2003): 104-110.