Author Archives: Ochieng

Reading the conventional; Reading Kwame Anthony Appiah

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.

Sophie Oluwole on Why Philosophers Can’t Read (Hint: They are Toothless)

ó d’ órí akáyín, àkàrà d’ eegun
(For the toothless, the cake becomes a bone)
— Sophie Oluwole

It is a striking dimension of North Atlantic philosophy that it has failed to find satisfaction in declaring unfamiliar or differing philosophical traditions “bad” or “poor” philosophy. Rather, it has desired a far more categorical victory in rendering these intellectual formations non-philosophical, anti-philosophical even. The Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole, in the context of a brilliantly nuanced engagement with the Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka’s Sage Philosophy Project, commented thus on this phenomenon:

Another important point which most of Oruka’s critics fail to recognize is the fact that an inadequate philosophy is philosophy still. This is why it is possible to access philosophical treatises in terms of degrees of success. A philosophy may be rationally inadequate for many reasons. It does not, by that token, become geography or mythology. Many analytic philosophers appear unable to distinguish between a work produced in a tradition different from their own and another produced completely out of philosophy. The tradition of analytic philosophers condemning continental philosophy as irrational and non-philosophical just because it does not fit within the analytic tradition can no more hold sway. Oruka’s Sage Philosophy Project was meant to demonstrate that such a move cannot be intellectually justified. Philosophers do not have to belong to the same methodological tradition even though they cannot opt out of reason.
— Sophie B. Oluwole, “Oruka’s Mission in African Philosophy”

Notes on Reading Philosophy

“The primary problem isn’t that North Atlantic philosophers don’t read Africana thinkers and theorists; the deeper problem is that they don’t know how to read them.”
— Omedi Ochieng

“An important fact which many philosophers often forget is that the level of success of a project in philosophy can only be adequately determined when a critic has a clear understanding of the primary challenge a colleague sets out to meet.”
— Sophie Oluwole,”Oruka’s Mission in African Philosophy”

“Paul Grice use to say that we “should treat great and dead philosophers as we treat great and living philosophers, as having something to say to us.” That is fine, so long as it is not assumed that what the dead have to say to us is much the same as what the living have to say to us. Unfortunately, this is probably what was being assumed by those who, in the heyday of confidence in what was being called the “analytic history of philosophy,” encouraged us to read something written by Plato “as though it had come out in Mind last month” – an idea which, if it means anything at all, means something that destroys the main philosophical point of reading Plato at all.”
— Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”)

“Questions that, alas, I don’t see often enough from a certain kind of philosopher: How should I read this? What is the background against which this speech act is emergent? What is this utterance’s (asymptotic) horizon? Who is being addressed and why?”
–Omedi Ochieng

The Difference Principle

Elizabeth Anderson:

The current troubles of President Summers remind me of a conversation I had with my dissertation advisor, John Rawls, nearly 20 years ago. No two great Harvard scholars could be more opposite in intellectual temperament: Summers the supremely arrogant; Rawls, the supremely modest. (Whenever a student offered a misguided criticism of his work, Rawls would blame himself for not expressing himself clearly, rather than the student for failing to read him correctly.) Yet even Rawls had a blind spot for Harvard’s faults, which is shared by Summers today. In that conversation long ago, Rawls told me of his recent visit to Oxford University, warning me not to accept an offer to teach there until I was securely tenured somewhere in the U.S. Oxford was too obsessed with rank, he said, happy to treat the likes of him as royalty, but terribly snobby to not-yet-established scholars, who could expect to be treated shabbily. While I appreciated his kind advice, it was almost too much to keep from laughing. Here I was at Harvard, an institution that bent over backwards to make distinctions of rank invidious–even to the point, in those days, of putting their “folding chairs” (Assistant Professors on terminating 3-year appointments) on a common party line, instead of giving them the dignity of individual office phones! (When I arrived at the University of Michigan to take up a tenure-track position after graduating from Harvard, the atmosphere felt so egalitarian by comparison that I felt like Orwell arriving in Catalonia. My feeling didn’t last, but neither did Orwell’s.)
— Elizabeth Anderson, “What’s Troubling Harvard”

Intellectual Vocations; Found, Won, Lost

George Eliot on the intellectual vocation, found, won, and lost:

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey’s Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea,” which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for though he “did” his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in them. It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions which have not yet recurred. But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels—the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which he first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s “makdom and her fairnesse,” never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch

Soren Kierkegaard on his heirs

Soren Kierkegaard:

Somewhere in a psalm it tells of the rich man who painstakingly amasses a fortune and “knows not who will inherit it from him.”
In the same way I will leave behind me, intellectually speaking, a not-so-little capital. Alas , but I know who is going to inherit from me, that character I find so repulsive, he who will keep on inheriting all that is best just as he has done in the past — namely, the assistant professor, the professor.

And even if ‘the professor’ happened to read this, it would not stop him, it would not prick his conscience — no, he would lecture on this, too. And even if the professor happened to read this remark, it would not stop him either — no, he would lecture on this, too. For the professor is even longer than the tapeworm which a woman was delivered of recently (200 feet according to her husband, who expressed his gratitude in Addresseavisen recently) — a professor is even longer that — and if a man has this tapeworm “the professor” in him, no human being can deliver him of it; only God can do it if the man himself is willing.
— Soren Kierkegaard, Journals, 6: 6817-18

Kant’s “Jewish Mind”

Stephen Greenblatt reminisces:

In 1969, in my first year of teaching at Berkeley, I was in the English Department office checking my mail (a ritual I repeated several times a day in the vague hope that something, as Mr. Micawber was fond of saying, would “turn up”). I was carrying a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though I can no longer remember why: perhaps I was actually reading it or perhaps I merely hoped to impress one of my new colleagues. If the latter was my motive, the strategy sorely backfired. A senior professor did indeed notice the book. “You are reading Kant, Greenblatt?” he said. (He was one of those who affect the brusque manner of address of the Oxford Senior Common Room.) “That’s right.” “I don’t like Kant,” he declared flatly. “Oh, why is that?” I ventured to ask. “Because Kant had a Jewish mind.” “A Jewish mind? What on earth do you mean?” “Clever, sterile, absorbed in endless hair-splitting subtleties — a mind without true culture.” “Oh,” I said, for want of something better to say.
— Stephen Greenblatt

Gossip, Rumor and the Arts of Domination

“Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews.”
— Theodor W. Adorno

Once I was passed over for a newsroom position I very much wanted. “We needed a woman,” an editor told me. I said nothing, although I seethed. In short order, I was made a columnist, so I didn’t even get a chance to cry. But the instant rush of utter unfairness lingers. The woman chosen was qualified, but her qualification had nothing to do with her sex. I was told she was just a needed statistic.
— Richard Cohen, “Privilege is real. But being a white man shouldn’t disqualify me.”

A senior philosopher elsewhere writes: Just wanted to tell you that your latest CHE piece really resonated with me. Back when I was first on the job market I had an APA interview with my undergrad alma mater [University X]. Of course, I felt confident going in—I knew the school, the culture, the students, the area. As the end of the interview, the (sole) interviewer said, “Well, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. But I have to be honest. The Dean said we are hiring a woman or the position won’t exist. This was a courtesy interview because you are an alum.” They hired some woman whose name I now forget, although I know she left [University X].
–Brian Leiter, “Academic job searches with ‘hidden’ search criteria”

One of the things that keeps shocking me over and over is the number of interviews Amanda and TT Lady announce having. NINE first round interviews? Jesus. I’ve had fewer than that in three years on the market… I’ve had zero this year so far. None. Not a single first-round interview.The response I expect is ‘Well, Tim (no, not my real name), you really need to reexamine your materials then, or publish more or..’ Here’s the thing: I hired Kelsky to help with my materials. And I did some of the job-mentoring stuff offered elsewhere. And I (literally) have published almost twice the amount that is required for tenure at the institution where I currently have a temporary position. And no, not all of them are epicycle pubs. And there are several areas where I’m one of the `go to’ people to ask. Yet I’ve had zero first-round interviews. My application is not being taken seriously, it seems. I would love to explain this (this fact, the general one) by anything other than my being a white male. But it’s hard to come up with anything nearly as plausible.
–“Tim,” philosophy job-market candidate

With these perceptions of unfairness and with the social baggage we grew up with, University life was characterized by a clear boundary between Savarnas and Dalits. I remember with great regret referring to Dalit students with derogatory terms because of the perceived injustice that my own friends were unable to get into the university while less qualified Dalits were given “an easy route in. “ No doubt there were Dalits from well-to-do families who were able to avail of the Reservation system to get in, but what large social system doesn’t have such cases? The rich and privileged use “the system” to their advantage every day but when someone else uses the very system in the very same way, we blanch and invoke morality! In a curious inversion, we declared ourselves victims!
–Prashant Nema, “Upper Caste Privilege: From Catharsis To Change”

Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip—and here I have in mind malicious gossip—be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
— James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 142–43.

Virginia Woolf, Priya Gopal, and Thinking While a Woman in the University

George Steiner’s pining for a university without women should be a reminder of the rupture that women occasion by their very presence in the university. Here is Virginia Woolf’s evocative account of thinking while a woman and of a university that makes those thoughts fugitive:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on  the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought–to call it by a prouder name than it deserved–had let its line down into  the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind–put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I  could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind–Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they  came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his  essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning  crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay–the name escapes me–about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here.
…
It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I  put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the  manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. … Here I was actually at  the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a  flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its  treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and  will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. 
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

That Beadle, gesticulating wildly in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, his face contorted in horror and indignation, is George Steiner. I think we mustn’t underestimate the trauma, the disorientation, the sheer terror that clutches at Steiner and the male structures that he deputizes for when he chances upon women in the seminar room, at faculty talks, at high table. That’s what it’s often about, the deep grammar in the yowls about “political correctness,” the mewls about “free speech,” the sanctimony about “rigor,” standards,” “clarity,” “merit,” “real disciplines,” in the end often amounts to a recoil at the sheer presence of women — now increasingly black and brown women — in the university.

“What theorem out of Africa?”: What George Steiner’s Racist Rage Teaches Us About Conservative Ideology

There’s a certain kind of academic who likes to cite George Steiner to the effect that knowledge of Goethe, or a delight in Rilke doesn’t make a person any less likely to be barbaric. And yet the strongest argument for that position has always been Steiner himself, not least because his visceral racism and palpable misogyny have flourished in a historical milieu when the humanities have produced some of the most far-reaching, stringent inquiries into the relationship of high culture to moral sadism. In that sense, Steiner’s skepticism is no different from the gushing encomiums to intellectual supremacy espoused by most of his academic colleagues – “philosophers are skeptical and dangerous to the status quo!” “Those who graduate with English degrees are empathetic and cosmopolitan!” – for, despite their varying affective registers, they function as roundabout ways by which the speaker transitively, insidiously congratulates himself.

Consider, for example, Steiner’s space clearing remarks as he launches into his study of the rhetoric of philosophy in his book, The Poetry of Thought:

The incandescence of intellectual and poetic creativity in mainland Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. remains unique in human history. In some respects, the life of the mind thereafter is a copious footnote. So much has long been obvious. Yet the causes of this sunburst, the motives which brought it about in that time and place remain unclear. The penitential “political correctness” now prevalent, the remorse of postcolonialism make it awkward even to pose what may be the pertinent questions, to ask why the ardent wonder that is pure thought prevailed almost nowhere else (what theorem out of Africa?).

Manifold and complex factors must have been interactive, “implosive” to borrow a crucial concept from the packed collisions in atomic physics. Among these were a more or less benign climate and ease of maritime communication. Argument traveled fast; it was, in the ancient and figural sense, “Mercurial.” The availability of protein, cruelly denied to so much of the sub-Saharan world, may have been pivotal. Nutritionists speak of protein as “brain food.” Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit. There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility. It is, however, evident that for the privileged, and they were relatively numerous, the ownership of slaves comported leisure and dispensation from manual and domestic tasks. It bestowed time and space for the free play of intellect. This is an immense license. Neither Parmenides nor Plato needed to earn a living. Under temperate skies, a nourished man could proceed to argue or to listen in the agora, in the groves of the Academy.

The third element is the most difficult to evaluate. With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis. Some may have had access to higher education. But there is little evidence prior to Plotinus. Did this (enforced, traditional?) abstention contribute to the luxury and even arrogance of the speculative? Does it reach, via the arrestingly modest contribution to mathematics and metaphysics made by women, into our own, now metamorphic day? Protein, slavery, male prepotence: what was their cumulative causation in the Greek miracle? For let us be clear: a miracle it was.
— George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

What is notable here, I think, isn’t the vulgarity of the racism and sexism. As pointed out above, it shouldn’t by now be news to us (though it is no less appalling, of course) that the racism of intellectuals like Steiner proves to be the usual banal fare available from Fox News and the Daily Mail, a coagulation of folk science, modern myths and legends about ancient Greece, and a “Great Books + Classical Music” cultural fetish.

Rather, what I find striking here is how strenuously Steiner strives to pack in as many “politically incorrect” slurs as he can manage in two paragraphs. One would almost be forgiven for thinking this a Sokal-like, reverse hoax of what a cultural studies type imagines conservative thought to be like; so determined is he to check off every space in his bingo checklist of imagined “intersectional” foes of conservative thought. Racism: “what theorem out of Africa?” no doubt a deliberate echo of Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” Ableism: “Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit.” Class domination and brutality: “There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility.” Misogyny: “With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis.”

It is this breathless, flailing litany of invective that I think may tell us something useful about conservative thought. I mean here, specifically, not only the white rage that it bespeaks, the desperation and rancid resentment simmering to a boil just beneath Steiner’s rococo prose, but also how that rage is constituted by phantasms, visions, nightmares summoned precisely by their very telling. In other words, the phantasms generative of conservative rage and resentment are constitutive of – rather than only or primarily reactions to – observations made about an “objective,” “external” reality.

This carries certain implications not only for a hermeneutic adequate to understanding conservative thought, but also a praxis attentive to its energies. The political theorist Corey Robin has offered one of the most penetrating accounts of how we ought to understand conservativism’s unifying vision. And yet if what I have argued above is correct, one of the implications he has been at pains to draw out and elaborate about the Trump era increasingly appears questionable. In a review of Robin’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lily Geismer offers a particularly helpful distillation of this dimension of Robin’s thesis:

“In a somewhat counterintuitive argument, Robin argues that the weaknesses and instability of the Trump administration and the Republicans on Capitol Hill are a result of conservatism’s past successes, and proof that that it is on the decline. The decline of conservatism as an intellectual tradition — its increasing instability, incoherence, and irresponsibility — has occurred, in Robin’s opinion, less because of Trump’s furious tweet storms and doctrinal sloppiness and more because the right does not have a credible left to borrow from and react against. Over the last half-century, he argues, conservatives have been so successful at thwarting emancipatory movements that now it has nothing to unify it. Although Robin does acknowledge the achievements of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders campaign, he believes that none of these movements are strong enough to truly galvanize and discipline the right.”

What Robin’s argument appears to presuppose is that the right is animated by a more or less realistic judgment of the balance of forces arrayed against it; that conservativism gains its coherence and discipline from the pressure exerted by an actually existing vibrant, credible left. This fails to account for the fantastical visions that have often galvanized and unified the right – terrors of conspiracy plotting by the enslaved, moral panics around sexuality and gender, Islamophobic fever dreams of Dhimmitude and Sharia. Even more crucially, Robin’s account does not register the extent to which the very marrow of “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” really, the very marrow of politics, economics, and culture, are significantly – though of course not completely – constituted by fantasy and myth (“witchcraft” and “racecraft”).