Category Archives: Philosophy

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

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

Following the Argument Where It Leads, Or What does Conservative Ideology Have to do with Professional Philosophy?

It is striking – in light of the claimed inevitability of fatalities from rogue trolleys and the like – the extent to which the analytic philosopher constructs his moral decision-making as a performance of toughness. The ultimate moral test, we are made to understand, comes down to the fortitudo moralis of opting for the unpalatable. “McMahan,” Eva Feder Kittay notes in her critique of the book, The Ethics of Killing, “eventually concludes that we have to bite the bullet and accept that those with the same cognitive functioning and psychological capacities should be given the same moral status regardless of their species.” In the circle of analytic moral philosophy, Stephen Mulhall observes in a critique of the same book, “being a fearless thinker matters more, it seems, than avoiding morally fearful thoughts.”
— Omedi Ochieng, “Analytic Moral Philosophy and the Affect of Masculine Reason”

Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when — particularly when — it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded — too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”

Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it… A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules — leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative — but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”

That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence — and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility — some might say masochism — and why he warms Scalia’s heart.

— Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind

I’ve long admired Williamson’s writing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s internalized Michael Kinsley’s warning that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, taking his arguments to thought frontiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone service and sometimes barely enough air to breathe. For examples of the Williamson oeuvre, see these National Review pieces arguing against reparations, decrying the mainstreaming of transgender rights, critiquing the “white working class” and dismissing the idea of “white supremacy.”

Every Williamson article contains strong meat, which has led his detractors to dismiss him as a troll. But that’s not who he is. He’s really more of an ogre who loves to take arguments to the breaking point in hopes of shocking readers with his cold, unbound logic. Where other writers might serve 7 percent alcohol in their brew, Williamson likes to up his percentage to 20. Where other writers might stop at mean, Williamson keeps going all the way to cruel.

I never read Williamson in hopes of seeking agreement. And on that score, he has almost never failed me. He’s not interested in building consensus or in gentle persuasion. He reduces all the grays to their black-and-white components. He pushes boundaries and doesn’t stop until he’s gone too far. In a 2014 piece about transgender actress Laverne Cox, for example, he dropped bombs when a sling-shot would have sufficed: “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.”

— Jack Shafer, “Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson,” Politico Magazine, April 06, 2018

Professional Philosophy as Ambush

Adrian Piper:

It was the New Graduate Student Reception for my class, the first social event of my first semester in the best graduate department in my field in the country. I was full of myself, as we all were, full of pride at having made the final cut, full of arrogance at our newly recorded membership among the privileged few, the intellectual elite, this country’s real aristocracy, my parents told me; full of confidence in our intellectual ability to prevail, to fashion original and powerful views about some topic we represented to ourselves only vaguely. I was a bit late, and noticed that many turned to look at – no, scrutinize me as I entered the room. I congratulated myself on having selected for wear my black velvet, bell-bottomed pants suit (yes, it was that long ago) with the cream silk blouse and crimson vest. One of the secretaries who’d earlier helped me find an apartment came forward to greet me and proceeded to introduce me to various members of the faculty, eminent and honorable faculty, with names I knew from books I’d studied intensely and heard discussed with awe and reverence by my undergraduate teachers. To be in the presence of these men and attach faces to names was delirium enough. But actually to enter into casual social conversation with them took every bit of poise I had. As often happens in such situations, I went on automatic pilot. I don’t remember what I said; I suppose I managed not to make a fool of myself. The most famous and highly respected member of the faculty observed me for awhile from a distance and then came forward. Without introduction or preamble he said to me with a triumphant smirk, “Miss Piper, you’re about as black as I am.”

One of the benefits of automatic pilot in social situations is that insults take longer to make themselves felt. The meaning of the words simply don’t register right away, particularly if the person who utters them is smiling. You reflexively respond to the social context and the smile rather than to the words. And so I automatically returned the smile and said something like, “Really? I hadn’t known that about you.” – something that sounded both innocent and impertinent, even though that was not what I felt. What I felt was numb, and then shocked and terrified, disoriented, as though I’d been awakened from a sweet dream of unconditional support and approval and plunged into a nightmare of jeering contempt. Later those feelings turned into wrenching grief and anger that one of my intellectual heroes had sullied himself in my presence and destroyed my illusion that these privileged surroundings were benevolent and safe; then guilt and remorse at having provided him the occasion for doing so.

— Adrian Piper, Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Essays in Meta-Art 1968-1992

George Yancy:

It is so easy to hide behind antiracist rhetoric when one limits oneself to predictable social encounters that are already predicated upon social transactions that do not challenge or complicate the white self. However, in social transactions that do challenge the white self, conditions obtain that are ripe for ambush. As Richards warns, “That’s what happens when you interrupt a white man, don’t you know?” While being ambushed by one’s whiteness can occur in the absence of people of color, as when one deems oneself an antiracist white and yet laughs hysterically at a racist joke while bonding with one’s white friends, actually transacting with flesh and blood bodies of color can function as a powerful catalyst that can trigger an ambush. “You’re a prolific Black philosopher.” And yet, there is the mantra: “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this.”

— George Yancy, “Whiteness as Ambush and the Transformative Power of Vigilance.”

On the alleged revolutionary power of philosophical skepticism

“There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”
— J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia

Descartes:

“If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.”

“For what is more self-evident than the fact that the Supreme Being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists?”

Kant:

This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom — and the most innocent of all that may be called “freedom”: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. Now I hear the cry from all sides: “Do not argue!” The officer says: “Do not argue–drill!” The tax collector: “Do not argue–pay!” The pastor: “Do not argue–believe!” Only one ruler in the world says: “Argue as much as you please, but obey!”

The Extraversion of Analytic Philosophy (Variations on a Hountondji theme)

Not for the first time, I’m struck by how much Paulin Hountondji’s critique of African philosophy applies just as forcefully — perhaps, even, more devastatingly — to USian analytic philosophy. The most obvious node of that critique, of course, is that analytic philosophy is largely a variant of ethnophilosophy.

Today, however, a deeper resonance occurred to me as I came across squeals of delight from analytic philosophers whose programs have gotten the nod from the cargo cult PGR report, punctuated by the wounded yawps of those whose programs are — in the dystopian idiom of analytics — “unranked.”

Consider, then, the following passage from Hountondji’s Combats Pour Le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain modified just a tad for the analytic philosophy crowd:

“The quest for rankings is always bound up with a desire for the gaze. It has meaning only in relation to the Other, from whom one wishes to distinguish one’s self at all costs. This is an ambiguous relationship, inasmuch as the assertion of one’s difference goes hand in hand with a passionate urge to have it recognized by the Other. As this recognition is usually long in coming, the desire of the subject, caught in his/her own trap, grows increasingly hollow until it is completely alienated in a restless craving for the slightest gesture, the most cursory glance from the Other.”

Thinking/Thought

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“Thought must be something unique.” When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we — and our meaning — do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this — is — so. But this paradox (which has the form of a truism) can also be expressed in this way: Thought can be of what is not the case.

Other illusions come from various quarters to attach themselves to the special one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing.)

Thought is surrounded by a halo. — Its essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it. — It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete — as it were the hardest thing there is

Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, — to see that we must stick to the subjects of our everyday thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.

Language (or thought?) is something unique” — this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions. And now the impressiveness retreats to these illusions, to the problems.

“But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain — behavior accompanied by pain and pain — behavior without any pain?” — Admit it? What greater difference could there be? — “And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.” — Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.
… The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts — which may be about houses, pains, and evil, or anything else you please.

Thinking/Thought

“Denken tut weh” (Thinking hurts)
— Georg Simmel

“The history of thought is the history of its models.”
— Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language

“Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.”
— Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought”

“I am convinced that there are ways of thinking that we don’t yet know about.”
— Adrienne Rich

“Thinking, like life, is never complete, it is a possibility that never exhausts itself.”
— Vincenzo Di Nicola

“All that we are is the result of our thoughts; it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. If a man speaks or acts with a harmful thought, trouble follows him as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.”
— The Dhammapada

“Writing is thinking. That means that you won’t think unless you do it.”
— Sarah Beckwith

“We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think.”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“Preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophizing.'”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

“Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach