Moral Philosophy as a Set-Up: Debate, Normalization, and the Incorporation of Radical Criticism

Cora Diamond:

A great difference between Murdoch and contemporary moral philosophy lies in the very idea of moral philosophy as such a set of debates. From Murdoch’s point of view, these debates are set up, in the sense in which she speaks of the “world of facts” as something which philosophers have “set up.” What are taken to be “the problems of the field” will invariably involve background ideas — ideas taken to be unproblematic, not in question in the debates that define the field as it is taught. The shaping of such debates depends on a picture of the world and a picture or group of related pictures of the soul; deep moral attitudes are embedded in these pictures. The bringing to awareness of such compelling pictures and of their historical and cultural connections, the opening up of alternative ways of understanding moral philosophy, is itself a task of philosophy, to be set over against the conception of it in terms of a set of debates.

Here I shall borrow an argument made by Talbot Brewer, in relation to Elizabeth Anscombe and her radical criticism of moral philosophy. The force of such criticism is utterly missed, Brewer argues, when an attempt is made to fit it into the structure of moral philosophy as a set of debates. When moral philosophy is set out and taught as involving a “well-defined field of questions,” with “a series of competing answers to these questions,” we make it unnecessary for ourselves or our students to take seriously the “fundamentally conflicting views concerning … the main questions and concerns of the field itself” — a field that is “perpetually concerned with the proper specification of its own focal preoccupations.” He speaks of moral philosophy as having a “fundamentally reflexive subject matter,” a reflexiveness that is inconsistent with setting out the subject in terms of such a set of debates. When we try to take the ideas of a radical critic like Anscombe as a contribution to such debates, we “normalize” her views, pull the sting from them.

While Brewer’s argument — about how radical criticism can be normalized by being fitted into “the debate” — refers directly to Anscombe, it applies also to Murdoch; indeed Brewer brings out the similarity of some of their central concerns. Their view of analytic moral philosophy was that of insiders, but they had double vision: they saw it also in its cultural context, saw its unacknowledged commitment to specific values. They were themselves committed (though in quite different ways) to an understanding of the moral realm deeply at odds with the conventional understanding, hence their sharp awareness of what was taken for granted and what was hidden from view in that understanding of moral philosophy — of what its problems were, how they could be addressed, and what would constitute progress in their resolution.

Brewer brings out the generality of the issue that surfaces in their writings and in the reception of their writings: when moral philosophy is normalized, the problematic character of the relation between the wider culture and the construction of moral philosophy is suppressed. Normalization is a continuing process, as emerges in the recent construction of a debate about the relevance of empirical investigation to moral philosophy, so far as the construction of the debate excludes a conception of empirical investigation like Murdoch’s and takes serious attention to what is available in human experience to be attention to what is available through the methods of the various empirical sciences. Murdoch the explorer begins from the felt tension between moral philosophy shaped in a taken-for-granted way, moral philosophy as we present it to students and to ourselves, these problems, these arguments, these possible approaches — and moral philosophy as continually needing to question what its own concerns are or may be, what modes of thinking it may have cut off from consideration, what conceptual configurations it has built into its own understanding of the world it investigates.

(Cora Diamond, “Murdoch the Explorer”)

Professional Philosophy, Territoriality, Enemyship, and Fantasies of Omniscience

Elizabeth V. Spelman:

At a certain stage in their careers — not only when writing their dissertations or entering the job market, but also simply when on the philosophical prowl – many philosophers we know, maybe even love, maybe even recognize in the mirror, assume, probably quite rightly, that in order to display their professional chops they’ve got to provide ready and palpable evidence of their skill at defining territory and then covering it.

One widely used and reliable approach is to make the territory very small (“The wild dog pack’s territorial nature leads its members to claim an area large enough to support them and any offspring, but not one so large that it requires excessive energy to adequately defend it”) and then corner it, seal it against possible intrusion — a little spray here, a little spray there, a little spray everywhere (Milani). The only way to prevent such intrusion is to anticipate every conceivable question that might occur to your thesis advisor, or prospective employer, or one of those philosopher-vultures (to change the animal metaphor briefly) who perch in the back of conference halls and live off the conceptual carrion of unsuspecting speakers. You better make sure to cover the territory, and to indicate that you know full well where intruders might slip in. Your territory may be a small territory, it may be a territory very few people actually want to occupy anyway, even if they enjoy trying to leave their own scent here and there, but by gum you know every blade of grass, every little once-unturned stone, every chipmunk hole, and you aren’t going to be surprised by anybody who would suggest there might be something in your territory you hadn’t seen or anticipated. It’s your territory and you’ve got it covered.

Whatever ends might be served by presenting one’s philosophical findings or explorations in this way, there wouldn’t seem much — apart from parochial disciplinary rituals — to recommend it as an invitation to a conversation or an inducement to engage in a joint examination….

Hmmm. Who are those philosophical enemies, those potential poachers? Well, for individual philosophers, among the likely candidates for enemy status is that motley crew of fellow “wisdom lovers” I alluded to earlier, lying in wait to expose the gopher holes you’ve failed to notice, tsk tsk tsk. For the whole posse of philosophers, especially the teeth-baring disciplinarians in the front lines, the enemy includes nonphilosophers (some of who somehow, some-where managed to slip into the profession, like slinky felines under the fence) who think they have the right to roam the territory without knowing how to cover it correctly (“Oh, what do those literary critics think they know about Wittgenstein, for God’s sake?”).

But sometimes it seems as if the real enemy the territory-covering activity is meant to subdue is language itself, the primary tool of the philosopher — as if the very medium of our expression carries with it some awful threat of uncontainability, is contaminated with the possibility of untamable sabotage or betrayal. Martin Jay recently has resurrected an example of such philosophica nervosa in Michael Oakeshott’s examination of “experience”: according to Oakeshott, “it must be the ambition of every writer reckless enough the use the word [i.e., “experience”] to escape the ambiguities it contains”(1933, 9). Covering the territory involves not only traversing it, but doing so in such a way as to keep unwanted semantic growth from popping up. I’ve got to know the meaning, indeed every possible meaning, of each word and phrase I use; only then can I control the language I use in such a way that I can mean just this, nothing more, nothing less. Only with such semantic omniscience and omnipotence can I prevent your claiming with any justice that something I said maybe doesn’t mean quite what I think it does, or that it is ambiguous or open to an interpretation I hadn’t imagined.

(Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Philosophical Doggedness”)

Bad News for The Consolation of Philosophy

You see the great indifference of the gods
to these things that have happened,
who begat us and are called our fathers,
and look on such sufferings.
What is to come no one can see,
but what is here now is pitiable for us
and shameful for them,
but of all men hardest for him
on whom this disaster has fallen.
Maiden, do not stay in this house:
you have seen death and many agonies,
fresh and strange
and there is nothing here that is not Zeus.
— Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266-78

In a post I found as deeply moving as it is clarifying, Liam Kofi Bright writes of four approaches to tragedy: a “social” approach, which seeks to provide “social structures and valorised practices that will allow the individual to come to terms where that is appropriate, and make changes to avoid future instances of the loss where that is appropriate”; an approach that seeks to “dissipate” tragedy, insofar as it holds that “there is something we could teach people, which if fully and properly internalised (perhaps accompanied by appropriate changes in attitude), will allow people to see apparent tragedies as no-real-tragedy at all”; a “compensatory” approach, wherein “we recognise that the tragedy is indeed a tragedy, but can be convinced that it shall be compensated by (indeed may actively help bring about) some great good in the long run, and we overcome our loss by focusing instead on that great good”; and a “heroizing” approach, which recognizes that “tragedies are, or at least can be, indeed gratuitous and utterly unjustified, shall not be compensated (and even if it were this could never really be enough), but counsels that there is none the less dignity in the struggle against this inevitability.”

As Bright points out, his post does not seek to offer a comprehensive account of various approaches. It nevertheless led me to wonder about modes of response to tragedy that — from the perspective of canonical philosophical texts — have often been ruled as lacking or deficient in philosophical temperament. In particular, I’m wondering about those approaches to tragedy that are neither contained nor containable.

Here I have in mind diverse but related modes of response such as wrathful grief (as in Euripides’s Medea or Renato Rosaldo’s anthropological rendering of the Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines); or uncontainable, inconsolable, and seemingly endless lamentation (such as Eliza’s wailing in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave); or the type of response to tragedy dramatized in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, which wants nothing to do with theodicean, stoic, or heroic responses. These forms of grieving, then, gesture to experiences of suffering, agony, and loss that defy our abilities to come to terms with the trauma (pace “socialization”); that insist on the losses suffered as unteachable (pace “dissipation”); that refuse the possibility of compensation (pace “compensation”); that reject dignified approaches to tragedy, or even, the very notion that “struggles” with grief can be dignifying (pace “heroizing”); that give witness to how tragedy may often unravel the very fabric of the social and the self.

What could be at stake in paying greater attention to this a-philosophical, post-philosophical or even anti-philosophical forms of grieving? Bernard Williams’s remarkable and brilliant essay, “The Women of Trachis” may offer some pointers. Williams’s essay contests institutional philosophy’s attachment to dispensing “good news” – that is, the notion, as exemplified in the theodicies of Leibniz and Hegel, that ultimately horrendous suffering will be redeemed. But it may also be read as an uncompromising critique of the philosophic self, at least as has been imagined by its most celebrated practitioners from Plato to Parfit.

Against these blandishments of philosophy, Williams recommends what he calls stark fictions, by which he means accounts that carve out in the bleakest relief possible “extreme, undeserved, and uncompensated suffering.” By so doing, William continues, they offer a devastating “limitation to the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people.”

Skepticism as White Solipsism

Racism is often alluded to as if it were monolithic or uniform: in fact it is multiform. As women we need to develop a language in which to describe the forms that directly affect our relationships with each other. I believe that white feminists today, raised in a racist society, are often ridden with white solipsism — not the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic, impotent guilt-reflexes, which have little or no long-term continuing momentum or political usefulness.
— Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia”

A few years ago, I delivered a talk based on this project before a group of mostly historians. At the conclusion of my talk, a white (male) senior scholar started off by asking me to further explain why I had referred to these women as “theorists” — a term that clearly made him feel uneasy. I explained, as best as I could, that there was nothing especially novel about the term. Indeed, a theorist is one who simply theorizes or crafts ideas concerning a range of issues. He persisted to ask me to explain further, noting that he understood Karl Marx, for example, to be a theorist but felt like I was simply trying to exaggerate these women’s significance and influence by labeling them “theorists.” Maybe they were activists. But, certainly not theorists. Somehow he had missed the point of my entire presentation — carefully crafted (or so I thought) to demonstrate exactly how these women theorized black internationalism, often forging idiosyncratic political philosophies that drew on (and at times departed from) a range of political figures including Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali. We went back and forth for several minutes until his colleagues grew exasperated by his line of questioning and jumped in to redirect the conversation.
— By Keisha N. Blain, “Writing Black Women’s Intellectual History,” Black Perspectives

Saidiya Hartman delivered a lecture in Amsterdam in 2013, focusing on the story of the brutal torture and murder of an enslaved African girl by a ship’s European captain during the Middle Passage. After the reading, the air in the room weighed heavy with the girl’s story of unimaginable suffering. And yet the atmosphere was rapidly shattered by the first white interjection to follow the story, delivered in the form of the words: “But what about the captain?” To the consternation of many others present, whose thoughts were with the enslaved girl and her suffering, the intervenor wanted to know more about the motivations and fate of the perpetrator.
— Lisa Tilley, “But what about the aid worker?”, Al Jazeera

“Bullshit!” That was the immediate response of a white student after I gave a lecture exploring the interstitial “race” dynamics theorized in the elevator example, explored in chapter I, where my body is confiscated and marked as dangerous. I was invited to a class on multiculturalism to talk about whiteness and the Black body. The majority of the class was white. Having given a variation of this lecture before, I had become used to hands being raised in eagerness, if only then to have my interlocutor launch into a diatribe aimed at finding holes in my presentation, but never a definitive “Bullshit!” I was particularly struck by the harsh tone of her response and the look of self-certainty that appeared on her face. Much needs to be explored in terms of the communicational dynamics that arise within contexts where Black bodies (in this case, a Black male body) speak openly and honestly about issues of whiteness to a mostly white audience. On the one hand because I am Black, I am already the racially marked body that is expected to be able to say something knowledgeable, meaningful, and important about race. On the other hand, when that knowledge exposes the racist operations of white bodies, marks them as raced and racist, I am deemed either overly sensitive or too quick to generalize to all whites what I have experienced on the basis of a “few unfortunate events” or “exceptional cases.”
— George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes

Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read African Philosophy

“My journey into African Philosophy was prompted by my training and experience in Western Philosophy. … I was taught, in the classroom of Western oriented African universities and textbooks that Africans never originated any cogent tradition of philosophy. My first Ph.D. proposal to the University of Ibadan in 1977 was rejected because the title The Rational Basis of Yoruba Ethical Thinking was declared a myth and not philosophy. I was forced to write on a Western (British) philosopher. At my doctoral graduation party in 1984, the then Head of Department of Philosophy at Ibadan congratulated me for my attainment of the license to talk all the nonsense I had been talking before. Since then, I have tried to strengthen my intellectual capacity to make the adversaries see the sense in what, by their own perceived standard, is absolute nonsense.” (Sophie Oluwole, “For Africans, Philosophy Is In Languages.”)

A Feminist African Philosophy Syllabus

Propaedeutic bookmarks toward a feminist African Philosophy Syllabus:

Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

Gail M. Presbey, “Should Women Love “Wisdom”? Evaluating the Ethiopian Wisdom Tradition.”

Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture

Betty Wambui, “Women, Children, Goats, Land.”

Sophie Oluwole, Socrates and Orunmila: Two Patron Saints of Classical Philosophy

Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader

Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare

Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell (eds.), African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the late Nineteenth Century to the Present.

Yaba Badoe, The Witches of Gambaga

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Olufemi Taiwo, “Theory and the Future of Women’s Studies in Nigeria.”

Amina Mama, “The Power of Feminist Pan-African Intellect.”

Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyiki Musisi, eds. Women in African Colonial Histories

Louise du Toit and Azille Coetzee, “Gendering African Philosophy, or: African Feminism as Decolonizing Force”

Sandra Harding,”The curious coincidence of feminine and African moralities”

Philosophy at the University of Nairobi

Odera Oruka on the beginnings of the philosophy department at the University of Nairobi:

“By 1969 University of Nairobi launched a new department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Both at Makerere and Nairobi the majority and dominant staff of the departments were priests and lay theologians. At Nairobi the department was headed by the late Rt. Rev. Prof. Bishop Stephen C. Neill, an Anglican British scholar of much rhetorical persuasions. He often claimed to have been born on the same day and hour as King George the Sixth — midnight Dec. 31st 1899.

Neill had me recruited in the department as a temporary lecturer in October, 1970. With me was a Kenyan colleague, Dr. J. Nyasani, recruited as a tutorial assistant. Neill himself used to refer to both of us as “our two assistant African tutorial assistants.” There was no such rank in the university hierarchy, but it pleased the boss to lower us to such levels.

Neill had little time for ‘African Philosophy,’ and harbored doubt about the ability of Africans to think logically. Once in 1971 he inquired to know about the number of students I had in my ‘Introduction to Logic’ class.

“Not so many…only about ten or so,” I answered and added, “there is a belief among the students here that logic is a difficult subject, so quite a number steer off it.”

Neill responded with vigor: “The belief is well-founded and I completely agree with the students! I do not think that logic is really a subject for the African mind. We in the West are familiar with it right from the days of Aristotle. The African mind, I believe, is intuitive, not logical.”

There is no space here for going into details about the experience and conflict we had with persons of this frame of mind in the department. The long term solution I took was to work towards isolating the teaching of philosophy from the dominance by scholars of this type of attitude. But I had two to three main problems. First, I was too junior and temporary for this sort of task. Secondly, the theologians in the department were making sure that no more staff would be recruited for the sub-discipline of philosophy. And lastly, the majority of the relevant university authorities who could effect changes conceived of real distinction between philosophy and religion.”

(Odera Oruka, “African Philosophy: A Brief Personal History and Current Debate”).

What it is like to be an African in U.S. Philosophy

In the acknowledgments page for his book, Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions, Professor Polycarp Ikuenobe writes:

“I acknowledge the help, support, and encouragement of some of my professors at Wayne State University, especially Bob Yanal, my dissertation advisor, Mike McKinsey, Bill Stine, Brad Angell, and the late Barbara Humphries. I also wish to thank those professors at the Department of Philosophy at Wayne State University, who, for reasons best known to them, thought I was not good enough to get a Ph.D. or get a teaching job in philosophy, and then made efforts to frustrate me. Their doubts about my abilities, their lack of encouragement and support, and their efforts to frustrate me and make sure I did not succeed in my graduate work have been part of my motivation to excel or not to fail — at least, so that I can prove them wrong.

Thanks to the professor who told me that nothing good can come from me. It seems to have turned out — if my humble accomplishments are any indication — that something good can indeed come from me. Thanks to the other professor who said he would not waste his time helping me with my job application because it took him fifteen years to get tenure and that I was not good enough to get a job. However, other people who were more perceptive than he thought otherwise and gave me the opportunity by offering me jobs. Thanks to the professors, who, out of pure ignorance and prejudice, said that I got jobs because I was black. I have worked hard to try to show them that being black alone cannot guarantee one a job in academia…. My achievements thus far have been the only or perhaps the best payback for these people. It is possible that if they had not doubted my abilities or made efforts to make sure I did not succeed, I would not have been as hardworking and motivated as I have been in my efforts to succeed or not to fail. I acknowledge their negative efforts, which have turned out to be positive for me.”

(Polycarp Ikuenobe, Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions)

African Philosophy: Beyond the Usual Suspects

Olúfémi Táíwò on the narrow canon of establishment African philosophy:

“Only the foolhardy now deny the existence of African Philosophy or its philosophical pedigree. But if one were to peruse some of the recent works, textbooks and anthologies, published in the discipline, especially in the United States, one would be ill-served by the narrowness of the focus and the limited works that are marked as foundational. Indeed the thrust of my discussion in this paper came from reflections about a few recent books in African philosophy; African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry edited by Ivan Karp and Dismas Masolo and Richard Bell’s Understanding African Philosophy, to be specific. In perusing those books one is likely to come away with the impression that the discipline is a conversation among Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Gyekye, Odera Oruka, and Anthony Appiah, in the first book, with Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo, and Wole Soyinka thrown in.” (Olúfémi Táíwò, “Beyond the Usual Suspects: Towards Renewing the Foundations of African Philosophy.”)

How Not to Read Black Intellectuals

Lewis Gordon on how not to read black intellectuals:

The aim of What Fanon Said is to offer a study of Fanon and his ideas in their own right. “What Fanon said,” then, pertains not only to the black letter words in his writings but also to their spirit, their meaning. This task also involves stepping outside of a tendency that often emerges in the study of intellectuals of African descent—namely, the reduction of their thought to the thinkers they study. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre was able to comment on black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor without becoming “Césairian,” “Fanonian,” or “Senghorian”; Simone de Beauvoir could comment on the thought of Richard Wright without becoming “Wrightian”; the German sociologist Max Weber could comment on the African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois without becoming “Du Boisian.” Why, then, is there a different story when black authors comment on their (white) European counterparts? “Standard” scholarship has explored whether Du Bois is Herderian, Hegelian, Marxian, or Weberian; whether Senghor is Heideggerian; and whether Fanon is every one of the Europeans on whom he has commented Adlerian, Bergsonian, Freudian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Lacanian, Marxian,Merleau-Pontian, and Sartrean, to name several.

The problem of subordinated theoretical identity is a theme against which Fanon argued. It is connected to another problem—the tendency to reduce black intellectuals to their biographies. Critics of this approach ask: How many biographies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Fanon do we need before it is recognized that they also produced ideas? It is as if to say that white thinkers provide theory and black thinkers provide experience for which all seek explanatory force from the former. As there are many studies of Immanuel Kant without reducing him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who had the most influence on the former’s moral philosophy), my approach will be to address Fanon’s life and thought as reflections of his own ideals, with the reminder that no thinker produces ideas in a vacuum.

(Lewis R. Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought)