Category Archives: Thought

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

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)

Notes toward a critical contextual social ontology

Call the non-ideal social ontology that I would elaborate as adequate to a robust engagement with African intellectual thought a critical contextual social ontology. It advances an account of social ontology that is contextual – that is, that social lives are constituted by the interaction of situated, creaturely, human animals not only with one another, but also with non-human organisms in diverse ecological contexts; historical – that is, that social lives are emergent from a deep temporal background, are dynamic, and are processual; structural – that is, that the contours of social lives are formed by interanimated but irreducible political, economic, and cultural vectors; existential – that is, that social lives are striated through by the radical particularity of creaturely embodiment, subjectivity, and phenomenology; and reflexive – that inquiry into social ontology is itself embedded, and therefore demanding of a recursive, dialectical critique of the very conditions of possibility – the non-ideal social ontology – from which the philosopher, critic, or thinker is speaking and writing.

A critical contextual social ontology, then, advances a thoroughgoing break with the presuppositions and horizons of the standard account of social ontology. Standard social ontology takes itself to be engaged in elaborating the fundamental entities – that is, the very basic units – of social life. Insofar then as it speaks of the basic entities of society, it searches for the “essence” of social life. This commits standard social ontology to a reductionist method – one that in most accounts comes under the moniker methodological individualism, which explains social phenomena as reducible to individual intentions; to an anthropocentric bias – such is the manner in which it abstracts from the facts of ecological existence that it pays no mind to any other biota and abiota other than the human animal; to a synchronic episteme – its account of social life is cadastral and therefore static; and to an archetypalist normativity – it posits a singular model of social life as universal and paradigmatic and thereby flattens the spectacular diversity of social formations.

African Philosophy as Inquiry into Non-Ideal Social Ontology

“Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

A non-ideal social ontology is inquiry keyed toward understanding actually existing constituents of social reality, the nature of the relationships among these constituents, and their meaning and significance for ecology, politics, economics, and culture. As such, a non-ideal social ontology critiques the foundational assumptions of social ontology, which are revealed to be ideologically freighted toward naturalizing and legitimating exploitative and oppressive socio-political regimes.

Inquiry into a non-ideal social ontology unfolds a stunning range of critical projects for African philosophy. If the vectors of a non-ideal social ontology can be said to be those of ecology, politics, economics, and culture, that raises the question of what precisely constitutes ecology, politics, economics, and culture; their points of articulation and disarticulation; and what follows from the deliverance of these knowledges.

What constitutes “the ecological” in African philosophy – in what ways is it theorized in both critical and vernacular intellectual traditions and how is the ecological imbricated in political economic, and cultural practices? What is “the political” in African intellectual thought and practice – what are its residual, dominant and emergent institutional formations, hegemonic and fugitive figurations of power, systematic and diffuse ideologies, particularistic and transversalist relational attachments and affiliations, existential and queer identities, utopian and dystopian imaginative horizons? What are the contours and formations of “the economic” in African societies – what are the zones of contact and incommensurability, conflict and consilience, dissonance and resonance, between and among practices of endowment, exchange, and need? What is constitutive of “the cultural” in the African context – how are subjectivities emergent and performed, what is the texture of political, economic, and aesthetic culture?

And in considering all the above, what are the currents and gyres of exchange and appropriation that cut a middle passage between Africa and other geo-political formations?

African Philosophy as an intellectual formation

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

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

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

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

African Philosophy as a Missed Opportunity

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

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

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