Into Philosophy

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Sidra Shahid are launching a new Research Series at the Blog of the APA. They talked with Heidi Schmidt, the Editor of the Research beat, about what the series investigates and what inspired them to take on this work. Jeremy and Sidra formatted the interview as a week’s rotation, one question per day. In so doing, they wanted to emphasize time and the diurnal quality of being into philosophy.

Monday. Tell me about Into Philosophy and its motto, “stories exceed ideas.”

Jeremy – Heidi, thank you for welcoming us on your beat, for this interview, and for rolling with us. Sidra came up with the title. You can be “into” philosophy. We can ask, “how do we get into philosophy?” too. “Into” also reminds many of “intro.” The idea is to leave the title ambiguous and equivocal, as “philosophy” is, especially for non-dogmatic or uninitiated people.

Into Philosophy is a collection of limited-run mini-series wherein we explore how philosophy interacts with circumstance.  What stories do philosophers, institutions, fields, and topics have about what shaped them?  How do personal, historical, and political events happen to change people’s minds? What is it to live philosophically in this world? How can philosophical life cope with scarcity?  How do we find ourselves within philosophical debates when once we were outsiders? In what ways has philosophy involved meeting and getting to know people more deeply?  When philosophy sometimes occurs by chance and sometimes by choice, what routes are there into philosophy?

Sidra – Jeremy and I both worked on that description of the series, and Jeremy pitched the mottos. My angle on the motto is this: Take the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, a catastrophe that shook up Western philosophy. As Susan Neiman explains in her book Evil in Modern Thought, to understand the conceptual upheaval that brought us to think of evil as a socially produced quality of institutions, practices, and relationships, rather than as a metaphysical curse, it is crucial to understand the story of the Lisbon earthquake and its significance for 18th century Europe. Moreover, the story of that earthquake did not simply produce an idea. For one thing, it cured Voltaire of his optimism (as Adorno puts it), but it also changed a culture’s sensibility. It exceeded ideas in its power to challenge the sense of the world and its meaning.

There are other ways that stories exceed ideas, too, smaller and more quotidian than an earthquake. We want to understand the stories behind why we in philosophy choose the topics that we do and why we find certain ideas compelling. How we do philosophy also has a story, and our pitch is to ask guests and readers to probe the stories behind their ideas. These stories might contain subtleties and dimensions that the ideas crystallized on account of them don’t express. With “stories exceed ideas,” we are trying to look at these things – big and small – that shape our practices and also exceed our ideas.

Tuesday. What about the miniseries comprising Into Philosophy?

Sidra – These are exciting to us and still being worked out! Here’s what we know so far. We’ll start with two mini-series, alternating between each once a month so that the whole collection comes out bi-weekly. We will begin with Into Philosophy: Genealogies of Philosophy. In this mini-series, we want to consider events ranging from the hidden to the historical in order to discuss what shapes philosophical thinking. How do philosophers respond to political and personal crises? How does happenstance lead to particular opportunities for thought? And how, more broadly, have the upheavals of difficult times challenged philosophy and its subfields?  Jeremy’s motto for this mini-series is how we arrived at our thoughts. I want especially to focus on histories that changed us.

Jeremy – A couple weeks after the first post of Genealogies, we’ll start the second mini-series. It’s called, Into Philosophy:  Philosophy as a Way of Life. In it, we want to explore contemporary interest in the ancient philosophical idea of philosophy as a way of life (an ēthos) expressed in the whole life (the bios) of people studying philosophy.  What should happen to philosophical studies in this light?  We are curious about how philosophical practices and relationships may appear differently when the lived dimension of them is our focus. The motto for this mini-series could be, how we lived thoughtfully.

Sidra – After the two mini-series begin, we’ll see how things unfold, phasing in a new mini-series when the moment is right and then gradually phasing out one of the old ones. The process of phasing in and out then repeats itself until it’s time for a change and we leave Into Philosophy as its own story!

Jeremy – Something like this happened with the discussion group, The Moral Inquiries, that I co-created in Cleveland Heights, Ohio (once land of many older nations) for four and a half years from 2015-2019. We went through stretches on topics until they’d run their course, and the same applied to the group, which knew when it was time to end and ended wonderfully.

Sidra – In any case, here are the titles and mottos we’re currently considering for other mini-series:

Into Philosophy:  Poverty & Philosophy (“How we dealt with scarcity”) This mini-series is meant to be about the economic condition of practicing philosophy. Our blog is already doing this in some thoughtful posts! We wanted to keep exploring the issue. Jeremy grew up in poverty for a time and experienced it in graduate school, and he believes that it is a story that exceeds ideas.

Into Philosophy:  Joining (“How we became part of the debate”) How did philosophers in the thick of active scholarly exchanges find themselves there? We want to provide some insight into how people find their way into the work that fills their life with interest.

Into Philosophy:  By Acquaintance (“How we found others as we learned”) We want to look at philosophy as a social process, not just one that is theoretical or practical. How has philosophy often involved deepened relationships with others and the making of life-long friends?

Wednesday. Why do you think it’s worth publishing Into Philosophy right now? How are you seeing it in the context of our blog?

Sidra – We live in weird and uncertain times, with the rise of authoritarianism across the world, the climate crisis, and since earlier this year, the COVID-19 pandemic. Philosophy can help clarify these issues, allowing us to think and act critically. But that’s not all. Philosophy is not outside these issues, as something that can only frame them. It’s part of these issues and it’s shaped by them. This interaction, though, is not always evident. Sometimes it gets buried by how we might think of philosophy as something that has its entire life within academic institutions. At least part of the idea was to give voice to this interaction between philosophy and the sorts of things that shape it.

Jeremy – I see the Blog of the APA as doing something significant for the future. It’s projecting a vision of philosophy beyond academic gatekeeping, one that is more inclusive than modern academic philosophy has historically been. One way to think about both inclusion and philosophy is to think about how we are worldly, of a world that exceeds us. And a way to get at the worldly is to get at the stories that show us the contingencies of philosophical practice.

Thursday. How do these topics and questions relate to your own research interests? Also, how does what you’re doing here relate to how you do philosophy?

Sidra – I’ve been interested in critique since I got into philosophy (or maybe even before that) – very roughly, why things are the way they are and whether they can be otherwise. In my PhD, I looked at critique in the Kantian sense, the conditions of possibility that make experience and/or knowledge possible. Among other things, I argued along phenomenological lines that these conditions are not formal and fixed but concrete, lived, and open-ended. Attention to embodiment is a big part of this because it places subjects in time and history and opens up possibilities for political critique. In a similar vein, my recent article traces the historical conditions of the Dutch burqa ban to colonial policies in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Here, too, I was interested in the cultural and historical conditions that enabled the ban and how the ban characterises and impacts the embodiment of Muslim women.

I’m still thinking about how philosophy changes when we make room for lived experiences and living bodies. Right now, I’m working on a paper that compares Jean Améry’s and Hannah Arendt’s work on evil. I’m arguing that we need a phenomenology of pain and suffering to understand evil. We can’t fully understand our moral response to evil without this connection to suffering, which is embodied and lived. I now understand critique as attention to lived experience. In a very rough way, this idea still takes its inspiration from Kant, who argued that turning towards experience gets us away from dogmatism.

To connect the threads: In an important sense, our series for the APA also looks at the enabling conditions of philosophy (as transcendental philosophers might say), what shapes it, and how philosophy, like subjectivity, lives time and is of the world.

Jeremy – I want to use my training in philosophy to help do some good in my community, to grow as a person, and to help my society grow up, which today means confronting its coloniality and working on reparations at the same time as it comes to be environmentally just across time, thoughtful with life on Earth in the lands we are so lucky to inhabit. The same purposes form my endowed chair at my university, where I think the tradition of philosophy is worth passing along. In plain terms, my orientation in philosophy is to see it as a community-based practice where the goals are primarily moral and political. That’s also how I approach Into Philosophy.

In general, I have some qualms about the way the theory industry works in academic philosophical research. Rather than go over my arguments here, I’ll refer to my attempt to write in a mode of knowing by acquaintance, in what I call “relational reason” – but that’s theory-speak! One way to look at Into Philosophy theoretically is that it is another experiment in letting relating lead our way into research and theoretical life.

Friday. Do you have inspirations for the kind of writing that will be found in these mini-series or for what you hope Into Philosophy to be?

Jeremy – We do. For myself, I want this series to feel like a written version of aspects of The Moral Inquiries, which I alluded to earlier. I would like this series to show real philosophical communities, to convey philosophy scrappily, and to give us an insight into how anything can be philosophical. What’s new is that I want these qualities and communities to appear through story, which I now consider crucial for planetary justice. That may seem like a lot of pressure on a minor chord. But I have always found that one of the things about seeking wisdom is to sense how the quotidian carries the meaning of major things. I want Into Philosophy to feel that way – small & light while touching on what matters. The inspiration is that conversation group to which I’ve alluded, evolving emergent learning in early childhood education that is multi-modal, or improvised piano fantasies (which also inspired Cavell).

Sidra – I like the way you put it Jeremy. I would add that reasons and arguments have a bigger life in what isn’t exactly another chain of reasons or another set of arguments. Sharing what that is can deepen our sense of what we do.

Saturday. Can you tell us if there’s a personal story behind the development of Into Philosophy?

Sidra – Jeremy and I met at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates what seems like centuries ago. Jeremy gave classes on a whole host of topics, including ethics, philosophy of art, and modernity. He also organised a reading group on Plato’s Phaedrus, which we read in a small group, into the evening.

I remember we spent a long time talking about the first line, “Where have you come from, my dear Phaedrus, and where are you going?” We of course talked about the cicadas and the chariots too, but it was the first time I understood what it means to really read philosophy. Most philosophers encounter a book or a piece of writing that convinced them, though of course not single-handedly, that philosophy is what they want to pursue. For me, it was probably Plato’s Phaedrus. Jeremy’s classes were a kind of slowed-down philosophy, there was no rush — really reading a text, really talking about it. And when you finally caught glimpses of what it might mean — that was deeply exciting.

These classes and the broader community at Sharjah is where I first found not only philosophy, but a particular way of thinking about it or doing it, as a kind of pursuit for meaning and sense. I spent a lot of years in Europe, living on student visas and scholarships. Finishing my PhD and entering the world of precarious contracts and neoliberal competition, it is seeing philosophy as a way of making meaning, of giving work and even failure sense, that has made all the difference. Given that Jeremy and I’ve been in touch since Sharjah and are now here, it’s great that we can still spend some time thinking together with other folks around the planet, creating something we differently find important.

Jeremy – In some ways, Into Philosophy goes back to Conversation Circle at American University of Sharjah, where students and faculty met informally on the steps of the main building in the evening once a week at night for a year to discuss what came up between us emergently. The group’s location was the students’ choosing, fit for desert culture where nights are cool. The unity of the circle came from a more communitarian world than the liberal one of the coffee hour. The equality of it came from a culture where people are supposed to be brothers and sisters to each other first. In the circle, students were not talked at by professors on a podium. We all discussed things together, the circle being dialogical from the get-go. Sidra and I were often there along with our friends and the late Dr. Richard Gassan. It was great to join in with her and others.

Answering your question, Heidi, reminds me too of the time when Sidra and I read Al-Ghazali together in an independent study. Working with Sidra helped me better understand the world in which I was living then.

A couple years ago, I met Sidra, her partner, their animals, and Sidra’s friends in Amsterdam. I could sense that she felt that philosophy lives best in a city, a land, a community outside the academy but including it in relationship. It was good to meet Sidra again, now with her impressive work on transcendental arguments, her being a “dr.”, and her being a part of Amsterdam – politically active and with friends in non-academic areas of cultural life. That brought back the feeling that we shared a sensibility, and so Sidra came to mind when the Blog of the APA approached me to work on a series.

My hope here in our series is that, thanks to getting to hang out and talk with Sidra some more, we can do something transnational that both makes philosophy more down to earth and works creatively with it in subtle ways out and about in the world.

Sunday. One last question in honor of Halloween. What is your nightmare readership? No, seriously, how do you want to relate to readers over the course of this series?

Jeremy – My nightmare readership? People who just want to argue, who do not have the guts to consider things between us all. The truth-owners. And then this: academic gate keepers. Philosophy is a contingent tradition that grew up in colonies in Ionia and hit the streets in Athens. In the past several centuries, it became institutionalized along with modern knowledge. The institutionalization of philosophy has been good for some forms of precision, transmission, and productivity, but bad for other aspects of philosophy, including its relationship to its community. I’d like to find readers who will participate with us in filling in the worldly and communal conditions of philosophy.

Sidra – Our nightmare readership might also include people who argue about things like whether analytic philosophers are the real ones and all continental thinkers phonies (and vice versa). And people who believe that philosophy is less legitimate when it is about life. In keeping with the spirit of Halloween, I suppose they would have to ghost us right after the conversation began, too!

Seriously, though, it would be great if readers got in touch with us and told us what they thought of the series so that we can shape things together.

Thank you for hanging out with us to get Into Philosophy.