Is There Room for Everyone’s Odd, Lost Life in Philosophy?

University City, Sharjah, 2007

 "Time held [us] green and dying, though [we] sang in [our] chains like the sea."
~ Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill," 1945

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Something was bugging them, and it wasn’t just Headgear (the 90s spellcheck-correction for “Heidegger” on Word). Sidra and Jeremy met in philosophy classes at American University of Sharjah and were part of the 2005-6 Conversation Circle convening each week on the steps of the main building after sun-fall. They stayed in touch and began their editing for the APA in 2020. Sidra edited “Genealogies of Philosophy,” and J, “Philosophy as a Way of Life.” After eight months of work, they decided to reflect. 

Here’s the first half of their correspondence.

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April 22^nd, 2021, “Earth Day”

Hey Sidra,

Thank you for the whole thing.

About your question, I’ve been thinking.  But first, I have something to tell you:

Going back to August 28^th, 2020 – the day we began discussing our column – I found 251 emails between us labelled “Into Philosophy.”

Add the Fall weekly Zoom meetings, time spent together with guests (Susan, Lynne …), laboring over our own & each other’s posts, copyediting, … there’s been some work [this post is going on 250 revisions once online, not counting the six Word versions; “American Ecstatics” ended with 315 revisions online, after 50 or so revisions the previous summer – jbk]. I feel that we’ve done something important – letting people come to light – with care. At least, we’ve tried to.

People’s stories can keep philosophy low to the ground. When we give each other pause for them, we build up philosophy incrementally in a key prior to theory.

You ask (my paraphrase): How should we relate to an author when they have led a questionable life? – The problem of the philosopher who was – at times or overall – a sh***y person.  You mentioned Heidegger; we’ve discussed Foucault.  #MeToo has shattered the illusion of authority around many an author’s bios (lifetime). And people stop & think. I do too.

I don’t usually know what to make of your question, because it risks answers that are too neat and tidy (“There’s nothing to learn from that monster”), too abstract (“Philosophy is always an art of living”), or too decontextualized (“They should have known better than their world”); and all of these things can be false.

But to reject your question out of hand, as I’ve heard some do (“All that matters are their arguments”), is equally too neat, tidy, abstract, and … irresponsible. I mean, we are people, and that means morality comes at the beginning of our relations.

Your question deserves to be addressed inversely, too. What should we make of a hum-drum life next to writing that contains deadly things?  How should the words bear on the life?

For instance, Kant did some bad things – as Susan relayed in her recent book, with one letter to a warden, he shut down the singing of inmates in a nearby prison during their work duty rather than lose writing time. I mean, Jesus! A few hours for Kant’s quill was more important than a rare, humanizing moment for inmates?  Kant’s life didn’t sing tunes. But it wasn’t marred by mundane actions (or was it? What an a-hole). There are all sorts of uptight, selfish people … or moments … in regular life.

Still, as we’ve discussed and debated, Kant was an Enlightenment racist. In the true fashion of exemplary coloniality, Kant twisted the cold facts to confirm his unacknowledged, imperial bias.  Does that problematize his life? I mean, a consensus solidified by thoughts like his helped kill (they bolstered the “brute facts” of the institutions of slavery and genocide, what “one can do” with Africans and the Indigenous).

I think that Kant’s racist writings do mar his life. Susan, how I love her, is wrong. Our word is our bond. Especially as writers employing the “private, universal exercise of enlightenment,” why shouldn’t we be held accountable for failing to express modes of attention?

Attention is our job, and just as my head spins to think that the police in my country so often fight being held to minimal standards of professional safety when they recklessly kill — and even murder — people they are charged to protect at all times, no matter what, well, my head spins to see philosophers who are supposed to think and write responsibly back-peddle before holding their heroes accountable for what they’ve written. For everyone’s sake, just have them own it. Make the heroes human.

In 18th century Europe, it was not impossible to withhold judgment about hearsay from the colonies and to be skeptical of racist claims when you see who benefits from them. Even Rousseau, that paragon for Kant, can be argued to have done so.

Still, things here are difficult. We can mis-locate the problem in a person’s will while bypassing structural injustice in the systems we unthinkingly reproduce.  When Julia Gibson asked, “How should we think of philosophical writing written on the land occupied by settler colonization?”, writing becomes charged with “decolonizing our agency.” It’s something many folks are trying to catch up with, and it often exceeds our powers, even if that does not excuse our efforts.

How should we understand the relationship between life and philosophical writing?  The moral unease raised by this question is something that contemporary philosophy – unlike ancient philosophy as a way of life – doesn’t seem so equipped to answer.  But that holds for other areas of modern culture such as art, too.

The problem is more general:

Must intellectual production be contextualized within moral relations first and foremost?

The obvious answer is, yes. Otherwise, morality is conditional, and that’s a contradiction. But what then’s involved in contextualizing intellectual production within moral relations? That the question has grip shows us the problem.

So as I was recently walking around the neighborhood with Phoebe [the family corgi -jbk], I thought:

Your question gets us to think neither about the bios, nor about the writing per se, but about the linkage between the two.  It focuses us on what we are really doing when we do philosophy.

J.

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April 26th, 2021

Hi Jeremy,

It’s been a whole 8 months with 13 posts between us. Writing you these letters, I hope, will help us pick out some themes we’ve found important in our work together.

The question about how the life of a philosopher relates to their work is one I’ve had for a long time. But it came into sharp relief more recently when I came across allegations regarding Foucault’s time in Tunisia.

We had just conducted an interview with Lynne Huffer on Foucault, and I had just been reading Didier Eribon’s biography of Foucault. Didier describes Foucault as a profoundly original intellectual who flowered in the French academy and, though idiosyncratic and controversial, became one of its canonical figures. Eribon’s Foucault struck me as earnest and sincere, like the Foucault I’ve read, whose genealogical investigations often betray indignation towards bourgeois hypocrisy and tacit compassion towards those subjected to it. 

Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different than any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labour. Our philanthropy prefers to recognise the signs of a benevolence towards sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness.
 ~ Foucault, History of Madness, p. 43.

What I found remarkable is that this is the same Foucault who is now being accused of horrendous colonial behavior at the very least and child abuse at worst during his time in Tunisia. And I had thought of Foucault in Tunisia in light of his support for anti-colonial/authoritarian movements. Should these allegations change my conception of Foucault’s work? If not, why not.

And why, I found myself wondering, do we typically feel that the intellectual position of philosophers (and the work that embodies it) need not represent who they are.

Whatever one might say about the truth of the allegations against Foucault, they opened up for me questions about how we read philosophy. My moral unease I found, then, is not only about Foucault, but what it means to read philosophy in light of concerns that might at first seem “extra-philosophical.”

But if this is the way we see things, then philosophy operates in a vacuum “developing” through a kind of dialectical unfolding of pure concepts, untouched by the world. And if that’s how we understand philosophy, it can never be linked critically to its context, for instance, its colonial lineage or settler colonialism today. So, the question for me is not just about the life of a philosopher, but their context too, and how that relates to their work.

This brings me to what you say about the link between bios and writing. Here I think of Merleau-Ponty who said that reflection is always situated. Merleau-Ponty calls this “radical reflection,” radical, as in “from the root,” because it keeps in view our starting point – or the situation from which we reflect but which often escapes our reflection. So, to return to Foucault, let us leave aside the truth of the allegations – perhaps unverifiable anyway – to first ask questions about our situation — how are allegations against Foucault framed today?

With most articles referencing the opinions of other French philosophers, castigating the left for its (supposed) championing of Foucault, or aiming to defend Foucault’s reputation as a gem of the French academe, it seems the targets of his putative abuse are of marginal concern. In fact, French media (quoting Jean Daniel’s Les Miens), refers to the supposed stories of young Tunisians from the village of Sidi Bou Saïd as “les rumeurs des petits voyous du village,” “the rumors of the little village thugs.”

What is worthy of reflection, then, is not Foucault’s decency (with other reports indicating that Foucault lived a generally wholesome life in Tunisia and Foucault himself is dead), but our context. I’m left with questions about the French intellectual milieu, in Foucault’s times and today, and how it is that young Tunisians (who might well have been targets of abuse) can so easily be referred to as “little thugs,” a phrase repeated over and over again in the French media and one which has obvious associations with stereotypes of young North Africans in France today.

These questions cannot be cast aside in favor of an exclusive focus on Foucault’s personal conduct. To abstract from these contexts, and to focus wholly on Foucault’s (or any philosopher’s) moral failures, is to fail to see how entire contexts are responsible, too, when the individuals they nurture behave unjustly. I can’t think of any institution that has harbored or cultivated problematic figures that is itself free of structural injustices and the bent optics that go with them. 

Philosophy emerges in particular forms of life and it can make sense only in light of them. So, reflecting on the relationship between bios and writing actually allows us to make sense of philosophy. 

– Sidra

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April 29^th, 2021

Hey Sidra!

Thank you for the photo.  When I first visited Amsterdam in 1986 as a guest of the Lions Club of Soest, I remember the feeling of the North Sea air – that and the squatters Mariette mentioned. Coming out of Centraal Station for the first time, I heard a group of industrial musicians pounding metal sheets like Einstürzende Neubauten did.

In letting your letter soak in, Julia Gibson’s comment in their post from last November returned.  Julia reported something Kyle Whyte said about how settler colonial relations have a high degree of instability. Julia took it to heart in working on their family farm.  Thinking of your comment that “philosophy emerges in particular forms of life,” I wanted to ask, “What is the form of life of academic philosophy?” 

Taking just this blog as a window into academic philosophy, the forms here seem mixed, incomplete, abstract and so on.  As you’ve noted, the forms can be muddled in our training, too – in the life of departments and on campuses.

It is hard to identify the criteria for meaningful expressions in the grammar of our practices outside of particular institutions (e.g., the dissertation defense), organizations (e.g., one of those small, close knit societies of scholars), even sub-groups of friends with a fluid but coherent culture (possibly many of us at American University of Sharjah in 2007?).  These things are fairly local and unstable themselves. That doesn’t mean there aren’t forms of life to them, of course, but it makes speaking generally a problem.

Thinking about your question also led me to ask, “Is there a life in what form there is to academic philosophy?”  There seems to be fragments of a life, some good intentions, good practices – also a lot of status, recurring exclusions, many negative anxieties, worries about work being unjust or unfulfilling.  How do these things condition a life? I guess they’re pretty normal under capitalism, but that doesn’t mean that they are acceptable. That doesn’t mean that they are wholesome.

I remember Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra ridiculing the professors for being misshapen fragments of life, for instance.

I want to see the profession pushing for something better, not seeking to be more “powerful,” “influential,” or “high performing,” but being focused on people having room in and because of philosophy to live whole lives with all their oddity and confusions. We should split off from the trend and try to practice good living.

The discipline of philosophy would have to become vulnerable. And, given the power asymmetries in the profession mirroring many of the inequalities of society, we’d also have to find ways to protest and challenge subtle and not-so-subtle forms of disciplinary oppression without repeating the vices of neoliberalism and settler colonialism. As you know, I don’t think that the “Left” has always done this so well.

Then, before the precariousness forced on us by neoliberal labor practices, attacks against the humanities, and by the administrative bloat that marshals these into both strategic and blundering erosions of Departments of Philosophy and related programs, becoming sustainable would depend on being vulnerable without being weak. Is there a way to be vulnerable that bypasses the – abusive – dichotomy of “hardness” and “softness”? The call here is for a different logic of strength, for the pressure to come off as invulnerable in academia is already dehumanization.

It matters whether people doing philosophy lead thoughtful, human lives.  How can there be a search for human wisdom without some such reference point?

Someone might reply, “Only if we look for effects on the society, not the thinker.” But if we abandon the thinker to look only to collective wisdom, letting their lives be contradictory sacrifices of unsound being for the common good, we don’t ask that the practice of philosophy work out something for the practitioner between their thinking, writing, & their lives. Yet that connection holds personal promise for people anywhere to exercise their own cognitive agency so that they can improve the local good of their lives and neighborhoods. It isn’t moral to let that part go.

I remember Foucault’s discussion with Chomsky. It’s always bothered me.  Chomsky strikes me as being a straight up person. Remember when we met him in Cambridge in 2007 with our model U.N. team (by the way, look at what we started!)? How was Foucault with him? Maybe it was me, but that night, Michel seemed to toy with people.

Yet noting this kind of thing seems hyper nit picky. The idea was to hold a debate between “great minds,” to have a sparring match, not a heart-to-heart. The custom wasn’t there, and the media frenzy pushed against finding one. That night, Foucault’s lack of sincerity was better located as a feature of the unstable and fragmentary institution of academia.  It wasn’t unique to our discipline; it was part of a larger problem of knowledge in societies such as those of Europe and America.

I’m remembering Shiri Pasternak’s introduction to her work for the Algonquins of Barriere Lake. She had to go out of her way to make her academic research trustworthy, called for, and reciprocal.

The philosophical and moral problem is that knowledge is detachable from moral relations, and what moral relations there are are often thin, whether under liberal pretense or under “strategic,” anarcho-socialist “solidarity.”   In the U.S.A. at large, there aren’t well worked out roles and relationships establishing high degrees of reciprocity, accountability, trust, and equality.  Echoing Kyle again, I’m remembering Rousseau.

Thoughtfulness among “great thinkers” easily drifts away from being on the level with folks in everyday, moral relationships. The line here can be blurry. People who are brilliant and highly successful often make exceptions for themselves so that they don’t have to be on the level with people.  By contrast, what is everyday thoughtfulness?

One of the things I’ve appreciated about our series is that the posts we’ve co-created often felt personal. Through them, we glimpse people and their lives.  I think of Michael Eze’s snapshots, Bin Song’s origin story, and of Joey and John Burt’s community.

What should be the relationship between the personal and a form of life? Perhaps the singularity of “a” form of life is what’s hexing me. To really love wisdom seems, in this world and in institutions called “academic” to live blurred among many forms, often pulling apart, clumping, overlaying, not meeting up in any perfect union. The lack of high degrees of many important qualities of interpersonal and institutional relationships just accentuates this fragmentation. What, then, keeps things together?

J.

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May 8^th, 2021

Hi Jeremy,

I understand “forms of life” (loosely) in a Wittgensteinian sense, as the conditions that make language, or, in this case, philosophy meaningful. Forms of life need not be coherent or gapless. They can be muddled, fragmentary, and inconsistent – these features would constitute the particular form of life and the way life is made meaningful under it.

When we do admin, teach, or write, it is still life that we are living constituted by particular structures of meaning and priority. Recognizing that this is life that we are living and asking what kind of form it has (that, for instance, it is fragmentary, or unstable, etc.), allows us to bring into view the background conditions that generate and shape philosophy but may fall out of view. In talking to our interviewees, we saw that it is communities, institutional contexts, political commitments, historical events, and friendships in which (academic) philosophy is embedded.

I think these muddled forms of academic life are very much lived and have profound consequences on our sense of self, our relationships with our counterparts, and our private lives — whether we delay having children, feel pressured into devoting our energies to “marketable” topics in philosophy, or how, under conditions of precarious labor, we turn to those we love careworn, anxious, and overstretched. This is, indeed, a problem under neoliberalism in general, and in this sense, the university as an institution participates in (a) broader form(s) of life.

Forms of life can be vicious, incoherent, and unsustainable. Recognizing a form of life as such allows us to criticize the way our lives are formed and reflect on the way we find and make meaning. What is the form of life at our institutions? What kind of life do we live in them?

I agree with you that the moral and philosophical problem may lie in the way that academic (knowledge) work comes apart from the rest of our lives (morals relations). I’ve seen this, too. The more technical and disconnected from life philosophy is, the more attractive it is in some quarters. In fact, I have witnessed real contempt towards philosophy as a way of life even in the more or less standard sense during my time as a student. Public philosophy, too, in some quarters is an object of derision, not to be taken seriously. In other contexts, I have been told that standing up for certain causes is doing the job of an activist, not an academic.

So, there is a sense, across the board, in which our institutional setting can discourage continuity between who we are, our communities at large, our commitments, and what we do academically. Splitting the cogitation from the person who does the cogitating, does not, however, leave the person unaltered. To argue against climate change in one’s work while working within an institution that is funded by Shell, without complaint, must do something to one’s character.

When I reflect on philosophy and its relation to life, I think back to how and why we were first taken by philosophy.

There is something true in how and where we first find things.

I studied philosophy in what was an exceptional community, and the philosophers who struck me back then, Descartes and al-Ghazali, for instance, were committed to questions of knowledge as questions of life. Al-Ghazali was touched by his epistemological skepticism as by a “malady” from which he suffered for months. Al-Ghazali’s lived skepticism is not so different from what Wittgenstein appeals to when he says that philosophers ought to drop the pretense of skepticism to see how they (and we) actually live. Turning to the latter might show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle and dissolve philosophical quandaries along the way, but it also brings us closer to moral relations, to questions of agency and responsibility.

But Wittgenstein can only go so far. Feminist philosophers, like Hilde Lindemann, raise questions about what it is that allows a person to assume the role of cogitator, to set aside one’s situation in the world. What kinds of relations must a person be embedded in for the world not to impinge on them as they sit at their table, cogitating? Here we cannot help but think of questions of class, race, and gender, as well as broader historical structures of power in which philosophy is embedded.

For some time, I had an allergy to these questions in relation to philosophy, because I wanted philosophy to be pure and good – far away from power, before it. I certainly don’t think philosophy is reducible to relations of power, but again, philosophy exists in forms of life (that encompass the institution but also extend beyond it).

I’m now thinking of Edmund Husserl, whose Cartesian Meditations I found both enticing and formidable as an MA student. Sara Ahmed asks what conditions make it possible for Husserl to write the foundational works of phenomenology. In other words, what conditions make it possible for him to sit at his table and even get started?

There is no cogitator without the whole person, and the whole person is embodied, historical, and fundamentally situated.

Phenomenologists argue for this view when they say, for instance, that the subject and the world are inextricable (co-constitutive for each other), but the consequences of such a line of thinking are far-reaching. Acknowledging that we are always somewhere, always in a situation, means that philosophy and philosophers, too, are embedded in the world. We can then raise questions about our place in our institutions, our society, as well as the history of knowledge production in the West.

That gets me wondering, in light of how you conclude your letter, what is it to have a moral relationship to knowledge?

–  Sidra

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In part II, Sidra and Jeremy will speak to this question.  They’ll also announce some changes to the series, since they plan to taper down their two mini-series and phase in the next ones, including one about joining up with philosophy debates when one is an outsider, another about poverty in philosophy, and a third about how philosophy includes stories of good relationships.  Also beginning next month, they’ll shift to a single, monthly post on the last Friday of each month.

As always, be in touch if you’d like to be part of this series or have an idea for it.

Thank you for reading.

See you June 25th for part II.

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.