A Little Place to Oppose Insecurity in the World

Still from Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna by Chantal Akerman (1978), paired with Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” covered by Bardo Pond (2015).  The still prefigures one of the only scenes of contact in the film, two people smoking out the window of a train in media res, deep into the night between Brussels and Paris.  Anna is momentarily at home in trains of thought.

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What makes doing philosophy morally worthwhile? What constitutes a moral relationship to knowledge? And what do our institutions have to be like to create the grounds for such a relationship?

In the second half of their correspondence, thinking back to their own intellectual biographies, Jeremy and Sidra consider the ways in which autonomy, authenticity, and interpersonal care contribute to moral meaning in academic work. And they reflect on what community and place, as well as rootedness and uprootedness, mean for one’s relationship to philosophy.

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May 25^th, 2021

New Shoreham, Rhode Island

Dear Sidra,

I’ve been thinking of your last letter, how I should respond.  My undergraduate institution’s department of philosophy underwent an historic implosion as I became a junior in college.  Was studying philosophy a mess?  But there were professors then who supported the intellectual autonomy of students to a great extent, perhaps far more than at any comparable institution at the time.  As a result, rather than being driven to conform to narrow forms of pre-professional philosophy either in the analytic or Continental traditions, many students found their way between traditions and even used the personal voice.  

(Sound familiar?  Genealogies of philosophy can have this déja vu.  From failure came good things.)

Personal and academic inquiry can be joined.  Knowledge-seeking can support our authenticity, in Charles Larmore’s sense, where we stand behind our commitments without cynicism or stratagem. That part of undergraduate education was moral, since it showed how knowledge-seeking coheres with, rather than pulls against, our autonomy as persons.

In graduate school, I came to appreciate objectivity – that virtue of practices, not state of knowingness.  The practice of objectivity was bound up with intersubjective accountability.  It cultivated and depended upon ego decentering whereby what mattered was to get things right, not to be the one who is right.  

Then the friend was one who cared enough to criticize your position, pushing for greater comprehension, not the one who avoided disagreement.  When things worked, students collaborated through critique, not superficial feel-goodness.  Surface agreeableness did not matter more than being truthful.  Being truthful felt good, and our minds grew through it.

I still hold critique as a form of solidarity.  Yet how can one emphasize the importance of personal inquiry while not taking things personally during inquiry?  The conjunction’s complex, for we do owe it to ourselves to figure out what makes sense to us, i.e., to respect autonomy in ourselves as we desire to understand.  We also owe it to each other to try to get things right above and beyond the caprice of our egos. 

Our relationship to knowledge won’t be moral if we seek to know without it making sense to us to do so or if we avoid each other’s judgments and opinions – not to mention the evidence of the world – and prefer instead to insulate ourselves in egotistical satisfaction.  What kind of people would we be if we didn’t care enough about the world to get to know it – or if we didn’t care about each other enough to hear each other out?

Yes, we need to be true to what makes sense to us in order to be autonomous.  But we also cannot live deluded and remain autonomous.  We can be autonomous only on the basis of letting the world – and others’ viewpoints – in, including tarrying with the negatives.

Jeremy

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30 May, 2021

Amsterdam 

Dear Jeremy,

Your letter made me think back to my own philosophical past, the earliest relationships I had with philosophy. I remember I chanced upon a copy of Aristotle’s De Anima, when I was around fourteen. I think this was at a book fair at my high school in Kuwait. As eager as I was to read the book, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Instead, I followed my youthful penchant for musty authors and became an avid reader of Alexander Pope (again without understanding much of it).

After my first failed encounter with Aristotle, I encountered philosophy more closely when I was eighteen while studying in Sharjah with a friend who, a year or two older than me, had already read Nietzsche, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. My friend and I spent hours in the university library leafing through the artbooks. On one occasion, my friend read the table of contents of Ecce Homo and told me about Rousseau’s Confessions. I was amazed. But my friendship also challenged me, because it asked me to reconsider my framework of intelligibility, how it is that I made sense of the world and my life in it. Philosophy was entangled with art, entangled, too, in a friendship. Whenever I think about my relationship to philosophy back then, to my friend, the painted landscapes we looked at together come to mind, the tall cypress trees….

I encountered philosophy formally, first in our ethics class where we read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Most of my classmates studying philosophy with me were women. It is difficult to explain the situation for many of us back then, and I feel that I should tread carefully here, because women in the Middle East are so often typified and understood through distorted and clichéd narratives. Let me just say that the questions we struggled with were complicated, profound, and philosophical. In my own case, my mother did not study beyond primary school and was married at fourteen, the same age when I tried to read Aristotle for the first time. I understood the gravity of being in a classroom as did many of my classmates who — as lost as one is in that phase of one’s life — were similarly sincere about knowledge, serious beyond their years. On long drives with my closest friend, (incidentally, her name is Sofia) we wondered about religion, our own place in society, our future. 

I recount these things here because it is in this environment that we read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and encountered Islamic philosophy. It was also here that I read Kierkegaard’s Either/or and Fear and Trembling, where he says, under one of his pseudonyms, that he has never been afraid to follow a thought through to its conclusion, that faith is not merely self-assured obedience, but also doubt and anguish. Autonomy and authenticity both, as you point out, too, worked together and characterized my relationship to philosophy. I felt that I had a living relationship with what I read.

And this was helped by our department back then, anarchic and wide-ranging, yet surpassing merely shallow or diffuse interdisciplinarity. The courses worked together to deepen things. So, it was the broader environment, even the congenial relationship between faculty members, that created the ground for a moral relationship to knowledge. Turning to what I encountered here with cynicism would have been a betrayal. 

I see how practices of objectivity – including holding each other accountable through critique and disagreement – are significant to a moral relationship to knowledge. I’d like to add, however, that disagreements rooted in the desire to get it right, as you put it, are moral only if they are grounded not only in care for what is under discussion but also for each other. Critique is an expression of care when it has the right object and includes right relations. I saw critique of this kind and the serious thinking that goes with it during my graduate and post-graduate studies often. But I also saw, in some cases, that the pursuit of objectivity meant leaning into people for their philosophical choices. For some time, I thought this attitude may be what is needed to succeed as an academic. Thankfully I learned, via negativa, if you will, that the pursuit of objectivity (or truth) is, in fact, at odds with dismissiveness.

Truth-seeking cannot be inhospitable or unkind, and hospitality and kindness, are deep and difficult, certainly not the same as “anything goes.”  

I don’t say this for disliking arguing when it matters, when arguments are serious, when they have the right object, and aim at what Gadamer called, a “fusion of horizons.” But what of directionless attempts at shredding someone’s work that veers into derision and contempt? How can a relationship to knowledge be moral when we cease being moral to each other as we pursue knowledge together? So, the pursuit of objectivity is indeed about disagreement, but how we disagree seems to me to be crucial for moral practices of disagreement.

Let me ask you now – what kinds of environments create the grounds for a moral relationship to knowledge? 

– Sidra

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May 30^th, 2021

Shaker Heights, Ohio

Dear Sidra,

On returning to Ohio, something came to me.  I wanted to be critical of my educational experience.

Last week went by, windswept in ocean roar.  On the drive home through Connecticut, then Manhattan where we spent the night at my Aunt Ruth’s place after dropping her off from the week, and next across Pennsylvania into Ohio, I started reconnecting with my time in Connecticut and New York City in college and just after.

Leaving Connecticut and New York City for Chicago was hard for me in my early 20s, because of the way I made sense in that New England ecosystem.  For many years in Chicago, I did not make sense there.  Only in the last years of graduate school did I make sense where I lived.  But then I had to leave for my first full time academic job out West.  

Last evening, as Misty & I chatted in bed before drifting off, she summed the moral:  

“Education in this country doesn’t make sense, because you’re supposed to leave the places where you’ve formed a community to go somewhere else to study at a higher level.”

We slept soundly, the night back from being away for the first time in two years, and I dreamed many things.  When I awoke, I realized that a flaw in my educational experience – in the tacit norms of the system in which I studied – is that community, place, and education do not work together.  Indeed, they aren’t supposed to.

As I finished undergrad, a venerable professor suggested that I might continue my studies there.  But everyone with whom I spoke (even this professor on second thought), claimed that going somewhere else was more important because of the new professors and new challenges that one will face.  

In the educational culture surrounding me, there was little valuation of the community wherein I had become comfortable, knew my way around, had relationships built up, and could find a rare route. I knew the feel of the weather, sky, and street-corners, had an intuitive sense of how to enter into a social scene or how to grow into something adjacent to my existing way of life.  

By contrast, when I got to Chicago, I couldn’t grow into an adjacent way of life, because I had to work to understand what my way of life was at all. It scarcely felt like a life for many years.

 Misty summed up this realization again: 

“Education in this country is messed up, because you’re supposed to ‘go forth and conquer.’”  

I could have not admitted this messed up & shallow feeling to myself then.  But underneath ambitious schools that set the normative tone and competitive standards of the U.S. educational system, some such message gets whispered like the silent words suffusing the home in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner.”  You don’t have to leave home to find the traces of imperialism in such a world!

But what if formal, philosophical education were spun around places and communities where we make sense?  What if sage advice were to find a place where you make sense and to stay in that place learning until you no longer make sense there?  Are we already morally uprooted when we no longer make (or never have made) sense in an educational setting?

To your “situated philosophy” from last month’s letters, I then agree.  Something morally problematic has transpired in working displaced from where we make sense – an original rupture.  

(“Where we make sense” gets at something categorically different than “where it makes sense,” too.  The latter expression gets used to “challenge” ourselves with new conquests.)

~ Jeremy

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June 1^st, 2021

Shaker Heights, Ohio

Dear Sidra,

I just got your letter!  Your reply was buried in a Gmail chain, and I didn’t see it.  Our letters passed in transit.  

Jeremy

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June 4, 2021

Amsterdam

Dear Jeremy,

Since reading your windswept letter, I’ve been considering the idea of place and movement. What did it mean to leave to pursue knowledge for historical figures who moved to renowned places to study – Baghdad, Samarkand, Delhi? Here, once again, al-Ghazali came to mind.

In the midst of a philosophical and spiritual crisis, al-Ghazali left Baghdad, his family, and his teaching position at Niẓāmiyyah first for Damascus, and then Jerusalem, returning home to Iraq a whole decade later. Al-Ghazali’s realization that his pursuits had been inauthentic compelled him to leave. His pursuit of authenticity left him with little recourse but to change the course of his life. However, it is, in part, the circumstances that allowed him to do so, and I imagine al-Ghazali’s wife or daughter could hardly have traveled as he did, nor could his servants (if he had any) have done so.

Could it be said that al-Ghazali abandoned his family and his obligations in Baghdad? Could it be said that he did so immorally, that his pursuit of knowledge, came apart from moral considerations having to do with place and community? In fact, he even lied, claiming to be going to Mecca to save himself the trouble of explaining his spiritual crisis to his colleagues and officials of the state. Here, however, the two characteristics of a moral relationship to knowledge you identified in your first letter come to mind: authenticity and autonomy.

Al-Ghazali did not leave in search of more prestige elsewhere, but because, given who he felt he was, he — as you put it in your last letter — stopped making sense in Baghdad. It was in pursuit of an authentic relationship to knowledge that he left.

Furthermore, though he spent long meditative periods in isolation, al-Ghazali was not solitary. He turned to others to give himself and his perspective traction, conversing with various schools of thought on his journey, as recorded in Deliverance from Error. So like Descartes who sent the manuscript of the Meditations to his counterparts before including the “objections and replies” at the end of it, al-Ghazali’s philosophical perspective developed through encounters with others. In this sense, the deepening of his philosophical and spiritual perspective was fundamentally intersubjective. This intersubjectivity captures what you described as practices of objectivity in your first letter. 

Now, to move closer to your last letter, you say that there may be something imperial involved in moving to new places to study within the U.S. American context. The spirit of al-Ghazali’s travels and of my own (though not quite driven by reasons as profound as al-Ghazali’s) cannot be characterized as imperial. There was no “motivation” to go forth and conquer. There was a compulsion to leave. The motivation didn’t take the form of a pull towards something discrete – say, new ground to conquer — it was a kind of searching. (So, I’m now wondering about what movement — staying or leaving — has meant to me over the years…. )

Start with the conditions that allow someone to stay or leave. I alluded to this earlier in our first correspondence in light of the conditions that allow one to begin philosophy, also when I mentioned that al-Ghazali’s position enabled him to leave (as courageous as his decision was to actually do so). For some, the question of place and community is indexed to a passport. And if a moral relationship to knowledge includes a deepening of one’s relationship to one’s community, this possibility might be foreclosed for some, owing to where they are from, their financial situation, and similar factors. But this does not mean that one’s relationship to knowledge is less than moral. 

In fact, I’m now wondering if there are ways in which a moral relationship to knowledge may in fact push against one’s embeddedness in a community, whether the philosopher, as authentic, isn’t always solitary in some sense. Take Pierre Hadot who describes philosophers as strange, at odds with their community. Isn’t the philosopher the one who questions things, who does not belong?

The reason I’m wondering about these things is that both community and a sense of place have been something transitory and dispersed for me given the conditions that I described earlier. Even now, as I think back to my time in Sharjah, I remember how there was a great deal of ambivalence I experienced about being there.  

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June 7^th, 2021

Shaker Heights, Ohio

(land of many older nations)

Hey Sidra,

I love the name “Nour” (نور / light) – the name of many boys and girls.  Thank you for reminding me of Niche of Lights.

Initially, you asked, “How do you think we can create an environment in which students can relate to knowledge morally?”  Then in your last letter, you suggested that displacement can have an intellectual and moral motivation.  These two concerns focus us on environments that we create, not on the ones that we are given. 

Yes. We cannot be autonomous within environments if we do not come to relate to them as making sense to us.  To come to relate to an environment we’ve been given involves identifying enough with it that we make sense there.  In practice, this may imply recreating it.  

When I complained that community, education, and place do not often work together in neoliberal higher education, I meant to point to some such personal relationship to one’s place and how one learns in it.

Without relating to things personally, we cannot focus in on whether they make sense to us entirely in the context of our lives, whether following them out is true to ourselves, or what it would be to care for people and all that matters with a whole heart and mind.  These aren’t infallible things. But the soulfulness – and surfaced emptinesses – in our personal worlds reveal micro-details in our days and nights, through bodily feelings, dreams, errant thoughts – each a chance to throw social reproduction out of joint.

Should we then worry about reproducing alienation or injustice in ourselves?  Yes.  But connecting with ourselves is one – not infallible, but real – check on the system.

In my experience, academic philosophy often ignores the interpersonal dimension of life, including what personal acquaintance means for moral substance, learning, and the process of becoming thoughtful, liberated people together.  One of the main things I’ve come to consider after three decades in academic philosophy is whether philosophy would feel different – and differently – if we engaged in it through the depth and accountability of personal relationships.  

Do folks approach education, migration, work, or much else out of the spirit of going forth and conquering or out of the spirit of interpersonal care?  To move across borders in this world today almost certainly runs afoul of imperial history as we navigate the morally arbitrary and highly insecure territorial sovereignties of nation states.  Then there’s the deracination that’s part of capitalism, where communities and ecologies don’t come before profits, and our cities are torqued.  

Keeping strong personal relationships to what we do helps in such situations.  When they are strong, our relationships provide seemingly endless resources for criticizing the often impersonal, dehumanizing, unjust, and alienating systems in which we commonly find ourselves living and working as academics and as people navigating the still imperial world order with its rampant capitalism.  

In relating personally to the places where we live and work, we eventually have to stake something of ourselves to get started.  Personal relationships have a phenomenological priority “in our blood and bones,” as Raimond Gaita once wrote, allowing us to stretch toward ourselves, if I may put it like that, so that we can make sense where we are – or begin to protest against our environs.  

In this darkness, I see Al-Ghazali seeking to find what it is that he could stake.  We begin to create moral learning environments by staking ourselves in them.  Mariette, Joey and John Burt, Julia, or Bin Song took the place where they were and gave themselves to it, both conserving parts of it and remaking others.  By putting their souls into their lives where they were, they connected with their places, work, and learning in ways that, to my mind, opens up the authenticity and autonomy of their relations.  

Whenever I get stuck, I go back to an interpersonal perspective to orient myself toward answers.  It grounds things, giving them a balance point from which I can go forward.  It’s gotten me out of abusive places. Care-memory is resilient.

Our series has been slowly situating academic philosophy in personal relationships to people, places, and to learning.  It’s been eroding what’s grandiose about philosophy by a wave-like action that simultaneously restores some of what’s life-sized and familiar.

*

There’s one thing I want to flag as we go. The personal can be a source of agency and resistance – it has heart – but it doesn’t immunize anyone against precarity. There’s little ultimately learnt without opposing precarity in the world.

The system of imperial capitalism – racialized, classist, and sexist – undergirds and drives the displacement and uprootedness, the lack of human connection, and the meritocratic and exclusive reproduction of elite schools that haunted me, even as I learned something from them. Through the complexities of post-colonial nation forms, the system has joined our experience at Sharjah in a highly stratified and yet economically disorienting society with both the insecurity of labor in Amsterdam today and the exclusiveness and privilege of the colleges I attended before we happened to meet.

Yet we are one in this world; our fate is joined; no knowledge is moral if it allows some of us to be the sacrifices or the dross of others benefitting from insecurity and inequality.

Jeremy

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June 10^th, 2021

Amsterdam

Dear Jeremy,

After reading your last letter, I helped out a friend on their plot of land. As I was pulling out the grass and weeds from their roots, I thought of the torquing that you describe happening to people, institutions, and cities. It made me wonder about the role that universities play in our uprooted world. And I found my reflections came full circle back to bios and the forms of life we considered in our first round of letters last month. 

Under some conditions, say of exploitative labor, it is difficult to have a moral relationship to one’s work – to turn to it in a way that is autonomous, authentic, and governed by interpersonal care. Lynne Huffer described fear as seeing life through a straw. One could say this about fear’s close relative, anxiety, too. When we interviewed Susan Neiman, she described how growing up, reaching maturity, is being able to distinguish between the major and the minor. When institutions foster forms of precarious labor at times even keeping out temporary staff members from democratic representation, they perpetuate conditions of anxiety. When staff are replaceable for universities, how can there be a deepening of a relationship to one’s place? How can one stake something to create a community, as you put it?

The uprootedness here is top-down. People have to leave places where they could have grown. If community and interpersonal care are significant for a moral relationship to knowledge, then at times conditions quite outside our own control impair our moral relationship to knowledge.

Bernard Williams might be right – moral praise or blame is not just down to individuals choosing something, but to extraneous factors that are outside the agent’s control. Williams’ position here is akin to Adorno’s claim that the wrong life cannot be lived rightly. But I think that while an individual’s moral relationship to knowledge might be determined (in part) by factors outside her control, these factors need not be matters of sheer luck.

To bring this to bear on institutions, the order of priority – say profit before ethics – that constitutes many of our institutions is not the luck of the draw, but part and parcel of entrenched colonial and capitalist (for Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh the two are inseparable) arrangements of power, and, often, the result of decisions which include deliberate inaction in the face of unethical policies. I’m referring here not to the historical fact of colonialism but to a way of thinking about the world — the logic of colonialism — which measures the worth of human beings in light of capital and renders them expungable in its service.

Writing about this reminds me of Arendt’s essay on Kafka where she describes what happens when human laws, open to change in light of our priorities, are treated as tantamount to natural laws that are outside the scope of our agency. She says understanding institutional or bureaucratic rules as necessary in the same way as the laws of nature is a forfeiture of autonomy (in the Kantian sense) and ultimately ruinous for one’s conscience – and, one could add, for the conscience of an institution.

Breaking rules is not a good thing when the rules are good. The same goes for commitments. But we know that when two courses of action are in conflict, we ought to go for what is our overriding duty. If the ethical were non-negotiable for our institutions, then rather than individuals having to live the wrong life governed by anxiety, the protocol and regulations – structures and arrangements of power – would have to change.

To my mind, ruthless competition and manufactured scarcity – each conditioning a great deal of (academic) work – are corrosive to a moral relationship to knowledge, including relations of autonomy, authenticity, and interpersonal care.

When universities hire staff – academic and non-academic – on exploitative contracts and justify these conditions by appealing to protocol, they impair interpersonal care. The uncaring policies of universities strain individuals in a way that they, in turn, struggle to turn towards the world with care.

Oftentimes, when these decisions are presented as matters of fate – our hands are tied; this is a broader issue; etc. – then interpersonal care is no longer the priority, and we no longer can be said to participate in making our institutions and the policies that shape them. We are, then, in the throes of what Arendt describes. We take human laws to be natural laws or, as she calls it, the law of ruin.

These considerations, I must say, seem far away from the place where I first found philosophy – those fragrant evenings when I walked among the palm trees, full of wonder.

S

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.