If you want to contribute to this mini-series, give me a shout: bendik-keymer@case.edu
“Are You a Philosopher?”
Meaning to be kind, sometimes people introduce me to other academics or outsiders by saying that I am a “philosopher.” It’s awkward when I tell them that I am not. It could look either like a ploy to actually be a philosopher by throwing things into question or like virtue signaling modesty, since who could ever claim to be a Philosopher? But I am in earnest. What I do with my questions and how I check the language game of social status is found apart from philosophy. It’s because I see something better than philosophy that I am not a philosopher. With that thing in view, not being a philosopher is freeing and more mature than being one. What makes sense to me instead is to say, as is true, that I work in the discipline of philosophy and have learned a lot from philosophical traditions, despite their shortcomings; it is worth transmitting philosophical practices and traditions to the next generation; there is much that is worthwhile in studying and practicing philosophy in any number of a variety of ways on any number of a variety of problems worth considering thoughtfully. Still, philosophy is just a discipline I work in.
What’s better than philosophy is growing up to become part of a community of people who are mature enough to communicate well and form good, deep, long-lasting, and authentic relationships in which people grow. No doubt philosophy has articulated many of the ideas that inform that ideal; its practices have helped construct it, and both the ideas and the practices contribute to sustaining the actual life of folks trying to live in such a way. Such a community can even be seen as a projection of elements of modern philosophy and its critics. Think of the idea of authenticity or the moral category of personal respect, even what it is to grow up. Around these ideas, practices of personal self-reflection; moral discernment, respect, and accountability; and critical thinking have found their way into many people’s lives. What Stanley Cavell stood for in his final book, his memoir, as to the modest and contextualized use of the discipline of philosophy to increase our intimacy with ourselves and each other; or what Bernard Williams suggested in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy or Making Sense of Humanity, that philosophy can make our lives somewhat better in the world beyond the academy; something that John Dewey centered academics on; or what Susan Neiman means by the Enlightenment notion of growing up, or Martha C. Nussbaum shows in her marathon efforts to engage with matters of public concern in an open and reasoned way beyond the academy but using it; these can be related to the ideas of integrity, intimacy, relationship, and morality that form the real goals of the work of Kierkegaard, Irigaray, and Levinas; and that in turn might lead us to consider how living in moral accountability is a horizon for our pursuits as R. Jay Wallace argues that it ought to be, but also Kyle Powys Whyte and Max Liboiron; or how being in touch with how we know others by acquaintance, as Kieran Setiya has begun to argue, articulates important dimensions of moral life; such that the forms of our lives are at stake through the projections of philosophy even more than philosophical positions or theories, something that underlay Wittgenstein’s mature practice of work in the discipline for the sake of the world beyond it.
The point still remains that the horizon of the life that I think is worth living is beyond philosophy, contextualizing its practices and traditions leading back to Ionian colonies roughly 2800 years ago, within a broader pursuit; to grow up, down, or into becoming people, and to live well in community. The emphasis, too, is not on theory, although theory is no doubt useful, and it is not even on practice, although we must do and be coordinated together to live and to live together. The stress is on relating well, on good relationships, on personal and interpersonal deepening and on mature and high-quality communication, with philosophy having a part to play in developing, critiquing, or sustaining these. The main reason why I am not a philosopher but only someone who works in the discipline of philosophy is that I care most about my relationships, not about giving an account of them. When I die, I don’t want to be remembered as someone who died nobly in a philosophical way, but by those who loved me and by my community as one of its plain members with my own idiosyncratic contribution. The contribution? Well, it may have involved philosophy, but it was really about the commitment, not the commitment being about the philosophy. The commitment to what? To being a person, not a fake, to being an okay person, not a creep, and to continuing to grow in my pursuits, tasks, and relationships. These are really commitments to whom.
And these things are small sounding but demanding as all get-out. To be an okay person is to have a conscience, and that means it is to care for justice and to be accountable to others and for what matters. In today’s world, to be an okay person is to seek decolonization and to take on the colonial world order that has petrochemically powered its way, thanks to imperialism, the nation-state, capitalism and industrial economics, into forcing the planet into a phase shift that may very well lead to reorganizing the rules of life through the great dying off of the sixth mass extinction. Philosophy has helped me understand this messed up history we are in, but the point is not be a philosopher but to deal with the history and let people be people, including, yes, in the “pluriverse” of worlds where the terms are so different that they do not include “philosophy” or even “person.” To echo Dipesh Chakrabarty, philosophy really is such a small, “provincial” thing. And of course philosophy is only a small province in the work of becoming a person, a who.
Probably the first person to pierce through my undergraduate philosophy bubble was the human right activist and sometimes philosophy or geography teacher, and Kierkegaard translator, Anne-Christine Habbard. The energy of her activism and love of philosophy was outmatched only by her commitment to and love for community, including just being part of her neighborhood. At a crucial time when I was entering the discipline of philosophy, thanks to her, I came to see that what mattered most to me still came from the lessons I’d learned from my parents, Esther Bendik and Dave Keymer, refined through philosophy, and it was found in people inside and outside the academy who are not identified as philosophers but who are thoughtful: the law professor Stephen M. Rich, the composer Steve Reich, the nurse and my first cousin once removed Ruth Bendik, the sociologist Neil Brenner, the novelist Alex Shakar, the social justice advocate and political scientist Rana Khoury, the financial analyst of real estate development Joel Scott Thompson, the school-teacher Lars Helge-Strand, the graphic designer Amir Berbic, the artist and gardener Joey Behrens, the early childhood educator Elizabeth Baker, the archeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy, the science communicator Judy Twedt, the drone couple and record store owners Windy & Carl, the English professor John Levy Barnard, my partner Misty Morrison. All these people have made the world genuinely thoughtful for me, and in that philosophy has often helped, but it has not been the essence of that thoughtfulness, nor has it been the center.
Thoughtfulness is nearer to the things that matter than philosophy. And so it is not just that, say, the films of Chantal Akerman, Rick Alverson, or Khalik Allah can be interpreted using philosophical practices, but that they help some of us to become more thoughtful in different ways even before practicing philosophy, like Sesame Street from 1969-76 did, or the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education in Chicago in the 1990s through the Chicago Family Centers explained in Dan and Sandra Scheinfeld and Karen Haigh’s We Are All Explorers. So too music has made some of us more thoughtful with or without our philosophy, hear, that Nonaah by Roscoe Mitchell. BAM (Black American Music) is philosophical, but its origin is in an ensemble, a tradition-of-crossing, more anonymous than named and more improvised than codified, its politics intent on displacing the code. Its listening-in-and-with each step? The promise is more than just being philosophical. Here, the thing that really matters is being thoughtful in our relations, especially when we’re raising children. Whether they do philosophy is really not that important. Oh, and another not-identified-as-philosopher taught me that, the musicologist A. J. Kluth, but also Stephen M. Rich, Dave Keymer, and reading Fred Moten.
Here I live in Cleveland, in Shaker Heights, where my neighbors probably go to psychotherapy much sooner than they would to a philosophy book, even a funny one mercifully light in the hand by Simon Critchley, and their psychotherapy is rarely a neo-Stoic development of philosophy as a way of life. The things they seem to find moving more likely include outdoor philosophy remote from disciplinary practice like Marisa Diaz-Waian’s Merlin CCC community organization, or even Julia D. Gibson’s farm practices; the books I imagine they read draw more on the anarchic spirit that Sadiya Hartman detailed where a dance or a love is more powerful than an idea. Or what we call “religion” in English matters to them, blurring lines with philosophy in practice as my neighbors seek to be all right on this block in their families and in their jobs, given this messed-up country. The kind of hybrid sensibility that Bin Song’s Ruism develops is closer to where people on my block are if they get philosophical: ritual, spirit, thought, good works, community-mindedness, not big theories and comprehensive accounts. This of course is nothing new to the discipline of philosophy where the hoi polloi (the “many”) have often had it hard, being seen as less than fully “reasonable.” But then philosophy hardly touches the history of what is called “private” life, and it isn’t obvious to me, either, that philosophy ends up being so reasonable.
The point is just that I have these many everyday reasons – let us call each person and point of culture a “reason” – to disidentify from philosophy and to put it in context, provincializing and making it just a small part of our much bigger lives. Standing on the outside, sometimes jumping in to participate, this is how I read Sidra’s Genealogies of Philosophy mini-series in my own way. What Jean-Luc Marion calls the “givenness” of thoughtful life far exceeds philosophy. Katherine seems to be writing about that already, not even a semester into Harvard in her series on Starting Out in Philosophy. She’s started out – and already jumped through. I think of my old friend Roger Lopez, a philosophy teacher in Mexico, who once walked Emerson Hall too. He went to the orchestra whenever he could anywhere in the world where he travelled, seeking out the music, jumping beyond philosophy.
The question is where we jump to. Katherine’s professor last semester, Sean D. Kelly, who so thoughtfully wrote about authenticity just last December on this site, focuses criticism on self-optimization, and he has reason. “Instrumentality” is deeper than its latest financialized form in neoliberalism, with roots at least as deep as Francis Bacon’s “torment[ing]” nature “by art” [i.e. by scientific technique] five hundred years ago, despite his noble intentions to interpret and to learn from nature. But where to grow, or how to thrive, instead? To my mind, the two questions lead to the same place: deepening our capacities for good relationships. I am not convinced that Professor Kelly has gotten to the simplest point by spending his time with Martin Heidegger, that murky and corrupt human being who lacked accountability and basic decency. You want more to life than tooling yourself? Become authentic in your relationships, that is, have some messy, faithful, difficult, caring, growing, de-centering, unsettling, empowering, humbling, inspiring, core-orienting, sustaining, life-transforming, lovely and loving relationships. The unexpected good that proves irony to all life-plans, as Charles Larmore once argued, is the thing to which the good life must be open. The problem with self-optimizing is the enclosure; it’s a misunderstanding of the self as a “me,” rather than as an accountability practice in relating to others and committing to our beliefs, acknowledging our desires, being responsible for our intentions, failing, failing better, and failing better again by recommitting to what matters in the face of each other and in the mirror. These are really commitments to whom. The moral core of the answer to the life-logic of technology isn’t Heideggerian thoughtfulness – that avoidance of conscience that co-opted and obfuscated conscience in the name of delusional and overblown “poetry” – it’s communication and intimacy in your family, working through difficulties in relationships and letting them be incomplete and messy, jettisoning the unhealthy desire to fit in and disappear into normalcy as the adaptation to domination that it was when you grew up, the bravery of facing injustice and acknowledging suffering. It’s way more plebeian than Being, even if the genealogical awareness of the Ontological Difference can help us see how modernity has been colonial all the way down into what Mignolo calls the “coloniality of knowledge.” But then am I just a Platonist about modernity – that the problem begins in our soulfulness and moral relations?
Thoughtfulness & Harmonious Relationships
So, the point of this last (!) mini-series of Into Philosophy called “On Congeniality” is to go before and beyond philosophy, even within philosophy, by thinking about our relationships, and not abstract ones, but the inter-and-intra-personal ones that allow or inhibit our growing up, down, and into becoming real, messy, and trying-to-be-moral people. Unlike Philosophy as a Way of Life, On Congeniality brackets philosophy to get a clearer view of what living should be for, even as philosophy may be useful for it at times. Let me now explain how that might work in this series opener.
Let us say, following an ancient tradition rooted through to the times and places where “philosophy” was coined as a neologism and solidified into schools, even “academies” (named after Plato’s use of the grove, just outside the city of Athens, named Hekademia after Akademos, Athena’s hero; this place was the site of Plato’s school), that a good part of both philosophical practice and philosophical life is the use of theory to both seek the true and to provide an account, an explanation of it. Here, we might agree with John Cooper’s criticism of Pierre Hadot, even if, as Caleb Cahoe did, we hold a space for ways of living that do not depend on theoretical reason but that can be part of the philosophical life alongside it. The point is that philosophy is bound up with theory. To do philosophy or to pursue the philosophical life is to seek to understand truly why we do what we do, are how we are, where we are, how we think, what everything that matters is, why somethings do not matter, are insignificant, or where the limits of our understanding are and why. The thing that’s crucial is the account of things, and this seeking truth always, reasoned out theoretically.
It makes good sense that theoretical explanation is central to philosophy. Philosophy has located a need of humans, something Martha C. Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought, following Lucretius, calls “the mind’s original joy.” Even as infants, we take delight in understanding the world and how it works – the what and the why – something the Scheinfeld’s underlined for me when we worked together on the Chicago Commons Family Centers in the early 2000s. Children have theories, too, about, for instance, how and why water falls down out of a shower – the example from We Are All Explorers. Philosophy emerged as a tradition that met the mind’s need to find joy in intellectual illumination, that is, in understanding that is explanatory and puts us into mental intimacy with things and our world. For myself, it would be a clear loss to the quality of my life if I were no longer able to inquire as to why things are as they are, to seek to understand them theoretically, and to question, criticize, even speculate within reason about all manner of things that come up in our complex existences and worlds. But I would live and can imagine a good life without it.
It’s this last realization that suggests the modus tollens, that is, if theoretical practice is both necessary to philosophy and philosophy has, as Cooper thought, laid claim to the good life. When my father worked for the New York State Association for Retarded Citizens, renamed in 1992, “the Arc,” to avoid the offense that ablist American culture started to make of the word “retarded,” it was obvious to me and to our family that people with variabilities that get made into disabilities in our society can live good lives and that their doing theory was not a necessary part of their good lives.
The issue goes deep here into how we understand being human. If we use an Aristotelian categorical about our life-form in the spirit of Michael Thompson and claim that philosophy is made for people who can do theory, then we come up on the noxious impression that those who cannot are “defective,” even if Thompson protests that the “defect” is not ethical, contra Foot’s account of natural goodness, but only interpretive for grasping the kind of organism we are and the limitation and potentials of a given individual interpreted under a species concept. A “defect” we have relative to our kind may actually be an ethical potential. But what if we understand being human in such a way that our kind is of secondary importance, except in so far as we think about our capacity for what Stephen M. Rich once called, around 1992, our “togetherness”? Certainly, that we can touch in such and such ways is relevant to that, and also that we can voice, signal, speak, emote, and so on. Then also that some of us can be together with those of us who are lost from contact, too, whether in comas, complex whorls of chemistry and neurons that close the outside world off from insight, or deep dissociative states.
The point here is then that being human is made between us, not individualized and judged as such, not ego-bound, and that the good life reflects this communal condition. Theory just isn’t necessary for all of us, nor is philosophy THE locus of authoritative living. Philosophy then has a context – a check in time, place and need – as well as something beyond it for which we ought to live. Philosophy just is a locus, one of many, for living that makes sense and can be good, and theory just is as well.
But I can’t wrap my head, because I can’t wrap my heart, around a good life that doesn’t involve togetherness and, even more, doesn’t center it. The hinge here isn’t that relating feels good, because it often does not. Relating has its own kind of authenticity, one found in intimacy, being close in the only way closeness grows, namely, through trust, consent, appreciation, consideration, self-reflection, communication, attending, patience, forthrightness, even sometimes anger, restraint, honesty, respect, that is: through thoughtfulness. With thoughtfulness, I include the full range of moral accountability to each other and ethical responsibility regarding what matters, and I center it in relational, not even practical or theoretical reason.
Whereas theoretical reasoning is guided by the true and practical reasoning is guided by the good, relational reasoning is guided by the beautiful understood as harmony, the free play of being inside a connection. As with any modes of our being thoughtful, it involves doing things – and so involves practical reasoning – and it depends on being clear sighted at times – and so on truth-seeking, although it does not need in many instances an account of what’s true to work well. Whereas theoretical reasoning depends on knowledge-that and practical reasoning depends on know-how, relational reasoning depends on knowing by acquaintance, and how it knows is as and of “who,” not “what.” That is, the operative category of reasoning relationally is that of persons or personae, and how things move between them, rather than that of the subject and object in reasoning theoretically and that of the agent and action in reasoning practically. In relating, things like agency and subjectivity are organized by the relating and the inter(or intra-)personal. So too is truth seeking and do-gooding, or, more prosaically, calculation.
The phenomenal modality of relating – of how its considerations appear and are conveyed, that is, its “reasons” – is also specific. Whereas theoretical reasoning unfolds through propositions functioning as “explanations-that,” and practical reasoning guides through deeds essaying as “showings-how,” relational reasoning calls us in – to echo an expression of Max Liboiron – through connections surprising us with “realizations-who,” or what Cavell seemed to call “acknowledgment.” If following Nussbaum, comprehension enjoys the mind’s original joy and agency regales in momentary empowerment, relationships deepen and broaden us in their often hard-won, inner complementarity. They “fill us up” (from the Latin root of “complement”) and enliven us, who we are, even as they open us and make us race into the space between us, the room of the world for being-with each other and even, by close extension, with the intimate qualities of things.
The point of this jaunt through theory spoken here inside our discipline of philosophy is to point to the life beyond our disciplinary logic, and not just the cynical one that many of us critique in neoliberal and colonial institutions of so-called “higher” education, but the one with sometimes tendentious roots in the ancient “soil” from which “philosophy” – that neologism – sprung in Ionia, only to shape itself strongly in Athens inside what has become a bizarre and itinerant genealogy behind the way knowing gets articulated today in university systems. The point is to speak inside our discipline about what’s beyond it.
Moving from this theoretical modality to one that is more phenomenologically consistent, what I am pointing to, and calling for, is the thoughtfulness that comes with togetherness, contributing to it, growing from it, the result of harmonious relationships, and issuing in them too. To live on account of these is not to depend on a theoretical account, but to develop the touch for another way in which the meaning of life and wisdom appear as we live our daily lives. Philosophy has a place in striving for and from a harmonious life, one of communication, community, intimacy inside our practices and our thoughts, and accountability for what matters as from an inner source that prefigures us, “who” we are. But to philosophize from the dramas of disharmony and the comedies of harmony that make us our lives in or fallen out of togetherness becomes a different thing, often very far from the cold and impersonal logic of the discipline and its functionaries’ practices.
To name just one thing that will be central to this mini-series, working from relational reasoning is seeking authenticity and accountability between people first, even within the Socratic condition of the elenchus that each of us state only what we believe. And this authenticity is emotional and relational, not just what Charles Larmore called a “practice of the self” rendering fidelity to our beliefs and desires. It is, more than anything, moral in R. Jay Wallace’s sense. But following Cavell – and Irigaray – Rich – and Whyte – and, yes, also the writerly practice of Kierkegaard in addressing the reader from his core – it is moral where the connection, or division, between us stirs who we are. The identification goes that deep.
~
This is an installment of Into Philosophy.
Of remaining mini-series, Sidra has just begun Precarity & Philosophy, and Katherine is underway with Starting Out in Philosophy. If you want to contribute to this mini-series, give me a shout: bendik-keymer@case.edu
ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).
Edited 2.1.22 to nuance the claim about Francis Bacon
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
