Dr. Nathifa Greene, I would like to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m really looking forward to hearing about your work. I expect we’ll talk about a lot of different issues, but to begin, I wonder if you can tell me a little about what excites you about philosophy.
I really like intellectual history, lineages of ideas, and tracing connections. I enjoy thinking about where ideas come from, or how things developed in the past. And the cool thing about intellectual history in philosophy is that we can, in a way, follow the lineages of ideas.
Is there a figure or person in particular who got you excited about philosophy? Or can you tell me how you became interested in philosophy?
I became interested in philosophy as a reader, by growing up as a child who loved to read. I loved literature and learning languages. And being Caribbean, I feel a connection to different traditions, languages, and places that feel close. So, I wouldn’t say I’ve been brought into philosophy by a specific figure or era. Growing up I became interested in philosophy before I even knew what it was.
You said something about following the lineages of ideas. What does that look like to you, or can you give me an example of what that means to you?
I like to attend to the nooks and crannies rather than the big picture. I like foregrounding the stories of people or events that are important, but maybe not discussed as much, or not foregrounded as much as they should be. I know this might sound really wild, but I think that Voltaire’s Candide is the best book about the Enlightenment because there are all these figures from different empires, different parts of the world, figures that show up representing such a wide range of issues and ideas. And also, because Voltaire hated that people loved it so much.
That’s the nook.
And so, while Voltaire would have wanted his encyclopedia to be the thing that people cared about the most, he was famously sexist, and so the fact that he is most widely known for this book ridicules him, in a way. I think Candide is a fabulous book for introductory philosophy courses because it opens up so much history of philosophy, colonialism, and attention to past global landscapes, like the Ottoman empire and the early modern history of Europe. This points to the earlier phases of European colonization of the Americas.
What do you think philosophy can do if we think of it in these ways, in the nooks and crannies?
I think philosophy gives us agency. It provides us with the ability to see that things did not just happen, but that ideas that became cultural practice are just ideas, and other ideas could become new cultural practices or new ideas that we take for granted. So, understanding how things came to be helps us to understand that they could be otherwise. Because if people made these things up, we could make up other things.
It sounds like when you think about philosophy it’s important to you to note that ideas have a particular kind of force, but that they are also important for future world-building.
Yes, because ideas come from somewhere. They merge in contexts with new ideas. We could make new texts.
Do you see yourself as a storyteller, as a philosopher?
That is a good question: Do I see myself as a storyteller? I see myself as a reader who loves stories, and so perhaps in my teaching and in conversation I communicate that. But no, I have not really thought of myself as a storyteller.
But now that you ask that question, I’m thinking about the way that I teach, using maps and visual tools to connect ideas to places, and bringing up lesser-known figures. I always do that in all my classes. So maybe I am weaving a story together. But it’s not how I plan to be a philosopher.
In the presentations I have heard you give, you often begin with a particular narrative or story, like that of Gang Gang Sarah in Tobago, and then from there you weave in the ethical and political implications of the story, or figures of the story, like the silk cotton tree. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Yes, the silk cotton tree is my current fascination, and for me the best part of philosophy is fascination.
So, the silk cotton tree is known as ceiba in Spanish. It’s a close cousin of the Kapok tree in Southeast Asia.
This tree has deep ancestral significance in Indigenous and African practices and spiritualities, and I’m currently working on its significance in the Americas. I aim to develop a kind of philosophical encounter with the questions that people are thinking about in Caribbean and in colonial philosophies with this tree as a centerpiece.
Philosophers typically haven’t worked very much with plants. And of course, there is the notorious comparison of Aristotle of women to flowerpots. And there is some interesting work in feminist interpretations of Aristotle challenging his use of the vegetative soul as a kind of nothing, like the work of Elaine Miller. In more commonly taught Western philosophy, that would be the exception. Another notable exception is in Caribbean philosophy, in creolization studies; people who work on Edouard Glissant to some extent talk about the roots as rhizomes, and the difference between the rhizome and the tap root. In these contexts, plants do figure into these philosophies.
The ceiba or silk cotton tree has spiritual, political, and historical significance. As a result, it’s a way for me to dive into issues in Indigenous and Afrocentric theorizing. While this tree is found in tropical zones around the world, I’m primarily focusing on the Afrodiasporic spiritualities and the significance of the ceiba in the Americas and in the Caribbean. It’s a place where words, practices, and meanings have had contact with Indigenous forms and to some extents have become uniquely mixed.
What can being attentive to the ceiba tree, for instance, as a point of fascination, do?
Well, it provides an opening for understanding the kinds of practices that make communities, the cultural and spiritual practices that are important for people. And just like any other special idea or object, this tree has a symbolic form of significance. It opens up onto bigger questions like the practices that enable survival of African peoples in the catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade, healing, and visions of life beyond survival. The tree is a point of entry.
Do you think that it can change the way in which philosophy is done?
I hope so. Thinking about this tree in this way enables us to question plantation monoculture. By analogy we could question the forms of monoculture and the ways that we set up our ideas and our cultures as mono-cultural. Just like with plants, monocultures are a recipe for disaster: diversity, resilience, and flourishing go together. So, I think that incorporating plants and other beings into the ways we do philosophy will make our thinking deeper, instead of just centering the human, alone, separate from other forms of life, and among humans, only ideas from a very small fraction of human beings.
So, what does it look like to think with the ceiba tree?
It looks like taking the materiality of the tree seriously, like the structure of the roots that are above ground and the way that the actual tree exists in its world as a figure. The material and the abstract go together. So, the kind of thing that the tree is in its world is philosophically interesting. It’s not a side issue, or just a steppingstone, but an integral part of my thinking.
You have me thinking about the act of tending, like tending to a garden as someone whose goal is not to necessarily create the garden, but to foster or encourage it towards its own ends…
…so it can be what it needs to be instead of just being only what I envision. There are so many parts of plant life that do their thing independently of what humans want them to be or can control. And unfortunately, when we do try to control plants in this way, like with monoculture, the results aren’t very good.
I enjoy learning to partner with plant life.
Can you tell me more about your research?
As a gardener I hope to connect my love of plants more closely to my intellectual life. And right now, it is the ceiba tree that I’m enjoying because it’s a point of entry into ideas in Caribbean philosophy.
It’s a special tree in Indigenous an Afrodiasporic cultures, which are important to me.
And I’m thinking of integrating that tree into future projects.
You have mentioned a bit about the spiritual aspects of the ceiba tree, but can you tell me about ethical or political aspects of the ceiba?
In addition to the general point about the risks of monoculture, there’s a deep resonance of respect for other beings tied to that tree in civilizations around the world. It is found in creation myths, it is a site of sacred rituals, and there are prohibitions against cutting it down. It’s a tree that’s treated with reverence and respect in different cultures, and it also became a symbol of anti-colonial resistance. For example, the place that’s called Mucurapo just outside of the place that is now known as Port of Spain, Trinidad. Mucurapo means the place of the ceiba in the Indigenous language.
To me that points to the ways that people connect and build rituals and practices that preserve humanity in a world that tries to deny them humanity. In this view, the tree represents ways to be human.
I appreciate the way you describe how the ceiba tree teaches us how to be human. I think that is a really striking point, which goes against a lot of traditional European theorizing. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
In an anthropocentric world, humans make everything up and decide everything, and determine the future by ourselves. But learning with and from other beings, human beings could come up with better ideas and be better thinkers, less oblivious and more sensitive to the implications of our ideas. And I think our philosophy should reflect that. We are interconnected, not just human beings to each other, but humans and other kinds of beings as well. And it is a kind of deprivation to do philosophy without acknowledging this fact.
Given your approach to philosophy, and working against a mode of deprivation, can you tell me a bit about how you approach teaching philosophy?
I like doing philosophy with maps in order to put ideas into historical context. Bringing a sense of place into philosophy is important for me, because disembodied names of figures get held up as these venerated sorts of demigods. But, I think there is an alternative way to do philosophy with students by bringing the ancient Mediterranean, the Americas, the Atlantic world, or Australia into the classroom. Not just a map, but images. Since we have the technology to do that, it brings the ideas down from this disembodied heaven, where only a few people get to be called philosophers. Bringing ideas into the human realm, and learning to think critically, practicing the things that philosophy teachers and students can do with figures who aren’t the supposedly canonical ones, or the only ones who get to be called philosophers.
For example, in my ethics courses, I might teach virtue ethics with African or Asian philosophers who talk about character and virtuous or vicious traits, rather than just Aristotle. Aristotle is not the only virtue ethicist to ever live, and so opening up the boundaries of philosophy by thinking with a sense of place can alter assumptions of who a philosopher is supposed to be.
Can you tell me how you use maps in your in your teaching? What does that look like?
A map of the Mediterranean world as the ancient Mediterranean people experienced it included Africa, but not Northern Europe. Northern Europe was a different place in the political imaginary of the ancient world and in the early stages of European colonization of the Americas given that the maps of the Iberian peninsula, for example, would typically have Asia on them. Consider the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Treaty of Zaragoza, those lines that were drawn didn’t map the Atlantic world as we know it now, but Europe, Africa, and the Americas were drawn with lines that included China because of Chinese trade in the 1400s, and that was much more present up until the 1600s.
And I have shown Aztec maps of the Americas as well in class, to make these places a part of our thinking.
The goal is to expose what we take for granted, for example in the idea of North America. I think maps are an interesting way to bring those questions into the classroom.
Asking for assumptions is another useful point of entry into philosophy, like figuring out what assumptions are guiding an argument or a system as we map it out. That kind of excavation is more interesting than just telling students what to think. I like to evoke a sense of curiosity and maps are one way to do that, but not the only.
Of course, it is difficult as a teacher to evoke fascination or curiosity in someone else. But I will say it’s always my hope to spark curiosity. I think that if curiosity drives a student, then they’re much more engaged than if they’re just trying to memorize or follow information. I can’t say that I’m always successful, but it is my hope to spark curiosity.
I was struck, too, by the way that you talked about disembodiment, about being disembodied as a relation to place. And so that place becomes a body in some sense, in that framing.
That is true. I love that you put it that way. Place brings the materiality of life into the names or the texts and the ideas that we’re talking about. And aside from personal biographies of thinkers, influential people and influential ideas end up shaping the places where we live. That is what ideas do. So, bringing a sense of place into philosophy reconnects ideas and those of us who think about ideas into the world.
So in a sense, then, you think ideas can bring life?
I think ideas organize our lifeworlds and they are really precious things. They shape us, and they shape the world. So yes, ideas help us to sustain life and we should tend them like tending and caring for plants.
Thank you, Nathifa, for taking the time to speak with me today. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to reading more of your work!
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Nathifa Greene
Nathifa Greene is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Buffalo (SUNY). She works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. Her publications can be found in the following journals: Badiou Studies; Philosophy Today; Radical Philosophy Review; Hypatia; philoSOPHIA; and Philosophy Compass. She is the founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop. She enjoys rock climbing, camping, knitting, and walking the dogs!
