Philosophy is a neglected subject in American universities. Most young people in the U.S. have zero exposure to the subject and tend to associate philosophical thinking with the power of crystals and Oprah Winfrey. Other countries make philosophical thinking, logic and expression central to educational efforts at secondary and university levels -- France, for example.
The U.S. is now 29th in the world, by some reckonings, in reading levels in the general population and in "literacy" skills or "cultural awareness." (28% of Americans identify Andrew Lloyd Weber as the author of "A Midsummer Night's Dream.") The U.S. was 17th among developed nations in educational level when I was in law school. Dr. Ben Carson noted that out of 22 countries competing in math and science knowledge among university students, the U.S. was listed 21. Only one country had lower scores than the U.S. -- Look up the statistics. These are the numbers I remember.
At a party recently, an asshole who thought highly of himself, explained that what he knew of Hegel is only that the name "rhymes with bagel." He was proud of his ignorance. Here is another statistic that stayed with me. When I was an undergraduate student, then in law school, the U.S. automobile industry was surpassed in terms of the quality of its products by Japanese car makers. However, sales by Japan's auto makers totaled about 50% of global U.S. car sales. Recently, Japan became the world's largest maker and seller of cars. Japan is a fraction of the size of the United States. Japan should never out-produce or out-sell the United States of America. Japan is doing both today, deservedly.
Is there a connection between this lack of reading and widespread scientific ignorance by Americans and these developments? How many students are aware of these statistics or find them alarming for their future prospects? They should be alarmed. I promise you that this is an issue that should concern people much more than the fate of Ms. Hilton at the L.A. County Jail, the "cleavage issue" regarding any candidate's attire, or the fashion choices of a candidate's spouse. If I have to hear about another O.J. Simpson trial, I am moving to the North Pole -- but not New Jersey. I can't wait for Bill Clinton, as "First Spouse," to provide television viewers with a tour of the White House and descriptions of the new China in the blue room.
Graduates of elite colleges, as I can attest, are often shockingly ignorant of fundamental areas in the sciences and humanities. They are also, often, arrogant and dismissive of what they do not know, which is most things. All of this adds to the hostility against the U.S. in the world. To be patronized and insulted by people who then ask you to explain things to them that seem trivial enough not to require explanation, items of common knowledge, is a surreal and increasingly familiar experience. I have endured such experiences. They aren't pleasant.
I have been treated like shit by people who are barely capable of holding a conversation with me. I can imagine the reactions of persons in different parts of the world to such encounters. Americans are reputedly idiots. "They don't know anything." This is what is said (privately) in many parts of the world. This is not accurate. However, there are factors contributing to this misperception -- and, occasionally, accurate -- view of Americans, factors which can be remedied.
Whoever you are, you can read A People's History of Science or Carl Sagan's books. I promise that you will be fascinated by the beauty and elegance in nature revealed by science. If you are hostile to traditional religions, then the study of science -- even as an amateur -- will help get you to some of the deepest insights and wisdom found in religious experience. This wisdom is not science, but it can be a fringe benefit of doing science. If you are religious and hostile to science, please believe that your faith can be illuminated by the joy in scientific learning. Don't be frightened of science. Science is a human achievement that confirms much of what you believe for non-scientific reasons. Science is great. Scientific study and work, like anything else, can be a kind of devotion.
"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments," Albert Einstein writes, "are given to us in the Jewish-Christian [and Islamic] religious tradition. [Or traditions.] It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations."
Out of My Later Years (New York: Castle Books, 2005), p. 21. (I include all of the world's religions as a single tradition of human speculation on ultimate matters.)
We are perceived as stupid and selfish, obsessed with what the Japanese call, "creature comforts." We want our gadgets, toys, gizmos, flashy SUVs, trinkets, as the world burns and billions of people suffer needlessly because of our alleged insensitivity. The damage Americans do to the environment alone should give us pause. I am planning to read Al Gore's book. I saw and admired Mr. Gore's film on global warming -- which featured the insights of another Gore, the exalted one, Gore Vidal. (Unfortunately, an "error" was inserted in this paragraph since my previous review of the essay. I have now corrected it.) Cosmos is being re-broadcast on the Science Network. See it.
Rage, resentment, the crafty and committed hatred of dispossessed and tormented millions directed at their tormentors is beyond the comprehension of many Americans. We have allowed some of the world's worst oppressors and tyrants to define us to billions of people in the world as the evil enemy to be feared and fought against because we have too often been unwilling (or unable) to engage in philosophical debates erupting right now among the brightest and most adept young people in the world. America is what props up men like Mubarak or Gaddafi to billions of persons in the world.
What do you think the Internet is for? Do we wish to be seen censoring and suppressing the speech of some writers, while providing much worse writers with forums to spout banalities? The New York Times?
The reaction to my attempts to explore these issues in a humble way in a far corner of the electronic landscape is a daily struggle with censorship and oppression on the part of ass-covering imbeciles from New Jersey and/or elsewhere. If such people are typical of government and security officials in the U.S. -- I fear that they may be! -- we are in deep trouble. (This last sentence was just corrected after the insertion of new "errors," since yesterday, then corrected again.)
No wonder the rest of the world thinks that we are fascistic assholes and hypocrites. I think of us that way. Take a look at the hackers identified on a daily basis by me, seeking to destroy or suppress the writings of a tortured intellectual in a society that claims to protect freedom of speech. This is not the nation envisioned under the U.S. Constitution. On June 16, 2009 at 4:05 P.M. I am furious at being denied access to my home e-mail after another intrusion into my computer and further violations of my privacy.
Do you understand why people see us as oppressive? I do. Perception becomes reality -- unless it is challenged. Antiamericanism is a serious problem for U.S. foreign policy and economics. Antiamericanism will result in the loss of many American lives and billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. We ignore this problem at our peril. Middle-aged professionals, academics, students -- all are engaged in these polemics concerning modernity and postmodernity; ideology and its future; economy as science and moral concern; culture as religion; science as religion; religion as science. These are philosophical debates, involving urgent, potentially life-altering issues for billions of intelligent people on the planet. We are making ourselves irrelevant to this global discussion, except as a source of vilification and hatred or ridicule. We better wake up.
The answer to these criticisms is not to deface my writings. It is not to further torture or torment critics, like me, who have been deeply injured for decades. It is not sophomoric insults and threats, further harming me. (I have just corrected this sentence again.)
We need a respectful effort to address genuine concerns and doubts expressed by many people in the world, including Americans, about who we are today and what we really believe -- if we believe anything -- and what our lives are about. I sometimes think that we do not believe very much anymore and that this loss of faith and values is a big part of our trouble. ("Civilization and Terrorism" and "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Is it O.K. that the U.S. tortures people? Does it matter to you that it is mostly brown people adhering to different religions or American dissidents whom we are torturing? Do you believe for one second that torturing other people makes us safer? These tortures are taking place in your name, if you're an American. How do you feel about that? Do you believe that censorship can be contained once it is permitted to flourish? Violating my free speech rights is equal to violating your rights.
This morning several young women in Newark, New Jersey got into an argument over seemingly trivial items that ended with the shooting of three women in the head and the stabbing of one college student in the face. Nihilism is just as lethal to inner city young people as drugs and crime, since it produces both drug use and criminality. Why are we making young people insensitive and ruthless? What does it say about us that these incidents occur on a daily basis?
U.S. crime rates are vastly disproportionate compared to other advanced nations. The solution is not more prisons. Our ideas, how we see and think of ourselves, are relevant to these troubles. Those connections between systems of ideas and deeds are rarely traced in the writings of philosophers. Why is that? Not "rigorous" enough? No tenure in such efforts? Isn't that "idealism" which is "out of fashion" among academics who have no understanding of what is idealism or why it still matters?
You cannot escape metaphysical assumptions or foundations for your views in life. The only question is how you will arrive at those metaphysical foundations, intelligently and knowingly, or with complete ignorance of the literature dealing with the subject. Norman Swartz, Beyond Experience: Metaphysical Theories and Philosophical Constraints (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991), pp. 9-23.
One place where this discussion should and must take place is popular culture. American pop culture is abandoning the field to others, as we wallow in ever more predictable second-rate fare, especially during the summer "blockbuster season." Where are the great novels of ideas today? Not more books about who got laid last summer in a rented house somewhere in Long Island, or is having an affair on campus this year, or has just discovered feminism. An exception to this is "The Bourne Ultimatum," which is a great action movie raising genuine issues.
We need real philosophy. We need real literature. We need to find both philosophy and literature in good cinema. We need international perspectives. We need wide reading and cultural experience, imagination and cultivation of feelings. All of these areas of human intellectual and spiritual development are neglected in contemporary America, especially by young people who think they're getting an elite education. The results of this "necrosis of the spirit" are all around us. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?")
Is the intellectual project of our civilization fatally contaminated by racism and imperialist ambitions? Is thought, as we have understood it, pervaded by notions of gender-oppression, binary oppositions that are invidious and self-undermining? Is Western logos only the "prison house" of intellect to be transcended by its finest flower, science? Science has no answers to these questions. Is it necessary to engage in self-flagellation to demonstrate our hipness or excellent prospects for tenure at our local university? Must we swear an oath in academia to hate Republicans and struggle against them at all times?
Here is a future loyalty oath in academia: "I am not now, nor have ever I been, a member of the Republican party." These questions are mostly unrecognized by graduates of elite schools in my society. When they are recognized, they are usually discussed incompetently, sometimes for several hundred tedious pages. Those of us with fire in the belly and the necessary training to engage in this debate are relegated to irrelevance, denied opportunities to be heard. We see our writings destroyed, publicly, by persons incapable of understanding them. We see our books suppressed, censored, burned or stolen. We are reproducing injustices beyond and within America's borders, while throwing away lives by the millions -- including the lives of persons who may have useful suggestions to make for how to cope with our most pressing troubles. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")
Each time that I have read this essay, I am forced to correct the same or additional inserted "errors" meant to destroy work that is meaningful for me and others. To deny words and speech to survivors of great trauma is to attempt to obliterate their experience and capacities to cope through finding meaning. Such an attempt amounts to erasing a person's significance and humanity. Censorship is the final denial of all human dignity to tortured persons seeking to articulate what has happened to them. Slaves learning to read and write were threatened even with death. I will continue to write.
The person with the ideas we need at this crucial moment in our history may not be the person you think of as "smart" -- i.e., a skinny person dressed in black, residing somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, majoring in Women's Studies at Brandeis University, interning at the Nation magazine, and saving whales. This may be true even if such persons are offered the opportunity to write reviews in The New York Times or a "thought piece" in The New Yorker. Naomi Klein, Adam Gopkin, Susan Faludi -- the usual suspects come to mind.
The same book is being written by the same sort of person every year, the same thoughts are repeated by predictable "pundits" in chi-chi magazines. We are wallowing in an ideology of antiamericanism as enemies are planning to eat our lunch at recess. We better open our eyes. Originality and intellectual brilliance have become categories of guilt for entire segments of America's population, including many women -- women who write about menopause and a brief lesbian affair are welcome on ABC's "The View." Women who challenge oppression and economic injustice, who rail against the intellectual and philosophical prisons built for women's minds, are not so welcome. Anger is not "televisual." Television is a "cool medium." (McLuhan)
Worse, are alleged "sub-humans" (like me) occupying a status roughly equal to that of the most despised women in society -- like sex workers and women of color -- who must be destroyed "for their own good," for their truth-telling and freedom, qualities which are unforgivable faults among the lower-orders. I am about to do a little of both. What follows is an example of truth-telling and a display of one man's freedom. I will make people angry with what I am about to say and have said already. This is part of a philosopher's and writer's job description -- to make people uncomfortable and angry enough to think and take action.
Is Western thought inevitably racist? Is all philosophy saturated with racism and worthless? No. Is racism a part of our civilization and heritage? Yes. Does it exist and is it found even in some of the best philosophical thought? Yes. However, the ideas of freedom and equality leading to the most effective forms of opposition to racism -- universal ideals of human equality and concerns with social justice -- also emerge from our Western heritage.
Philosophy, like any other important area of culture is a locus of struggle, where abiding tensions between competing values will always be found at an abstract and, therefore, discussable level. American cinema at the moment is divided and uncertain about its loyalties. The Bush Administration is universally disliked, but the real threat from terrorism and antiamericanism is also seen. Hence, politics is (mostly) a forbidden subject in this summer's movies.
Philosophy should concern persons of African ancestry as much as anyone. Africa has been a player in the Mediterrenean world from antiquity, contributing philosophers to the roster of great Western thinkers from Augustine to Camus and Derrida. In defending philosophy from charges of racism, the question is what do we mean by philosophy? What kind of racism are we primarily concerned to examine? What is the role of philosophers in this daily struggle against the evil of racism? Whose Western philosophy do we celebrate and how are we to do that celebrating? Racism includes both the attitudes of the Abu Ghraib torturers and of the men flying airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11. (See "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
Numerous errors have been inserted in these sentences already, as I say, as part of the continuing effort to silence and further torture me. "Errors" are corrected each time that I read this work-in-progress. I try to make a little more progress towards completion every day. I will not stop writing. How many people are destroyed by discouragement, insults, frustrations, denigration of intellectual abilities, assault, rape, destruction of relationships? How many are deformed and diminished in their capacities, by constant belittling, racism, sexism? Many.
Why are the powers that be so frightened about one voice crying in the wilderness? Why do I frighten you? How does it hurt you for me to post images at my blog or profile? Why are you frightened by what I have to say?
My concern in this essay is with charges of racism brought against philosophy. I will focus on the greatest philosopher of the modern period, Immanuel Kant. I will defend both philosophy and Kant against these charges, arguing that such charges presuppose values for which all opponents of racism must be indebted -- especially as regards Kant -- to Western speculative thought. We need Kant in the fight against all forms of racism and sexism.
I contend that in framing this accusation of racism against philosophy, one is already drawing on philosophical notions, developed by philosophers (such as Immanuel Kant) that make racism or the denial of universal human dignity unacceptable. The rejection of philosophy makes us philosophers. Accusations of racism against any philosophy may amount to a defense of the importance of philosophy in our thinking about the evils of racism. Kant's Critical theory is one of the most powerful systems of thought constructed AGAINST racism and in defense of the universality of human freedom.
I write these words in a communicative environment that can only be described as a "torture chamber," something I always believed would be impossible in America, confident that whatever happens to these sentences, my freedom to write them and their truth will not be diminished. Philosophy is too vital a weapon in the struggle for social justice and freedom to allow anyone to deny it to us, ordinary people, by defining the subject in such a way that it becomes a kind of parlor game for affluent intellectuals in very comfortable settings.
I begin by stating the issue with some care. I then set forth the evidence and arguments in support of these charges. Next I will offer opposing arguments and evidence relevant to the racism charges. Finally, I will argue that we need a revised reading or "interpretation" of Kant's Critical philosophy in the continuing struggle for freedom with equality.
If you are reading this essay, then you are sharing a philosophical dialogue with a person choosing to transform the pain of torture into reasoned discussion, not violence. For this choice, I am being censored and attacked. Power wishes and intends minority males to choose violence, so as to confirm demeaning stereotypes. I refuse to give the power-elite any legitimation for their racism and hatred, to say nothing of their crimes. I refuse to legitimate what they have done to me and others. In response to this stance, more efforts will be made to destroy this text and its author. ("America's Holocaust" and "Racism on New Jersey's Roads and Highways.")
Before participating in such an effort at destruction of anyone's creative work, I ask you to ponder the alternatives for people all over the world. If reasoned debate is forbidden, if the crimes to which billions are subjected every day are ignored, if further censorship and silence is imposed on the angry and wounded masses of humanity -- is it likely that the future will be peaceful? I doubt it. Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Suppremacy (New York: Pantheon, 2008), pp. 44-45, pp. 52-57.
I. Is Western Philosophy Racist?
A. A Sidebar on Words and Things.
Opposition to racism has led to an example of the sort of stupidity to which I object because it is clearly produced by philosophical ignorance. Race is inevitably a construct. Bear this point in mind. Today's New York Times contains two articles that the average reader will see as totally unrelated. In fact, both reflect ignorance of a massive number of issues in epistemology, linguistic theory and metaphysics (to say nothing of the "nominalist controversy"). First, Michael M. Grynbaum, "It's a Female Dog, or Worse. Or Endearing. And Illegal?," in The New York Times, August 7, 2007, at p. B1; second, Dennis Overbye, "What's in a Name? Parsing the 'God Particle,' the Ultimate Metaphor," in The New York Times, August 7, 2007, at p. F3.
The first article discusses a proposal in New York's City Council to adopt a city-wide ban on the "b-word," following a "successful" city-wide ban on the "n-word." The second article explores, in a whimsical way, the controversy among scientists resulting from the use of the "g-word." Talk of a "God-particle" is only a kind of shorthand for the quest for a "Higgs-field-constant" or the so-called "Higgs boson." Peter Higgs, an English physicist conceived of it in 1964, as the term to designate the foundation stone of matter. In other words the particle responsible for endowing the other elementary particles in the universe with mass.
If you examine the medieval literature of alchemy, you will find nearly identical descriptions in the search for a "philosopher's stone" containing the power to "transmute" base metals (including lead) into gold. This trick of turning lead into gold could only be achieved with the unity of masculine and feminine principles in the magical ritual of love-making, the "Chymical Wedding" (yes, that's how it is spelled). See Lyndsey Clarke's Chymical Wedding (New York: Fawcett, 1989). For an up to date version of this philosophical-scientific-magical thinking, do not pass up this gem of a scholarly work: Fiona Horne, Bewitch a Man: How to Find and Keep Him Under Your Spell (New York: Simon Spotlight, 2006). Now I know how she did it!
For those who really want to know more, see Carl Jung's The Psychology of the Transference and Mysterium Coniuncionis which are the best places to start researching that dissertation in P.C. feminist theory. (This last sentence was altered and corrected since my most recent reading of this work.) For serious feminist scholars and historians as well as theologians, see Stanislas Klossowski de Rola's Alchemy: The Secret Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973).
All words are symbols. Words designate the things they stand for and are, to that extent, metaphorical. You will not do away with racism or with the ugliness designated by some people's use of the "n-word" by forbidding the use of this word. These are make-believe solutions designed for an ignorant and politically correct public square. The "n-word" used by African-Americans -- with very few exceptions, I refuse to use that word for personal reasons -- may have a totally different meaning, a meaning that undermines racism by reappropriating the label as a source of pride.
The same may be said for the word "fag," or any number of other slurs and insulting terms. I am against any proposed "words that wound" exception to First Amendment protections. It is not words that should concern us, but the intention governing usage of a word that is worrisome. Isaiah Thomas recently made the same point in court testimony concerning the use of the "b-word" by white males as opposed to African-Americans. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Scientists are disturbed by the "g-word" in physics because they associate this term with fundamentalists and archetypal representations of an old man in the sky. However, the order and beauty which entrances them (think of how Carl Sagan used the word "cosmos") is close to what many religious people mean by using this short word. People use this word "God" because there is no other word to do the job. Social ills cannot be cured by policing language. Such restrictions on speech curtail priceless freedoms necessary for science, causing rather than resolving social troubles. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Censorship, even when it is well-intended, smells no-so-sweet -- to me.
The nominalist controversy deals with whether "universals" (essences) are only names or whether they are "real" entities, existing beyond or as more than names. Neglected in the medieval discussion of this issue is the Kantian observation that arrives with modernity: We may construct as we perceive such entities, making them as real as cancer. Cancer is a word and concept. The disease identified by this word and concept would be just as real under another term -- although, I must admit, cancer is a name that seems to fit the entity very well. Racism is like cancer. It is something that we construct as we identify this diseased tendency in human nature. How do our words hook up with the world?
"A ... decision of the Supreme Court," Gore Vidal writes, "leaves to each community the right to decide what is pornography. Speaking for the majority of the Court, [then Chief Justice] Warren Burger admitted that although no link has yet been found between the consumption of pornography and antisocial behavior, any community may assume that such connection exists if it wants to -- in other words, an outraged community may burn a witch even though, properly speaking, witches do not exist."
Pay attention as genius kicks in:
"The Court's decision has, of course, alarmed and confused the peddlers of smut, who claim, disingenuously, that guidelines are now lacking. They complain that the elders of Drake, North Dakota, may object to the word 'damn' in a novel while the swingers in L.A. may want to read even worse words. Must the publisher, they ask, bring out two editions, one for permissive L.A. with the word 'damn' and another for high toned Drake with the word 'darn'? Or settle the matter by publishing only for Drake?"
Vidal has a keen analytical mind that resolves these difficulties with ease:
"This is a deep problem which I have solved. Wanting in every way to conform with the letter as well as the spirit of the Court's decision, I have carefully eliminated from this book" -- Myron, a novel -- "those words that might cause distress to anyone. Since books are nothing but words, a book is pornographic if it contains 'bad' or 'dirty' words. Eliminate the 'bad' or 'dirty' words and you have made the work 'clean.'"
"In this novel, I have replaced the missing bad words with some very good words indeed: the names of the justices who concurred in the Court's majority decision. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun fill, as it were, the breach; their names replace the 'bad' or 'dirty' words. ... " ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Vidal's characters then "Burgered" each other. A name is not to be confused with the object to which it is attached and which it may create. Think of the implications in our consumer society. I purchase a polo shirt that has no trademark on it for $7.00. The identical shirt with a small polo player in the chest area can be sold for $75.00. This is because wearing such a shirt will tell our neighbors that we like to play polo at the country club to which we belong. Naturally, this is when we are not residing in our one bedroom apartment in the barrio. For $75.00, we get instant social pedigree. Incidentally, both shirts are made in China, at the same factory, at identical cost. Marx and Mailer on "surplus value" will be illuminating on this idiocy.
What are we inventing by wearing this shirt? An identity? How do we perceive African-Americans in "hip-hop" gear as opposed to Brooks Brothers suits? Why and how are we "conditioned" to make these language-like associations between or among symbols coding messages and identities? Race may have become one such symbol, an increasingly ambiguous one, even for racists. Is race a brand label?
Klan members cheering for their favorite football players, who happen to be African-Americans, must experience an identity crisis. I am wearing a polo shirt with an alligator on my chest that looks more like an armadillo. (I have just corrected a new "error" in the foregoing sentence.) My shirt was actually more expensive without this creature on my chest. What does this shirt say about me? Nothing, I hope. Jean Baudrillard, "From the System of Objects to the Destiny of Objects," in The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotexte, 1988), pp. 78-95.
Tampering with this title or deleting letters or any other "errors" inserted in these writings will not slow me down. Joel T. Leyner, Esq. is next to be profiled. Preventing me from accessing my e-mails will not stop me. More N.J. judges and their disgusting sex lives will be profiled soon. What you put out to me, I will return to you.
If love is a kind of language, then maybe hatred is also a kind of language. Both may be associated with our richest symbols, with race, gender, and (today) with national flags of one kind or another. Symbols of hatred have also metastisized in a philosophical setting made up mostly of symbols and symbol-clusters, a media-defined universe of images, created by us and now universal, where indirection becomes the optimum mode of relations. Paul Ricoeur's discussion of our "truncated ontology" and need for "indirection" or misdirection in confronting ultimate issues -- including political issues -- comes to mind. You can't go to the store to get a sandwich today without engaging in hermeneutics. Welcome to postmodernity. ("'Are You Cukoo for Cocoa Puffs?' -- How to be a Postmodernist.")
Guess where we "are" right "now"? Are we lost in the fun house? Have our symbols become so real that we can no longer be sure of what, if anything, our lives are about other than such symbols? See "The Stepford Wives." Has race become only symbolic? Is race now a product "label" whatever else it may be? Can you go to the mall and buy some African-American identity? There are some African-Americans who will be happy to sell you the look. Anybody seen Puffy? Have we become only symbolic? Think of 9/11 again. Why the Twin Towers? Why America? ("'The Prisoner': A Review of the AMC Television Series" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Not only ideas, but all of us are in danger of becoming symbols coding ideas? (See "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.") Has race become a code for things demonized in the general culture? Is race now a kind of trademark-like identification of persons where what is coded is fought over, challenged by African-Americans struggling to define themselves? Racism cannot be eliminated from society unless there is a philosophical struggle as well as a political one. Are you sure that we can dispense with the insights in philosophical idealism in this new struggle against racism? (This last sentence has been corrected, yet again, since last night.)
Dr. King and Malcolm X spoke of the need to end what I call the "philosophical slavery" of an oppressed people. What would those men say about my daily struggle to speak freely?
Not all persons regarded as "black" in America will be African-Americans. Not all persons described by the "n-word" in the U.S. today will have dark skin. Guess what that makes me? If you are a middle class Latino -- despite your white skin -- you better think about this. By the way, this caution is especially aimed at Cuban-Americans. Senator Bob? Go to the wrong country club and you'll find out quickly enough that everybody thinks you, Senator Bob, are the caddie.
If you wish to see human evil, then all you need to do is give people secret power over others. Even the best persons are then tempted to delight in hurting others because they can get away with it. One way to do that hurting today is by means of the labeling game. You are a "n-----" in America, if someomebody calls you a "n-----." Congratulations.
None of what I am saying in this essay is refuted by the repeated insertion of "errors" and destruction of written work with meaning for others. You do not disprove my contentions or invalidate an argument by further harming me. In fact, you may be proving my point by doing so. I don't know how else to say this so that it will be understood, so I will simply repeat that you cannot beat up ideas.
II. Human Nature and Racism.
"Is modern philosophy racist?" Professor Andrew Valls raises this question in his important recent collection: Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 1-15:
"Does it matter that Locke defended slavery and helped to run companies involved in the slave trade? That Berkeley owned slaves? That Hume thought blacks inferior to whites? That Kant agreed with Hume, and developed elaborate theories of the various races of humans? Are these facts merely incidental, calling for no thorough examination of the views of these figures? Or do the facts reveal something deeper about their philosophies, and about modern philosophy itself?"
I will be focusing on Kant and Western thought's emancipatory mission:
"... Kant's views on the inferiority of nonwhites show that he intends his universal moral theory to apply only to white Europeans -- that only these people count as persons for Kant."
Marxists should not be jumping for joy:
"Marx agreed with Mill that European civilization is superior, and with Hegel, that history itself, in a strict sense, takes place only in European society."
Before turning to the excellent paper by Professor Mills in this collection, I wish to be clear about what I understand by the philosophical endeavor and the task of evaluating philosophical work. Philosophy is thinking. If you've ever sat down with family or friends to try to figure out what you think about life or meaning, God or ethics, politics and justice then you are a philosopher. Everyone is and must be a philosopher to some degree. (Antonio Gramsci)
Everybody also dances. Some people dance like Fred Astaire or Bill "Bojangels" Robinson, Margo Fontaine or Ginger Rodgers (going backwards and in high heels). Most of us don't dance that well. Some people have very orderly and powerful minds that also welcome chaos and deep diving into the subconscious. If they happen to be highly articulate and have read many books, they may become good philosophers.
Philosophers are suggestive thinkers because they articulate and clarify, anticipate as well as formulate intellectual currents and developments in a culture, while connecting such forces to personal autobiographical perspectives. No philosopher, not even the very greatest, is right about everything for everyone. However, great philosophers will be better (more systematic and powerful) thinkers than most of us. Philosophers will have persuasive and insightful comments on most issues -- many of which have been absorbed from the culture by their own critics, who are often unaware of being influenced by their targets.
You cannot get away from Kant or Hegel, Marx or Freud, James or Dewey in contemporary U.S. society, Latin America, or Europe (where additional thinkers will be important), even if you have never heard of these people or read their books. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. must be seen as American philosophers whatever political roles they played. Philosophy is an attempt to theorize our historical moment and the human condition. With the arrival of modernity this challenge becomes crucial since what defines us, as persons, is precisely this transcendental move to the status of humanity per se. (An "error" was inserted in this sentence since my last reading of this essay.)
Notice that, if humanity becomes an abstract category, then "sub-humanity" will also become an abstract category, a category to which anybody may be assigned. Before you become a racist, you better remember that next week it may be you or your loved-ones who will be ostracized. If you feel threatened by people of different races, the answer is to join them in fighting against all forms of racism, no matter who is the victim. Think of Rawls. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")
A quick recap is in order: We used to believe that what made us special or unique is our divine origins and place in a universal structure ordained by God. After the Renaissance and scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, these ideas became somewhat difficult to sustain, especially when we ran into weird people from "new worlds" who had never heard of the Bible and yet thought that they were pretty special. Bartolomeo de Las Casas is not mentioned by scholars addressing this racism issue as often as he should be. For that matter, neither is Marco Polo.
We moderns wanted to think about humanity in "new" ways -- the idea of the "new" is crucial in the modern world -- while still trying to make sense of our predicament. What is it that makes us worthy of moral consideration? Set aside God and different understandings of religion -- which led to a number of bloody European wars after the crusades -- how should we think about other people?
A fascinating conversation about this question unfolding over several centuries takes place between two groups of guys and gals, one group saying: "Hey, let's actually look at people and take lab specimens and do science stuff, then we'll be able to answer our question concerning what are the races of 'man' and how we should treat 'inferior' races or beings, assuming that we know who they are." This is the "empirical" team. By the way, this is the sort of thinking found in people like Josef Mengele, not just Charles Darwin.
Another group of thinkers, culminating with Kant's synthesis, answered by saying: "We challenge your so-called scientific approach because just looking at people and doing experiments and all that disgusting stuff isn't going to answer our moral question. This empiricist guy, Hume, is all bent out of shape about facts and values. We have our doubts about whether there really is a difference between those two things, facts and values. We're not so sure that you can exclude as 'non-factual' everything that isn't revealed by empirical methods, especially in the realm of values as facts. What is a human being or person in a moral sense? How should or must we treat persons?" Let's call these boys and girls the "rationalists."
I can hear the psychobabblers whining about how values are not facts. Says who? Whatever judgment you make concerning a value question is itself a fact to the extent that you have made it. As for the defense of moral rationalism, see Christopher Peacocke's The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 198-226 and my essay on "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism."
A distinction emerges between two rival discussions, overlapping in some areas and not in others, from the explosion of the Florentine Quatrocento until about 1945. This distinction is not always borne in mind by the rival philosophers, disagreeing without understanding that the subject-matter of their conversation is quicksilver, shifting from one setting to another before their eyes, as philosophers and scientists are increasingly puzzled about their irrelevance in light of the alternating purposes of the dialogue, often speaking at cross purposes. Steven Toulmin's recent book on modernity is very useful in exploring this issue. (Another new "error" has been found and corrected.)
At the center of this shifting dialectic are the concepts of human nature and race. One debate is conceptual; the other is empirical; both come together, as it were, in discussions of race, slavery and modernity's "reconceptualizing" of the relationship between individuals and others in the form of Law or the State. The trajectory, remember, is from Machiavelli's Prince to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Often the conversation does not come together at all because philosophers and scientists are discussing the topic of humanity for different purposes, in opposed vocabularies, misleadingly making use of the same terms, concerning different entities and with opposed definitions. Intellectuals are often unaware of their different purposes when arriving at this Western psychological fault line of race.
No amount of empirical examination of people, for example, will answer the conceptual question concerning "What is a person?" This is because a person is a moral and forensic, also a theological concept. What is a human animal is a biological question. No amount of philosophizing will tell you how the pancreas works because a biological animal called a human being's pancreatic functions will need to be examined empirically. Each of these endeavors, conceptual analysis and empirical examination, involves both facts and values. We will need both science and philosophy to understand people. We will require each approach to fulfill different roles in variable settings. As in dancing, first one partner leads; then the other leads. Science (Scully), being more rigorous, may be thought of as female; philosophy (Mulder) -- being often in need of directions -- may be thought of as male. Racism cuts across all disciplinary boundaries, so you better do the same if you plan to understand racism. Time to remove another letter from one of my words?
This is the opposite of a fact/value distinction. It is an argument for a unification of factual-evaluative discourses in order to provide simultanaeous multi-perspectival views of humanity in an age of surfaces or images, fractal subjects, compartmentalized identities. Don't think "outside the box," but think from within and outside the box at the same time. My sources for these ideas, which I develop in a postmodernist direction, are Ricoeur and Gadamer, Davidson and Putnam, Rorty and Butler, Davis and West.
Do these ideas frighten people so much that, even in the formulations of a powerless and shattered -- also marginalized -- intellectual they must be suppressed, even as he is further damaged? Why? What is so frightening about these ideas? Is it the demonstration of the absurdity and evil of racism? If so, then please believe that you will not destroy ideas -- or philosophical opposition to racism -- by further hurting me or altering and defacing these essays on a daily basis. You are hurting those who may benefit from reading these essays as much (or more) than you are injuring me. You are also hurting yourselves in New Jersey worse than any other party. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
Race reflects a division of human beings based on pre-existing conceptual categories (often subconscious ones) that then make observable biological features relevant, like skin color and/or facial characteristics, or gender. These pre-existing categories are arbitrary. A society may wish to make baldness the relevant feature for purposes of establishing the moral superiority of persons. In such a society, race is a trivial factor (like baldness for us), but in my alternative planet -- let us call it "New Jersey 2" -- bald persons are discriminated against, enslaved, possibly sent to concentration camps as the obvious moral inferiors of the hairy members of the species, such as myself. Think of Dick Cheney.
It is obvious to everyone in "New Jersey 2" that some people are bald and others are not. This is a natural, empirical fact. This fact is "scientifically" undeniable. However, the ethical significance attached to this fact is totally arbitrary. It just happens that persons who are bald are traditionally thought of as evil and intellectually inferior in this hypothetical society. True, there are unusual examples of bald persons who happen to be geniuses, but this is clearly anomalous. Such persons are the exception that proves the rule. Some of your best friends may be bald, but would you want a bald guy to marry your sister? Obviously not.
A. Professor Charles Mills Judges Immanuel Kant's Philosophy.
"Kant's pivotal place in the Enlightenment project," Charles Mills writes, "and the modern canon locates him strategically. If Kant is central as an emblematic figure, and if racist ideas were central to his thought, then this obviously implies a radical rethinking of our conventional narratives of the history and content of Western philosophy. And such a rethinking, as said, is precisely what I am arguing for." (p. 169.)
Professor Mills points to evidence from Kant's letters, not primarily his published texts, that this thinker -- who lived one of the most sheltered lives of any of the great philosophers -- had doubts about the intellectual capacity of Asians and non-Europeans, so that his egalitarian notions were not meant to apply or were doubtful, as far as Kant was concerned (privately), outside the European context. (pp. 170-171.)
Professor Mills may be relying on a mistaken understanding of Kant's project. Critical philosophy cannot be racist, even if Kant held racist views. If a racist says 2 + 2 = 4, this statement will be true, even if the racist's ideas concerning race are mistaken. Kant's abstract transcendental ego has no race or gender. It may be that Kant was mistaken in his assumptions concerning whether all persons would be encompassed by this concept. This is irrelevant to the validity of the concept, which today is seen as applying to all of humanity as rational agents. Kant's goal was to specify the morally essential criteria of humanity, universally, not to say whether this or that person or group of persons met the standard. The analogy to the U.S. Constitution is obvious. Professor Mills writes:
"The position that Kant's defenders have taken is not to deny Kant's racial views, but to deny that they have the philosophical implications claimed by Eze, Bernasconi, and others (such as myself). So either Kant's racial views do not affect his philosophy at all (the extreme view), or they do not affect it in its key/central/basic claims (the more moderate position). (p. 175.)
This is to make a profound error, in my opinion, because Kant's Critical Theory is not a theory of human nature or race. Kant may have been a racist, from our perspective today, but his philosophy cannot be racist -- just as it cannot be made of peanut butter. Critical theory is a philosophical description of the transcendental subject as knowing agent. It is an epistemological theory with humbling metaphysical implications which leads to a theory of the foundations of morals.
This distinction and critique of philosophical views as racist -- and therefore, suspect -- is a Kantian critique. It is the sort of criticism that only becomes possible in the modern world, when the essential criteria of personhood and humanity are removed from the realm of empirical "racial" considerations (skin color, baldness) and made a matter of a priori moral/epistemological concepts. Race, gender, sexual-orientation then become irrelevant to the subject's capacity for autonomous action (freedom) and thought. And freedom and thought are held to be the essential criteria of humanity, in a moral sense, and to follow from the capacity for "rational agency."
When I say that philosophy is a locus of struggle, I mean that opposition to faulty philosophical ideas is also part of philosophy. All philosophical criticism is itself philosophy. Neither racism nor anti-racist views define philosophy. Philosophy is something much bigger and more inclusive than critics realize.
The issue is not whether Kant's views of race affected his philosophy, but whether his philosophy was applied incorrectly by Kant himself in formulating his own racial views. My answer to that question is that, for historical reasons, Kant screwed up his interpretation of his own principles. Kant may be the greatest philosopher who ever lived. However, Kant might have made a bad judge. It should be noted that most (or all) judges in Kant's day would have agreed with his racial views. Judges held far worse views. Kant may well be wrong about whether a person or group has this capacity for autonomy, which would be an empirical question based on observation. This is irrelevant to the objective standard concerning "the transcendental unity of apperception" derived from the first Critique. Thus, Kolakowski writes:
"Kant's insistence on considering people as ends in themselves, and thus on considering each person separately" -- in abstraction from empirical reality -- "postulates that no human being may be the property of another and that slavery contradicts the concept of being human. If we deny, however, the pretense of common humanity in the name of the concrete human being, we thereby also deny the single foundation of the principle of human rights. This principle is valid only under the precondition that rights exist to which every individual may lay claim simply by being human, under the preconditions of everyone's equal participation in human nature or, in other words, on the basis of the 'abstract human being.' ... " (emphasis added)
A Kantian subject, like the "average reasonable person" in common law, has no race or gender, no nationality or religious preference -- until applied as a standard. Kant's application of the standard is no better or worse than anyone else's in his day. Kant lived at a time when people owned slaves. Furthermore, Kant's intent in 1786 is not dispositive regarding the meaning of his philosophy today, as evidenced by the use to which that philosophy was put in the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, Charles Fried and Ronald Dworkin. Kolakowski concludes:
"The concrete human being, on the other hand -- as the word is commonly used -- is concrete only in the sense that he is determined, not by his human nature, but by a more specific category." [Like nationality, gender, race and so on?]
Leszek Kolakowski, "Why Do We Need Kant?," in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), pp. 49-50.
Kolakowski closes with some memorable sentences, given his own experience of totalitarianism: "Humanity is a moral concept. Unless we recognize that, we have no good reason to challenge the ideology of slavery." (p. 54.) (Or racism?)
Notice that this point is philosophical, not scientific. Incidentally, Kant liked women and was more respectful of women's intellects than most philosophers of his era. Kant pondered a marriage proposal, philosophically, only to discover that when he made the offer, the lady in question was already married and had three children. Kant's brilliant advice to offer women tea with cheese and honey has yet to be surpassed by any philosopher as a sure-fire aphrodisiac. Antonio cologne also works in seduction efforts, allegedly, although I lack empirical verification of this fascinating principle. There is always a possibility of a Popperian falsification of this postulate concerning Antonio cologne and a subsequent testing of the maxim concerning cold showers, as anti-stimulus or as a "deflationary" agent, as it were.
The idea of human nature did not, formally, exclude persons on the basis of nationality or race -- nor as women, for Kant -- since the "transcendental move" located the human essence in abstract properties deemed essential to humanity, such as autonomous decision-making, intelligence, and moral capacity. Physical characteristics, again, are irrelevant. This point may become doubtful in amorous situations.
I would be surprised if anyone living in the eighteenth century -- including the framers of the U.S. Constitution -- could avoid all racist notions by our standards today. Kant's Critical philosophy is not racist and cannot be racist, by definition, since unlike Kant's personal opinions about concrete individuals, it is not empirically-based, even if it is compatible with empiricism. Kant's philosophy is a conceptual-structure, like the U.S. Constitution. It is the conceptual structure that provides the ultimate arsenal against all forms of racism or slavery. Like a bridge that must move with the winds to remain stable, such conceptual structures are always evolving, usually dialectically. Roger Scruton writes:
"Kant repeatedly emphasizes that the theory is not to be construed as empirical psychology. It is not, nor does it purport to be, a theory of the workings of the human, as opposed to some other, intelligence. It is a theory of the understanding as such, telling us what it is, and how it must function if there are to be judgments at all. In all philosophical discussions of these matters, Kant argues, we are talking 'not about the origin of experience, but about what lies in it' And he compares such purely philosophical questions to that analysis of concepts that has since become so fashionable. Kant wishes to draw the limits of the understanding. If there are things that cannot be grasped by the understanding, then all assertions about them are meaningless."
Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 32-33.
"What is the perfect or best race of humans?" This question falls under the category of meaningless or absurd metaphysical speculation because it seeks answers to what cannot be known in metaphysical thinking because it is beyond the grasp of the human mind. To formulate the question is, surreptitiously, to put yourself in the category of those qualified to determine the matter. Isn't that convenient? This point is established by Kant's meaningful epistemological, metaphysical and moral speculation that sets limits on the knowable. What we cannot know, we may nevertheless understand.
Questioning the existence of racism in philosophy is a defense of the importance of all philosophical speculation and a vindication of the philosopher's capacity to transcend racist conditions and conceptual tools. Reasonableness is the right balance between what is meaningful and (therefore) understandable and the knowable, which is often quite different. Some philosophers may be racists. Philosophy cannot be racist.
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