Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed 9781350102279, 9781350102293, 9781350102262

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Source Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: (Moral) Philosophy in a Thoroughly Disenchanted Universe
Chapter 2: An Insurrectionist Ethics: Critical Pragmatism and Philosophia Nata Ex Conatu
Chapter 3: New Descriptions, New Possibilities
Chapter 4: Empathy or Insurrection: Wielding Positive andNegative Affect
Chapter 5: Evoking Race (To Counter Race-Based Oppression); Or, Adversarial Groups as Anabsolute
Chapter 6: Building Traditions, Shaping Futures: Values, Norms, and Transvaluation
Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

ETHICS AND INSURRECTION

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader, Leonard Harris, ed. Lee A. McBride III The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute, Drew M. Dalton American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, Erin McKenna and Scott L. Pratt Classical American Philosophy: Poiesis in Public, Rebecca Farinas

ETHICS AND INSURRECTION A Pragmatism for the Oppressed

LEE A. MCBRIDE III

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This edition published in 2022 Copyright © Lee A. McBride III, 2021 Lee A. McBride III has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Composition (1921), linocut on laid paper, by Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest ( © National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McBride, Lee A., III, author. Title: Ethics and insurrection: a pragmatism for the oppressed / Lee A. McBride, III. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034804 (print) | LCCN 2020034805 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350102279 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350102262 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350102286 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Harris, Leonard, 1948–Influence. | Ethics. | Social sciences and ethics. | Naturalism. | Pragmatism. | Liberty–Philosophy. | Revolutions–Philosophy. | Oppression (Psychology) | Discrimination. Classification: LCC BJ51.M37 2021 (print) | LCC BJ51 (ebook) | DDC 171/.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034804 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034805 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0227-9 PB: 978-1-3502-0262-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0226-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-0228-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  vi Source Acknowledgments  viii Abbreviations  ix

Introduction  1 1 (Moral) Philosophy in a Thoroughly Disenchanted Universe  11 2 An Insurrectionist Ethic: Critical Pragmatism and Philosophia Nata Ex Conatu  41 3 New Descriptions, New Possibilities  65 4 Empathy or Insurrection: Wielding Positive and Negative Affect  77 5 Evoking Race (To Counter Race-Based Oppression); Or, Adversarial Groups as Anabsolute  89 6 Building Traditions, Shaping Futures: Values, Norms, and Transvaluation  109 Epilogue 125 Index 129

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Large tracts of this manuscript were stimulated or worked out under the aegis of the Research Leaves program, the Faculty Travel Benefit, Faculty Development Funds, and the Hales International Field Study Seminars at the College of Wooster. Portions of the manuscript were made possible by the generosity of the 2018 Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities at St. John’s University. I am grateful for the support and nurturing I have received from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Alain L. Locke Society, and Philosophy Born of Struggle—I stand upon your shoulders. I am especially indebted to Leonard Harris, who, as a mentor, opened new vistas to me, welcomed me, and offered me sharper knives. I am indebted to my teachers, friends, and advocates: Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Paul B. Thompson, William L. McBride, Jacoby A. Carter, Erin McKenna, Scott Pratt, Jerry Rosiek, James Campbell, Gregory Pappas, Douglas Anderson, Judith Green, Lisa Heldke, Bryan G. Norton, Naomi Zack, John Stuhr, Evelyn Brister, Marilyn Fischer, Corey McCall, Phillip McReynolds, Christopher Voparil, Terrance MacMullan, Kristie Dotson, V. Denise James, Dwayne Tunstall, Aaron Pratt Shepherd, Tess Varner, S. Joshua Thomas, Kim Garchar, David Henderson, Dennis Lunt, Jack Mulder, Tadd Ruetenik, John Huss, William Vaughan, Clair Morrissey, Greg Moses, Alfred Prettyman, Utz McKnight, Myisha Cherry, Owen Flanagan, and Mara-Daria Cojocaru. I am grateful for the judicious comments and insights I received from my undergraduate research assistant, Grace O’Leary '20. Any fortitude, self-confidence, or composure that can be detected in my comportment should be credited to my mother, Dorothy McBride, my step-father, Richard T. Williams, my

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godfather, Francisco Pitpit, my brother, Dax Velarde, and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins—a substantial bulwark. Lastly, I am evermore grateful for the encouragement, counsel, and (free) time I received from my formidable and loving partner, Amber Garcia McBride and my brainy and beautiful daughter, Margaret Garcia McBride—the light in a dark room.

SOURCE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book: Epigraph, Chapter 1: Williams, Bernard. 2008. “The Human Prejudice.” In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Edited by A. W. Moore, 137. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chapter 3: McBride, Lee. 2018. “New Descriptions, New Possibilities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 168–78. Reproduced by permission of the Pennsylvania State Press.

ABBREVIATIONS

Citations of John Dewey reference the critical edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1990), which is published as The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW), and The Later Works (LW). Following standard practice, “MW 2: 306” will refer to The Middle Works, Volume 2, page 306; “LW 7: 166” will refer to The Later Works, Volume 7, page 166; and so forth.

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Introduction

In 1909, Herbert Croly asserted that Americans are raised to believe that their national responsibility is “to continue resolutely and cheerfully along the appointed path” (Croly 2014, 6).1 Americans are imbued with a mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism toward a culture and political economy that caters to the individual’s pursuit of wholly selfish motives—a society that reproduces and condones economic slavery, grinding of the poor, exploitation of the weak, unfair distribution of wealth, unjust monopoly, unequal laws, industrial and commercial chicanery, disgraceful ignorance, economic fallacies, public corruption, and partisan legislation (Croly 2014, 22–3). Nevertheless, on this account, Americans tend to be optimistic, believing that American democracy and freedom will ultimately prevail. Americans tend to be fatalistic, believing that all events are predetermined, or that their best efforts will not affect what is destined to occur. Americans tend to be conservative in their thinking, predisposed to preserve established tradition and fear radical change. In this fashion, citizens of the United States are raised to have faith in the American Dream: to hold their democratic way of life as exemplary. And this sentiment still pervades large swaths of Anglo-American political and socioeconomic thought, even though most US citizens have neither experienced nor considered other (less-pecuniary, less-consumerist) democratic ways of life. I was raised in the United States and taught to believe that the United States is the world’s leader of democracy and freedom. I am one generation away from migrant farm labor, one generation away from Jim Crow apartheid. Something about this “American Dream” never sat right with me, but alas

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(early on) I did not possess the conceptual framework or vocabulary to articulate my misgivings. In graduate school, I eventually gravitated toward genealogists and pragmatist philosophers, especially the work of John Dewey. Here, I found clearly articulated ways of conceiving pluralism, liberalism, and democracy. Here, I found commitments to egalitarianism and positive liberty—that individuals, regardless of class, sex, or race, should be provided with those institutions and resources needed to develop as rational autonomous agents, agents that can participate competently in the democratic process (McBride 2006, 81, 2017, 77). Here, I found commitments to open-minded experimental inquiry, empathetic apprehension of the point of view of the other, and cooperative intelligence (Addams 2002, 33–4; Seigfried 1996, 259). These are commitments that I still hold. But I question the tools and methods typically afforded to social amelioration. John Dewey asserts that “democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization” (LW 13: 187). I agree. But I am dubious of the manner in which “democratic methods” are typically depicted (McBride 2017, 81). Many interpret this pragmatist commitment to democratic methods to be a commitment to tolerant, egalitarian problem resolution through empathetic, nonviolent, cooperative deliberation. On this view, when a problem arises between two groups, both parties would ideally approach the situation open-mindedly, not coercively, hoping to empathetically understand the perspective of the other. Approaching the problem in this fashion, the two groups could identify the real point of contention and work cooperatively to ameliorate the situation. As Jane Addams puts it, “The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy” (Addams 2002, 9). But conceiving of democratic methods in this fashion seems to lock oppressed groups into a tenuous position. Oppressed groups are expected to seek justice through “the proper channels,” to voice their concerns civilly, to remain calm and well-mannered (Anderson 1998, 36). Oppressed groups are compelled to engage in (oppressive) problematic situations with empathy, with compassion. If only the oppressed would show sufficient goodwill, or work through the proper channels in a truly good-natured fashion, the dominant

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group would then work cooperatively with them to ameliorate the situation (cf. Douglass 2016, 48–9). Imagine a man pinned face down to the floor, his oppressor’s boot firmly pressed into the back of his neck. This man, when capable, is expected to calmly petition his oppressor with compassion: “Sir, I understand that you are frustrated with your lot, but would you please remove your boot from my neck?” To suggest that oppressed people need to develop a greater sense of empathy (for their oppressors), or that oppressed people need to be more persuasive and less threatening in their petitions for basic human dignity, is unscrupulously one-sided.2 It places a disproportionate burden on the already oppressed— to “take the high road,” to “be the change they want to see in the world,” to convince their oppressors that there is something amiss/unjust within the hegemonic order of things. Note, there is an underlying assumption that democratic methods (so conceived) have worked historically and provide our only viable way forward. Leonard Harris’s work has been a watershed for me, offering numerous insights that challenged my previous commitments and motivated this book (Harris 2020). In Harris’s work I find a prescient challenge to classical pragmatism, clear-eyed advocacy for Alain Locke’s critical pragmatism, and a fruitfully idiosyncratic conception of philosophy—philosophia nata ex conatu. In Harris’s work I find alternative ways of conceiving oppressive conditions, immiseration, and necro-being. I find compelling reasons to critique complacent and callous philosophical perspectives, which far too often offer “theodicies” for the prevailing order of things. I find liberating depictions of adversarial coalitions with efficacious agents bearing bold, tenacious dispositions to challenge and escape oppressive boundaries and impediments. This book is an attempt at articulating an ethical perspective that squares my commitments to pragmatic ethical naturalism, critical pragmatism, and insurrectionist ethics. It is an attempt to work out the types of moral intuitions,

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character traits, reasoning strategies, and methods required to garner impetus for the liberation of oppressed groups. Emphasis is placed on the liberating of people from various oppressive and debilitating boundaries; for instance, boundaries that impose and enforce racial, gender, and class categories; boundaries that mark a population as bereft of honor and dignity; boundaries that deny access to social and material capital. The focus here is on facing and countering those existing conditions which cause or sustain oppression, immiseration, and necro-being.

Oppression and Insurrection By “oppression” I refer to a system of interrelated barriers and forces that conspire to reduce, immobilize, and mold people who are assigned to a denigrated group, and thereby rendered subordinate to a dominant group (Frye 1983, 33). This is a structural account of oppression, which forgoes both the psychologism of attempting to pin oppressive intentions or attitudes to isolated “bad apples” and the hunt for indisputable isolated oppressive acts (Frye 1983, 7; Manne 2018, 60). Rather, the structural account focuses on how individuals, once categorized as a member of a stigmatized group, experience social and physical barriers and forces that limit or inhibit their bodily comportment, their opportunities. Oppression can take various forms: sex-based, class-based, race-based, sexuality-based, disability-based, and so forth. So, women are oppressed in patriarchal cultures. Nonwhite people are oppressed in nations that propagate and impose white supremacist social hierarchies. Poor people are oppressed in situations where their lack of economic or social capital precludes them from basic human dignities, educational and economic opportunity, or equal protection under the law. And, of course, we find various ways in which oppressions of this sort intersect (Collins 2009, 2019; Lugones 2003; Davis 1983).

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Are white men in the United States oppressed? Are white men oppressed by radical feminists assertively stating their feminist views? Or, were white men in the United States oppressed by having to bear eight years of the Obama administration? To answer these questions, we need to discern whether or not white men in the United States are caught in a system of interrelated barriers and forces which conspire to reduce, immobilize, and mold them and render them a subordinated group dominated by radical feminists or Obama? I would argue that white men in the United States are not presently oppressed for being white or for being men. White men in the United States can be wronged, discriminated against, and treated unjustly—but, on this view, that would not necessarily amount to oppression. Now, let us be clear, white men can be oppressed. Gay and queer white men can be oppressed for deviating from heteronormativity. Poor white men can be oppressed qua “poor white trash,” expendable members of an exploited laboring class. Non-able-bodied white men can be oppressed for visible or unseen features of their bodies, invariably barring them from particular activities and spaces. But, again, in our present milieu, I would suggest that white men are not oppressed for being white or for being men. It is important to note that oppressed groups are relegated to a subordinated position. There are power differentials between the oppressed groups and the dominant groups. In light of this, I find it troubling that oppressed groups are compelled to exhibit empathy and compassion in hopes that their appeals to conscience, their shows of achievement, will lure their oppressors into cooperative efforts to undermine structural forms of oppression. At very least, I think that it is stifling to limit oppressed groups to compassionate gestures, appeals to conscience, and carefully articulated moral arguments as the only legitimate means by which oppressed peoples could approach or solicit social amelioration. I think oppressed groups will likely need to bear an insurrectionist ethos (or spirit), an ethos that will conjure new norms and reorient what counts as ethical comportment and conduct. Many recoil at the use of the term “insurrection.” Insurrections are typically depicted as armed revolts, rebellions, attempts at revolution—heavy emphasis

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on armed combat, blood, and chaotic lawlessness. Many have trouble seeing how insurrection could be ethical, sensing an implicit contradiction in terms. (Perhaps insurrection was justified in 1676 [Bacon’s Rebellion], or 1775 [American Revolutionary War], or 1831 [the Southampton Insurrection], or 1859 [John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry], but surely not now.) The term “insurrection,” as I am deploying it, denotes the action of rising in open resistance against established authority or normative restraint. I believe some form of open resistance against established authority, a break with tacit norms and background assumptions is needed in order to challenge or perhaps escape extant oppressive conditions. Play along. Imagine if representatives of the church dutifully read Plato, understanding Plato’s assertion that human beings have a tripartite soul—a rational part, a spirited part (thumos), and an appetitive part—that should be ruled by reason (Plato 1995, Phaedrus 246a–8e; Plato 2004, Republic 435c–41e). Imagine an especially revered representative of the church subsequently argued: (1) The appetitive should always be ruled by or subjected to the rational. (2) Women, tied to their bodily sex, are bound to the appetitive, while men are ruled by the rational mind. (Augustine 1994, 48, 51) (∴) Women should always be ruled by or subjected to men. (Augustine 1993, 285, 1994, 51) Imagine you and your kin were deemed spiritually and corporally polluted and taught that you and the people of your caste were meant (by the holy scriptures) to serve as servants to the twice-born castes. Imagine if only the twice-born were allowed to study the holy scriptures, and your submission to this law (viz., Varnashrama dharma) was considered the key to the continued success of the your civilization (Laws of Manu 1957, 175; Gandhi 1996, 221). Imagine if colonial settlers came from space (or Western Europe) and deemed you and your people savages. Imagine they were shocked at your lack of faith in Jesus Christus, or your lack of fence-bound linear row crops, or they

INTRODUCTION  7

just wanted to extract your precious metals, your tea, your labor. In any case, the settlers mixed their labor with your wretched, untamed land and thereby assumed ownership of your land and its resources, then restricted your people to arid reservations and townships (Locke 1980, 21; Columbus 1893, 46–7; Smith 1910, 934–6; Quinney 2002, 297; Fanon 2004, 4; Simpson 2017, 15). These are but mere vignettes of oppression—sex-based, caste-based, and the variety of ways colonized peoples were rendered “other” or naturally subordinate. Justifications were given (by St. Augustine, Mohandas Gandhi, John Locke, and many, many others). But could you imagine it happening to you or people like you? And here is the real question: Would you openly resist such oppression, such injustice? Would you assume “a militant posture of resistance,” even if such oppression became commonplace and legal? (McBride 2017, 229–30). Should you harbor an insurrectionist spirit?

Structure of the Book In Chapter 1, I give reasons to question de rigueur professional moral philosophy. Following William James and Leonard Harris, I postulate a thoroughly disenchanted universe—an unfinished universe, a universe “without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the lid off ” (Dewey, MW 4: 45). From this perspective I offer an account of ethical naturalism, separating a materialist strain of naturalism from a critical strain of naturalism. In the end, I articulate reasons for harboring a critical form of pragmatic ethical naturalism, appropriating insights from John Dewey, Elizabeth Anderson, and Bryan Norton. In Chapter 2, I hone the critical edge. I unpack Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist challenge to pragmatism, highlighting compelling reasons to remain critical of the classical pragmatic tradition. I articulate Harris’s conception of philosophy as philosophia nata ex conatu (philosophy born of struggle) and explain the role that Alain Locke’s critical pragmatism plays

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in imagining new values, new norms, a new order of things. I conclude the chapter with an account of the four basic tenets of an insurrectionist ethics. In Chapter 3, I set a naturalistic form of dialectic/conflict as a backdrop to the discussion. I appropriate Nietzsche’s “metamorphosis of the spirit” to suggest that the values we hold influence our ethical conduct, our comportment. Through enculturation some of us are rendered oppressed weight-bearing camel spirits. Through agonistic struggle against the conventional norms, camel spirits can morph into insurrectionist lion spirits. Lion spirits, in turn, can make space for the next phase in metamorphosis, the child spirits, who are afforded the freedom to conjure new values, new (bold) modes of comportment. To this end, insurrectionists are needed to liberate camel spirits and create space for joyful and creative child spirits. In Chapter 4, I discuss moral psychology and a predominant thrust (in the hegemonic discourse of the West) to give approbation to empathetic dispositions and disapprobation to insurrectionist dispositions. I suggest that there is something deeply oppressive about declaring empathy and compassion as the only legitimate responses to oppression. Rather, I argue that insurrectionist character traits (e.g., anger, enmity, and pugnacity) may be vital to any attempt to really alter both the normative and the material conditions for oppressed peoples. I argue against those who preclude insurrectionist resistance; that is, against those who claim that empathy (or love) is the only ethical way to approach injustice or oppression. In Chapter 5, I acknowledge that racial adversarial groups will be needed to address race-based oppression and necro-being. Yet, I critique a prominent Du Boisian strand of racial separatism that argues that the preservation of racial distinctiveness is desirable and anthropologically necessary. I argue that views of this sort invariably overlook, disregard, or erase the multiplicity, the intersectional complexity within these communities of resistance. In response, I outline an alternative way forward, one that allows for multiplicitous identities extending beyond stark racial nationalisms (and separatism) and

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facilitates interracial, intercaste and multicultural coalitions, opening avenues to intercultural communication and collective action. In Chapter 6, I discuss the shaping of the future. I suggest that stoic fatalism and nihilistic skepticism are two perennial impediments to social amelioration. I critically assess both perspectives before offering a third option, splitting the horns of this false dilemma. I argue that critical progressive traditions can codify and perpetuate values and norms that can be dragged into the future, helping to shape the future of the social group. Traditions, on this view, are value-laden, provincial creations, iteratively open to transvaluation. In the Epilogue, I attempt to tie up loose ends. I offer brief remarks about my intentions and how the chapters hang together.

Notes 1 “Americans,” here, is used to denote US citizens. 2 See Elizabeth Anderson’s discussion of norms of civility in “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry” (Anderson 1998, 36).

References Addams, Jane. 2002. Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Anderson, Elizabeth. 1998. “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry,” In In Face of the Facts, edited by R. Wightman Fox and R. Westbrook, pp. 10–39. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Augustine. 1993. Confessions: Books I-XIII. Translated by F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Augustine. 1994. [selections]. Included in The Philosophy of Woman: An Anthology of Classic to Current Concepts, Third Edition. Edited by Mary Mahowald, pp. 44–52. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2009. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Columbus, Christopher. 1893. “Spanish Letter to Luis De Sant Angel, 1493,” in The Columbus Memorial, edited by George Young, pp. 37–49. Philadelphia: Jordan Bros. Croly, Herbert. 2014. The Promise of American Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davis, Angela Y. 1983. Women, Race, & Class. New York: Vintage Books. Dewey, John. 1977. “Intelligence and Morals,” in The Middle Works, Vol. 4: 1907–1909, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 31–49. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Douglass, Frederick. 2016. “Is Civil Government Right?,” in The Essential Douglass, edited by Nicholas Buccola, pp. 45–49. Indianapolis: Hackett. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Berkeley: The Crossing Press. Gandhi, Mohandas. 1996. The Penguin Gandhi Reader. Edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee. New York: Penguin Books. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. London: Bloomsbury. The Laws of Manu [selections]. 1957. In A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Edited by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles Moore, pp. 172–92. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Locke, John. 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press. McBride, Lee. 2006. “Collectivistic Individualism: Dewey and MacIntyre,” Contemporary Pragmatism, Vol. 3, No. 1 (June), pp. 69–83. McBride, Lee. 2017. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Racism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, pp. 225–34. New York: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1995. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett. Plato. 2004. Republic. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett. Quinney, John Wannuaucon. 2002. “Fourth of July Address at Reidsville, New York, 1854,” in American Philosophies, edited by Leonard Harris, Scott Pratt, and Anne Waters, pp. 295–7. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Seigfried, Charlene H. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, John. 1910. Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England, Or Any Where; Or, The Path-way to Erect a Plantation, included in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, 1580–1631, New Edition. Edited by Edward Arber, pp. 934–40. Edinburgh: John Grant.

1 (Moral) Philosophy in a Thoroughly Disenchanted Universe

If there is no such thing as the cosmic point of view, if the idea of absolute importance in the scheme of things is an illusion, a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted, then there is no other point of view except ours in which our activities can have or lack a significance. —BERNARD WILLIAMS, “THE HUMAN PREJUDICE”

I, like all (enculturated) people, approach ethics with particular commitments, biases, and background assumptions. In this chapter I aim to shed some light on my approach to ethics and the moral life. I assume that some people, especially the professional philosophers, will want to know my affiliation, to know where I stand (normatively and metaethically). To be forthright, I am resistant to the idea of slotting myself into any of the readily acknowledged ethical camps/traditions; to do so seems to limit my position to the confines of those well-rehearsed conceptual schemes. When I share the names of the people and traditions that inspire me and buttress my position, I do not wish to be interpreted as a mere disciple of said thinker or tradition. I do not wish to be judged by my (in)fidelity to this thinker or that tradition. That said, I am not wandering in the desert alone. Although my approach may be heterodox in

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the grand scheme of moral philosophy, I find support for my views in several sources and traditions. Foremost among them stands a decidedly critical strain of ethical naturalism. In this chapter I voice some of my concerns about the conventional practice of moral philosophy, then, in contrast, articulate a form of pragmatic ethical naturalism, one that postulates a thoroughly disenchanted universe.1 In the end, I briefly consider whether this position is also susceptible to ethnocentrism and provincial cultural limitations, blind to systemic oppression and pervasive asymmetries in the ascribing of dignity.

Moral Philosophy and Cultural Myopia I have been accused of being cynical—it was implied. In any case, I do not see myself as a cynic. I have not given up on humanity. I have not succumbed to nihilism. Now, I may show contempt for accepted standards of behavior in the dominant culture. I may sneer at the brutality or the callousness exhibited toward stigmatized groups. I may disparage the plundering, the ecological degradation, the climate injustice, the wretchedness that is often inflicted on historically colonized populations. (Guilty.) But I am not a mere cynic. I mean, I think it is worth trying to shape a future that minimizes misery and subjection. I think there are better (more sustainable) ways to live on, with, and through our natural environments. I try to be a good person. But I do have my misgivings with de rigueur moral philosophy. Moral philosophy often seems like an ornate game played by only the cleverest professional philosophers. If normative ethics is to be helpful in the project of living well, of flourishing, of finding meaning and purpose, of leaving the world a better place, it ought to help us to be attentive, sensitive, and open to value, not



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cocky, overconfident, and closed to other ways of thinking and being. Many philosophers behave as if their job is to win arguments, leaving one’s opponent defeated, maimed, and breathless. (Flanagan 2017, 15) For those who participate in these practices (with jaunty flair), the key is to devise astute, unassailable thought experiments, evoking key canonical positions, formalizing long chains of valid argumentation, and withstanding subsequent criticism from clever philosophical detractors. Moral claims are purported to mirror what is morally real or to represent universal moral objectivity; avowed fundamental moral principles are purported to serve as the condition for all derivative moral principles; metaethical stances are purported to be the only tenable moral edifices upon which to stand. In this practice, intuition pumps are harnessed and wielded. The dueling of wits abounds, the convolution/sophistication of thought experiment ramps up (Anderson 2015, 25). Owen Flanagan is right; the standard practice of professional moral philosophy (in the Euro-American “West”) is often pretentious, myopic, and cloistered. First, “the standard philosophical picture of moral interaction and exchange is historically and ecologically unrealistic because it is transcendentally pretentious, conceiving the philosopher’s vocation as identifying what is really good or right independently of history or culture” (Flanagan 2017, 7). Moral philosophers typically seek absolutes and universally applicable truths. And, in many cases, professional moral philosophers carry out this search largely ignorant of the insights assembled by the social sciences: history, cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and so on. In fact, philosophy is often described as an a priori investigation, as opposed to the empirical, descriptive investigation of the natural and social sciences.2 On this reading, philosophy distinguishes itself from the sciences by restricting its purview to reason alone, to clearing up semantic confusion, to analytically discerning what may and may not intelligibly be thought (Shafer-Landau 2013, 54–5; Dummett 2010, 14; Thomson 2003, 11–12). Thus, the ebb and flow of human valuations and

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intuitions, the contextual articulations of normativity (as empirical matters) are rendered inconsequential or simply not philosophical. And how could laws for the determination of our will be regarded as laws for the determination of a rational being in general and of ourselves only insofar as we are rational beings, if these laws were merely empirical and did not have their source completely a priori in pure, but practical, reason? (Kant 2011, 955) The moral philosopher’s vocation, then, is to articulate what is good or morally fundamental in all cases, for all moral agents, paying no attention to cultural differences, the variety of intervening background assumptions, implicit bias, or tendencies toward ethnocentrism. Indeed, the project, isolated from transnational history, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and the like, seems unrealistic and pretentious. It seems to assume that the adroit Euro-American moral philosopher can rely upon their intuitions, norms, and intervening background assumptions to discern what is good or right absolutely and universally (cf. Anderson 2015, 41; Kornblith 2015, 152). Second, the standard picture evokes a singleton agent who assesses and judges moral situations alone, one dilemma at a time (Flanagan 2017, 7). In Cartesian fashion, one need only conceive of something clearly and distinctly to apprehend its apodictic truth. René Descartes was absolutely certain that the three angles of any triangle must equal two right angles, and that God existed in more than thought. These, for Descartes, were self-evident truths (Descartes 1993, 43–4). (Of course, non-Euclidean geometry attenuates the universality of this geometric claim.3) In any event, for the (crypto-)Cartesian philosopher, to reach epistemic certainty neither extrinsic nor intersubjective corroboration is necessary.4 In an isolated cabin in the woods, alone by the fire, Descartes was able to deduce that God exists, that God is no deceiver, and thus, because that which he (mentally) perceives clearly and distinctly is undoubtedly true, “full and certain knowledge of countless things is possible”



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(Descartes 1993, 47). No peer review, no corroboration, no (concurring) community of inquiry is needed (Cf. Peirce 1992, 52; Hacking 2002, 123). Ideally, then, the singleton moral philosopher has the ability (somehow) to reach across the chasm from the phenomenal realm into the noumenal realm, into “what really is.” Or, the singleton philosopher, at their most rational, personifies the ideal observer—omniscient, omnipercipient, disinterested, dispassionate, consistent, and in all other respects normal (Firth 1952). The ideal observer is abreast of all nonmoral facts, he perceives all the perspectives, he is unbiased and unemotional, and he makes inferences in a consistent manner. The ideal observer, in various guises, permeates moral philosophy. An ideal observer of this sort stands behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance, laying bare the ideal, foundational principles of justice (Bok 2017, 175). An ideal observer carries out the utilitarian calculus, perceptively and impartially assessing and quantifying the immediate and long-term pleasures and pains for all affected parties—always recognizing that intellectual pleasures bear more value than corporeal pleasures. An ideal observer perceives and concedes the force of bedrock beliefs, defeaters, and counterfactuals. The ideal observer, as omniscient, omnipercipient, disinterested, dispassionate, consistent, and yet otherwise normal, sounds quite fanciful—“a slimmed-down surrogate of the Christian God” (Williams 2008, 145). The ideal observer is not divine, but a pseudo-supernatural Being to which we, as moral agents, should aspire. (Queer, indeed.)5 And, yet, it is far too common that the moral philosopher, by his singleton rational faculties, assumes the vantage point of a god, presuming to deliver universal principles and absolute moral claims. Philosophers of this ilk seem to evoke a philosophical “sixth sense.” Rachels is right; it does seem like “occult mumbo jumbo” (Rachels 1995, 2). In this sense, the singleton moral philosopher who makes absolutist and universalist claims based only on his intuitions with no concern for extrinsic corroboration is hubristic and likely blinkered from live alternatives (Anderson 2015, 25–7). Third, philosophers tend to fret over sanitized, abstract moral problems rather than quotidian, mundane problems. Moral philosophers, especially

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absolutists and realists, tend to confine themselves to a priori investigations (i.e., investigations by reason alone) discerning universal principles and moral absolutes that hold either in concert with the view of the ideal observer or in a noumenal sense, in and of themselves (Firth 1952; Shafer-Landau 2013, 55). To tease out shared intuitions, to reveal the exact force of the argument, or to expose misgivings in rival positions, moral philosophers trade in highly contrived thought experiments (e.g., The Trolley Problem, The Lifeboat Case, The Ring of Gyges, The Murderer at the Door, The Experience Machine, and The Last Man Argument). The semantics of (moral) propositions are scrutinized. (And propositions, as declarative statements or sentences, must be either true or false.) The necessity or feasibility of inferences is disputed. As Flanagan points out, there is a distancing between the work of professional moral philosophy and the messy complexity of the lived moral life.6 The sanitized problems of the moral philosopher routinely ignore the complex cultural and historical particularities of the moral issues we face in the lived experience (James 1956, 204). It fails to recognize the tacit social, political, public policy, and legal dimensions. This locates moral philosophers as ivory tower, armchair theorists (Kornblith 2015, 153; Anderson 1998, 16). Philosophy is depicted as “a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience” (Dummett 2010, 4). We, as philosophers, study concepts rather than that which is “seen” through a particular set of concepts; we study the lenses rather than the world (Thomson 2003, 12–13). “Reasons come first, policies second, not the other way around” (Callicott 1995, 23). Painted in this fashion, philosophers qua philosopher do not dabble in practical application, in enacting policy. Rather, abstract principles, true (moral) propositions, and theories of justice are handed down (from the ivory tower) to policymakers, social scientists, social activists, or reasonable autonomous agents. Moral philosophy, thus, remains effete and insular, cloistered from the roughly hewn complexity of thick concepts and polyphonic moral conduct.7



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Flanagan argues that our moral imagination is hindered by the dominant conception of moral philosophy in the Anglo-American West. Without some familiarity with cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology, no adequate sense of the varieties of moral possibility can be acquired. Without some sense of the historical and cultural context, “one remains imprisoned by one’s upbringing” (Flanagan 2017, 5). Empirical studies that could potentially problematize or unseat our received intuitions are eschewed (Anderson 1998, 16, 22, 2015, 26–7). The documented (historical and anthropological) fact of normative and value difference goes unseen. The (psychologically) predictable ways in which implicit bias influences human perception and moral reasoning are disregarded. The profound failures of our society are often massaged or excepted—narrow-mindedness, exceptionalism, and ethnocentrism prevail. As such, contemporary academic moral philosophy distances itself from the complex thick, context-dependent concepts of the lived experience. It conceals the anomalies, deviations, particularities of context; it waves off the epistemic limitations of human finitude and provincialism. It “operates with an antiseptic and ecologically unrealistic conception of the participants in moral life” (Flanagan 2017, 5). There is little sense inside much of moral philosophy that the “I’s” and “thou’s,” the “we’s” and “they’s,” the “us’s” and “them’s” engaged in moral commerce are occupants of worlds defined in part by gender and race, poverty and war, degradation, subjugation, and hierarchy, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Rwanda, Somalia, the Nankin massacre, inflation, deflation, rape, cocaine, refugees, childhood leukemia, apartheid, caste, love gained, love lost, birth, and death as well as the long and weighty force fields of particular histories, languages, and traditions. We are born into worlds among Confucians or Methodists or Buddhists or Catholics, as Navaho, Shuar, Piraha, Hopi, Aztec, Ashanti, Akan, Maasai, Dinka, Nuer, Yoruba, Sunni, or Shia, and we learn to speak, think, and judge, at least at first, inside these worlds. (Flanagan 2017, 5)

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There are real differences in concepts and values, traditions and practices, temperamental styles and personalities. And these differences matter (in the moral life) (Flanagan 2017, 5–6). A moral philosophy that neglects these differences is bound to see its values and customs, its cultural background assumptions as supracultural. Furthermore, norms and virtuous dispositions that engender widespread agreement when described abstractly can conceal structural incongruities or regimes of oppression. Nota bene, “Colonialist regimes always recommend certain virtues for those they colonize” (Flanagan 2017, 6). We live in increasingly multicultural, multiethnic, cosmopolitan worlds, and our varying perspectives may color our assessments of particular contexts and situations. It matters how members of original displaced communities, or people who were brought here or came here as chattel slaves or indentured workers or political refugees or for economic opportunity, have thought about virtues, moral psychology, normative ethics, and good human lives. (Flanagan 2017, 4)8 Flanagan prods us to recognize the role of the (social and cognitive) sciences in helping us to understand these various contexts and perspectives. He implores us to not overextend their authority/reach in regard to human conduct and human values; to brace against reductive scientistic naturalism. Nevertheless, he prods us qua moral philosophers to recognize that there are differing moral traditions, differing depictions of virtue, differing modes of upright comportment. Acknowledging this pluralism makes us aware of the space of possibility, allowing us to imagine alternative value schemes and modes of conduct. “Often we don’t see the possibilities for becoming better than we are or the possibilities for better ways of achieving our ends” (Flanagan 2017, 11). He continues: If I see no possibilities, then effectively there are none. And if I don’t see that how I conceive the kind of person I am—a man, a white man, an American



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white man, an Irish American Catholic white man—is itself a space with dynamic shape, porous boundaries, and various points of leverage, then it fixes me and limits my capacities for change and growth in ways that might seem necessary, but that are not. (Flanagan 2017, 12) If you and I cannot discern or recognize the kind of persons we are and could be, we are trapped, imprisoned within a customary order of things, with fixed cultural norms and background assumptions; ensnared in an episteme.9

Ethical Naturalism David Papineau writes, “The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy” (2016). By his account, the term derives from twentieth-century debates in the United States (cf. Jewett 2011). Figures such as John Dewey, George Santayana, C. I. Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Lewis White Beck, and Thomas Nagel attempted to align philosophy more closely with science. The heart of the position rests upon an attempt to explain the world and reality within the limits of nature; to limit our theorizing, philosophical investigations, and explanations to natural events, entities, and causes. That is, to exclude supernatural entities, forces, and justifications from philosophical explanation. Papineau holds that “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. He suggests that “The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized” (Papineau 2016). Papineau, here, seems disinterested in this particular strain of naturalism. Either the net that is cast is so wide that the categorization does not do much philosophical/explanatory work, or this tradition of naturalism has so thoroughly permeated the field that it no longer bears mention. Unlike Papineau, I am not confident that “the great majority” of philosophers have thoroughly embraced naturalism, so conceived. Many philosophers still

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make (tacit) references to a “third realm,” independent of (i) extrinsic material reality and (ii) subjective/psychological experiences, where timeless, eternal, and unvarying thoughts reside (Frege 1997, 337, 343). “What is in this place is without color and without shape and without solidity, a being that really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence”—it is “the plain where truth stands” (Plato 1995, 33, 35). We “grasp” or “recollect” or postulate eternal intelligible entities—things-in-themselves—apart from our (phenomenal) perceptions of such entities (Frege 1997, 341; Kant 1965, 271– 2). The traditional correspondence theory of truth seems to presuppose such an ethereal noumenal or transcendental realm. Moreover, many philosophers still help themselves to conceptions of divine providence, Brahman, or the notion that there is one ultimate teleology for the cosmos. Many philosophers retain a failsafe Redeemer, Ātman, or Over-Soul pulling levers behind the curtain (Harris 2020, 15, 20, 275). Some philosophers tacitly hold that there is a cosmic Geist/Spirit unraveling, through dialectical means, toward Absolute Knowing and Freedom—(European) Enlightenment rationality, Western democratic institutions, and techno-industrial development are often taken as benchmarks in a grand narrative of Geist expanding, revealing Itself to itself (Hegel 1988, 58–9). In any case, let us consider this strain of naturalism a bit further, in broad strokes. Lewis White Beck suggests that the naturalist is committed to three main theses. First, the naturalist holds the anti-dualistic thesis (Beck 1952, 382). The naturalist situates every entity as a part or a manifestation of nature. Reality does not consist of nature plus God, or nature plus minds. Reality is approached through (concrete and abstract) investigations arising out of the natural realm. Second, the naturalist holds the anti-idealistic thesis (Beck 1952, 383). On this view, minds and their experiences are explained in terms of nature. Human beings are considered organic creatures that have developed complex methods of apprehending and adapting to precarious environments. “Mind” refers to the organism’s process of knowing. Third, the naturalist holds the scientific thesis (Beck 1952, 384). The naturalist advocates a scientific



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approach as the most reliable method of acquiring, corroborating, and revising knowledge. This will include careful empirical observation, formulation of explanatory hypotheses, testing of hypotheses, and systematic attempts to generalize findings into “laws” or valid inferences. Now, of these naturalists, we can distinguish two types. The first group we can label materialists or scientifically reductive naturalists; the second group we can label critical, fallibilist, or pragmatic naturalists. The materialist strand of naturalism leans heavily on the authority and truths established by a scientific establishment. For instance, materialist theories of mind and reductive neuroscience tend to support an epiphenomenalist view, where mental events are caused by physical (or neurochemical) events in the brain, but mental events (such as intentions to act) play no causal role in human behavior (Beck 1952, 394–8). Analogously, orthodox Marxists, dialectical materialists, believe that, in the final analysis, the determining factor in human behavior is found in a human being’s relation to the material productive system (Beck 1952, 400–6; Lukacs 1971, 1, 20–3). Social ills and misery are reduced to class antagonism, an ongoing dialectical struggle over economic modes of production and distribution of goods. “Dialectical materialism is seen to offer the only approach to reality which can give action a direction” (Lukacs 1971, 23). Naturalism in this materialist guise is prone to dogmatic assertions, displaying an uncritical acceptance of the results proffered by favored methods and exacting (scientific) investigators. In this sense, the materialist naturalist is out of step with the actual de rigueur practice of science, where investigators limit themselves to claims of strong correlation, statistical significance, and warranted assertion. Moreover, materialist views tend to deny or deemphasize the role of human valuation and intentional action. In reducing all phenomena to material factors, the materialist seems to offer an overly simplistic (or overly reductive) view of its subject matter, be it neurochemistry, modes of production, or human experience (Beck 1952, 410–11). The second strain of naturalist—the critical naturalists—offer a different approach. While still holding to the anti-dualistic, the anti-idealistic, and the

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scientific theses, these naturalists approach philosophical inquiry in a nonreductive manner. “Reasoning . . . need not be interpreted as a transcendental function of an other-worldly entity called mind or pure reason” (Beck 1952, 436). Mind is a name we, as discursive organic beings, give to a way of acting; that is, “a way of acting under the guidance of alternative sets of symbolic interpretations of the stimulus, each of which promises its own anticipated consequences for the future behavior of the organism” (Beck 1952, 436; cf. Dewey LW 1: 217). In the sociopolitical realm, the critical naturalist can make use of an economic critique of the prevailing modes of production, but need not reduce all forms of social strife (e.g., misogyny, racism, or caste subordination) to an economic class antagonism (Mouffe 2013b, 46). Moreover, these critical naturalists retain notions of fallibilism and corrigibility with regard to experimental inquiry and human knowledge. Anomalies and novel findings/ evidence are acknowledged. It is recognized that new explanatory models and new scientific paradigms are always a possibility. It is acknowledged that the world is wild and still in the making; that natural regularities and patterns evolve sporadically—rogue asteroids, shifts in plate tectonics, exposure to nuclear radiation, the proliferation of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides, and the exponential increase of anthropogenic carbon emissions are known to alter natural climate cycles and established patterns of genetic reproduction. Critical naturalism, so conceived, casts a broad net and captures a disparate group of thinkers: neo-Aristotelian, pragmatic, and genealogical. It is with this critical lot that I would place myself. I grew up outside of “the church,” a heathen. As such, the naturalistic perspective came easily to me. Parochial theistic doctrines are hard to square with lived experience and accrued knowledge, especially for those not immersed or initiated in a religious creed. Rainbows are God’s promise (to never flood the earth again) (Gen. 9:14-17).10 God apparently intended Adam and Eve (i.e., humanity) to be and remain ignorant; He forbade them from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17). God gave “his only begotten Son,” Jesus, for our sins; Jesus died and was



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resurrected (Jn 3:16). And yet I am supposed to accept the profound truth of the Trinity (i.e., God is at once God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit)?11 These types of supernatural claims and explanations have troubled me since adolescence.12 But, please note, I am not trying to definitively disprove the existence of this or that divinity.13 I am not interested in denying anyone’s religious experiences or denying the function of faith in purposive action (James 1956, 96; Dewey LW 5: 267; Locke 1989, 137; Joas 2001, 49; Anderson 2006, 129). Rather, I am mainly concerned with those barriers and impediments that limit, confine, and shape human conduct, especially those norms and institutions that make insubordinate thoughts indiscernible or render comportment self-effacing and conciliatory. I have deep concerns that an overaccentuated, overriding deference to extrinsic supernatural agencies serves as an impediment to defiant, counter-hegemonic efforts. I think John Dewey is right; bestowing intervening faith in supernatural entities or occult causal agencies depreciates human intelligence and effort and dissipates human moral responsibility. The objection to supernaturalism is that it stands in the way of an effective realization of the sweep and depth of the implications of natural human relations. It stands in the way of using the means that are in our power to make radical changes in these relations. (Dewey, LW 9: 53) To resign ourselves to the enchanted workings of transcendent, supernatural agencies seems to abdicate the human work of understanding, altering, and adapting to social and natural environments (e.g., Ps. 34:17; Hippolytus 1987, 386). To submit resolutely to supernatural preordinance (or divine fiat) seems to grant trust too easily—trust that everything is as it was meant to be (e.g., Col. 1:16; Voltaire 2000, 2). In this sense, an overaccentuated, overriding deference to enchanted agencies seems to welcome resignation and fatalism. Indeed, to seek natural means and the power to ameliorate material realities while abdicating ultimate responsibility to a supernatural agency is like “riding two horses that are going in opposite directions” (LW 9:52).

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Like William James and Leonard Harris, I postulate a radically contingent, amoral universe, a feral world still in the making—a universe without an immutable realm of eternal Truths, without the three grey goddesses (The Fates), without one immanent cosmic telos, without Ātman or Being revealing Itself to itself, without guaranteed redemption. It is an untethered pluralistic universe—or, a multiverse—thoroughly disenchanted (James 1956, ix, 103, 292, 1981, 117; Harris 2020, 20, 275).14 Note that these presuppositions run contrary to many of the presuppositions held implicitly if not explicitly by a legion of professional philosophers, theists, atheists, and agnostics alike. Many philosophers, following Aristotle, will argue that there has to be an ultimate telos/end, otherwise all philosophical inquiry, all the causal chains, all the attempts at justification devolve into infinite regress (Aristotle 2000, 4). Meno’s paradox rears its head again as a real issue—either we are searching for what we already know (intuitively or innately), or we have no standard by which to know if we have stumbled upon the True account (Plato, Meno 80e). Philosophical inquiry is either disconcertingly circular or futile. My colleagues invariably select the first horn of the dilemma (often smugly). They insist that it is intuitive that the universe bears an underlying order and purpose; correct answers are undeniable, self-evident.15 Or, they say that there must be an immutable Truth (that transcends human experience), otherwise the conventional conception of philosophy is besmirched. Or, they dismiss my queries as inscrutable or decidedly un-philosophical. To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon. . . . Such a world would not be respectable philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar in the eyes of most professors of philosophy. (James 1981, 117) Nevertheless, I postulate a perilous, contingent universe still roiling with quirks, anomalies, and mutability. I postulate a universe that never completely conceals the “soft, monstrous masses” that lurk just beyond the



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veneer—disorder and obscene nakedness (Sartre 1964, 127). Of course, we can establish regularities in this world; we can trace regenerative patterns of flora and fauna; we can build systems and traditions. But there is no “smile” in the garden (there, on the trunk of the chestnut tree). There is no “odd little sense,” no transcendental secret taunting us from a noumenal realm (Sartre 1964, 135).16 I propose a disenchanted philosophy that tarries here in the murk and ambiguity of lived experience (Harris 2020, 14–15, 20; De Beauvoir 2015, 8, 139; Williams 2008, 137).

A Pragmatic Naturalism When I am hard-pressed to give an account of my ethical stance, I inevitably draw upon the pragmatic naturalism of John Dewey. The specter of Dewey looms large in my thinking (McBride 2006; 2017). But again, I do not want to be cast as a Dewey acolyte; this, too, may ensnare. Dewey’s variant of pragmatic ethical naturalism is unorthodox; it does not play within the established (Anglo-American analytic) philosophical protocols. It refrains from making absolute moral claims and evoking immutable truths. It stresses context, situatedness, the lived experience. It admits to judging the value of ideas and beliefs by their facility in assuring prized ends-in-view (mental or physical equilibrium, consummatory experiences, etc.). Dewey argues that we can only expect so much from moral theory (LW 7: 166). Moral theory does not provide moral algorithms, unambiguous moral principles, or universally applicable failsafe decision procedures. Rather, the studying of moral theory offers three potential benefits. First, it can generalize the types of moral conflicts human beings have faced, enabling a perplexed and doubtful individual to clarify their particular problem by placing it in a larger context. Second, it can articulate the leading ways in which such problems have been intellectually dealt with by our predecessors. And, third, moral theory can render personal reflection more systematic and enlightened,

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suggesting alternatives that might otherwise be overlooked, thereby sharpening judgment. Dewey is clear, those who expect more from moral theory will be gravely disappointed. If we expect to be genuinely reflective in your thinking, we should not expect moral theory to offer a derivation manual, casuistry, or ready-made conclusions (Dewey LW 7: 166; Rawls 1999, 42–3). Dewey’s ethics does not fit neatly into any of “the big three” normative theories—it is not representative of virtue theory, deontology, or consequentialism. Dewey engages each of these chief classic theories, mining them for insights and heuristics (LW 7: 181–3). The first, “teleological theory” (or utilitarian consequentialism), attaches chief importance to the attainment of beneficial/good ends (teloi) or intended outcomes. The great problem is the sophisticated discernment of good consequences; that is, the discernment of those actions most likely to augment the most benefit/pleasure for the most people. Jeremy Bentham and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek stand as two representative utilitarian philosophers. The second normative theory, “jural theory” (or deontology), makes law and duty/obligation supreme. The great problem for this view is discovering the underlying authority or law; that is, discovering the universalizable principles and norms that should govern the actions of rational beings. Immanuel Kant and Onora O’Neill are two prominent deontologists. The third theory, “reflective theory” (or virtue ethics), makes virtue and vice, approbation and disapprobation supreme. The great problem is to lay bare the standard/criterion for virtuousness; that is, to lay bare the conceptions of “the good,” human flourishing, and the like. Aristotle and Sarah Broadie are representative virtue theorists. Rather than isolating and discerning the correct moral theory, Dewey, here, aims to determine the value these moral theories have for contemporary reflective (pragmatist) moral inquiry (LW 7: 183). While deontology and consequentialism typically focus on actions/conduct, virtue theory focuses on character. But, as Dewey points out, “conduct” presupposes a subject (or self) with particular character traits, and one’s actions/ conduct cannot be completely isolated from one’s character (LW 7: 168, 171).



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Thus, moral theory should be concerned with both actions and character. Furthermore, while deontology focuses primarily on attitudes/motives (that precede actions of a particular type), consequentialism focuses primarily on consequences (that follow actions of a particular type). The suggestion here is that both deontology and consequentialism are one-sided and thus inadequate (Dewey LW 7: 173; Williams 2011, 204–5). The moral agent is not dealing with two things—they are dealing with two poles of the same thing (i.e., a problematic moral situation). Thus, a judicious moral theory should be concerned with both the motive and the consequences of an action, as well as the integrity of one’s character. In other words, Dewey offers a terribly complicated ethical picture, where the moral agent is called upon to weigh (i) the intentions/motives that lie behind actions, (ii) the likely outcomes/consequences of actions, and (iii) the quality/integrity of character evinced in one’s conduct. Dewey’s pragmatic ethics, so conceived, does not offer a moral monism. Moral monism maintains that all moral principles are reducible to one foundational principle (Norton 1996, 106). Moral monists argue that a single master principle assures moral consistency and prevents moral promiscuity (Callicott 1990, 110–11).17 Kant heralds the categorical imperative: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Kant 1998, 31, 42, 44). All other formulated Kantian principles— for example, the formula of the end in itself—are reducible to the categorical imperative (Kant 1998, 38). The foundation of Bentham’s consequentialist theory rests on the principle of utility: “that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the [pleasure/benefit/happiness] of the party whose interest is in question” (Bentham 1988, 2). Ordering principles, or principles preferencing particular types of pleasures, are derivative. In contrast, pragmatic ethics remains open to a variety of principles that cannot be reduced to or derived from a single foundational or master principle. In this sense, it is a form of moral pluralism. Dewey’s ethics relies heavily upon experimental inquiry and reflective deliberation in problematic

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situations, making use of all the resources afforded in that context (including moral principles). Dewey rejects fixed rules, which dictate a specific course of action for all persons in any situation (e.g., You shall not kill [Exod. 20:13]). Dewey welcomes those principles and insights that clarify and illuminate the situations requiring intelligent deliberation (e.g., Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful [Udānavarga 5:18]). “A moral principle, then, is not a command to act or forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, and not by the rule as such” (Dewey LW 7: 280, emphasis in original). Standards, rules, and principles would then be treated as intellectual instruments to be tested and confirmed—and altered—in light of consequences effected by acting upon them (LW 4: 221). Hence, each generation must reevaluate and overhaul its inherited principles, reconsidering them in relation to the contemporary conditions, needs, and shifts in ends-in-view (LW 7: 283). An iterative process of experimental logic, reflective thinking, or moral inquiry is thus central to Dewey’s ethics (MW 3: 20–3).18 Logic, on this account, refers to the general process of making good (or dependable) inferences. If logic and reflective thinking tarries here in the phenomenal realm, the problem of logical theory is “the problem of the possibility of the development and employment of intelligent method in inquiries concerned with deliberate reconstruction of experience” (MW 12: 159). Human beings are creatures of habit. We are enculturated (as children), inculcated with particular methods of dealing with problematic situations. It is through this process of inquiry that human beings discern those inferences that prove effective in dispelling or circumnavigating problematic situations. Efficacious experimental inquiry bears a typical pattern (MW 2: 306–7; MW 1: 152–72; LW 12: 108–18). In the first phase, the habitual mode of conduct (or, equilibrium) is disturbed or thrown into perplexity by some unknown; we find ourselves in an indeterminate situation. There is chafing—mental or physical irritation or impediment.19 During the second phase, there is a gathering of crude and unorganized facts; there is a dialectical threshing of ideas. This may



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be called an empirical stage. The third phase features the framing of ideas, distinction-making, hypotheses-making; guiding ideas and likely inferences are postulated. This is the speculative stage. During the fourth phase, there is (imaginative and concrete) experimentation—testing of inferences, drawing of conclusions, and experiments in living. If an equilibrium is achieved, if the chafing is quelled, then the agent has successfully transformed an indeterminate situation into a determinately unified situation. If an equilibrium is not found, various aspects of the inquiry may be revisited, and newly revealed insights can be incorporated into subsequent inquiry. This view stands in opposition to the traditional correspondence theory of truth. The traditional correspondence theory of truth relies upon a distinction between the noumenal (i.e., things as they really are) and the phenomenal (i.e., things as they are perceived). Truth, then, is established when a proposition mirrors the actual/noumenal state of affairs; or, when the phenomenal maps onto to, or corresponds to, the noumenal. Dewey rejects the traditional philosopher’s quest for some antecedent, immutable realm of truth (Dewey LW 4: 26–7). He confines his inquiry to the phenomenal realm, the realm of lived experience (and those heuristics, leading principles, and regularities that can be abstracted from experience). Conceptions, theories, and systems of thought are rendered fallible and corrigible (i.e., always open to further development or revision) (MW 12: 163; Norton 2015, 67, 144). Knowing, on this account, is instrumental to the reconstruction of indeterminant situations and the promotion of successful, non-perplexing, or unimpeded action toward particular ends. The term “true,” then, denotes that which clears up confusion, or eliminates impediments; that which guides us through this precarious world truly/actually (Dewey MW 4: 83; MW 12: 164, 168–70). Pragmatic ethical inquiry is thus modeled on the scientific or experimental approach to knowledge creation. Rather than subscribe to either dogmatic certainty or debilitating skepticism, Dewey proffers an idiosyncratic notion of realism, which has been characterized more recently as transactional realism, real realism, and limited realism (Garrison 1994, 7–8; Kitcher 2012, 128–9;

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Norton 2015, 66). On this account, what is real cannot be reduced to a subjective thought or ideation. Human beings are finite organisms that must transact with a perilous biological environment for our continued existence. Without air, water, and sustenance human organisms die. More broadly, limitations and impediments are set by the (biological and social) environments in which we find ourselves. Given an existential context, there will be better and worse methods of exceeding this limitation or to removing that impediment, if amelioration is possible (Dewey LW 12: 108). Our successes and failures in mitigating these context-based problems are real. Limited realism, then, is the method of repeatedly applying the scientific method in the face of bombardment by new and sometimes novel stimuli, making assumptions, and trying out the assumptions as various ways of understanding our sensory inputs. If participants, in an attempt to manage their place, undertake an iterative process, seek partial solutions, build trust among competing factions, and place their faith in the scientific method, progress can be made. (Norton 2015, 67) As such, this experimental approach to knowledge runs contrary to claims to absolute Truth. It is opposed to isolating philosophy to a priori reason and intuition. It suggests ways in which our values and principles can be altered or corrected in light of scientific/empirical modes investigation. It “urges us to view social scientific, humanistic, and ethical inquiry as interconnected aspects of a joint enterprise” (Anderson 1998, 15). Ethics, on this view, is bounded, circumscribed; it is bound to groups of people—cultures and social orders. Ethics, then, is culture- or society-relative. C. I. Lewis writes: So what do we mean, “Ethics”? One thing we mean is that body of general accepted doctrine which is to be found in any social group which ever lasted long enough to be singled out and named as a social order or a culture.



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And one large lesson to be learned from “Ethics” in this sense, and one hardly needing mention, is that any such body of general accepted doctrine, any such particular “ethics,” is relative. We are no longer naive enough to suppose our own such positive doctrine is the ethics, and that any departure from it must be an anomalism and a total misapprehension on the part of barbarians or primitive societies. (Lewis 2017, 13) Similarly, John Rawls writes: An immediate consequence of taking our inquiry as focused on the apparent conflict between freedom and equality in a democratic society is that we are not trying to find a conception of justice suitable for all societies regardless of their particular social or historical circumstances. We want to settle a fundamental disagreement over the just form of basic institutions within a democratic society under modern conditions. (Rawls 1980, 518)20 On this view, goods, values, and normativity are established through the considered judgment of reflective agents engaged in iterative deliberative processes. In other words, ethics is constructivist and procedural. Rawlsianwide reflective equilibrium and Deweyan moral inquiry are representations of this type of procedural constructivism (Rawls 1999, 18; Anderson 1998, 17). I am partial to Bryan Norton’s heuristic proceduralism—“a process-andaction-oriented, iterative process that can be self-correcting of both scientific beliefs and emerging social values” (Norton 2015, 119–20). “Heuristic proceduralism is normatively anchored in the public interest, understood as a procedurally defined ideal that identifies a flexible goal for the adaptive process” (Norton 2015, 120). Within this process, discussions of value and policy (in a democracy), ideally, would be cooperative and inclusive; it would recognize the diversity of values held by disparate peoples and communities. This approach recognizes human fallibility and nurtures processes that seek compromise, incremental change, and improvement of understanding, which allow for greater adaptability/intelligence (Norton 1996, 124). The point is to

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understand and justify our values and adjust them through public deliberation and education when they become maladaptive (Norton 1996, 126). I have thus placed myself among ethical naturalists, particularly the critical sort. Moreover, I have associated myself with Deweyan pragmatic ethical naturalists, rendering ethical reflection context-based, experimental, and iterative. This conception of pragmatic ethical naturalism offers a tenable way to approach moral philosophy in a thoroughly disenchanted world.

Ensnared In a paper titled “Insurrectionist Ethics: Advocacy, Moral Psychology, and Pragmatism” Leonard Harris leveled “the insurrectionist challenge.” Harris argues that moral philosophies are defective if they fail to support or engage in slave insurrections or if they fail to make advocacy of the oppressed a fundamental, meritorious feature of moral agency. On this account, pragmatism is declared inadequate; it fails to meet both conditions (Harris 2020, 186). Harris points out that Dewey’s method of intelligence (its moral inquiry, its faith in democracy, etc.) offers no surety against patriarchy or racial imperialism. Nota bene, centuries passed in the United States where calm democratic inquiry allowed the enslavement of Afro-descended people, the annihilation of indigenous populations, and the withholding of basic rights from women (Harris 2020, 185). (Harris argues that an insurrectionist ethos is needed to meet this challenge.) With this glancing blow, I am suggesting that Dewey, too, was entrapped in the intervening background assumptions of his epoch. Perhaps the Deweyan approach to ethics is imprisoned in the dominant episteme arising out of the colonial expansion, within which the dominant Anglo-European technoindustrial order of things is taken as supracultural and its culturally specific conception of “Man”—male, Christian, bourgeois, heterosexual, racially white,



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genetically superior, and so forth—is misrepresented as isomorphic with the human species (Wynter 1995, 17, 23–4). In Europe [utilitarian fruitfulness] coincided with the predominance of a type of man—the so-called bourgeois—who felt no vocation for the contemplative or the theoretic, but only for the practical. The bourgeois wanted to settle himself comfortably in the world, and for his comfort to intervene in it, to modify it for his own pleasure. Therefore the bourgeois age is honored most of all for the triumph of industrialization, and in general, for those techniques which are useful to life—medicine, economics, administration. (Ortega y Gasset 1960, 41) Perhaps the Deweyan picture smuggles in an unwarranted reassurance in progress and development through experimental inquiry. Perhaps the Deweyan picture presupposes a genteel conception of democratic deliberation that (un)intentionally maintains oppressive hierarchies (Anderson 1998, 36). Perhaps it fails to recognize the actual misery and necro-being upon which Western techno-industrial democratic societies are predicated. Perhaps the genocide (and subsequent erasure) of the indigenous peoples of North America and the enslavement of Afro-descended peoples are simply not pictured—“a perfect crime” (Simpson 2017, 15).21 This is where I stand. I still see benefit in a Deweyan pragmatic ethical naturalism. The specter lurks. But there may be good reason to refrain from embracing the position too tightly.

Notes 1 I am aware that the term “disenchanted” signals Max Weber and the notion that intellectualist rationalization, scientifically oriented technology, and the mechanistic view of the world have secularized or disenchanted modernity (Weber 1958, 139, 155, 350). But, I do not mean to evoke Weber, not directly (Mishima 2020). Actually, I was intrigued to find this term utilized in both Bernard Williams and Sylvia Wynter (Williams 2008, 137; Wynter 1987, 31, Wynter 1995). In any case,

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the notion of “disenchanted” helps me to articulate something like Leonard Harris’s amoral, paradoxical universe and Richard Rorty’s radically contingent (de-divinized, nonteleological) world (Harris 2020, 20, 275; Rorty 1989, 40). 2 The Latin term “a priori” means by reason alone. In philosophy, a priori forms of investigation are typically juxtaposed to a posteriori forms of investigation. These a posteriori investigations make use of sense data and human experience, including empirical observation and experimentation. 3 If one accepts Euclid’s fifth postulate, then the three angles of any triangle will always equal two right angles (i.e., 180 degrees) (Euclid 1956, 155). Non-Euclidian geometries do not accept Euclid’s fifth postulate, giving rise to logically consistent alternative (curved-space) geometries. Thus, it is false to say that the three angles of any triangle will always equal two right angles in every logically consistent system of geometry. 4 C. S. Peirce is right; most philosophers, in this sense, have been, in effect, Cartesians (Peirce 1992, 28). 5 See J. L. Mackie’s argument from queerness (Mackie 1990, 38). 6 For example, Onora O’Neill writes: I may come to rethink my commitment to the death penalty when I grasp the tension between this principle and a principle of protecting the innocent from punishment, especially irrevocable punishment. I do not need to consider actual miscarriages of justice, or actual criminal trials: I merely need to know that miscarriages of justice happen. I may rethink my acceptance of the use of torture of supposed criminals when I see that it is likely to corrupt testimony and undermine prosecutions. Again I do not need to consider actual cases where torture has elicited unreliable confessions: I merely need to know that this happens. (O’Neill 2018, 184) 7 For more on “thick concepts,” see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams 2011, 143, 163, 171). Additionally, see Elizabeth Anderson, “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry” (Anderson 1998, 18). 8 Similarly, Elizabeth Anderson writes, “My case study [of slavery in the United States] raises an alarm for philosophy as we currently practice it. Without active participation of the oppressed and disadvantaged, the moral views reached by philosophers are liable to be biased—ignorant of and unresponsive to the concerns and claims of those not present” (Anderson 2015, 41). 9 See Leonard Harris, “Autonomy Under Duress” (Harris 2020, 99–112). 10 It will be fire next time (Revelation 8:7). 11 Ethereal God willed an aspect of Himself to be manifested as flesh (qua Jesus Christ). That corporeal avatar of the Ethereal God (viz., Jesus) was crucified and died, only to be resurrected three days later. Jesus returns to be with Ethereal God (i.e., himself). And I am supposed to seek atonement. 12 My examples show a clear Catholic/Christian bias, I know. I definitely have loosely Catholic family; there are cultural permeations. And yet I almost never went to church; I know neither the prayers nor the liturgy.



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13 I am happy to remain agnostic on this account. There are likely entities and dimensions that escape comprehension. Perhaps there are historical deities, “finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once” (James 1996, 311). Perhaps not. 14 One can find similar descriptions in the works of John Dewey, Alain Locke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Richard Rorty. 15 See Elizabeth Anderson’s discussion of philosophers and their intuitions (Anderson 2015, 25–7). 16 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea; the protagonist of the story, Antoine Roquentin, seems to haphazardly dip below the surface experience of regular discrete objects (the ontic), just glimpsing primordial Being (the ontological) that pervades. In these instances, he is met with unsettling soft monstrous masses. 17 “Moral promiscuity” refers to the strategic use of whichever principle suits one’s fleeting self-serving preferences. 18 For further discussion, see S. Morris Eames, “The Importance of Method” (Eames 1977); Raymond Boisvert, “From the Biological to the Logical” (Boisvert 1999); John Capps, “Achieving Pluralism” (Capps 2002); Gregory Pappas, “Moral Theory and Moral Practice” (Pappas 2008); Charlene H. Seigfried, “What’s Wrong with Instrumental Reasoning?” (Seigfried 1996); and Paula Droege, “Reclaiming the Subject, or a View from Here” (Droege 2002). 19 Notice that a blatant anomaly in theoretical physics may chafe just as robustly as an immediate and strangely undiagnosable skin rash. 20 I, like both Leonard Harris and Elizabeth Anderson, see pragmatic elements in the work of John Rawls (Harris 2020, 131; Anderson 1998, 14). Notice, in “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (Rawls 1980, 518–20), Rawls asserts that the real task is to formulate the deeper bases of agreement implicit in common sense, particularly those that stand up to critical reflection. The search for reasonable grounds for reaching agreement replaces the search for moral truth interpreted as fixed, antecedently given and immutable order; the practical social task is primary. Thus, moral objectivity is understood in terms of a suitably constructed social point of view that all can accept; and, apart from the procedure, there are no moral facts (519). 21 Simpson sarcastically describes “a perfect crime” as “a crime where the victims are unable to see or name the crime as a crime” (Simpson 2017, 15).

References Anderson, Douglas. 2006. Philosophy Americana. New York: Fordham University Press. Anderson, Elizabeth. 1998. “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry,” in In Face of the Facts, edited by R. Wightman Fox and R. Westbrook, pp. 10–39. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

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Anderson, Elizabeth. 2015. “Moral Bias and Corrective Practices: A Pragmatist Perspective,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 89 (November 2015), pp. 21–47. Aristotle. 2000. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Roger Crisp. New York: Cambridge University Press. Beck, Lewis White. 1952. Philosophic Inquiry: An Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Bentham, Jeremy. 1988. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Bok, P. MacKenzie. 2017. “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and PostProtestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 153–85. Boisvert, Raymond. 1999. “From the Biological to the Logical,” in Classical American Pragmatism, edited by Sandra Rosenthal, Carl Hausman, and Douglas Anderson, 45–58. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Callicott, J. Baird. 1990. “The Case against Moral Pluralism,” Environmental Ethics, Vol. 12, pp. 99–124. Callicott, J. Baird. 1995. “Environmental Philosophy Is Environmental Activism: The Most Radical and Effective Kind,” in Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism, edited by Don Marietta and Lester Embree, 19–35. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Capps, John. 2002. “Achieving Pluralism,” in Dewey’s Logical Theory, edited by F. Thomas Burke, D. Micah Hester, and Robert Talisse, pp. 239–61. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. De Beauvoir, Simone. 2015. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Open Road. Descartes, René. 1993. Meditations on First Philosophy, Third Edition. Translated by Donald Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Dewey, John. 1976a. The Middle Works, Vol. 1: 1899–1901. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1976b. “Studies in Logical Theory,” in The Middle Works, Vol. 2: 1902–1903, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1977a. “Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality,” in The Middle Works, Vol. 3: 1903–1906, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 3–39. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1977b. “The Control of Ideas by Facts,” in The Middle Works, Vol. 4: 1907– 1909, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 78–90. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1986a. “A Common Faith,” in The Later Works, Vol. 9: 1933–1934, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1986b. “Logic: The Theory of Inquiry,” in The Later Works, Vol. 12: 1938, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1988a. “Reconstruction in Philosophy,” in The Middle Works, Vol. 12: 1920, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1988b. “Experience and Nature,” in The Later Works, Vol. 1: 1925, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.



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Dewey, John. 1988c. “The Quest for Certainty,” in The Later Works, Vol. 4: 1929, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1988d. The Later Works, Vol. 5: 1929–1930. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1989a. “Ethics,” in The Later Works, Vol. 7, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Droege, Paula. 2002. “Reclaiming the Subject, or A View from Here,” in Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey, edited by Charlene Haddock Seigfried, pp. 160–85. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Dummett, Michael. 2010. The Nature and Future of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Eames, S. Morris. 1977. Pragmatic Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Euclid. 1956. The Elements, Vol. 1, Second Edition Unabridged. Translated by Sir Thomas Heath. New York: Dover. Firth, Roderick. 1952. “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 12, pp. 317–45. Flanagan, Owen. 2017. The Geography of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press. Frege, Gottlob. 1997. “Thought.” In The Frege Reader, edited by Michael Beaney, pp. 325–45. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Garrison, Jim. 1994. “Realism, Deweyan Pragmatism, and Educational Research,” Educational Researcher, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January–February, 1994), pp. 5–14. Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. London: Bloomsbury. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1988. Introduction to The Philosophy of History. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Hippolytus. 1987. “Refutation of All Heresies I.21,” in The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1. Translated by A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, p. 386. New York: Cambridge University Press. James, William. 1956. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover. James, William. 1981. Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Hackett. James, William. 1996. A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Jewett, Andrew. 2011. “Canonizing Dewey: Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 91–125. Joas, Hans. 2001. “Values versus Norms: A Pragmatist Account of Moral Objectivity,” The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Fall), pp. 42–56. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason, Unabridged Edition. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St Martin’s Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2011. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by James W. Ellington. In Classics of Moral and Political Theory, Fifth Edition. Edited by Michael Morgan, pp. 944–84. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Kitcher, Philip. 2012. Prelude to Pragmatism. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Kornblith, Hilary. 2015. “Naturalistic Defenses of Intuition,” in Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism, edited by Eugen Fischer and John Collins, pp. 151–68. New York: Routledge. Lewis, C.I. 2017. Essays on the Foundations of Ethics. Edited by John Lange. Albany: State University of New York Press. Locke, Alain. 1989. The Philosophy of Alain Locke. Edited by Leonard Harris. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mackie, J. L. 1990. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin Books. McBride, Lee. 2006. “Collectivistic Individualism: Dewey and MacIntyre,” Contemporary Pragmatism, Vol. 3, No. 1 (June), pp. 69–83. McBride, Lee. 2017. “Leftist Democratic Politics,” in Jahrbuch Praktische Philosophie in globaler Perspektive / Yearbook Practical Philosophy in a Global Perspective, edited by Michael Reder, Dominik Finkelde, Alexander Filipovic, and Johannes Wallacher, pp. 74–92. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. Mishima, Kenichi. 2020. “The “Disenchantment of the World” or Why We Can No Longer Use the Formula as Max Weber Might Have Intended,” in The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, edited by Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster, pp. 353–73. New York: Oxford University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013b. Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political. Edited by James Martin. New York: Routledge. Norton, Bryan G. 1996. “Integration or Reduction: Two Approaches to Environmental Values,” in Environmental Pragmatism. Edited by Andrew Light and Eric Katz. New York: Routledge. Norton, Bryan G. 2015. Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Neill, Onora. 2018. From Principles to Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ortega y Gasset, Jose. 1960. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Mildred Adams. New York: W.W. Norton. Papineau, David. 2016. “Naturalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 Edition. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. https​://pl​ato.s​tanfo​rd.ed​u/arc​hives​/win2​016/ e​ntrie​s/nat​urali​sm/. Pappas, Gregory. 2008. John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1992. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Essential Peirce, Vol. 1, edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel, pp. 28–55. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Plato. 1995. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett. Rachels, James. 1995. “Introduction: Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century,” in Twentieth Century Ethical Theory, edited by Steven Cahn and Joram Haber, 1–9. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Rawls, John. 1980. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 77, No. 9 (September 9), pp. 515–72. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.



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Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions. Shafer-Landau, Russ. 2013. “Ethics as Philosophy: A Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism,” in Ethical Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, pp. 54–62. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Seigfried, Charlene H. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamsake. 2017. As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thomson, Garrett. 2003. On Philosophy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Voltaire. 2000. Candide and Related Texts. Translated by David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett. Weber, Max. 1958. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Bernard. 2008. “The Human Prejudice,” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, edited by A.W. Moore, pp. 135–52. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williams, Bernard. 2011. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. New York: Routledge Classics. Wynter, Sylvia. 1987. “On Disenchanting Discourse,” Cultural Critique, No. 7, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II (Autumn, 1987), pp. 207–44. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, And The Caribbean Rethinking Modernity,” in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, The Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, edited by Alvina Reprecht and Cecilia Taiana, pp. 17–41. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

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2 An Insurrectionist Ethics Critical Pragmatism and Philosophia Nata Ex Conatu

Pragmatic ethical naturalism (outlined in the previous chapter) offers a platform, a base from which to reflectively consider the murk and intractable quandaries of lived experience in a disenchanted universe. That platform, like Neurath’s boat, is at sea and repeatedly in need of repair/revision (Norton 2015, 64). We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. (Neurath 1973, 199) We are perpetually at sea, so to speak. An antecedently true, absolute form or essence of the vessel is neither presupposed nor sought after. There is no preordained goal/telos to our voyage. Yet, we are not necessarily cast into anarchic relativism or debilitating fatalism. We can try our best to circumnavigate storms and ghastly sea monsters. (Many ships will be lost.) We can bind together and detail common denominator values, leading principles, and efficacious methods of problem resolution. We can chart a course (thereby giving ourselves a purpose/telos). Through iterative cooperative processes, through a heuristic

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proceduralism, we can establish context-based social goods, values, and norms. A naturalized pragmatic ethics (of sorts) can be fashioned. But there is room for concern. Leonard Harris has been vital in disclosing the limitations and ligatures of resolutely accepting a pragmatic naturalism in its canonical/classical form (Harris 2013, 108, 2020, 185). If not supplemented with adversarial perspectives couched in the lived experiences of oppressed and immiserated peoples, the canonical view has a tendency to breed an unwarranted reassurance in progress and development through cooperative, experimental inquiry (Locke 1989, 37). The canonical texts proffer political models and methods of amelioration drawn from and directed to a genteel, dominant social group. The actual exploitation and plunder upon which Western techno-industrial democratic societies are predicated is mentioned briefly (in an endnote), if mentioned at all. Esteemed genteel conceptions of civility, empathy, and democratic deliberation help maintain extant oppressive hierarchies (Anderson 1998, 36; Harris 2020, 172). The experiences and legacies of settler colonialism or de jure racial apartheid are erased. “Democracy as a way of life” is sanitized and held up as a moral ideal. In this chapter, I explore the critical edge, offering a foray into an insurrectionist philosophy. I set myself three tasks. First, I attempt to explain the way in which rule-based moral reasoning is suspect, given that any codified normative system will rely upon a set of provincial intervening background assumptions. Second, I offer an articulation of Harris’s philosophy born of struggle, suggesting that a critical pragmatism and an insurrectionist philosophy can be run together. And, third, I articulate the basic features and anticipated benefits of an insurrectionist ethic.

Challenging the Episteme Harris argues that procedures for reasoning from principles or concepts to practice are invariably incomplete in ways that tend to ignore the importance



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of the episteme. An “episteme” comprises the tacit intervening background assumptions of a discourse in a given epoch—“the order of things” (Foucault 2010, 191). Harris suggests that there are limits for what we can reasonably expect from moral concepts and reasoning procedures. Concepts, like health and autonomy, do not escape entrapment in a web of meaning; they do not escape the prevailing episteme (Harris 2020, 100). Without critically analyzing our intervening background assumptions, we remain ensnared/trapped within dominant provincial valuations. Despite good intentions and conscientiously engaged ethical inquiry, we can still operate within social arrangements that take for granted subjection and necro-being.1 To make his point, Harris offers an allegory. We are invited to imagine a doctor: Dr. Dick. Dr. Dick, by all local accounts, is a good person—thoughtful and kind. Dr. Dick conscientiously incorporates ethical deliberation into his medical practice. He carefully considers deontological standpoints, utilitarian calculations, contractarian sensibilities, and of course his religious faith. He tries his very best to avoid logical fallacies and mistaken inferences, showing genuine concern for his patients and his community. Dr. Dick prevents illness and offers therapeutic procedures; he stays abreast of new and well-tested cures; he is a philanthropist; he attends church regularly; he believes all persons are equal members of the human family, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Harris 2020, 101). Dr. Dick is a physician who specializes in castration. Dr. Dick makes eunuchs of black boys and young men. Black boys, in this allegory, are known to be liars, delinquents, and sexual predators—this is common knowledge, borne out in philosophical discourse, sermons, state sanctioned aptitude tests, and police records. But black boys that are carved into eunuchs are perceived as less threatening, sexually and emotionally neutered, infantilized. Once the genitals are removed, known eunuchs are almost never suspected for having coitus with the (white) ladies of the house or fathering interracial children. Eunuchs are, thus, less likely to be lynched. (There are no guarantees.) In any

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event, being a eunuch opens additional opportunities for black boys. In some cases, eunuchs are taught to read and write; that is, black boys qua eunuchs are afforded educational opportunities. In some cases, eunuchs are offered positions that come with particular forms of power and influence, including the managing of assets or serving as ward and attendant for white children. (Eunuchs are integrated more easily into the workings of the big house.) In short, the removal the black boy’s penis comes with positive consequences/ utility, and Dr. Dick approaches his work with good will toward his community and these black boys. Moreover, Dr. Dick engages in well-reasoned deliberation in consultation with his intuitions, principles of justice, and the boy’s master. Informed consent is required prior to castration.2 Neither the good doctor’s church nor his prayers elicited palpable misgivings about this practice. “The good doctor was apprised by received tradition that scripture did not strictly forbid making eunuchs of those destined for service, particularly if there were reasons to believe that their souls might thereby have a better chance of salvation” (Harris 2020, 102). Thus, it would seem that Dr. Dick’s general practice of eunuchization is judicious and therapeutic, if not pious and morally justified. Dr. Dick also performs abortions. This, too, requires experimental inquiry and deliberation. The racial identities of both the pregnant woman and the man who impregnated the woman need to be determined. “A fetus in a Black woman’s body, whether fertilized by a Black or white male, was considered in Dr. Dick’s society as fundamentally different from a fetus in a white woman’s body” (Harris 2020, 103). A fetus in a black woman’s body, in this society, is encoded as potential cheap labor, sex, and property. Mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons could be kept, reared, and turn a profit. By that same coin, interracial fetuses in a black woman’s body, like black male penises, could be excised at the discretion of the lord of the house/plantation. But a mixed-race fetus in a white woman’s body is invariably encoded as pollution, infection, and corruption. (Whether the coitus was consensual or not, a black male will likely be lynched.) The termination of the fetus, in these cases, is understood as



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compulsory, a necessary evil. Care and discretion must be taken not to shame the house or the family. Racial distinctions tacitly pervade Dr. Dick’s society. Common sense suggests that white boys and young men are unlikely candidates for eunuchization. Again, this is corroborated by philosophical discourse, sermons, state sanctioned aptitude tests, and police records. Nota bene, the excising of a white boy’s “potency” remains, in most cases, counterintuitive if not unfathomable (Harris 2020, 104). That is, the castration of white boys does not fit the intervening background assumptions; it suggests a category mistake. White boy ≠ subordinated subject. In this episteme, only particular groups of boys are constituted as innately, irreversibly, and permanently subordinate persons. Black boys are (tacitly) encoded as subhuman and excluded from the human family. Remember, this is an allegory. “Eunuchization as a therapeutic practice” is meant as a figurative/metaphorical depiction highlighting the ways in which a population can be dehumanized, subordinated, and robbed of their ability to create a future, to shape their own futures, by a dominant group that carefully consults moral intuitions, normative concepts, and principles. Given a particularly racist set of prevailing background assumptions, moral reasoning can easily countenance (or approve of) a well-ordered democratic society that features a population of innately, permanently subordinated persons (Harris 2020, 104; Anderson 2015, 31–2). This suggests that the epistemai that undergird and condition the epochs within which we dwell are far more influential and pertinent than typically recognized. It gives us reason to question whether our moral reasoning, our elected methods of moving from moral principles to practical judgment harbor (hitherto unnoticed) abhorrent valuations. This raises questions about our ability to reason morally. It seems to suggest that we have good reason to be doubtful of any claims to complete moral objectivity. Indeed, it does. But all is not lost. We need not resign ourselves to fatalism or debilitating cynicism.3 Harris urges us to interrogate and

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deconstruct those intervening background assumptions that authorize and reinforce the subordination of stigmatized groups. He prods us to fashion or conjure new assumptions, new ways of conceiving. He prods us to challenge the episteme. New conceptions of personhood and humanity are needed, conceptions that do not cast groups of human beings as inherently subhuman or naturally bereft of honor (Harris 2020, 154). Critical traditions, like abolitionist, suffragette, and insurrectionist traditions, may serve as instructive exemplars. With this in mind, one is able to see the impetus that lies behind “the insurrectionist challenge.” In two pieces (namely, “Insurrectionist Ethics: Advocacy, Moral Psychology, and Pragmatism” and “Can a Pragmatist Recite a Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note? Or Insurrectionist Challenges to Pragmatism—Walker, Child, and Locke”), Harris poses challenges to pragmatism. Does pragmatism necessarily advocate for the release of slaves or the destruction of oppressive hierarchies? (Harris 2020, 175). Does pragmatism obviously stand on the side of and support antislavery abolitionists and insurrectionists? Or, does classical pragmatism tacitly harbor racist or settlercolonial valuations? Does classical pragmatism almost by default skip hand in hand with Anglo-American patriarchy and the exploitation of the laboring classes? Perhaps more presciently, does pragmatism today persist within hegemonic oppressive hierarchies rarely scrutinized? It is worth noting that Harris is a renowned scholar of and advocate for the African American critical pragmatist Alain Locke.4 Harris is also an advocate for the insurrectionist ethos he locates in a philosophy born of struggle.5 Perhaps there is creative (dialectical/agonistic) tension here.6

Philosophia Nata Ex Conatu: An Insurrectionist Philosophy Leonard Harris contends that a viable philosophy should provide resources and reasoning methods that make the management of abjection and existential



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crisis viable (Harris 2020, 189). This philosophy should be encoded with the sort of spirit or philosophic orientation that gives credence to epideictic rhetoric, imagination, and insurrection. Harris is articulating a philosophy born of struggle (philosophia nata ex conatu), which is an insurrectionist philosophy (Harris 2020, 189–90). I endorse this position. Harris prods us to begin by tarrying in the world, rather than standing above or outside of the world (Harris 2020, 14–15).7 Harris postulates an amoral universe—no cosmic telos, no immutable human nature, no preordination.8 The view is concrete, existential, and perspectival, rather than transcendental. The universe is radically contingent. In such a world, there is no handy derivation manual which leads us from immutable a priori truths to knowing that “kale is better than spinach” (Harris 2020, 15). Thus, “it is not the discovery of absolute truth, objective categories, abstract principles, laws, or pristine methods or reasoning, but a making that is the hallmark of philosophies” (Harris 2020, 15). Values and morals are not antecedent objects or properties of objects out there in the universe. Values and morals are made, fashioned, and constructed. Provincialism and difference are inescapable. Nevertheless, Harris is “pleased with the challenge of starting anew and hoping for well-being and continuity” (Harris 2020, 14). Philosophy born of struggle, so conceived, bears three constitutive features. First, this philosophy includes corporeality of health. In other words, a viable philosophy should recognize the centrality of bodily health. Health is fundamental to our being. “Without health, nothing follows” (Harris 2020, 15). Our subsequent goals and ambitions are of little consequence without corporeal health. A life stripped of health and efficacious agency is necro-being. (And there is no efficacious agency if you are dead.) Thus, this philosophy born of struggle acknowledges the unnecessary boundaries that preclude select groups from bodily health. It acknowledges that some people actually live in misery, in necro-being. The second constitutive aspect of this philosophy born of struggle is that it includes avowed valuations. In other words, our philosophy should recognize

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the value-ladenness of our reasoning. It should acknowledge that we never escape some set of provincialisms, biases, and intervening background assumptions. As Elizabeth Anderson puts it, “If humanistic and social scientific inquiry ought to classify phenomena in terms of their relations to human interests and values, then these forms of inquiry are, and ought to be, value laden” (Anderson 1998, 24). Our descriptions, our evidential claims, our depictions of objective material conditions, our moral imperatives will be undeniably value laden, arising from a concrete place/perspective with an attending episteme (Harris 2020, 20). The third constitutive aspect of this philosophy is that it expressly provides ideas, poetry, imagery, explanations, queries, dispositions, evidential reasoning methods, and conceptual categories as resources for the abused, subjugated, and humiliated populations facing existential crisis and impossible odds of relief. It provides conceptual tools to those who are immiserated, living in necro-being. Notice that this list extends well beyond Aristotelean categories, propositional logic, and semantic analysis, allowing for epideictic rhetoric, storytelling, and poetry alongside experimental inquiry and heuristic proceduralism. As such, this philosophy operates in stark contrast to most conventional philosophies. Philosophy is not merely a leisurely pastime of high caste men. Philosophy is not understood as a practice in dying, the shedding of our corporeal limitations so that we can peer into an immutable realm.9 The claim is that most philosophers posit ethereal or categorically impossible beings, and this, in turn, prompts philosophy to trade in arid abstractions, detached from the organic struggle for life. The ancient philosopher Priscianus of Lydia sets as an exemplar an uncontaminated unified self that simultaneously gains knowledge of itself—a conceptual monster (Harris 2020, 15–16). In contrast, Vasubandhu of Gandhara posits a “non-self ” (anatta) set on the elimination of a fictitious phenomenology of ownership/attachment (Harris 2020, 17). That which is labeled the “self ” is revealed to be a transitory aggregate dependently originated—the self (and ruinous attachment) dissolves away. In either case, the philosopher is not primarily an agent with a mission of terminating



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human misery. Philosophy, on this score, has been largely a science of making the obvious disappear; misery is hidden or rendered less (philosophically) meaningful (Harris 2020, 17–18). Real problems with incommensurability and non-translatability—from one culture to the next, from pure abstract being to human conduct, from self to Ātman—are ignored. Priscianus avoided resting the definition of the soul on an attachment to, or feature of, corporeal reality. Corporal reality requires the physics of death— motion, energy, mass, space, and time. The universe is a cauldron of death. Every corporal entity is destined to die. (Harris 2020, 19) The sidestepping of death and decay allows philosophy to trade in pristine abstractions. It allows extant misery and necro-being to fall outside the purview of philosophy. In stark contrast, Harris tarries here in this “cauldron of death,” sinking into the mud. This philosophia nata ex conatu is always inclusive of immiseration and undue duress (Harris 2020, 20). Again, Harris postulates an amoral universe. This need not preclude us from constructing norms and imperatives in line with the values and ideals of a society or tradition. The universe is purposeless, and hooves are no better than feet, but undue misery is not just a consequence of evolution and maladaptation, Malthusian necessity, class conflicts or limitations and benefits made possible by geographic conditions, but also malevolent intentions and structures, desires, objectives, social group conflict, institutions, identities, communities and misguided values. (Harris 2020, 20) This second group—the malevolent intentions and structures, the social group conflict, and the misguided values—can be marked, listed, and countered. Not all undue misery is necessary; not all undue misery is reducible to happenstance. In some cases, the conditions that give rise to undue misery can be negated. Harris argues that human virtues/excellences are always decidable, revisable, and embodied; virtues and tablets of values are products of creation,

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thick descriptions dependent upon context for their articulation (Harris 2020, 21, 140).10 Hence there is not just one list of virtues, and any set of virtues is subject to forthcoming transvaluation. Philosophy born of struggle should make possible epistemologies, metaphysics, and aesthetics that include the excluded, the immiserated; they/we should not disappear (Harris 2020, 22).11 Concrete people and their suffering should be constitutive of philosophy, not ancillary. And yet, conceptual monsters abound. Martin Heidegger prods us to let Being reveal Itself as it reveals Itself to itself—this involves an openness of comportment— engaging beings freely, letting them be as they are (Harris 2020, 25). Gilles Deleuze makes philosophy into a game of fluctuating descriptions and metaphors: “a sort of historical continuum of ideas created by persons engaged in avoiding chaos and evaluating their reality” (Harris 2020, 26). Incessant becoming always interrupted, “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” (The sex-trafficked boy or girl, as subject, disappears in the category, the statistical numeration, the metaphor.) Giorgio Agamben and Paulin Hountondji, picturing a world free of intractable paradox and doublebinds, reduce philosophy to vexing questions with neat answers. One only need discern the appropriate form or mode of analysis (Harris 2020, 27). Karl Marx reduces the world to an immanent teleological dialectical force—class struggles, the contradictions of this or that mode of production, and so on (Harris 2020, 28). In each case, the ambiguity, the inconsistency, the undue injury, the necro-being falls to the margins, if it is pictured at all. It is noteworthy that Alain Locke’s critical pragmatism is integral to this Harrisian philosophy.12 Like the other pragmatists of his era, Locke was critical of absolutism, dogmatism, foundationalism, cultural intolerance, and “eitheror” dualisms (Harris 2020, 192). Unlike other pragmatists, Locke writes from the perspective of an oppressed group, showcasing experiences and disparate perspectives from Afro-descended peoples in the United States—urban, rural, proletarian, bourgeoisie, Protestant, Catholic, and so on, in various concrete instantiations (Locke 1989, 211). He writes at length about the downfalls of



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proprietary culture and cultural uniformity, of the pressures to evince the stereotype (Locke 1989, 203; Carter 2016, 122). He speaks of the shortcomings of the unfinished business of American democracy, including the farce that is racial imperialism, and the brutality of colonialism (Locke 1942, 455ff., 1992a, 33–5, 2016, 102). Locke is critical of scientism and reductivist views. He points out that classic pragmatism often bears a “logico-experimental slant,” with a scientific attitude “making truth too exclusively a matter of the correct anticipation of experience, of the confirmation of fact” (Locke 1989, 37). He explains: Human behavior, it is true, is experimental, but it is also selectively preferential, and not always in terms of outer adjustments and concrete results. Value reactions guided by emotional preferences and affinities are as potent in the determination of attitudes as pragmatic consequences are in the determination of actions. In the generic and best sense of the term “pragmatic,” it is as important to take stock of the one as the other. (Locke 1989, 37) Locke’s pragmatism offers a critical edge toward classical pragmatism and the intervening background assumptions of his time. In this sense, critical pragmatism provides reasoning methods, terms, depictions, explanations, queries, dispositions, spirit, and conceptual categories as resources for the abused, subjugated, and humiliated facing existential crisis and impossible odds of relief (Harris 2020, 189). Locke describes a world replete with paradoxes and acrimonious quandaries. Locke’s value theory rejects absolutism, depicting values as fundamentally relative categories (Locke 1989, 34, 53; Carter 2010, 219). Values are made or decided from provincial perspectives. He denies that races as social groups matching biological groups are real and yet works tirelessly on behalf of African Americans, helping to conjure a new conception of “the Negro” (Locke 1992b, 3–16). He advocates for a concrete racialized ethnic group and also advocates for a moderate form of cosmopolitanism (Locke 1989, 210–13,

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2010, 142–3). Locke recognizes that stereotypes and representative heuristics are prone to fallacious reasoning and bad inferences, yet deploys stereotypes and representative heuristics provisionally to accomplish set goals (Locke 1989, 202, 1992a, 74–6). Locke recognizes that his moral position admits of cultural relativism, yet he insists that social orders (and those seeking liberation) will require moral imperatives and assertive confidence, if they hope to establish a functional democratic social order (Locke 1989, 34, 69–77). On this account, we are organic beings struggling for survival—philosophia nata ex conatu. Emphasis is placed on the endeavor, the striving, the struggle. Harris’s philosophy forefronts the undue robbing of life/health. It recognizes that we, as finite human beings, cannot escape the value-ladenness of our condition—any perspective we take will be, to some extent, provincial. But this view still allows for (constructed) goals and ideals. We can build traditions without the pretense that we have transcended provincialism or that our tradition, and only our tradition, bears the singular immutable truth (Harris 2020, 31–2). We can have hope without entrapment in undue delusions, progress without the pretense of having arrived at a location beyond provincialism, traditions without the pretense that traditions are purely inherited and we have no role in inventing our sacred rituals, and insurrectionist ethics without the feeling that our actions are justified by an algorithm of pure reason; we can acknowledge the use of representative heuristics in the formation of identities without portending that our social identities are instantiations of objective forms awaiting realization, admit our fallibility and remain excellent scientists, and pursue “our” eternity in a finite universe. (Harris 2020, 31). The question, then, becomes: Which values do we want to preserve? Or, which values will this or that tradition advocate to shape the future? Philosophy, so understood, is pluralistic. There is not just one philosophy born of struggle (Harris 2020, 31). Philosophy, on this view, is not a singularity;



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it is polyphonic. “Philosophy is not an algorithm, but a walkway,” a pragmatic means of escape (Harris 2020, 33). Let us dispense with philosophies that make the struggle disappear (Harris 2020, 34). We will not escape provincialism, but we should try. We will not avoid all conceptual monsters, but we should try. (Many ships will be lost.) Can a pragmatist provide a philosophy that includes the necro-being of the immiserated? Can a pragmatist provide a philosophy that offers tools, terms, categories, poetry, or evidential reasoning that make the management of abjection and existential crisis viable? Harris answers obliquely. Nothing in utilitarianism prevents John Stuart Mill from being a Hindu, but nothing in utilitarianism gives Mill the impetus to be a Hindu. Similarly, nothing in pragmatism prevents John Dewey from supporting insurrectionists, but nothing in pragmatism gives Dewey the impetus, the imperative to support insurrectionists (Harris 2020, 196). But Locke? Locke’s critical pragmatism is helpful in picturing or intimating an insurrectionist disposition (Harris 2020, 196). It helps to keep the murkiness and paradox of this universe visible. It helps to keep concrete misery and necro-being in sight. It helps in disclosing imaginative and conceptual ways of breaking with a received tradition. But, as Harris indicates, an insurrectionist philosophy will require assertive claims and moral imperatives in this world of intractable paradoxes and gutwrenching quandaries. It will require an insurrectionist spirit/ethos. For this, we may need to look beyond Locke’s critical pragmatism. Imagination requires leaving categories given to us by experience (Harris 2020, 196). Can we imagine new corporeal and socioeconomic realities? Can we imagine a world beyond entrapment in established national, racial, and sexual identities? It is possible. We are not completely trapped in the current world; emergence is a real phenomenon. Sometimes large patterns generate unanticipated results; sometimes new phenomena emerge; sometimes the order of things is altered. Emergence sometimes requires leaving the wellworn grooves of habitual experience. Discord, negation, or separation may be required in this leaving. In any case, we are enwebbed in the limitations of

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existing language, cognitive reasoning strategies, viable categories, and wellresearched “best” explanations and predictions (Harris 2020, 197). Imagine trying to surmount these limitations without the existing vocabulary and favored methods of inquiry. Imagination may very well require walking away from esteemed pragmatic values or traditional methods of cooperative intelligence. Such moves will likely seem unwarranted, incomprehensible, or insolent.

A Foray into Insurrectionist Ethics As described, this philosophia nata ex conatu is an insurrectionist philosophy. It pointedly advocates for slave insurrections and makes advocacy for the oppressed a fundamental, meritorious feature of moral agency (Harris 2020, 175). Additionally, the position bears an insurrectionist spirit, the kind of ethos one finds in David Walker (1785–1830), Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879), and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862).13 In this adversarial, abolitionist tradition, Harris locates the types of moral intuitions, reasoning strategies, and character traits that make an ethics an insurrectionist ethics. Importantly, the insurrectionist spirit is antithetical to submissiveness, self-effacement, and complacency; those who would fight against misogyny, racism, settler colonialism, or any cognate form of oppression should be confident, demanding, uncompromising, and aggressive (Harris 2020, 66). As I interpret the position, insurrectionist ethics promotes four tenets (McBride 2013a, 32). Tenet One: Practitioners of insurrectionist ethics exhibit a willingness to defy norms and convention when those norms sanction or perpetuate injustice or oppression (McBride 2013a, 32; Harris 2020, 177). They are willing to challenge civic and moral authority when those authorities conspire to denigrate a population, allowing a dominant group to strip a subordinated group of its dignity, its property, or its efficacious agency. And, thus, the practitioner of insurrectionist ethics sees reason to disrupt relatively



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stable social orders, if those social orders countenance oppressive practices and institutions. To this end, they may endorse acts of resistance, which can take various forms, including satirical publications, irreverent protest, civil disobedience, subterfuge, or physical violence. Frederick Douglass writes: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning” (Douglass 1985, 204). Thoreau writes: “unjust laws exist” (Thoreau 2004, 72). We have three options: (i) we can obey them, (ii) we can endeavor to amend them, obeying these laws until we succeed, or (iii) we can transgress them. Thoreau advocates the third option (Thoreau 2004, 73–4). He declares: “let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” (Thoreau 2004, 73). Marilyn Frye writes: “Feminists are, by definition, to some degree non-compliant with the patriarchal norms of femininity and rebellious against patriarchal institutions” (Frye 1992, 128). “To embody and enact a consistent and all-the-way feminism you have to be a heretic, a deviant, an undomesticated female, an impossible thing. You have to be a [free woman, not bound to, not possessed by any man]” (Frye 1992, 133, 136). Douglass, Thoreau, and Frye, each in their own way, echo the imperative to defy norms and convention when those norms sanction or perpetuate subjection or necro-being. Tenet Two: Insurrectionist ethicists maintain conceptions of personhood and humanity that motivate moral action against obvious injustice or brutality, justifying militancy and radical action on the behalf of oppressed peoples (McBride 2013a, 32; Harris 2020, 170). Personhood, here, assures membership in the human family and secures those basic human dignities afforded to its members. Harris writes, “Dignity, I contend, exists when there are conditions that make possible feelings of self-worth, high aspirations and viable expectations; those conditions exclude the conditions of subjection” (Harris 2020, 148). That is, to be human, or to have personhood in this sense, should afford dignity; it should ward off subjection and oppression (Harris 2020, 105, 108–11). Yet, historically speaking, these basic entitlements have been contingent upon one’s

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ability to be recognized as a representative of the human family (Harris 2020, 123). Historically, countless populations have been denied full personhood based on sex, religion, caste, ethnicity, and race. Without these entitlements, these populations are regarded as mere objects to be bought and sold, tools for material production, vessels of reproduction, sexual playthings, or degenerates to be imprisoned, committed, or exterminated (McBride 2017, 227; Davis 1998, 104–5, 114–15). Chattel slavery in the United States is thus a pertinent example. People of African lineage were denied full personhood. Based on racialized phenotypic features, a targeted population was excluded from membership in the human family, rescinding that population’s claim to basic human dignities (Harris 2020, 163, 167; Walker 1965, 26). Given unspeakable terrors, the theft of labor and lives, the undue destruction of countless futures, the insurrectionist ethicist sees slavery as vile and egregiously unjust. Indignant, the insurrectionist ethicist advocates militant acts of resistance on behalf of the enslaved. The insurrectionist takes opportunities to disrupt or challenge racist practices, institutions, and the intervening background assumptions that perpetuate slavery (Harris 2020, 136, 168). This commitment to humanity, to the recognition and dignity of oppressed persons, offers ardent motivation to engage in insurrectionist moral action. And resistance can be a highly risky endeavor. Insurrectionists risk reputation and livelihood, since disrupting the social order typically involves confrontation with established authority and opinion, decline in social status, disadvantages to one’s family, lynch mobs, and material losses (McBride 2013a, 33; Harris 2020, 178). Nevertheless, the practitioner of insurrectionist ethics dutifully acts on behalf of oppressed populations, even when consequences are likely to be unfavorable in the immediate future (Harris 2020, 186). Tenet Three: The practitioners of insurrectionist ethics work to achieve a broader, more universal liberation through the advocacy of particular oppressed groups (McBride 2013a, 33; Harris 2020, 178). Insurrectionists understand that social or collective action is required to make substantial changes in institutional and material conditions, and that collective action is not



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marshalled without the concerted effort of individuals mobilizing around shared goals and identity. Oppressed individuals bind together in communities or coalitions of resistance to articulate their conditions, the particular ways in which they are dehumanized, economically disadvantaged, or subordinated. While particular features of an adversarial community may be salient (e.g., race, ethnicity, sex, and class), these features may rely upon known stereotypes (or functional heuristics) that aid in the process of building effective collective action aimed at a localized form of struggle, demand, and compulsion. The building of anabsolute adversarial social groupings will rely upon representative heuristics (Harris 2020, 179, 185).14 Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb that are used when one must make a decision but lacks either ample time or the accurate information necessary to make the decision. Representative heuristics are cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb used in assessing the similarity of objects and organizing them based around the category prototype. We determine whether a person should be put into a certain category by judging how similar the person is to the prototypical person of that category. Heuristic reasoning of this sort utilizes rough cognitive shortcuts and stereotypes and, as such, is susceptible to fallacious inferences and poorly capturing the complexity and malleability of concrete social groupings. Thus, insurrectionists are not committed to these particular social groupings as stable categories or natural kinds (Harris 2020, 179). These social groupings serve as political coalitions or communities of struggle, which are created in reaction to oppressive or unjust social contexts. It is not assumed that all members of these groups necessarily share the same essential feature, be it phenotype, culture, socioeconomic status, caste, or gender presentation (Harris 2020, 56–60, 179–80; Mohanty 2003, 46; Lugones 2003, 159, 2006, 84). Socially constructed racialized communities, feminist coalitions, and other anabsolute groups of resistance are understood as porous, evolving communities with contingent futures (Harris 2020, 219–21; Mohanty 2003, 46). If the object of resistance is annulled, the bonds that hold these coalitions and communities of resistance together may dissolve or become less salient (Collins 2009, 265–8).

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The insurrectionist can envision a world that will overcome the bounded local identities and social categories that they represent (Harris 2020, 180, 245). That is, they represent social groupings that they ultimately hope their collective action will render anachronistic. As such, this position runs contrary to nationalisms and rooted identities; it opens possibilities for moderate forms of cosmopolitanism, multiplicitous subjectivities, and intercultural polyglossia (Locke 2010, 143; Harris 2010, 70; Lugones 2006, 84). Along these lines, Angela Davis works to achieve a broader, more universal liberation through the advocacy of particular oppressed groups. She claims that black women were “forced to leave behind the shadowy realm of female passivity” in order to assume their posts as “warriors against oppression” (Davis 1998, 125). But Davis is not a black nationalist; her adoration and advocacy for black women does not preclude her from recognizing the contingency of particular racialized identities and provincialisms (Davis 1998, 281–2; Davis 2012, 73). She writes: I grew up thinking of myself as a “Negro,” largely unable to articulate the extent to which social inferiority was constructed as an essential dimension of the “Negro.” It is important to recognize the various forms of agency with which identities can be and are constructed, in order not to get stuck in them, in order not to assume that racialized identities have always been there. A “black” subject was created. We can also create a “women of color” subject. (Davis 1998, 300) In fact, Davis advocates a revolutionary, multiracial women’s movement that addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women transnationally (Davis 1990, 7). Davis argues that women of color must be willing to appeal for multiracial unity, to look beyond the boundaries of race and ethnicity, so that shared political goals can be pursued (Davis 1990, 11, 151). Davis envisions a broader, more universal form of human liberation, yet she works on behalf of black women and women of color to approach a form of transnational feminist liberation.



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Tenet Four: Insurrectionist ethicists give esteem to insurrectionist character traits (McBride 2013a, 33–4; Harris 2020, 161, 184). On this view, audacity, tenacity, enmity, indignation, and guile are recognized as valued character traits to exhibit when faced with debilitating networks of oppression. Audacity, boldness of comportment, confidence will likely be needed to stand up and challenge oppressive norms and conventions. Anger or indignation may be a natural and welcomed emotion prompting us to confront, resist, or counter perceived threat, injustice, or wrong. Enmity, opposition, or hostility seems like an appropriate reaction to exhibit toward that which maintains or facilitates a group’s subordination. It seems only natural to be irreverent (or to refuse to show reverence or admiration) toward that which maintains or symbolizes oppression. Guile, shrewdness, or cunning is required to navigate a social order that harbors oppressive hierarchies, especially if you are strategically confronting or countering oppressive boundaries and impediments. These insurrectionist/defiant character traits may work contrary to conventional character traits, such as humility, restraint, serenity, compassion, impartiality, and forthrightness. But, while some (e.g., moral suasionists) will only give approbation to the conventional character traits (such as, civility, restraint, compassion, and humility), the insurrectionist ethicist recognizes that the valorization of compassion and serenity (to the exclusion of enmity and pugnacity) in immiserated populations is suspect. These conventional character traits—without the possibility of real anger, fierce opposition, and defiance of norms—render an oppressed population self-effacing, submissive, impotent, and pliable. This, in effect, pacifies and binds these populations, eliminating even the notion of resistance. To the contrary, practitioners of insurrectionist ethics give moral approbation to those character traits and modes of comportment that embolden a beleaguered people and disrupt morally abhorrent social practices. Insurrectionist character traits, on this score, help to make resistance possible, advocating for the bold, tenacious voices that demand the liberation of the oppressed (Harris 2020, 186).

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Thus, the insurrectionist ethicist is engaged in disrupting systems, institutions,

structures

designed

to

perpetuate

racism,

patriarchy,

heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression. If effective, there will be a jarring to the system—conflict, struggle. Arguably, particular institutions will need to be dismantled, annihilated, destroyed (McBride 2018, 9–10). Violence will be done to particular sensibilities; discomfort. Odious values and traditions will be trammeled and scorned. Dispense with the platitudes.

Leaving In Chapter 1, I raise concerns about the practice of moral philosophy and the ways in which one can be entrapped in one’s upbringing. I also outlined a pragmatic ethical naturalism with which I find resonance. In this chapter, I have outlined a philosophy born of striving and struggle, an insurrectionist philosophy. I mean to suggest that the insurrectionist perspective does offer significant challenges to the pragmatic ethical naturalist. If it is the case that canonical iterations of pragmatist philosophy and the vast variety of philosophical perspectives in the Anglophone world operate within rarely scrutinized hegemonic oppressive hierarchies, if darker-skinned people, heathens, or women are systemically neutered, infantilized, or encoded as objects undeserving of honor, if the episteme in which we live influences our moral reasoning far more than we typically realize, if conceptual monsters abound and concrete misery and necro-being are left unpictured, then this would seem to suggest that pointed change is needed. It seems to suggest that we may need to rebel against norms and institutions that condition subjection, misery, and loss of corporeal well-being. This will likely require imaginative conceptual changes; that is, changes in the values, concepts, and rhetorical devices wielded. This will also likely require imaginative changes in moral and political conduct, in comportment and tactic. It seems to suggest that we may need to leave our inherited categories and habitual modes of conduct—to walk away from the customary pragmatic values and methods of cooperative intelligence.



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Notes 1 Necro-being is “that which makes living a kind of death” (Harris 2020, 70). 2 One could easily imagine that, in such cases, consent is given under duress. 3 See Chapter 6 for a discussion of stoic fatalism and cynical skepticism. 4 Harris is the editor of three volumes regarding Alain Locke: The Philosophy of Alain Locke, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Temple University Press 1989); The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke (Rowman & Littlefield 1999); and (coedited with Jacoby A. Carter) Philosophical Values and World Citizenship (Lexington 2010). Harris also coauthored (with Charles Molesworth) Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (2008). 5 Harris is the editor of Philosophy Born of Struggle (Kendall/Hunt Publishing 2000). He is also author of A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader (Bloomsbury 2020). 6 In a 1998 interview, Harris disclosed: “In terms of my own life, I think that it’s an effort to make whole both the side that sees a justification in revolution and simultaneously the side that sees the need to be practical about life. I guess, on one level, my personal life has been sort of a search for a compatible existence between the two” (Harris 1998b, 218). 7 The term “tarry” means to stay longer than intended; to delay leaving a place. 8 In Chapter 1, I refer to this amoral universe as a “thoroughly disenchanted universe.” 9 Both Plato (1997), Phaedo, ln. 64a, and Michel de Montaigne (1958), in “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” argue that philosophy is practice in dying. 10 See Elizabeth Anderson (1998, 18–20) for a discussion of thick evaluative concepts. 11 Question: What happens to scholars who do not write in English or French? Answer: They disappear (Harris 2020, 24). 12 For more on critical pragmatism, consult Harris (1999), Carter and Harris (2010) and Carter (2016). 13 David Walker (1785–1830), shop keeper, abolitionist, author of the Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829); Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), journalist, novelist, abolitionist, author of An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833); Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879), teacher, journalist, abolitionist, author of Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build (1831); and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), essayist, abolitionist, author of “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), and “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859). See the Symposium on Insurrectionist Ethics (McBride 2013b). 14 “Anabsolute” means not-absolute or without-absolute.

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References Anderson, Elizabeth. 1998. “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry,” in In Face of the Facts, edited by R. Wightman Fox and R. Westbrook, pp. 10–39. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2015. “Moral Bias and Corrective Practices: A Pragmatist Perspective,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 89 (November 2015), pp. 21–47. Carter, Jacoby Adeshei. 2016. ““Like Rum in the Punch”: The Quest for Cultural Democracy,” in African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter, pp. 107–67. New York: Palgrave. Carter, Jacoby Adeshei. 2010. “New Moral Imperatives for World Order,” in Philosophic Values and World Citizenship, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Leonard Harris, pp. 217–33. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Carter, Jacoby Adeshei, and Leonard Harris (eds.). 2016. Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2009. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Davis, Angela Y. 1990. Women, Culture, & Politics. New York: Vintage Books. Davis, Angela Y. 1998. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Edited by Joy James. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Davis, Angela Y. 2012. The Meaning of Freedom. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Douglass, Frederick. 1985. “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies: An Address Delivered in Canandaigua, New York, on 3 August 1857,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 3: 1855–63, edited by John Blassingame, pp. 183–208. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. Frye, Marilyn. 1992. Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism 1976–1992. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. Harris, Leonard. 1998b. “Leonard Harris,” in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations, edited by George Yancy, pp. 207–27. New York: Routledge. Harris, Leonard (ed.). 1999. The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Harris, Leonard (ed.). 2000. Philosophy Born of Struggle, Second Edition. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing. Harris, Leonard. 2010. “Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism and Race,” in Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond, 57–73, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Leonard Harris. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Harris, Leonard. 2013. “Walker: Naturalism and Liberation,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter), pp. 93–111. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. New York: Bloomsbury. Harris, Leonard and Charles Molesworth. 2008. Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Leonard Harris (eds.). 2010. Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Locke, Alain. 1942. “Color: The Unfinished Business of Democracy,” Survey Graphic: Magazine of Social Interpretation, Vol. 31, No. 11, pp. 455–61. Locke, Alain. 1989. The Philosophy of Alain Locke. Edited by Leonard Harris. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Locke, Alain. 1992a. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Locke, Alain (ed.). 1992b. The New Negro. New York: Touchstone. Locke, Alain. 2010. “World Citizenship: Mirage or Reality?” in Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond, edited by Jacoby A. Carter and Leonard Harris. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Locke, Alain. 2016. African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures. Edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter. New York: Palgrave. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lugones, María. 2006. “On Complex Communication,” Hypatia, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer), pp. 75–85. McBride, Lee. 2013a. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter), pp. 29–45. McBride, Lee (ed.). 2013b. “Symposium on Insurrectionist Ethics,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter), pp. 27–111. McBride, Lee. 2017. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Racism,” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, pp. 225–34. New York: Oxford University Press. McBride, Lee. 2018. “Anger and Approbation,” in Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, pp. 1–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism Without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Montaigne, Michel. 1958. “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame, pp. 56–68. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Neurath, Otto. 1973. Empiricism and Sociology. Edited by Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Norton, Bryan G. 2015. Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plato. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett. Thoreau, Henry David. 2004. The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform. Edited by Wendell Glick. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walker, David. 1965. Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to those of The United States of America. New York: Hill and Wang.

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3 New Descriptions, New Possibilities

Dialectic as Backdrop Plato depicts dialectic (διαλεκτική) as a dialogical form of philosophical inquiry featuring both the collection of things into natural kinds and the division of natural kinds into subcategories (Phaedrus 265D–266C). In academic settings, in many a classroom, there is an attempt to facilitate dialectic exchanges between student and text, between student and teacher, and between student and student. Through these types of dialogical exchanges we are afforded opportunities to see the limitations of our own views, to consider the perspectives and interpretations of others, and, hopefully, to gain better notions of the truth. In Hegel, dialectic involves a much grander claim about the nature of existence. Hegel describes dialectic as a process of change in which a thesis (x) is confronted by an opposing/contradicting antithesis (the negation of x), which ultimately leads to synthesis (the negation of the negation of x)—a more refined, broadened form of the initial thesis (1988, 58, 67, 82). Dialectic, in this Hegelian instantiation, is discernible in all existing beings, in the development of history, and in the development of consciousness. The dialectic is universal and teleological, the dynamic principle behind change and the progressive

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unfolding of history (Hegel 1988, 57). Through the meeting of opposition and the subsequent sublation of this opposition, human beings broaden and expand, inching toward greater and greater consciousness of ourselves and our relations to the whole, toward Absolute Knowing. Of course, Marx appropriated the Hegelian dialectic to describe the development of the economic modes of production. On this account, tribal society was confronted with and supplanted by capitalist society, which inevitably will lead to the higher synthesis, communism. The existential philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wrestled with the dialectic. Kierkegaard suggests that the aesthete, living in immediacy, is annulled by the ethical, law-abiding judge but gestures toward the transcendence of this either/or dilemma (via leap of faith). Nietzsche offers a genealogy of morality in which a noble morality is subverted by a slave morality, yet he sees both as primitive relics of lower human culture that must be overcome. A naturalized, open-ended variant of Hegel’s dialectic surfaced in the United States in the work of William James. James writes: This dogging of everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual moving on to something future which shall supersede the personal, this is the Hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite. . . . Any partial view whatever of the world tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning it, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth of anything involves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than the whole of everything can be the truth of any-thing at all. . . . Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless, but accurate. There is a dialectic movement in things . . . but it is one that can be described and accounted for in terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. (1996, 89–90) Here, James is critical of Hegel’s closed teleology and his monist Absolute, yet he accepts the idea that there is a dialectical movement in things and that



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our relations grow as objects are dogged by their negative. James postulates a wild/evolving, pluralistic universe, and thus the dogging of everything by its negative does not necessarily lead to progress; development toward a predetermined end is not destined or inevitable, and every systematic inquiry leaves an unclassified residuum (James 1956, 110, 299).1 People often fail to recognize the pervasive dialectical features of human experience, in this Jamesian sense. But to recognize the dialectic movement of things highlights the contradictions, the tensions, the perspectivism we face in our lives (James 1996, 99). For instance, as enculturated fallible beings, we may recognize our epistemic limitations, our inability to discern with certainty the best way of life, and yet most of us are very much caught up in the practice of institutionalizing particular goals and norms. There is dialectical tension here. Similarly, there is tension between our commitments to remain open to novel or alternative perspectives and our commitments to maintaining and carrying forward a set of (traditional) ideas and cultural goods. There is a tension between our commitments to openness and tolerance and our loyalty/ allegiance to our culturally bound values and perspectives. There is a tension between a commitment to sympathy and compassion for the other and a commitment to confront and fight injustice or oppression. Here, I mean to make two preliminary points. First, human experience does seem to bear the marks of dialectic. We are often confronted by conflicting forces and ideas; things are dogged by their negatives. And, second, some benefit, some amelioration, may be wrought out through dialectical conflict. By overcoming factors of opposition and conflict, we can transform those factors into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life (Dewey LW 10: 20).

Camels, Lions, and Comportment In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche develops an extended metaphor concerning the “three metamorphoses of the spirit” (Nietzsche 1969, 54–5).

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Nietzsche describes the metamorphic process the spirit undergoes: from camel to lion and from lion to child. The camel represents a domesticated, weight-bearing spirit—a beast of burden, whose will is broken and dutifully bound to some external authority or power. The lion represents a rebellious (or insurrectionist) spirit—a proud beast of prey, who wants to be lord in its own desert and is willing to throw off shackles and destroy conventional mores. The lion creates space/freedom for new creation. The child spirit represents the innocent and forgetful spirit, a new beginning. The child is a self-propelled wheel—it is free to forget past confines, to will its own will and create new values for itself. Here again, the keen eye might notice the dialectic—(1) camel, (2) the negation of the camel (i.e., the lion), and (3) the negation of the lion (i.e., the child). In the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche revisits this theme, pointedly chastising what he perceived to be the weight-bearing camel spirit of his time. This, of course, was the morality of compassion, which has its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Consider the so-called Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. One is reproached for sexual desire, relish of fine food, the attempt to better one’s material existence, enjoying leisure, showing righteous indignation, the attempt to acquire what another possesses, or acknowledging one’s own power or excellence. Nietzsche prods us to consider whether there is anything wrong with pride, beauty, and strength. Following Nietzsche, I would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with these character traits. Yet these traits have been devalued and discouraged within the Judeo-Christian tradition—at least in principle. By valuing self-denial, self-sacrifice, humility, restraint, serenity, compassion, and charity, this morality of compassion breeds guilt-ridden, self-effacing, meek, impotent people (Nietzsche 1998, 4). Morality, in this case, acts as a poison or a narcotic that dulls, pacifies, and immobilizes these camel spirits. It produces a backward-glancing tiredness and turns their will against life, holding them back from reaching the highest power and splendor of the human type (Nietzsche 1998, 5). Hence arise the lion spirits, the proud beasts



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of prey, who rebel and take joy in negating conventional values, clearing space for the creation of new values. The lion spirit makes space for the imminent child spirits, for new possibilities. I rehearse this Nietzschean metaphor to draw attention to the dialectic between the camel spirit and the lion spirit. I want to emphasize the self-effacing and submissive character traits of the camel spirit, as well as the lion spirit’s bold and rebellious strivings to confront and annihilate that which confines the camel spirit. I want to emphasize how particular norms affect comportment, the manner in which a person carries themself. If we situate these ideas within discussions of oppression, the metaphor may become more salient. Oppressed people, as perceived members of a stigmatized group, are systemically reduced, immobilized, and molded as subordinate to another group (Frye 1983, 33). Through social norming, typecasting, estrangement, bigotry, and symbolic acts of terror/violence, the oppressed person is reduced, defanged, and molded in a particular caste. This may manifest in (lack of) sartorial choices, in (lack of) uprightness of posture, in (lack of) forcefulness of speech—in demeanor, in comportment. Women are compelled to be demure and sexually available, to smile (Frye 1992, 129; Manne 2018, 72). LGBTQ people are compelled to don sex-specific clothing and mannerisms and to deny their relationships, their most basic displays of affection. Black and brown men are compelled (often through threat of violence, loss of employment, or incarceration) to be nonthreatening and acquiescent. Other oppressed groups learn to hide in plain sight, to quietly carry out their work and not draw attention (Gallegos de Castillo 2018, 105–6; Kim 2014, 115– 16). Stepping outside of these roles, choosing another script, one is subject to reproach, often labeled bitch, man-hater, mentally unstable, sexual deviant, terrorist, thug, or bad hombre. Thus, in established oppressive relationships, oppressed groups maintain something like a camel spirit, a weight-bearing ethos of compliance and modesty. (That is, unless they become lion spirits.) Oppressed people can take a militant stance of resistance to their oppression and become lion spirits (McBride 2017, 230). They can overtly

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or surreptitiously challenge and undermine oppressive norms and authority figures (McBride 2013, 32). They can give approbation to insurrectionist character traits (e.g., tenacity, irreverence, indignation, guile, and audacity) when faced with injustice or oppression (Harris 1999, 230, 236, 2002, 196; McBride 2018b, 9–10). This could manifest in graceful, resolute, and bold comportment—in bold and assertive sartorial choices, posture, and speech (Kaiser 2012, 1, 23). Furthermore, these emboldened oppressed people can bind together in impure coalitions of resistance to marshal potent social agency (McBride 2018b). Hence arise the lion spirits, the bold and indignant, who rebel and take joy in destroying those material conditions that cause and maintain oppression and degradation, clearing space for imaginative scenarios of emancipation and the creation of new values and relationships (Harris 1997, 112, 1999, 240; cf. Foucault 1988, 124). This is not the work of submissive, selfeffacing, or complacent weight-bearing camel spirits. No, this is the work of confident, uncompromising, and rebellious lion spirits.

Descriptions and Possibilities To open new paths toward the lion spirit (and subsequent paths toward the child spirit), we may need to broaden, complicate, or change the descriptions we entertain. Here, Ian Hacking’s dynamic nominalism is instructive (Hacking 2002, 106). Hacking does not advocate a strict nominalism; he recognizes a distinction between people and things. He writes, “What camels, mountains, and microbes are doing does not depend on our words”: “The microbes’ possibilities are delimited by nature, not by words” (2002, 108). But human actions are different. Human actions are closely linked to the descriptions and conceptual frameworks available to us. Hacking writes, “Who we are is not only what we did, do, and will do, but also what we might have done and may do. Making up people changes the space of possibilities for personhood” (2002, 107). By and large, deliberate human action depends on the possibilities



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of description afforded to the human beings in question. As Foucault points out, particular lifestyles, interpersonal relationships, taboos, social norms, and specific forms of discipline were inconceivable prior to the making of the categories of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in the late nineteenth century (Foucault 1990, 43, 101). A similar claim can be made about modern racial categories, which were only fashioned in the eighteenth century. New possibilities are envisioned as new descriptions are articulated (Hacking 2002, 108). Robert Gooding-Williams, in “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” applies Hacking’s dynamic nominalism to racial classification and identity (Gooding-Williams 2006, 93). First, Gooding-Williams distinguishes between “being black” and “being a black person.” Being black is understood as a consequence of a practice of racial categorization to which blacks have been subjected (Gooding-Williams 2006, 91). Being black is thus socially constructed and imposed—the product of a rule-governed social practice of racial categorization, based upon visual and cognitive identification (Gooding-Williams 2006, 91–2). As such, “being black” expresses a thirdperson perspective (Gooding-Williams 2006, 92). In contrast, “being a black person” expresses a first-person perspective. One is a black person only if one (i) classifies oneself as black and (ii) makes choices and formulates plans in light of one’s identification of oneself as black. Gooding-Williams has thus deftly separated the imposed aspect of race from racial self-identification. We can now recognize the historic and structural oppression of “being black” while undermining essentialist conceptions of “being a black person.” And this, in turn, allows people to assume whichever first-person identity they find prominent and meaningful. On this view, there is no authentic way to be a black person. Being authentically (or inauthentically) a black person “makes no sense” (GoodingWilliams 2006, 95). Our sense of ourselves and of our possibilities is a function of the descriptions available (Gooding-Williams 2006, 93). Given new descriptions, myriad ways of being a black person are rendered possible

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(Gooding-Williams 2006, 95). Some of these descriptions may be liberating. Descriptions that evince insurrectionist character traits may create new ways to challenge antiblack racism. New descriptions that feature the perseverance and audacity of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, or “the Martin Luther King, Jr. who calls for some form of constructive coercive power (i.e., a higher synthesis beyond moral suasion and violent rebellion)” may counter the camel spirit, the compliant submissiveness that is expected of oppressed populations (King 2010, 137). Let me offer a personal example. I am named after my father, and he was named after his father; I am the third in a line. There is some pride in such things. But that is not the full story. As a boy, I was raised believing a tall tale. I was told that my (black American) great-great-grandfather had killed his slave master, escaped to freedom, and changed his name. This story, I learned much, much later, is spurious. Apparently, the genuine story is that my black great-grandfather was treated unjustly at the general store (in the Jim Crow South) by one or several white men—the accounts vary—and a fight ensued. As this story is told, my great-grandfather bested one or more white men and promptly fled Mississippi to evade the lynch mob that was assembled and sent after him. Once he made it to safety, he changed his surname to McBride and gave his children Irish-sounding names. My name, in this sense, is an alias— un nom de guerre. In any case, the stories I was told afforded me descriptions of proud, indignant black forefathers. When met with racism or injustice, they took a posture of resistance; they challenged the racial apartheid, the racist terrors of the time (McBride 2017, 230). Whether true or fictional, such descriptions opened new possibilities for me. They allow me to imagine myself a lion spirit, more confident and less afraid to flare with indignation when met with injustice. Of Nietzsche, Georg Simmel writes: It has frequently been stressed that Nietzsche’s doctrine is in opposition to his personality: a rude, warlike, and yet bacchantic cry erupts from



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an extremely sensitive, quiet, introspective, and loveable man. Certainly this does not constitute an argument against the doctrine’s validity. Often a philosopher expresses in his doctrine the opposite of what he is, supplementing his shortcomings in a personal dialectic and compensating for the desires he has never realized, thereby striving for full humanity. (1991, 179–80) Many of us do in fact think and write to enhance one aspect of our own personal dialectic, to supplement our shortcomings and thereby strive for a fuller instantiation of ourselves. (I do.) The descriptions and scripts we inherit through enculturation and tradition affect our comportment. If Hacking and Gooding-Williams are right, new descriptions offer new possibilities. For people who are oppressed, new descriptions could be extremely liberating. As Megan Craig points out, through imaginative projection, doors can open to modes of agency previously unrecognized, unimagined (Craig 2015, 181, 2018, 22–3). The approbation of insurrectionist character traits would affect demeanor, the manner in which the oppressed person carries or conducts themself. In other words, it makes bold comportment possible in oppressed populations. This bold comportment opens new avenues of resistance, new articulations of one’s self and potential coalitions, new imaginative scenarios of emancipation (McBride 2013, 40, 2017, 232).

Dialectical Conflict and Plural Descriptions I began this chapter with a discussion of dialectic. I, along Jamesian lines, see a dialectical movement in things. This suggests that there is tension or conflict imminent in any settled situation. Any settled situation is ripe for dogging by its negation. This postulate about the pervasiveness of dialectical conflict was meant to serve as the backdrop to the subsequent discussion

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of the tension between those who are compelled into a meek, immobilized mode of comportment and those who take on a bold, assertive mode of comportment as a means to destabilize the previous, oppressive mode of being. In addition, I attempted to appropriate an insight from Hacking—“If new modes of description come into being, new possibilities for action come into being in consequence” (2002, 108). It is here that I think that we see a vital “task of philosophy.” Philosophers are needed to conceive new descriptions and create new possibilities for action. Philosophers seem well situated to clearly articulate and critically assess the descriptions of oppressed groups that contribute to those groups remaining disempowered, timid. Philosophers are needed to creatively articulate new descriptions that offer new possibilities and direct oppressed groups toward liberation. But, of course, we are not all situated in the same way. Not everyone is oppressed. Many of us who are oppressed are not oppressed in the exact same ways. For this, intersectionality remains significant (Collins 2011, 2012). But I can imagine that some people will fail to see the oppression borne by stigmatized groups. This seems to suggest that we may need to articulate more than one set of descriptions. We may need to present the dominant groups among us with descriptions of attentive and empathetic comportment (Gallegos de Castillo 2018, 105; Hamington 2004, 68; Seigfried 1999, 91). We may also need to present the subordinated with clear and persuasive descriptions of audacious and insurrectionist comportment. In other words, we may need to articulate different descriptions for different groups—one set for those who do not recognize the oppression and another set for the oppressed. ([x] and [the negation of x].)

Note 1 Compare with Richard Rorty’s contingent, de-divinized world (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 40) and Leonard Harris’s amoral, perilous pluralverse (A Philosophy of Struggle, pp. 14, 275). In Chapter 1, I discuss this untidy pluralverse as a “thoroughly disenchanted universe.”



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References Collins, Patricia Hill. 2011. “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 88–112. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2012. “Social Inequality, Power, and Politics: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism in Dialogue,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 442–57. Craig, Megan. 2015. “Habit, Relaxation, and the Open Mind,” in Feminist Interpretations of William James, edited by Erin Tarver and Shannon Sullivan, pp. 165–88. University Park: Penn State University Press. Craig, Megan. 2018. “Looking Back from the Year 2117: America, Philosophy, and Hope,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 21–34. Dewey, John. 1989. Art as Experience. The Later Works, Vol. 10: 1934. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Power and Sex,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, pp. 110–24. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Frye, Marilyn. 1992. “Willful Virgin or Do You Have to Be a Lesbian to Be a Feminist?” in Willful Virgin, pp. 127–37. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Gallegos de Castillo, Lori. 2018. “Academic Philosophy and the Pursuit of Genuine Dialogue: Embracing Radical Friction,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 92–111. Gooding-Williams, Robert. 2006. “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” in Look, a Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics, pp. 87–108. New York: Routledge. Hacking, Ian. 2002. “Making Up People,” in Historical Ontology, pp. 99–114. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hamington, Maurice. 2004. Embodied Care. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Harris, Leonard. 1997. “The Horror of Tradition or How to Burn Babylon and Build Benin While Reading a Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” in African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions, edited by John Pittman, pp. 94–118. New York: Routledge. Harris, Leonard. 1999. “Honor and Insurrection or A Short Story About Why John Brown (with David Walker’s Spirit) Was Right and Frederick Douglass (with Benjamin Banneker’s Spirit) Was Wrong,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, edited by Bill Lawson and Frank Kirkland, pp. 227–42. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Harris, Leonard. 2002. “Insurrectionist Ethics: Advocacy, Moral Psychology, and Pragmatism,” in Ethical Issues for a New Millennium, edited by John Howie, pp. 192–210. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Hegel, G. W. F. 1988. Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett. James, William. 1956. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Immortality. New York: Dover. James, William. 1996. A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kaiser, Susan. 2012. Fashion and Cultural Studies. New York: Berg. Kim, David Haekwon. 2014. “Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, pp. 103–32. Albany: SUNY Press. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 2010. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press. Manne, Kate. 2018a. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press. McBride, Lee. 2013. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 29–45. McBride, Lee. 2017. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Racism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Race and Philosophy, edited by Naomi Zack, pp. 225–34. New York: Oxford University Press. McBride, Lee. 2018b. “Anger and Approbation,” in Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, pp. 1–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. McBride, Lee. 2018c. “Race, Multiplicity, and Impure Coalitions of Resistance,” in Philosophizing the Americas: An Inter-American Discourse, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Hernando A. Estévez. New York: Fordham University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1999. “James: Sympathetic Apprehension of the Point of View of the Other,” in Classical American Pragmatism, edited by Sandra Rosenthal, Carl Hausman, and Douglas Anderson, pp. 85–98. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Simmel, George. 1991. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Translated by Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

4 Empathy or Insurrection Wielding Positive and Negative Affect

The title of this chapter is intentionally misleading. It suggests that we have two options: empathy or insurrection. This (false) dilemma captures what I take to be the conventional way of depicting the problem. One is expected to approach social justice and social amelioration with empathy—with openness, love, and compassion for the other (even our oppressors). I am overgeneralizing, using the term “empathy” as a representative for a host of character traits that coincide with love and compassion. The alternative—insurrection (or rebellion)— is typically depicted as irrational, foolish, unwise. It conjures images of violent uprisings, murder, and mayhem. I am also overextending the term “insurrection” to be representative of the character traits evinced in those who rebel against oppression or immiseration: for example, audacity, indignation, aggressiveness, and guile. These insurrectionist character traits are typically marked as detrimental to philosophical discourse. We are told that justice and social amelioration will only be legitimately realized through empathy or love. To the contrary, I give moral approbation to these insurrectionist character traits. Here, in this chapter, I will argue against those who claim that empathy (or love) is the only rational or effective way to approach unjust or oppressive situations. I hope to persuade you that an insurrectionist stance of resistance is crucial to effectively confronting and challenging oppressive conditions.

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All You Need Is Love How are we to approach philosophical discourse? If we read Jurgen Habermas, we get a picture of ideal discourse—what it could be, if we enacted Habermas’s discourse ethics. In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, we learn that human beings inhabit semi-bounded lifeworlds, which always already hold meaning and tacit notions of rationality. We learn that communicative interactions are a particular type of interaction in which “participants coordinate their plans of action consensually, with the agreement reached at any point being evaluated in terms of the intersubjective recognition of validity claims” (Habermas 1996, 58). Discourse, on this view, comes with discursive principles and rules of procedure. No speaker may contradict themself. Every speaker may assert only what they really believe—no irony. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse; that is, no exclusion. Accepting rules of this type, we submit our propositions to all others within the discourse for purposes of discursively testing our proposition’s claim to universality (Habermas 1996, 67). Through these coordinated practices and procedures ratio​nal-i​nterl​ocuto​rs-en​gaged​-in-c​ ommun​icati​ve-di​scour​se inquire into the truth, coerced by nothing except the force of the better argument (Habermas 1996, 198). (Sounds nice, right?) But I do have concerns. What if my interlocutors approach discourse strategically rather than communicatively? What if my concerns, interests, and “eccentric” mode of being do not fit neatly into the dominant or hegemonic lifeworld and thus does not gain footing in the hegemonic philosophical discourse?1 What if my concerns, when recognized, are seen as unimportant or simply not philosophical? Even worse, what if women or people who share some vague set of phenotypic markers are deemed incompetent to speak within the discourse? To be clear, my issue is not with Habermasian discourse ethics, per se. Rather, I am much more concerned with the ways in which philosophical discourses are portrayed as calm, systematic, rule-governed rational procedures.



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On such accounts, we are often told implicitly and explicitly that many of the character traits that prompt one to confront and counter injustice or oppression (e.g., anger, pugnacity, and irreverence) have no place in philosophical discourse. For instance, Martha Nussbaum—in “Transitional Anger” (2015)—argues that “garden-variety anger” is normatively irrational, politically unnecessary, and inevitably destructive (Nussbaum 2015, 54– 6). Anger, according to Nussbaum, is a primitive vestige of bygone days, an impediment to the genuine pursuance of justice and the honoring of obligations. Anger at its core is about retribution—striking back, wanting the assailant to suffer (in the guise of punishment, or justice). Nussbaum writes, “[payback] does not bring dead people back to life, heal a broken limb, or undo a sexual violation” (Nussbaum 2015, 45). In essence, she argues that anger is normatively irrational and deserves reproach, unless the situation is momentous and anger is fleeting, quickly transitioning into compassionate hope focused on the future welfare of all parties. Thus, claims to unjust injury are to be petitioned calmly and rationally, in a nonthreatening manner (McBride 2018a, 8). In a similar vein, Shannon Sullivan—in “The Dangers of White Guilt, Shame, and Betrayal” (2014)—makes a distinction between positive affects and negative affects. Positive affects include joy, cheerfulness, and love; negative affects include anger, shame, and guilt. According to Sullivan, positive affects “build-up” and negative affects “tear-down” (Sullivan 2014, 120). Sullivan argues that white people qua white are bearers of toxic racial identities, psychosomatically depleted, and thus weak and powerless souls (Sullivan 2014, 121). On this account, white people are so spiritually toxic— their souls are so sick—that it is counterproductive to subject them to negative affects. In other words, we should not display anger or hostility toward white supremacists or compel them to feel shame or guilt. Such efforts only exacerbate already existing class schisms within the white population and will likely only elicit violent fits of backlash from these toxic, spiritually depleted white souls (Sullivan 2014, 136–7). Rather, we should investigate the potential

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of positive emotions: cheerfulness, joy, and love. Sullivan is keen on “white self-love.” Love, so understood, is a form of living attention (i.e., white people attending to other white people); it energizes and refuels the depleted (Sullivan 2014, 124–5). White people are urged to approach their white supremacist friends and kin with joy and love, not indignation or hostility. It is through a transactional form of love (without the burden of guilt and shame) that the destructive racialized habits, the domination and violence enacted by white people, can be challenged in a truly effective manner. Cornel West, in a string of papers dating back to 1989, promotes a democratic faith in humanity and moral outrage at unnecessary forms of social misery (West 2009b, 126). West evokes a Judeo-Christian tradition of “courageous resistance against, and relentless critiques of, injustice and social misery” (West 2009b). West champions a distinctively Chekovian Christian “prophetic pragmatism,” which recognizes the tragic, the catastrophic, aspects of life—the brutalities and atrocities of history, the present-day barbarities, the struggle against meaninglessness and despair (West 1989, 226–8; West 1999, xv–xix; Mills 2001, 209). West proclaims: black nihilism is “the most basic issue facing black America” (West 1993, 19). Nihilism, here, is best understood as “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness” (West 1993, 22–3, emphasis in original). Black Americans, according to West, suffer from worthlessness and self-loathing, “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition to the world” (West 1993). Nihilism, as such, is a disease of the soul, which requires a politics of conversion. A turning of the soul is required. (Here, I cannot help but think of Plato’s Republic, Bk VII: a turning of the soul from darkness toward light, from the shadowy images of the cave to what really is.) This turning requires a conversion from a culture of consumption and materialism to a culture of love, care, and service to others. In other words, an ethic of love must be at the center of prophetic pragmatism’s politics of conversion (West 1993, 30; Headley 2001, 75; Mills 2001, 207–9). This approach bears out a “blues sensibility,” according to West (West 2009a). Real blues people epitomize this



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ethic of love. A blues people tragically suffered Jim Crow; they did not choose violent rebellion; they did not want to Jim Crow their oppressors in return. In the face of racially motivated humiliation, unwarranted brutality, and hatefilled terrors, the blues people express love and compassion. (West is partial to John Coltrane and Curtis Mayfield.) In the face of nihilism and despair, the blues people create jovial comedy and heartfelt beauty. In the face of class exploitation, misogyny, or racial imperialism, West calls forth “engaged gaiety, subversive joy and revolutionary patience, which works for and looks to the kingdom to come” (West 1999, 439). Thus, it is through love, joy, and revolutionary patience that we fend off nihilism and mitigate oppression. So, to recap, moral agents are compelled to approach philosophical discourse in a calm and rational manner. There are principles and rules that facilitate the construction and reception of the best argument. Anger, hostility, and other negative affects are marked as detrimental to philosophical discourse. Justice and social amelioration will only be legitimately had through empathy, compassion, and love—Martin Luther King, Jr. is often evoked here. It is worth noting that these prescriptions are typically taken as universally applicable. That is, these prescriptions are meant for both the dominant group and the subordinated groups. And, as I see it, this conception of philosophical discourse precludes members of oppressed groups from expressing their anger, their enmity. It precludes oppressed groups from irreverence, from declining to give reverence to ideals and institutions that, in practice, have largely failed them or helped to sustain their subordination. This conception of philosophical discourse precludes oppressed groups from pugnaciously or aggressively attempting to draw hitherto-unseeninjustices into the hegemonic discourse or to actively confront oppression. It binds oppressed groups to nonthreatening moral appeals, to moral suasion. It requires these people to be patient and acquiescent to the present social order; to approach their oppressors with empathy and love. It requires that the oppressed wait (cheerfully and empathetically) upon the good conscience of their oppressors.

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Insurrection and Negative Affect This book—which attempts to carve out a space between a critical pragmatic experimentalism and an insurrectionist ethics—counters this approach to philosophical discourse. Insurrectionist ethics, as I conceive it, is concerned with challenging the dominant order of things (the episteme), the intervening background assumptions that condition and facilitate oppression and unnecessary misery. The view maintains four basic tenets (McBride 2013a, 32, 2017, 227): (i) A willingness to defy norms and convention when those norms sanction or perpetuate injustice or oppression; (ii) Advocating a conception of personhood that militates moral action against obvious injustice or brutality, justifying militancy and radical action on behalf of oppressed peoples; (iii) Promotion of collective action via (contingent) adversarial groups, working toward ameliorative changes in institutional and material conditions; and (iv) Moral approbation for insurrectionist character traits. I have argued elsewhere that an insurrectionist ethos (or spirit) can be located in both Henry David Thoreau and Angela Y. Davis (McBride 2013a, 2017). Furthermore, I argue that the moral approbation of insurrectionist character traits influences the demeanor, the behavior, the manner in which the oppressed person carries or conducts themself. This bold comportment opens new avenues of resistance, new articulations of one’s self and one’s coalitions, new imaginative scenarios of emancipation (McBride 2018b). Here, in this chapter, I am arguing against those who preclude rebellious or insurrectionist resistance; that is, against those claiming that empathy (or love) is the only rational or ethical way to approach unjust or oppressive situations. Nussbaum precludes people who have suffered unjust injury from feeling and harnessing their anger, justified or not. Victims of unjust acts are compelled to quickly get over their anger, with compassionate hope for the future welfare of all parties (including their oppressors, their rapists, their attackers, etc.). Those seeking justice are compelled to state their case to the proper authorities calmly and rationally—no one should be threatened; no one should be made to kowtow. Nussbaum suggests that those who have



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unjustly suffered sexual violation, racial brutality, or any variety of oppression are irrational if they remain angry. I find this way of conceiving anger to be callous and insensitive to those who suffer unjust injury (McBride 2018a, 8). Nussbaum seems unconcerned with the egregiousness or the pervasiveness of the injuries in question. In fact, Nussbaum’s view presupposes that contemporary norms and systems of justice (in the United States) are fair and just. It presupposes that civilized argumentation and considered judgment in wide reflective equilibrium do, in fact, result in just resolutions. The position seems to callously disregard de facto racial, gender, and class inequities— racially disproportionate incarceration rates, systemically unequal pay for women, meager educational and economic opportunities for the poor, and so on. Nussbaum seems blinkered, unable to comprehend the perspectives of those who remain angry about egregious injustice (cf. Dotson 2011, 248–9; Medina 2013, 70). And, given her inability to see anything but compassionate hope as a rational response to unjust injury, Nussbaum eo ipso silences or delegitimates those who remain angry and indignant about unjust injury. In this manner, Nussbaum’s conception of transitional anger seems to discourage the expression of anger, and thus is an impediment to basic resistance, an impediment to social amelioration. But, if we conceive of anger as a virtue (a la Aristotle), then anger is not inherently retaliatory or vengeful. Anger can then be controlled and strategically marshalled to put an end to certain policies, institutions, and behaviors (King 2010, 18).2 I would argue that confronting, resisting, or countering that which oppresses us does actually do some work toward amelioration (McBride 2018a, 9; Harris 2020, 135; Flanagan 2017, 210– 12; Myers and Dewall 2015, 478). Or, at least, it does some work toward changing the conditions which make such injuries possible. Anger can help sustain the need to be vigilant against future wrongs. It can motivate victims to bind together in coalitions of resistance. It can be instrumental in restoring self-confidence and self-worth in victimized or oppressed people (Harris 2020, 135; Flanagan 2017, 210–12). If this holds in at least some cases, it would seem to suggest that anger should not be eschewed or discarded as an irrational vestige of human prehistory.

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My hope is that this type of argument extends to other insurrectionist character traits. Let us consider enmity and pugnacity. Sullivan treats the dominant group in the United States as the group in desperate need of attention and love; they are (purportedly) “the truly wretched of the earth” (Sullivan 2014, 122). Sullivan’s approach dissuades us, as moral agents, from enmity, from hostility or opposition to those forces and ideas that conspire to confine, oppress, or terrorize nonwhites. Sullivan argues that toxic white people— racists, the white supremacists—should not be compelled to feel shame or guilt for racist behavior. Additionally, aggressive or pugnacious efforts to confront, publicly expose, or shrewdly deter white supremacists should be sidelined, if such efforts could potentially lead to shame or guilt in these delicate white souls. There is something awry here. Sullivan acknowledges that people of color do suffer under white racial imperialism. She seems to concede that white people (in the United States) have created unjust hierarchies, seizing land from indigenous peoples and (through chattel slavery, prison labor, and sharecropping) stealing labor from Afro-descended peoples. White people sit at the helm of our dominant culture, disproportionately occupying seats of power in government, the military, corporations, and the academy. Yet, Sullivan would have us see white folk as a proper object of pity (or empathy)? Sullivan’s work is ostensibly meant to rehabilitate the psychosomatically toxic white soul. Sullivan proffers joyous white self-love: white people loving each other, attentively rooting out the racist aspects of white identity. No guilt and no shame, just white love. But how does one change a white supremacist in any real sense without guilt or shame? How does a racially oppressed group even raise the issue without enmity, without bitterness? (Or, are racially oppressed groups not supposed to engage toxic white souls?) It is not clear to me that white people loving each other will change blatantly asymmetrical social norms and structural institutions that have and continue to give undue advantage to white people. If those people deemed white wish to combat white supremacy or racial injustice, they will need to articulate and carry out some strategy for combating social norms and structural institutions that give undue advantage or privilege



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to white people. Sullivan’s position on negative affect seems to obstruct such efforts. Let us be clear, white supremacy is predicated on establishing and maintaining racial imperialism—racial domination. The position is based on subordinating or annihilating nonwhites. From my perspective, it seems natural and justified for anti-racist whites and nonwhites to feel real opposition, hostility, enmity toward white supremacy. Yet, Sullivan seems to suggest that aggressive opposition, that pugnacious resistance to white supremacy will only cause greater discord and racial antagonism—the tearing down of white souls. West recognizes tragic, catastrophic suffering and unnecessary social misery. He prods us to tend to the worst off, all the while extending love and compassion (in good Christian fashion) to all human beings, oppressors and oppressed alike. He compels oppressed groups to smile defiantly in the face of their oppression—to wait patiently with joy in their hearts. For West, the dichotomy seems clear: either you are committed to empathy and love or you are committed to physical violence and hate-filled vengeance; nonviolent Gandhi or saber-wielding John Brown; saint or moral monster. For West, the choice seems clear: love, patience, and faith in democracy. But let us test our intuitions. Harriett Tubman smuggled hundreds of runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North. Of course, slavery, at the time, was legal in many states; there were federal Fugitive Slave Laws (1793, 1850). According to legal documents, these runaways were some slave driver’s property. With enmity, audacity, and guile, Tubman and a slew of free black and white Quaker dissidents broke the law surreptitiously. They delivered human beings from chattel slavery. Does West’s call for love, patience, and faith in democracy sound appropriate in this case? Should Tubman have been more patient? Moreover, what does the United States celebrate every Fourth of July? The American colonists, saddled with a British form of tyranny, engaged in a bloody revolution to win their freedom. You know, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” (Patrick Henry, anyone?) Should these rebels have waited with “revolutionary patience,” singing the blues?

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For my part, I am not convinced that either Tubman or the American revolutionaries were wrong for detesting, opposing, and working pugnaciously to subvert a glaringly unjust form of oppression. And, thus, I am inclined to give moral approbation to insurrectionist character traits that support such efforts.

Empathy and Insurrection I think what lurks beneath much of this is a false dichotomy—empathy or insurrection. Too many of us assume that love and empathy are diametrically opposed to enmity and anger. But it is very much possible that love and compassion (for the oppressed) can motivate insurrectionist resistance. People from any group or station can be moved to insurrectionist action if someone they love or have compassion for suffers through unnecessary social misery. And, more broadly, people may be moved to insurrect against unjust norms and institutions because they love all of humanity and they see some stigmatize group of human beings being excluded from the human community. That is, insurrection may be carried out as a manifestation of one’s love for humanity. Furthermore, I would argue that love and empathy are needed within oppressed groups. Within oppressed groups there are concrete cultural types. Dark-skinned people from Dakar (Senegal), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), and Mississippi (the United States) may not speak the same language, eat the same comfort foods, share the same religion, or share the same colonial regimes, but they may be lumped together into the same racial group. Thus, dark-skinned people labeled as black may share the same antiblack oppression in the United States, yet uphold differing concrete cultural types. The Muslim francophone, the Catholic Spanish-speaker, and the AME Protestant Englishspeaker will likely have to work empathetically to understand each other’s deeply held values and interests. Furthermore, the homosexual or queer Latinx may have differing perspectives and interests than the heterosexual Latinx. The poor person from Appalachia may have differing values and interests from



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the poor person from Queens. And many of these differences within these groups, these concrete cultural variants, are not readily visible. Thus, empathy is instrumental in facilitating the formation of coalitions and comprehending the divergent ways intersectional oppressions manifest for each of us. Empathy, in this sense, is needed to understand the opaque aspects of others’ lives. Thus, I want to leave space within philosophical discourse for empathy, anger, love, and logical experimentation. I want to wield both positive affects and negative affects, particularly for oppressed groups. Lastly, I want to point out that love need not be divorced from power and assertiveness. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes, “There is nothing essentially wrong with power” (King 2010, 38). “One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites” (King 2010, 37). This type of dualistic thinking has led people to seek their goals (i) through love and moral suasion devoid of power or (ii) through power devoid of love and conscience. Power without love is reckless and abusive and love without constructive coercive power is sentimental and ineffectual (King 2010, 38). We need not feel bound to the dichotomy: compassionate pleas or violent rebellion—empathy or insurrection. King prods us to imagine a higher synthesis, one that avoids the inadequacies and ineffectiveness of both (King 2010, 137–8). It is worth noting that King calls for an insurrection. (Actually, the term he uses is “revolution.”) King calls for “a genuine revolution of values.” He writes, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism” (King 2010, 200–1).

Notes 1 During a semester abroad at Oxford, one of my professors repeatedly informed me that my writing was “eccentric.” No further explanation was given. 2 Martin Luther King, Jr. writes, “nonviolent resistance caused no explosions of anger—it instigated no riots—it controlled anger and released it under discipline for maximum effect” (King 2010, 18).

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References Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 236–57. Flanagan, Owen. 2017. The Geography of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by C. Lenhardt and S. W. Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. London: Bloomsbury. Headley, Clevis. 2001. “Cornel West on Prophesy, Pragmatism, and Philosophy,” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader, edited by George Yancy, pp. 59–82. Malden, MA: Blackwell. King, Jr., Martin Luther. 2010. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press. McBride, Lee. 2013a. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter), pp. 29–45. McBride, Lee. 2017. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Racism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, pp. 225–34. New York: Oxford University Press. McBride, Lee. 2018a. “Anger and Approbation,” in Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, pp. 1–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. McBride, Lee. 2018b. “New Descriptions, New Possibilities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 168–78. Mills, Charles. 2001. “Prophetic Pragmatism as Political Philosophy,” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader, edited by George Yancy, pp. 192–223. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Myers, David G. and C. Nathan Dewall. 2015. Psychology In Modules, 11th ed. New York: Worth Publishers. Nussbaum, Martha. 2015. “Transitional Anger,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 41–56. Sullivan, Shannon. 2014. Good White People. Albany: SUNY Press. West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. West, Cornel. 1993. Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books. West, Cornel. 1999. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books. West, Cornel. 2009a. “Cornel West’s Catastrophic Love,” bigthink.com, http:​//big​think​ .com/​video​s/cor​nel-w​ests-​catas​troph​ic-lo​ve West, Cornel. 2009b. Keeping Faith. New York: Routledge.

5 Evoking Race (To Counter Race-Based Oppression); Or, Adversarial Groups as Anabsolute

William James writes: “Here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up” (James 1962, 135). Each of us peculiar organic beings, “militants, fighting free-handed” that the goods to which we are sensible may not be submerged and lost from out of life (James 1956, 204). I believe James is trying to elicit a deep sense of common humanity; that all human beings feel something like this in their beleaguered moments. (I do.) But that cannot be it. We cannot stop with an estranged existential struggle—angst and heroic striving alone. Structural changes and cultural revolutions cannot be reduced to the strong will or the rational agency of any one individual. We, as singleton individuals, rarely accomplish much in the way of social amelioration without the support and concerted effort of a mass of protestors/activists. Collective action is needed. Who will we fight for and with? Which social groups should we join? (Can I join more than one?) Which group identity is most salient in the struggle against the hegemonic Anglo-American techo-industrial episteme? Will you

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fight for your ethnic group, your racial group, your sex, your socioeconomic class? Of course, we can be intersectional, recognizing multiple overlapping forms of oppression. Still we will have to commit to and work on behalf of a social group to have any chance at achieving collective action aimed at structural change. For many—given the pervasiveness and the perniciousness of racism, the way racial imperialism implicitly affects racialized populations’ chances at corporeal health, their educational opportunities, and their chances at being recognized as honorable—their racial group is deeply meaningful and most salient. Here, race is evoked (to counter race-based oppression). But there is the potential for nationalisms along racial lines. That is, there is the potential for racialized people to develop chauvinistic loyalties to their assigned racial group. Nationalism, so understood, is a sentiment based on distinctive racial characteristics that binds a population in a chauvinistic manner, often producing a policy of racial separatism. Some argue that racial separatism is anthropologically inescapable, meaningful for racialized populations, and required for anti-racist struggle. To the contrary, I argue that the multiplicity, the multiculturalism, the intersectionality within these communities of resistance is typically overlooked, disregarded, or erased by the emphasis on racial distinctiveness and racial separatism. I outline an alternative way forward, one that allows for multiplicitous identities extending beyond racial nationalisms (and separatism) and facilitates interracial, multicultural coalitions, opening avenues to intercultural communication and coalitional collective action.

Racial Separatism In 1940, Ruth Benedict discussed race and racism in light of the persecution of Jewish people in Europe. Racism, she writes, is a modern creation that expresses an old human obsession: namely, in-group chauvinism and the



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protection of the group’s unique value; an unwillingness to give status or honor to the outsider (Benedict 1999, 32, 34, 40). Racism, as Benedict describes it, is systematic violent maltreatment directed against a racially stigmatized group for the advantage of those in power, which allows the dominant group to strip the racially stigmatized group of their capital/assets (Benedict 1999, 39, 35– 6). Strikingly, Benedict argues that race is not the problem. She writes, “To minimize racial persecution . . . it is necessary to minimize conditions which lead to persecution; it is not necessary to minimize race. Race is not in itself the source of conflict” (Benedict 1999, 43). Rather, a reduction of race conflict is needed. She writes, “Whatever reduces conflict, curtails irresponsible power, and allows people to obtain a decent livelihood will reduce race conflict” (Benedict 1999, 40). Benedict accepts racial groupings—a Jewish race, a black race, a white race, and so on—and does not question their persistence into the future. This position on race seems to suggest that racial distinctiveness and separatism is to be expected. More recently, Lucius Outlaw has articulated a similar view. Outlaw portrays racial grouping as a natural, time-tested feature of human anthropology. On this view, human populations inevitably group into “racial/ethnic” populations. Outlaw describes race as “a sociohistorical varying collection of sets of biological, cultural, and geographical factors” characteristic of a particular population (Outlaw 2005, 145; cf. Du Bois 2000, 110). Racial categories, thus, capture biologically related peoples who have shared culture and geographic location. Outlaw admits that efforts to locate a set of necessary and sufficient characteristics for a racial group are especially difficult. Here, he seems to acknowledge that the boundaries of racial categories are problematic and perhaps arbitrarily demarcated. Nevertheless, Outlaw insists that race is one of the defining characteristics of one’s group. Distinctive racial identities are key to the meaningfulness, authenticity, and legitimacy of peoples’ lives (Outlaw 2005, 140). Black people only truly understand themselves as black people, with shared lineage and culture. It gives them a sense of heritage and

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belonging. And, since race is a defining characteristic of these groups, it must be taken into account when we discuss the human condition. Racial categorization is thus necessary for just social ordering (Outlaw 2005, 140). Acknowledgment of the racial groups in a particular locale is required for the creation of just principles and social order. The adjudication of vexing questions of raciality and ethnicity in political, social, and economic life cannot be accomplished without collecting and tracking empirical data pertaining to these distinct racial populations (Outlaw 2005, 140). The abstract, race-less human being evoked in colorblind ideologies (or hidden behind hypothetical veils of ignorance) is conceptually and practically inadequate in changing the material realities of racially oppressed peoples (Outlaw 2005, 142). As many still suffer under invidious racism, racial communities of resistance provide the social agency needed to resist and oppose racist structures and policies. To forego racial groupings is to rule out racial communities of resistance. Thus, it would seem that racial identities are needed to ameliorate past and present injustices. Outlaw argues that we need not conclude that all regard for raciality must be eliminated to reach further social enlightenment for peoples of color. In fact, he says that the elimination of all regard for raciality is unlikely and unnecessary (Outlaw 2005, 146). Outlaw emphasizes that, for some, the continued existence of discernible racial/ethnic communities of meaning is highly desirable and politically necessary. Outlaw is convinced that both the struggle against invidious racism and the struggle of racial groups to share their gift (i.e., cultural goods) require that we recognize racial groups as political communities that value cultural pluralism and democratic justice (Outlaw 2005, 159). The task, then, is to revise the ways in which we conceive each of the distinct races and strip them of their egregious connotations and legacies. While he has explicitly advocated for and written in the interests of black folks, Outlaw recognizes that this line of thought should extend to folks hailing from other racial groups. If it is natural and inevitable for black people to self-segregate and find meaning and authenticity in their blackness, then



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we should expect white people and Asian people to self-segregate and find meaning and authenticity within their respective racial/ethnic groupings. But whiteness has been closely tied with white supremacy, imperialism, and the exploitation of nonwhites since these modern racial distinctions were created (Kant 2000, 9, 19–20; Mills 1998, 73; McBride 2018, 334). Outlaw sees the need for white people to change; they will have to confront their racial imperialism, their greed, and their xenophobia (Outlaw 2004, 165). White supremacy must be rooted out, but Outlaw does not see a need for the dissolution of racial whiteness. Rather he advocates for the rehabilitation of racial whiteness (with the intention of undermining white supremacy) (Outlaw 2004, 161). Whiteness should be reworked and rehabilitated, not abolished. For racial groupings are instrumental in fulfilling basic human needs. Racial groupings condition anthropologically necessary, socially mediated needs for place and person-securing identity-with-similar-others in a historical circumstance conditioned substantially by an intense “politics of identity and recognition” and by subsequent felt needs for transgenerational, transhistorical, transgeographic sociality of the kinds sought and gained, more or less, in collectives and associations characterized as races and ethnie, tribes, clans, poli, peoples, and nation-cum-nation-states. (Outlaw 2004, 167) On this account, it is in our racial groups that these anthropologically necessary, socially mediated needs are met. Thus, white people will need communion with white people, just as black people will need communion with black people. Again, race is not in itself the source of racial conflict; rather we must root out that which causes racial conflict between the races. Outlaw also argues that the retention of race supports the heterogeneous nature of democracy in the United States. A central aspect of democracy is the appreciation or tolerance of racially and ethnically diverse groups and their varied ways of life (Outlaw 2004, 161, 164). To do away with racial groupings/ identities (including whiteness) is to commit to homogeneity. But, reductio ad absurdum, that would be undemocratic. And thus, if we are truly committed

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to democracy, racial distinctiveness must be preserved. The rehabilitation of whiteness is then the socially necessary compliment of the reversal work on blackness (Outlaw 2004, 162; Sullivan 2001, 158). And thus we take the vertical hierarchy of race and lay it down horizontally; the distinctiveness of each race remains, but the hierarchic relation between them is annulled. This allows for democratic relations between these rehabilitated races. This allows for each distinct race to share its “gift” with the other racial groups in a democratic fashion (Du Bois 2000, 116; Sullivan 2003; MacMullan 2005). Shannon Sullivan follows Outlaw in arguing for the preservation of racial distinctiveness and separatism (Sullivan 2001, 157ff.). Sullivan develops a notion of transaction that captures the push and pull, the continuity of bodies and environments. The relation between bodies and environments is better described metaphorically as a stew than as a tossed salad. “In their transaction with each other, the vegetables of a stew dynamically constitute each other as the vegetables they are or that they become in the stew” (Sullivan 2001, 158). The vegetables do not lose all flavor, texture, or color in the stewing transaction; they do not become “one indistinguishable lump.” Rather, the distinctiveness of each vegetable is altered in the stewing transaction, yet each vegetable preserves distinctive flavors, textures, and contributions to the stew. Thus, races are like vegetables in a stew. Through social and environmental interaction, racial groups are dynamically co-constituting. White and black people do not melt into a homogenous “khaki-colored people”; “the distinctiveness of white and black people is preserved, not eliminated, but it is preserved in a relationship of dynamic connection” (Sullivan 2001, 158; Outlaw 1996, 13). Sullivan, like Outlaw, supports the preservation of whiteness. She argues that the move to preserve whiteness does not necessarily imply white supremacy or the domination of people of color. She argues that the habits of whiteness, especially white racist habits, can be exposed, critiqued, and rehabilitated (Sullivan 2006). She suggests that an egalitarian pro-whiteness is possible. That is, a form of white pride that does not deprecate other racial groups. This would allow white people to celebrate their heritage, their culture, the racial gifts they



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contribute to society. And, within white communities, white people will be able to have their anthropologically necessary, socially mediated needs met. Sullivan explicitly defends racial separatism (Sullivan 2006, 177). On this account, racial self-segregation or separatism plays an integral role in pluralist, cross-fertilizing relationships. Understood transactionally, self-segregation and separatism name a set of practices that attempt to make greater room for the voices of dominated or oppressed groups in their transaction with dominant culture (Sullivan 2006, 177). This separatism does not completely eliminate transaction between the races; rather, it attempts “to eliminate a situation in which the dominant group’s desires are always or primarily that to which an oppressed group has to respond” (Sullivan 2006). Thus, racial separatism is evoked to shield nonwhite races from hegemonic white supremacy and its structural pressures to play along or assimilate. Sullivan suggests that sometimes it is better for white people “to leave non-white people alone” (Sullivan 2006, 180; cf. Jaggar 2000, 4–10). This allows for the nonwhite spaces people of color need to build communities of resistance to counter white supremacy. And thus a multipronged case is made for racial separatism, if not (egalitarian) racial nationalism. We are prompted to imagine an idealized world where distinctive racial groups persist and thrive apart from racist practices and institutions, apart from pressures to assimilate to the dominant culture; a world where the races are allowed to self-separate and take pride in their racial heritage (without racial hierarchy or persecution) while simultaneously contributing their racial gifts to the heterogeneous, democratic society.

But, No I cringe at the racial separatism described in Outlaw and Sullivan. There are several things in that position that I am compelled to challenge. First, Outlaw seems to use the term “race” as a synonym for “ethnic group,” liberally

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referring to races as “race/ethnie.” But this is misleading. Ethnic groups are populations that share lineage and culture (e.g., language, cultural products, and objects of reverence). Racial groups, according to Outlaw, are populations that share readily observable phenotypic traits, lineage, and geographic location. Note that people assigned to a particular racial group may not share the same language, culture, or location. For instance, if we investigate black people in Colombia, Haiti, and the United States, we find people with differing languages and differing cultures (not to mention geographic locations), even though they may share some phenotypic features and a lineage tracing back to Africa. Racial categorization, so conceived, separates the world into four or five races based on distinct, readily observable phenotypes. Immanuel Kant recognized the white race, the Negro race, the Hun race, and the Hindustani race (Kant 2000, 11); Sullivan recognizes a white race, a black race, a red race, a brown race, and a yellow race (Sullivan 2001, 159). But these divisions are inadequate to capture the diversity of ethnic and cultural groupings (Freyre 1974, 110). Ethnic groups do not map cleanly onto these four or five basic categories, especially when we extend our analysis beyond the United States. In fact, regional cultural identities, which are central to ethnicity, often pervade a couple of these purportedly distinct racial groupings at one time. Thus, it seems a mistake to equate “race” and “ethnic group” or to run them together into “race/ethnie.” Now, let us recall that Outlaw argues that it is in our racial groups that our anthropologically necessary, socially mediated needs are met. He claims that people require “place and person-securing identity-with-similarothers”; they require “transgenerational, transhistorical, transgeographical sociality” (Outlaw 2004, 167). Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that this is right. Why are racially distinct groups the answer? These purported anthropologically necessary, socially mediated needs can be met within other salient forms of sociality: ethnic groups, religious groups, national groups, socioeconomic groups, gender groups, or LGBTQ groups. A dark-skinned Latinx person may find solace and communion among people in the Latinx



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community. A dark-skinned Latinx person might be assigned to the black race, yet this person may find intimacy and closeness with other Latinx people who may vary from pale-skinned to dark-skinned (Freyre 1974, 84). In this case, assigned race can be more of a hindrance than a socially binding feature (Martí 1977, 93–4). Race, here, seems to lump dark-skinned people (despite ethnic and cultural discrepancies) into one category, where they are expected to bond and revel in their shared lineage and their shared black culture. But this is dubious. I mean, if human beings require “place and person-securing identitywith-similar-others” or “transgenerational, transhistorical, transgeographical sociality,” it does not follow that racially distinct groups are the only means by which to fulfill these needs. Regarding Latin America, José Martí proclaims: There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. The theorists and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveler vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man’s universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent hunger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of various shapes and colors. (Martí 1977, 93–4) Here, race is portrayed as an impediment. Martí seeks place- and personsecuring identity-with-similar-others among his revolutionary comrades, regardless of body shape, hair texture, and skin color. At any rate, both Outlaw and Sullivan argue that the preservation of racial distinctiveness is essential to the heterogeneous nature of democracy in the United States. Either we retain racial groupings and cultivate a heterogeneous society or we eliminate racial groupings and commit ourselves to a homogenous society. Genuine democracy inherently rests upon heterogeneity/pluralism. Thus, genuine democracy requires the preservation of distinct racial groupings. But this argument is not compelling. While the second premise seems like a truism, the first premise forces us into a false dichotomy. Race is not the only variable that establishes heterogeneity. Cultural, linguistic, religious, or

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ideological pluralism can also establish heterogeneity. So, it is not clear to me why I should think that the democracy or the heterogeneity of the United States stands or falls depending on whether or not racial distinctiveness is preserved. Furthermore, if we look outside of the United States, we might recognize (in, for instance, Brazil) populations within democratic nations that identify as predominantly mestizo or moreno, pointedly eschewing notions of racial distinctiveness (Freyre 1974, 110–13; Guimarães 1999, 314, 319–20). Gilberto Freyre asserts that “the Brazilian is a living retort to any exclusivist mystique of racial purity such as the Aryan ideal, or Negritude, or the mystique of ‘yellow power’ embraced by certain imperialist groups in the Far East” (Freyre 1974, 84). Now, let us focus on the specific conception of race that is afoot in this account. Outlaw describes race as “a sociohistorical varying collection of sets of biological, cultural, and geographical factors” characteristic of a particular population (Outlaw 2005, 145). While giving a nod to sociohistorical fabrication of race, the account leads to a depiction of racial categorization as a natural, stable feature of human association. Emphasis is placed on the lineage, the biological relatedness of racialized people—the biological or blood ties. Racial categories, on this view, capture biologically related peoples who have shared culture and geographic location. Outlaw concedes that these “races/ethnies/tribes” may be constantly evolving. But what of interracial comingling? I would argue that no racial population has escaped the genetic or cultural (transactional) influence of other racial populations (McBride 2018, 336; Locke 1989, 202). If a black man and a white woman have a child, surely the white mother who gives birth to this brown child shares genetic material/ biology and historical lineage with her child. The white mother is then related to this darker race by lineage or line of descent. Or, this brown child is related to her mother’s white lineage (as well as her father’s black lineage). In such cases, blood ties and biological lineage do not then separate the races in any definitive, nonarbitrary way. Leopold Senghor admits, “there is no such thing as a pure race: scientifically speaking, races do not exist” (Senghor 2000, 137).



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Indeed, the necessary and sufficient conditions distinguishing each race are elusive (Outlaw 2005, 141). My point is that the categorization of populations along racial lines is not clean and neat, nor is it the natural order of things. I also think it is important to acknowledge that the racial categorization that we acknowledge in the United States today is a social fabrication established in the eighteenth century largely to support racial hierarchy and racial imperialism (McBride 2018, 337). As such, racial categories are suspect. The account we find in Outlaw and Sullivan is too simple and perhaps romanticized. It produces a troubling depiction of race and racial distinctiveness. For instance, Sullivan writes, “White, black, red, brown, yellow, and mixedrace people co-constitute each other’s racial existence at the same time that their racial distinctiveness is dynamically preserved” (Sullivan 2001, 159). The complex and dappled populations and cultures of the world are here literally reduced to crayon-box colors. African descendant people—all of them—are black. Indigenous people (of the Americas) are red. Asians, from Northern China to India, are yellow. Select European people are white. (The whiteness of Jewish people, the Irish, Slavic peoples, Italians, Egyptians, and Latinx peoples has been disputed at one time or another.) Also, I do not know who Sullivan is picking out with the term “brown people.” It could denote Latinx people, Middle Eastern people, South Asians, the Coloured people of South Africa, and/or the moreno of Brazil; I do not know. And I am not sure how a “mixedrace race” is even possible in a schema of racial distinctiveness. (What could that mean?) In any case, the claim is that these racial populations transact, shaping and influencing one another, while keeping their racial distinctiveness. To the contrary, I think that reducing these racialized populations to five distinct color/racial groups truncates our understanding of geographic location and the particular cultures involved. It mars our view of interracial mixing, the exchange of cultural products, and the existence of regional cultures that often pervade racial groups (McBride 2018; Carter 2016; Locke 1989, 1992, 2016). This view seems to reify stereotypes and racial scripts, as it stresses that racial populations retain their racial distinctiveness, despite transaction with other

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races. This account of race produces distinct racial populations and fragmented beings who are reduced to the race to which they are assigned. The multiplicity and the intersectionality within these populations is disregarded or erased.

Multiplicity Belittled, Fragmented, or Erased I distinctly remember sitting in a graduate seminar discussing race and the ontological status of racial groupings. I remember asking something like “What about me? What about multiethnic, mixed-race people?” My professor, Leonard Harris, flatly replied: “Oh, you don’t exist.” Harris’s quip, intentionally and without kid gloves, disclosed the exclusion of liminal, multiplicitous perspectives from the discourse on race. Those who fall outside of the neat racial categories, those who are visibly ambiguous or culturally “bilingual,” those who move back and forth between ethnic worlds, those who break with the customary racial script are not readily acknowledged. The multiplicity of individuals and subgroups within racial groups is often overlooked or disregarded by separatist racial categorization. María Lugones’s Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (2003) is groundbreaking and instructive on this topic. She, like me, is mixed-race and multicultural. She is an out lesbian (Lugones 2003, 142). Thus, she does not fit neatly into racial categories, she moves back and forth between Angla and Latina geographic locations and cultures, and she does not comply with heteronormativity. She is multiplicitous. Lugones writes: When I think of my own people, the only people I can think of as my own are transitionals, liminals, border-dwellers, world-travelers, beings in the middle of either/or. . . . As soon as I entertain the thought, I realize that separation into clean, tidy things and beings is not possible for me because it would be the death of myself as multiplicitous and a death of community with my own. (Lugones 2003, 134)



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The separation into clean, tidy things and beings is not possible for me either. Here, of course, I am thinking back to the position advanced by Outlaw and Sullivan. It belittles, fragments, or erases the multiplicity of my life and my family. It would be the death of me as multiplicitous and the death of all of those who do not fit neatly into the distinct racial categories. People within a race can be oppressed differently at the many intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, and ability (Lugones 2006, 75; Collins Collins 2009, 14, 245; 2011, 90–4; 2012, 449–52). How we are oppressed and how we respond to oppression may differ given our embodied situation. While Latinas may be oppressed or marginalized qua Latina, dark-skinned Latinas may be marginalized in differing ways than pale Latinas—for being dark and for being Latina. A queer black Latina may face even more complicated forms of degradation (for being dark, for being Latina, and for spurning heteronormativity) (Collins 2009, 138–42). Notice that if we follow the route of racial distinctiveness, it would seem to suggest that Latinx people are just Latinx people who share a lineage, particular phenotypic traits, a shared culture, and geographic location. But to reduce the Latinx position to one generalized Latinx experience is to reduce a variety of multiplicitous people to one-dimensional, fragmented beings. Within communities of resistance that endorse racial separatism, overtly mixed-race people, multicultural people, and people who flout the norms (of the racial grouping) are often treated with suspicion or not welcomed at all. Lugones writes: Where do you go to be seen? To be seen as something other than a moreor-less monstrous imitation, an imaginary being. Where do you go to be seen apart from tests of legitimacy that turn you into an imaginary being? Monstrous to different degrees. Imitation white/imitation color. Ready to be accused of failing to pass the ethnic legitimacy test of passing; of “git’n over” on Blacks, Latinos, Asians, folk of color. (Lugones 2003, 154) Within communities of resistance that endorse racial separatism, there are often pressures to follow one idealized racial script. The racial script typically

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dictates stereotypic comportment, aesthetic preferences, and cultural products. Conceptions of racial authenticity are often tied to this. Those who fail to uphold the racial script with fidelity, those who are insufficiently Asian, Latinx, or black can be belittled as “Twinkies,” “coconuts,” “Oreos,” or any number of in-group epithets.1 But multiplicitous people are a reality; we do exist. Sometimes, through racial transaction, mixture occurs. Sometimes two or three cultures are hung together in a makeshift mosaic. Some of us are “khaki-colored” (cf. Outlaw 1996, 13; Sullivan 2001, 158; Freyre 1974, 110). I mean to suggest that moving away from a focus on racial distinctiveness and separatism may actually allow racially oppressed peoples to recognize multiplicitous people and polyphonic perspectives within their resistance communities. Resistance communities may then open themselves to alternative perspectives, alternative matrices of intersectionality within their racialized groups. Perhaps coalitions of resistance can be built with full recognition of the intersectional diversity within their ranks.

Coalitions of Resistance and Intercultural Polyglossia To be clear, I am not advocating a colorblind ideology or the simple elimination of racial terms and concepts from our vocabularies. I think Outlaw is right on two points. First, the move to identify as race-less human beings (behind a veil of ignorance) is conceptually and practically inadequate in changing the material realities of racially oppressed peoples (Outlaw 2005, 142). If we cannot reference the racialized populations or those targeted by imposed race, then the effort to ameliorate racist injustices in any real way is rendered moot. Secondly, it is necessary to study the policies, institutions, and the material conditions under which racialized populations live in order to produce just social order and adjudicate disputes (Outlaw 2005, 140). That is to say, there



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are good reasons to bind together into racial groups. As Leonard Harris puts it, “there are compelling reasons for persons terrorized by race to band together, define themselves, and work on behalf of themselves” (Harris 2020, 57). Victims of racism need racial identity as long as the source of their victimization is racial, and the destruction of racism is aided by racial solidarity among victims (Harris 2020, 58). In communities mobilized around racial identities, racially persecuted individuals find emotional, economic, and political support. Moreover, the formation of a racialized adversarial group is an integral step in establishing social agency and combating racism. To gain a voice and free oneself from racial oppression, the racialized person will likely need to work together with other racialized people to articulate the distinctive nature of their oppression. The creation of an anti-racist, counter-hegemonic perspective and discourse requires the collaborative effort of a community (Harris 2002, 157–8; Jaggar 2000, 6–7). These adversarial communities, as I conceive them, are strategic coalitions, which construct provisional oppositional political identities for themselves (Mohanty 2003, 37; Harris 2020, 232; Jaggar 2000, 8–11). But I am committed to universal human liberation, the view that all human beings should be liberated from oppressive and debilitating boundaries, especially those boundaries that mark particular populations as subhuman or preclude them from basic human dignities (Harris 2020, 108, 216, 244). Harris points out that those social entities that strive for universal human liberation seem to anticipate the disbanding of these socially constructed coalitions of resistance. The liberation of the proletariat requires the negation of the class identity for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. By the same logic, liberation from racial oppression “requires the negation of the racial identity of the oppressor and the oppressed” (Harris 2020, 217). That is, racial coalitions of resistance should ultimately strive to negate the social and material conditions that provoke their existence as racial collectives. If we were able to eliminate the social and material conditions that maintain and propagate racial oppression, we could disband racial coalitions of resistance

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and create alternative forms of human association (Harris 2020, 58–9; Davis 1998, 300). It is important to note that racial groupings, on this account, are contingent, anabsolute social constructions; they are malleable, porous identities (Harris 2020, 57)2. Racial identities may have practical, liberatory import, but I agree with Leonard Harris: “Racial identities, especially when such identities are treated as inherent to every member, transhistorical, natural, and inevitable are odious. Such racial identities are inextricably tied to, and inevitably, indebted to, degrading, demeaning, and misguided stereotypes” (Harris 2020, 57). Racial separatism and its attending sense of “person-securing identitywith-similar-others” have, at best, temporary pragmatic merit (Harris 2020, 63; Zack 1997, 39–40). Beyond this, racial identities and separatisms have a tendency to reify racial stereotypes and racial scrips, shaping and confining racialized people in their thinking and comportment, closing off creative possibilities (Davis 1998, 300; Harris 2020, 245, 267). So, I am highly critical of any view that holds racial separatism as its end goal. In any event, there are liberatory projects to attend to, projects that prompt people of various shades and ethnic backgrounds to enter into racial coalitions of resistance. And coalitions of resistance rely upon a shared identity to harness collective action. Lugones reminds us: Of course, merely remembering ourselves in other worlds and coming to understand ourselves as multiplicitous is not enough for liberation: collective struggle in the reconstruction and transformation of structures is fundamental. But this collective practice is born of dialogue among multiplicitous persons. (Lugones 2003, 62) If they are serious about opposing oppressive structures and changing material realities, multiplicitous people will need to engage in collective struggle. In other words, if multiplicitous people wish to confront white supremacy or any other form of racism, they will likely need to separate (or self-segregate) into racial coalitions of resistance. In this case, one part of our multiplicity becomes



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most salient—that part that identifies with the racially oppressed coalition of resistance. This, too, is a form of fragmentation of the self. But rather than falling back upon pure, racially distinctive groups (a la Outlaw and Sullivan), multiplicitous people can enter into coalitions of resistance fully cognizant of their various multiplicities. Racial coalitions of resistance (and the implied racial separatism) then take an impure or “curdled” form (Lugones 2003, 144). As Lugones explains, the splitting of an egg, the separation of yolk from egg white, is an exercise in purity. Similarly, the splitting of human populations into five distinctive racial groups is an exercise in purity. In contrast, the separation that occurs when mayonnaise breaks and curdles (coalescing toward oily water or watery oil) is representative of impure, curdled separation. The mixedrace, multicultural, LGBTQ person can separate into an impure coalition of resistance to fight on behalf of a particular racially stigmatized group (Lugones 2003, 123). Although there is separation, it is neither clean nor comprehensive. Lugones recommends that, within these impure coalitions, we cultivate Bi- and multilingual experimentation; code-switching; categorical blurring and confusion; caricaturing the selves we are in the worlds of our oppressors, infusing them with ambiguity; practicing trickstery and foolery; elaborate and explicitly marked gender transgression; withdrawing our services from the pure or their agents whenever possible and with panache; drag; announcing the impurity of the pure by ridiculing his inability at selfmaintenance; playful reinvention of our names for things and people, multiple naming; caricaturing of the fragmented selves we are in our groups; revealing the chaotic in production; revealing the process of producing order if we cannot help producing it; undermining the orderliness of the social ordering; marking our cultural mixtures as we move; emphasizing mestizaje; crossing cultures; etc. (Lugones 2003, 145) To conceive racial coalitions of resistance in this manner allows for multiplicitous perspectives within the coalition; it makes it possible to see the ways in which oppressions are intersectional. Within these impure coalitions,

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the provisional nature of the coalition and the multiplicity of its constituents are foregrounded. It is recognized that the multiplicitous experience of some members of the race-based coalition may be opaque to others. Open dialogue is vital to communicate our worries and desires, to decipher the resistant codes of multiplicitous others within our coalitions. Hence, there is a need for “intercultural polyglots who are disposed to understand the peculiarities of each other’s resistant ways of living” (Lugones 2003, 84). Intercultural polyglossia, so understood, opens avenues to intercultural communication and impure coalitions of resistance, coalitions that do not rely upon untenable notions of racial distinctiveness or anthropologically necessary racial separatism.

Note 1 Twinkies are yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Coconuts are brown on the outside, white on the inside. Oreos are black on the outside. 2 “Anabsolute” means not-absolute or without-absolute. Racial groups, as anabsolute, may appear stable and well-defined, but they can range from extremely variegated to extremely cohesive. See p. 57. Also, see (Harris 2010, 68, 2020, 29, 76, 80, 138).

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Davis, Angela. 1998. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Edited by Joy James. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2000. “The Conservation of Races,” in The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, pp. 108–17. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Freyre, Gilberto. 1974. The Gilberto Freyre Reader. Translated by Barbara Shelby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Guimarães, Antonio. 1999. “Racism and Anti-Racism in Brazil,” in Racism, edited by Leonard Harris, pp. 314–30. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Harris, Leonard. 2002. “Universal Human Liberation and Community: Pixley Kalsaka Seme and Alain Leroy Locke,” in Perspectives in African Philosophy, edited by Claude Sumner and Samuel W. Yohannes, pp. 150–9. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University. Harris, Leonard. 2010. “Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism and Race: The Great Debate between Alain Locke and William James,” In Philosophical Values and World Citizenship, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Leonard Harris, pp. 57–73. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. London: Bloomsbury. Jaggar, Alison. 2000. “Global Feminist Ethics,” in Decentering the Center, edited by Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding, pp. 1–25. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, William. 1956. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover. James, William. 1962. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. Mineola, NY: Dover. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. “Of the Different Human Races,” in The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, pp. 8–22. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Locke, Alain. 1989. The Philosophy of Alain Locke. Edited by Leonard Harris. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Locke, Alain. 1992. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations. Edited by Jeffrey Stewart. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Locke, Alain. 2016. African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures. Edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lugones, María. 2006. “On Complex Communication,” Hypatia, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer), pp. 75–85. MacMullan, Terrance. 2005. “Is There a White Gift? A Pragmatist Response to the Problem of Whiteness,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 796–817. Martí, José. 1977. Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence. Translated by Elinor Randall and edited by Philip Foner. New York: Monthly Review Press. McBride, Lee. 2018. “Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions,” The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, eds. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett, pp. 333–44. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles. 1998. Blackness Visible. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Outlaw, Lucius. 1996. On Race and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Outlaw, Lucius. 2005. “Conserve Races? In Defense of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks, pp. 139–62. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, . Outlaw, Lucius. 2004. “Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?” in What White Looks Like, edited by George Yancy, 159–71. New York: Routledge. Senghor, Leopold (2000), “What Is ‘Negritude’?” in The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, pp. 136–8. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Sullivan, Shannon. 2001. “Transaction and the Dynamic Distinctiveness of Races,” in Living Across and Through Skins, pp. 157–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sullivan, Shannon. 2003. “Remembering the Gift: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Unconscious and Economic Operations of Racism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 205–25. Sullivan, Shannon. 2006. “In Defense of Separatism,” Revealing Whiteness, pp. 167–85. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zack, Naomi. 1997. “Race and Philosophic Meaning,” in Race/Sex, edited by Naomi Zack, pp. 29–43. New York: Routledge.

6 Building Traditions, Shaping Futures Values, Norms, and Transvaluation

Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.1 —GIORDANO BRUNO, ON THE HEROIC FRENZIES (1586)

Between the Shaper and the Dragon Toni Morrison is right. We, like Grendel, are posed with a dilemma; we find ourselves in “the nexus between the Shaper and the dragon” (Morrison 2019, 261).2 The Shaper is a silver-tongued poet, a prophet, bearer of the grand narrative. Grendel knows the Shaper’s song is full of lies, illusions. He has watched carefully the battles of men and knows they are not the glory the Shaper turns them into. But he succumbs to the Shaper’s language nevertheless because of its power to transform, its power to elevate, to discourage base action. (Morrison 2019, 260)

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The Shaper reshapes the world. His sermons, his glorious language give assured meaning and purpose. His elevated, patterned language allows Grendel to contemplate beauty, to recognize caritas, to desire agapē (ἀγάπη). In contrast, the dragon is the embodiment of the bitter, self-serving cynic, the nihilist. The dragon is unmoved by the Shaper’s gilded language; he sees it for what it is— inspirational stories and illusion. The dragon is a naturalist, who denies free will and intercession. Disabused of such enchantment, he sees human beings as stupid, banal, and insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things. As such, the dragon is an extreme skeptic, a cynic. The dragon is only driven by a selfserving greed; he hoards gold and sits on it, indifferent to the misery of others. Thus, to be between the Shaper and the dragon conjures a stark dilemma. We are compelled to decide between (i) giving our faith to the Shaper’s pretty lies and (ii) resigning ourselves, with open eyes, to the callous, cynical nihilism of the dragon. As stated, this is an awful dilemma. Both options are unappealing. This book has worked to disenchant philosophy—to draw philosophy back from ethereal immutable realms, supernatural stopgaps, absolute values antecedently woven into the fabric of the universe, and the reassuring telos of the Shaper’s song. Following Leonard Harris, I suggest a philosophy born of struggle, an approach to philosophy that implores us to tarry in this world of things that come to be and pass away, rather than standing aloof from or outside of the world (Harris 2020, 14–15). This, prima facie, seems to suggest that I have sided with the dragon. But that is not the case. We need not accept the false dichotomy, (i) or (ii). Rather, like Morrison, I wish to carve out a space in between the Shaper and the dragon. It is the nexus between the Shaper and the dragon; between Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, between art and science; between the Old Testament and the New, between swords and ploughshares. It is the space for as well as the act of thought; it is a magnetic space, pulling us away from reaction to thinking. Denying easy answers, and violence committed because, in crisis, it is the only thing one knows how to do. (Morrison 2019, 261)



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There is space between the horns of the dilemma, a magnetic space, repelling us from easy answers and suggesting new imaginative possibilities. This chapter confronts two philosophical positions that are used to perpetuate the two horns of the false dichotomy. In the end, I articulate a position that resides in that nexus between the Shaper and the dragon. This involves the building and iterative transvaluation of traditions and the shaping of futures (to the extent possible). This perspective requires well-patterned language, uplifting stories, norms, and teloi—all of which, shaped and dragged into the future by strenuous human effort.

Like a Dog Tied to a Cart The Stoics (circa 250 BCE) believed in fate (μοίρα). Rather than evoking the Moirai (the Fates), the three goddesses of destiny—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—the Stoics depicted fate as “a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unravelling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded” (Inwood and Gerson 1997, 184–5). The universe, on this account, is cyclical, moving from conflagration to conflagration, expanding and contracting, like a cosmic thorax breathing in and out. In line with providence, πνεῦμα (breath) moves causally through all corporeal things.3 “Things which will be do not spring up spontaneously” (Long and Sedley 1987, 338). Nothing springs from nothing (or without cause). “The passage of time is like the unwinding of a rope, bringing about nothing new and unrolling each stage in its turn” (Long and Sedley 1987). Thus, our human fates are set, destined. No matter the strenuousness of our efforts, we cannot change what is fated. We are placed on God’s stage with a part to play. We are counseled by the Stoics to study the causal pattern hitherto and to recognize our role, our place, and play that part well. “The wise man is like the good actor who, whether he puts on the mask of Thersites or Agamemnon, plays either part in the proper way” (Long

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and Sedley 1987, 356). That is, we can control the ways in which we interpret and react to the script we are dealt—this aspect is not predestined. We can subdue or discipline the motions of our minds, our ambitions, our passions. Stoic resignation makes for a life of modest expectations, fewer attachments, and less internal strife. On this view, there is no sense in struggling against your destined fate. Apparent loss, injustice, and calamity were destined—your anger or contempt does not change this (Nussbaum 2015, 45). In fact, the Stoics suggest that your belaboring the issue, your struggling against providence makes your condition worse. [Zeno and Chrysippus] affirmed that everything is fated, with the following model. When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity, but if it does not want to follow it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they do not want to, they will be compelled in any case to follow what is destined. (Long and Sedley 1987, 386)4 Hence, you and I are like dogs tied to a cart. This is fated. We are dogs, not cart drivers, no matter our consternation. Our fetters are indestructible and preordained. If we notice that the cart is moving, we can willingly follow the cart. We would then be pulled and harmoniously follow the cart, each of us making our spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if we do not recognize that the cart is moving or ardently refuse to follow it, we will be compelled in any case to follow what is destined. As such, human beings are tied to fate; you can accept your fate and run (harmoniously) alongside the preordained flow of life, or you can resist and be dragged. Some today take this to be sage wisdom. Noble capitulation to one’s station challenges our predilection for acquisitiveness; it muzzles our improvident passions; it modifies our conception of “reaching for the brass ring.” The position helps us to live with what we are given, and to appreciate whatever that is. The position proffers a life of simplicity and



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equanimity, without envy, resentment, or mental anguish. (You, too, can live like an emperor!)5 I find this position extremely troubling. (The Shaper’s enchanted language does not move me.) At best, this Stoic view justifies and advocates a caste system. True, a select few are born into the role of emperor, some will be feudal lords, but the vast majority of the populous are born to be foot soldiers, plebeians, servi pes (foot servants), or sex workers. Efforts toward social mobility are depicted as inherently juvenile or perhaps insolent. Some are destined to be landed gentry, plantation owners, or chief executive officers of corporations, others are destined for toilsome labor and want. We are asked to accept this as divine providence. (Get back to work!) W. E. B. Du Bois writes: Some of the very ones who were freed from the tyranny of the Middle Ages became the tyrants of the industrial age. There came a reaction. Men sneered at “democracy” and politics, and brought forth Fate and Philanthropy to rule the world—Fate which gave divine right to rule to the Captains of Industry and their created Millionaires; Philanthropy which organized vast schemes of relief to stop at least the flow of blood in the vaster wounds which industry was making. (Du Bois 2016, 79) In this light, the Stoic position seems to favor the dominant class in whichever society it is espoused. For the modern-day Stoic, those who own substantial tracts of land and assets, those who are afforded undue social privileges are relieved of culpability. The annihilation of indigenous populations throughout the Global South and the enslavement of people from Melanesia and Western Africa leave no unbecoming marks upon the present Anglo-European hegemony of the West. Those who stand in the palpable debris of settler colonization, chattel slavery, or de jure racial apartheid are told to appreciate what they have—to play their part. Anger and tenacity will not change your circumstances or your fated station (McBride 2018b, 3). You cannot argue with divine providence.

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At worst, the Stoic view depicts slavery as necessary and divinely instituted. Epictetus, who was born into slavery, writes: Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses—if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen, see that you act it well. For this is your business—to act well in the given part, but to choose it belongs to another. (Epictetus 1948, 22–3) If you are assigned the part of slave, eunuch, or concubine in God’s production, then it is your business to perform the given part excellently (Epictetus 1948, 22–3). If assigned the part, you should be the best trafficked scortum that has ever been.6 (Reach for that brass ring.) Again, we are prodded to discipline the motions of our minds, our ambitions, and our passions. We can embrace our role in God’s production and find equanimity in it. Like dogs, human beings are tied to a cart and our fate is determined. Whether we are headed toward ecological disaster, continued Euro-American patriarchal imperialism, or a barefaced oligarchical regime, we should stride stoically alongside that cart, for that is better than being hauled along against one’s will. Resistance is futile; insurrectionists will be dragged. On this view, it seems that one can be an optimist or a pessimist. The optimist believes that everything will be good and resolved in the end; there will be redemption. The pessimist believes that everything will end poorly; that we are doomed. Either way, we begin and end with fatalism. Our fates are sealed. Slaves and emperors alike are advised to capitulate to their stations. Notice that the melioristic struggle to create new conceptions, new relations, and new material conditions is seen as hubris, a cause of increased strife. Any attempt to alter the trajectory of (or upend) the cart is left unpictured. I cannot callously shrug off the systemic oppression of women, the poor, and racialized groups. I cannot shuffle along imperviously in the face of looming environmental catastrophe. I do not believe that these things were/ are fated, and I do not think the Stoics offer compelling reasons for such



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claims. To the contrary, I believe there are better explanations for our present conditions. I believe that the present order of things bears the markings of egregious human manipulation and greed; that the subjection of women, or the annihilation of indigenous people, or the chattel slavery of Afro-descended people are not necessary acts in God’s play. I will neither embrace nor find tranquility in the role of social eunuch.7 I will not accept or embrace “my role” as silent and timid, swarthy grandson of field worker, stage left. Hence, my postulation of a radically contingent, amoral universe, and my naturalistic approach to philosophy (Chapter 1). Hence, my rejection of fatalism. (The Shaper be damned.)

Reason Always Hobbles, Limps and Walks Askew If we turn back, away from some Shaper’s enchanted descriptions, are we then courting a skepticism of sorts? Are we caught on a slippery slope? If there is no antecedent immutable truth, no ultimate telos, no objective values written into the fabric of the universe, are we driven to nihilism? Are we in league with the dragon? Yes, there are skeptical aspects to my view that I will have to acknowledge. But, no, the view does not necessarily reduce to the dragon’s cynical nihilism. Let me explain. The Socrates of Plato’s Euthyphro and the sage Pyrrho of Elis modeled a skill and technique for publicly disarming purported experts on matters of virtue, what the gods love, justice, ontology, and the like. (Eristics: an approach to dialogue that aims to successfully dispute another’s argument, rather than searching for truth.) These ancient sources offer tools for undermining arrogance, hubris, and absolutism. The skeptics, in particular, are infamous for their tactical skill in questioning absolutists and doctrinaire philosophers. As Sextus Empiricus puts it, “Sceptics are philanthropic and wish to cure by argument, as far as they can, the conceit and rashness of the Dogmatist” (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 216).

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Skepticism is a philosophical position that fosters a disposition to treat epistemic claims with deep suspicion, often advocating suspension of judgment on topics that extend beyond the appearances of the phenomenal (or experienced) world (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 49). Ancient skepticism is essentially a reaction to dogmatism, to the attempt to get behind the phenomena, with aid of reason, to true reality and, thus, to dissolve the real or apparent contradictions among the phenomena, the contradictions in the world as it appears to us. (Frede 1997, 13) The skeptic recognizes anomalies and paradoxical phenomena in the lived experience. The skeptic can give arguments for and against any position, and thus refrains from making ontological, second-order claims (Mackie 1990, 18). Skeptics believe that our faculty of intellect is adequate enough to bring us to the apparent knowledge of some mundane/quotidian things, but there are definite limits to its power (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 8). For example, the skeptic is willing to assent to the claim that honey seems sweet; not that honey possesses the property or quality of sweetness (Long and Sedley 1987, 15; Sextus Empiricus 2000, 54). On this account, it is rash to extend our reasoning beyond these mundane capacities, attempting to discern essential qualities, the absolute truths, or to make ontological claims. It is hard to deny that our reasoned judgments are often mistaken; that reason leads us astray from time to time. Indeed, “Reason always hobbles, limps and walks askew, in falsehood as in truth, so that it is hard to detect when she is mistaken or unhinged” (Montaigne 1993, 144). We are so affected by emotion and disposition that it is hard to pinpoint when we are thinking “rationally.” Reason is often deeply infected by sincere rationalization, so that the reasoning agent does not recognize how their reasoning has been distorted (Kornblith 1999, 183). Additionally, that which is deemed social knowledge or public reason tends to be shaped by a common bias within that social group, so that within a community a bias/prejudice may persist undetected (Kornblith 1999, 193). In this fashion, skepticism offers compelling reasons to doubt the veracity of



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human reason. Human reason does not seem to possess an apodictic means of separating truth from falsehood; that is, we have yet to pin down a surefire criterion of truth. And, thus, if neither our reasoning nor our senses have an undisputable foundation to stand on, we should not rely upon them to make dogmatic philosophical claims about truth or reality (Montaigne 1993, 141). On this view, it seems that the skeptic would refrain from making definitive claims about anything. This paints the skeptic into a corner. The skeptic is at peace with ambiguity and multiple points of view—the apparent world via direct experience (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 9). But the skeptic is unable to denounce grave injustice, to make assertive moral claims. Nota bene, Montaigne’s admonition. The ultimate rapier-stroke which I am using here must only be employed as a remedy of last resort. It is a desperate act of dexterity, in which you must surrender your own arms to force your opponent to lose his. It is a covert blow which you should only use rarely and with discretion. It is rashness indeed to undo another by undoing yourself. (Montaigne 1993, 136) One undoes the dogmatist’s claims to truth by undoing their own epistemic claim to truth. The skeptic thus sacrifices their capacity to make assertive, ameliorative claims (without performative contradiction). The skeptic can poke holes in the dogmatist’s conceptual framework, but they are barred from confidently, authoritatively asserting a true (or better) position. And, thus, skepticism leaves us with the suspension of judgment, a standstill of the intellect neither rejecting nor positing anything (Long and Sedley 1987, 13). And it is this stillness of reason that gives way to tranquility (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 5; Long and Sedley 1987, 18–20). The common counterargument is that the skeptics cannot live by their own tenets, that no one can live a life without making serious actionguiding judgments (Burnyeat 1997, 42–6). This mushroom is edible. That hippopotamus is a threat to my life. I cannot breathe under water. Furthermore, a life without assertive judgments seems to imply a life without instantiated

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norms and values. Here, I imagine the angsty undergraduate, wearing all black and smoking cigarettes, stating disconcertedly: “It’s all absurd.” “Everything is permitted.” (Neither book read judiciously or in toto.)8 Alternatively, skepticism can undermine trust and reciprocity, so that life is reduced to a series of commercial exchanges, where self-serving profit is the only goal.9 In any case, my point is that skepticism can lead to existential dread, ambivalence, cynicism, or nihilism. The dragon lurks thereabouts. But there is another option: faith in a tradition. The skeptics were content to acquiesce to the ordinary ways of life, conventional norms and modes of comportment (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 9). Recognizing his own epistemic fallibility, Montaigne held a certain constancy in his opinions; (from his personal library in the tower of Château de Montaigne) he resigned to remain where God put him (Montaigne 1993, 149). (Sounds like Stoic resignation.) He writes, “the surest position for our intellect to adopt, and the happiest, would be the one where it could remain still, straight, and inflexible without motion or disturbance” (Montaigne 1993, 141). Montaigne advises his audience “to cling to moderation and temperance, as much in your opinions and arguments as in your conduct” (Montaigne 1993, 137). Raised Catholic, Montaigne advises us to keep closely to our usual ways and shield our souls from the latest speculative fads, especially the Protestants and their newfangled wares (Montaigne 1993, 138). In short, holding to skepticism seems to leave its adherents in the lap of some received tradition or what passes for conventional commonsense. It leaves its proponents with no clear means to authoritatively propose new counterhegemonic conceptions of personhood, dignity, or material conditions. The skeptic qua skeptic cannot confidently assert (i) treating a stigmatized group of human beings as innately servile is morally unacceptable; (ii) rape is always wrong; or, (iii) the Western techno-industrial order of things rests on the back of colonial expropriation, mass genocides, and chattel slavery.10 This, to me, is a substantial drawback to the skeptic’s position. To acquiesce to a tradition or prevalent custom seems to leave ordinary/conventional norms



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and social institutions unquestioned and unchallenged. This seems extremely conservative. The view robs me of the ability to make assertive moral claims on behalf of the immiserated and the oppressed. Skepticism, as a conservative tradition, appears antithetical to an insurrectionist ethic. It may be worthwhile to restate my intentions. The jog through stoicism and skepticism was meant to breathe life into the initial dilemma: the Shaper and the dragon. There are people today who buy into the Shaper’s song, optimistically embracing a form of fatalism, often spun as divine providence, God’s will, or the American Dream (McBride 2017, 77; Croly 2014, 6). Similarly, there are people who side with the dragon, cynical and indifferent. Of course, stoicism and skepticism are not the only two routes to fatalism and cynicism. But, again and again, fatalism and cynicism are conceptual impediments, barriers to social amelioration.

Building Traditions, Shaping Futures Notice that Montaigne acquiesced to a conventional tradition, rather than welcome nihilism or cynical indifference. If we reject the Shaper, we need not commit to the dragon. We can carve a space in the nexus in between. This involves the building of traditions and the shaping of futures (to the extent possible). Traditions, in this vein, are historical constructions. “Traditions are conservative repositories of claims and possible claims which are enrolled in the project of perpetuating or creating a given consensus; one that should be normalized” (Harris 2020, 252). Yet, we need not see our traditions as purely inherited; we need not operate under the pretense that we have no role in inventing/deciding our sacred rituals, norms, and moral imperatives. We can build traditions without the pretense that we have transcended provincialism or that our tradition, and only our tradition, bears the singular immutable truth (Harris 2020, 31–2). Conceiving traditions as inventions entails accepting the view that the content and form of traditions are historical developments, that is, there

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is nothing natural about any particular tradition; they are normative formations, constructed in a myriad of ways. (Harris 2020, 254) The universe is polyvalent and radically contingent. History does not proceed in a neat and linear fashion, in which each event contributes to the creation of antecedently determined future events. Vast swaths of Africa’s cultures and histories have been decimated, burned, erased. History for the various African and Afro-descended peoples is, thus, piecemeal, disjointed, and selective; it works from trace elements. No comfort, no promise of redemption. But traditions can be built with the intended purpose of telling a story— to transform, to elevate, to discourage base action (Morrison 2019, 260). Resistance traditions can codify and perpetuate uplifting stories, norms, and teloi, helping said traditions to orient their struggles and shape their futures to the extent possible.11 The existence of an archive on x is an affirmation that x is worthy of being maintained and being made accessible to others (Harris 2020, 279). Archives help shape the kinds of memories/traces that are retained (Harris 2020, 280). Notice, we still may require well-patterned language, inspiring stories, norms, and teloi (Morrison 2019, 260). We can string along traces, we can build bridges to the future worthy of our heritages, our cultures (Harris 2020, 281). These traces describe the agency of our ancestors; “an image of the future gives the sacrifices of the present a meaning and purpose” (Harris 2020, 281). In a thoroughly disenchanted, nonteleological universe, teloi/purposes can be manufactured. The “telos” is not pre-given (Harris 2020, 282). We are thus creating bridges to the future. Cultures are never stable; cultures are always emerging, always fragmented. New forms of being, communication, and communities arise as a function of newly created traditions (Harris 2020, 282). Hence, the iterative transvaluation of traditions is inherent to this position.12 We, as active manufacturers of tradition, are tasked with assessing and reassessing the values and norms of the tradition. While agents are influenced by the past, “existing identities are



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always themselves shaped and reshaped by active agents” (Harris 2020, 261). Prized values are shaped and dragged into the future by strenuous human effort. Given these peculiar conditions, this new evidence, or these new identities, we are tasked with selecting values to drag into the future. The question, then, is what values do we want to preserve, what will this or that tradition preserve to shape the future? “The maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms” (Wynter 1995, 35).

Notes 1 Translation (of Latin): “Even if it is not true, it is well conceived”; or, “Even if it is not true, it is a good story.” 2 Morrison is here referencing John Gardner’s novel Grendel (Vintage 1989), which is a retelling of the Old English poem Beowulf from the perspective of the (pensive) antagonist, Grendel. 3 The transliteration of the ancient Greek term “πνεῦμα” is “pneuma”; πνεῦμα: breath, understood as the force that pervades corporeal things, causing motion and life and death. When you die, your heart and lungs stop expanding and contracting—πνεῦμα has left your body. 4 For an alternative translation, see Inwood and Gerson 1997, 189–90. 5 Contemporary adherents are suggesting that young people today should learn to think like Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor from 161 CE to 180 CE and Stoic philosopher. See Robertson (2019); Pigliucci (2018). 6 The Latin term “scortum” translates to whore, prostitute—male or female. 7 In Chapter 2, I discuss eunuchization as a metaphorical depiction of the ways targeted groups can be rendered innately, permanently subordinated persons. 8 Imagined references to Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 9 Imagined references to Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. 10 William James writes: “Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for us is against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise skepticism, we are really doing volunteer service for one side or the other” (James 1956, 109).

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11 Philosophy Born of Struggle is one such resistance tradition (Harris 2020, 278). 12 In a similar vein, Simone de Beauvoir writes: “Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future” (Beauvoir 2011, 16).

References Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Bruno, Giordano. 2013. On the Heroic Frenzies / De gli eroici furori. Translated by Ingrid D. Rowland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Burnyeat, Myles. 1997. “Can A Sceptic Live His Scepticism?,” in The Original Sceptics: A Controversy, edited by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, pp. 25–57. Indianapolis: Hackett. Burnyeat, Myles, and Michael Frede (eds.). 1997. The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett. Croly, Herbert. 2014. The Promise of American Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2016. Darkwater. Brooklyn: Verso. Epictetus. 1948. The Enchiridion. Translated by Thomas W. Higginson. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Frede, Michael. 1997. “The Sceptic’s Belief,” in The Original Sceptics: A Controversy, edited by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, pp. 1–24. Indianapolis: Hackett. Gardner, John. 1989. Grendel. New York: Vintage. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy Born of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. London: Bloomsbury. Inwood, Brad, and L. P. Gerson (eds.). 1997. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, Second Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett. James, William. 1956. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover. Kornblith, Hilary. 1999. “Distrusting Reason,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XXIII, pp. 181–96. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley (eds.). 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mackie, J. L. 1990. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin. McBride, Lee. 2017. “Leftist Democratic Politics,” in Jahrbuch Praktische Philosophie in globaler Perspektive / Yearbook Practical Philosophy in a Global Perspective, edited by Michael Reder, Dominik Finkelde, Alexander Filipovic, and Johannes Wallacher, pp. 74–92. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. McBride, Lee. 2018b. “Anger and Approbation,” in Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, pp. 1–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.



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Montaigne, Michel. 1993. An Apology for Raymond Sebond. Translated by M. A. Screech. New York: Penguin Classics. Morrison, Toni. 2019. The Source of Self-Regard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Nussbaum, Martha. 2015. “Transitional Anger,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 41–56. Pigliucci, Massimo. 2018. How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. New York: Basic Books. Robertson, Donald. 2019. How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Scepticism. Edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, And The Caribbean Rethinking Modernity,” in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, The Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, edited by Alvina Reprecht and Cecilia Taiana, pp. 17–41. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

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Epilogue

This book is riddled with my frustrations. My frustrations with (professional) philosophy and moral theory. Frustration with canonical pragmatism. Frustration with systemic oppression. Difficulties understanding and coming to grips with Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist philosophy. Frustration with those who preclude anger and enmity from the list of warranted responses to oppression. Frustration with philosophy of race scholarship that belittles or erases multiplicity. Exasperation with stoic resignation and cynical indifference. And inquiry is that struggle, stimulated by doubt (i.e., “an uneasy and dissatisfied state”), to attain a calm and satisfactory state of belief (Peirce 1992, 114). There are some threads that run throughout my inquiries. I am concerned with ethics—the theory and the polyphonic lived experience. My goal was to outline a tenable ethical position that takes critical pragmatism and Harrisian insurrectionist philosophy seriously. I suggest that there are ethical values and norms that create boundaries and impediments that confine, reduce, circumscribe the actions and modes of comportment we allow ourselves to consider. I suggest that an insurrectionist ethos is integral in the disavowing of norms, traditions, and authority figures. I gesture toward newness, creativity, and transvaluation—new value tablets and traditions, new anabsolute coalitions, new methods and tactics. I am no prophet; the view I advocate should not be considered prophetic (Foucault 1988, 124; Rorty 1999, 209). Prophets are those who stagger out of the desert, down from the mountain, appearing from obscurity bearing the will of God or an enlightened view of the truth. When society has gone astray, the

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prophet arrives to point the way. Having postulated a disenchanted unfinished universe and marked the foibles and limitations of human reasoning, I have no place among the prophetic. Any form of cognition requires overgeneralized categories, some form of stereotypes, representative heuristics and exceptionalist thinking to explain or describe patterns. Evidential, dialectical, revelatory, pragmatic, epideictic, or discursive reason is an escape route into a realm of the real. At best we are faced with perpetual corrections and improved computations, not an end-state of self-known knowers of the real. (Harris 2020, 33)1 The pluralistic critical naturalism, the heuristic proceduralism evinced in my perspective does not countenance transcendental immutable truths, absolutes, or apodictic certainty. But it does not preclude me from assertively defending an avowedly provincial set of values or building progressive traditions with contingent futures. I believe that we must throw our faith behind something, some set of values, if we want a chance at shaping a future (Harris 2020, 61–2). Some philosophers, like Toni Morrison, Sylvia Wynter, and Leonard Harris, are artful in the ways they draw our attention to often missed misery, human and ecological degradation, and the contemporary propensity to callousness and fatalism (Morrison 2019; Wynter 1995b; Harris 2020). And, yet, they prod us to imagine and build better futures, they goad us to (re)imagine and shape futures with less subjection, less degradation. In like fashion, I urge you to interrogate and deconstruct those intervening background assumptions that authorize and reinforce the subordination of stigmatized groups—to conjure new assumptions, new ways of conceiving. I urge you to work out and build new creative forms of knowledge, new conceptions of culture and “being human” that do not assume Western patterns of hierarchy and domination (Wynter 1995b, 31–4). I implore you to pursue new conceptions of personhood and humanity, conceptions that forefront reciprocity and solidarity—conceptions that do not cast groups of human beings as inherently subhuman or naturally bereft of honor (Harris 2020, 154, 243; Locke 1989, 46; Wynter 1995a, 312;

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Cooper 1998, 130). I beseech you to form new coalitions and bonds of trust, to engage in those forms of collective action likely to shape a better future. This is our task.2

Notes 1 Similarly, Elizabeth Anderson writes, “All maps are simplifications of reality; they leave out most of the features of the world”—this does not make them empirically inadequate. Maps are empirically inadequate only if they leave out normatively significant features of our social world, or if they misplace or misdescribe them in ways that confuse and mislead us (Anderson 1998, 34–5). 2 “No shirking, no skulking, no masquerading in another’s uniform” (Cooper 1998, 131).

References Anderson, Elizabeth. 1998. “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry,” in In Face of the Facts, edited by R. Wightman Fox and R. Westbrook, pp. 10–39. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1998. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Edited by Lawrence Kritzman. New York: Routledge. Harris, Leonard. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride III. New York: Bloomsbury. Locke, Alain. 1989. The Philosophy of Alain Locke. Edited by Leonard Harris. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Morrison, Toni. 2019. The Source of Self-Regard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Peirce, Charles S. 1992. “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, Vol. 1. Edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel, pp. 109–23. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995a. “Is ‘Development’ a Purely Empirical Concept or also Teleological?: A Perspective from ‘We the Underdeveloped,’” in Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa, edited by Aguibou Yansané, 299–316. Westport: Greenwood Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995b. “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, And The Caribbean Rethinking Modernity,” in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, The Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, edited by Alvina Reprecht and Cecilia Taiana, pp. 17–41. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

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INDEX

absolutism  15, 50–1, 115 Addams, Jane  2 amoral  24, 33 n.1, 47, 49, 61 n.8, 74 n.1, 115 anabsolute  57, 61 n.14, 89, 104, 125 Anderson, Elizabeth  2, 7, 13, 15, 16, 17, 30, 33, 34 nn.7–8, 35 n.15, 35 n.20, 42, 45, 48, 61 n.10, 127 n.1 a posteriori  34 n.2 a priori  13, 14, 16, 30, 34 n.2, 47 Aristotle  24, 26, 83 Augustine of Hippo  6, 7, 110 Beck, Lewis White  19, 20–2 Benedict, Ruth  90–1 Bentham, Jeremy  26, 27 Bruno, Giordano  109 Callicott, J. Baird  16, 27 Carter, Jacoby Adeshei  51, 99 caste  6, 7, 9, 17, 22, 48, 56, 57, 69, 113 Child, Lydia Maria  54, 61 n.13 coalition  3, 9, 57, 70, 73, 82, 83, 87, 90, 102–6, 125, 127 collective action  9, 56–8, 82, 89, 90, 104, 127 Collins, Patricia Hill  4, 57, 74, 101 comportment  4, 5, 8, 18, 23, 50, 59, 60, 67, 69–70, 73–4, 82, 102, 104, 118, 125 conflict  8, 25, 49, 60, 67, 73, 91, 93 constructivism  31, 35 n.20 Cooper, Anna Julia  127 n.2 corrigibility  22, 29, 126 Craig, Megan  73 Croly, Herbert  1, 119 cynicism  12, 45, 110, 115, 118–19, 125

Davis, Angela  4, 56, 58, 72, 82, 104 democracy  1–2, 31–32, 42, 51, 85, 93–4, 97–8 deontology  26–7, 43 Dewey, John  2, 7, 19, 22, 23, 25–30, 32, 35 n.14, 53, 67 dialectic  8, 20, 21, 28, 46, 50, 65–7, 68, 69, 73, 126 discourse ethics  78 disenchanted  7, 11–12, 24–5, 32, 33 n.1, 41, 47, 49, 74 n.1, 115, 120, 126 Douglass, Frederick  3, 55, 72 dragon  109–11, 115, 118, 119 Du Bois, W. E. B.  91, 94, 113 empathy  2–3, 5, 8, 42, 77, 81–2, 84, 85, 86–7 episteme  19, 34 n.9, 42–3, 45–6, 48, 60, 82, 89 ethical naturalism  3, 7, 12, 19–32, 33, 60 eunuch  43–4, 114, 115 eunuchization  44–5, 121 n.7 experimental inquiry  2, 22, 27, 28–30, 32, 33, 42, 44, 48, 51, 82 fallibilism  21, 22, 29, 67, 126 fatalism  1, 9, 23, 41, 45, 111–15, 119, 126 Flanagan, Owen  13–19, 83 Foucault, Michel  43, 70, 71, 125 Frede, Michael  116 Frye, Marilyn  4, 55, 69 genealogy  2, 22, 66 Gooding-Williams, Robert  71–2, 73 Habermas, Jürgen  78 Hacking, Ian  15, 70–1, 73, 74 Harris, Leonard  3, 7, 20, 24–5, 32, 33 n.1, 35 n.20, 42–60, 61 nn.4–6, 70, 74 n.1, 83, 100, 103–4, 110, 119–21, 125–6

130 Index

Hegel, G. W. F.  20, 65–6 heuristic proceduralism  31–2, 41, 48, 126 inquiry  2, 15, 22, 24, 26, 27–33, 42–4, 48, 54, 65, 67, 125 insurrection  5–7, 46–54, 60, 77, 82, 86–7, 114, 125–6 insurrectionist character traits  4, 8, 54, 59–60, 68–70, 72–3, 77, 79, 82–6, 125 ethics  3, 8, 41–2, 52, 54–60 philosophy  42–54, 60, 125 intercultural polyglossia  58, 102, 106 intersectionality  74, 90, 100, 102 James, William  7, 16, 23, 24, 35 n.13, 66–7, 73, 89, 121 n.10 Kant, Immanuel  14, 20, 26–7, 93, 96 khaki-colored  94, 102 King, Martin Luther  72, 81, 83, 87, 87 n.2 Kornblith, Hilary  14, 16, 116 Lewis, C. I.  19, 30–1 Locke, Alain  23, 35 n.14, 42, 46, 50–3, 58, 61 n.4, 98, 99, 126 love  8, 77, 79–81, 82, 84–7 Lugones, Maria  4, 57, 58, 100–1, 104–6 Mackie, J. L.  34 n.5, 116 misery  12, 21, 33, 47, 49, 53, 60, 80, 82, 85, 86, 110, 126 Montaigne, Michel  61 n.9, 116–19 Morrison, Toni  109–11, 120, 121 n.2, 126 multiplicity  8, 90, 100–6, 125 naturalism critical  21–2, 32 materialist  21 necro-being  3, 4, 8, 33, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 60, 61 n.1 Neurath, Otto  41 Nietzsche, Friedrich  66, 67–8, 72, 110 nihilism  12, 80–1, 110, 115, 118, 119 Norton, Bryan  7, 27, 29, 30, 31–2, 41 Nussbaum, Martha  79, 82–3, 112

oppression  4–5 Ortega y Gasset, Jose  33 Outlaw, Lucius  91–102, 105 Papineau, David  19 paradox  33 n.1, 50–1, 53, 116 Philosophia nata ex conatu  3, 7, 46–7, 49, 52, 54 Plato  6, 20, 24, 61 n.9, 65 pluralism  2, 18, 24, 27, 52, 66–7, 92, 97–8, 126 pragmatic ethics  25–32 pragmatism canonical  32, 42, 60, 125 critical  3, 7, 42, 46, 50–1, 53, 61 n.12, 82, 125 prophetic  80 proceduralism  31, 42, 48, 78, 126 provincialism  17, 47, 52–3, 119 race  8, 43–5, 51–2, 58, 71–2, 90–106, 125 Rachels, James  15 racism  43–5, 54, 60, 72, 90–2, 103, 104 Rawls, John  15, 26, 31, 35 n.20 representative heuristics  52, 57, 126 Rorty, Richard  33 n.1, 35 n.14, 125 Sartre, Jean Paul  24, 25, 35 n.14, 35 n.16 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock  2, 74 Sextus Empiricus  115–18 Shaper  109–11, 113, 115, 119 Simmel, Georg  72 Simpson, Leanne Betasamsake  7, 33, 35 n.21 skepticism  9, 29, 110, 115–19, 121 n.10 Stewart, Maria  54, 61 n.13 stoic fatalism  9, 111–15 resignation  112, 118, 125 struggle  7, 8, 21, 46–50, 52–3, 55, 57, 60, 61 n.5, 80, 89–90, 92, 104, 110, 114, 120, 122 n.11, 125 Sullivan, Shannon  79–80, 84–5, 94–6, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105 supernatural  15, 19, 23, 110

Index

techno-industrial  20, 32, 33, 42, 118 telos  24, 26, 41, 47, 110, 111, 115, 120 thick concepts  16, 17, 34 n.7, 50, 61 n.10 Thoreau, Henry David  54, 55, 61 n.13, 82 tradition  1, 44, 49, 52, 53, 54, 73, 80, 118–21, 122 n.11 transactional realism  29 transvaluation  9, 50, 111, 120, 125 value-laden  9, 48, 52

131

values  8, 9, 18, 30–2, 41–2, 47–8, 49, 51–2, 54, 60, 67, 68–70, 86, 87, 110, 115, 120–1, 125–6 virtue  5, 8, 18, 26, 49–50, 59, 68–70, 72, 77, 81, 83, 84–6, 125 virtue ethics  26, 32, 53–4, 69, 82 Walker, David  54, 56, 61 n.13, 72 West, Cornel  80–1, 85 white self-love  80, 84 Williams, Bernard  11, 15, 25, 27, 33 n.1, 34 n.7 Wynter, Sylvia  32–3, 33 n.1, 121, 126

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