THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#20, SEPT-NOV/2024
So, what is philosophy? Furthermore, what does it mean to engage in philosophy? And how does the way by which we question the meaning of philosophy speak to an ongoing problematic of defining philosophy itself? For the very idea of philosophy has always been in question and is still vigorously contested on several fronts.
As such, we should certainly not be afraid to also ask ourselves just what is philosophy as a question from which to introduce and initiate the insurgent potentialities of Black liberation discourse? And it is in this register, that we mean to know whether, by starting to examine a few contemporary discursive orientations that speak to this question of the meaning of philosophy, we can somehow make our way towards a radical enough of a beginning, as an emancipatory provocation to justify epistemic ruptures of insurgent thought against imperialist structures of meaning and power in our contemporary world?
Indeed, there are certain analytic orientations of philosophy that emphasize the need for a clarity of thought that is replete with transparent language which regulates discourse through rules of logic and grammar towards a strict demarcation between that which is epistemologically legitimate or meaningful, and that which is epistemologically illegitimate or meaningless. Whatever conforms to these predetermined rules of logic, and hence lends itself to being regulated is distinguished as true, and as such is therefore diametrically opposed to whatever does not conform to these predetermined rules of logic as false, for it cannot be regulated. It is this very incongruence to epistemic conformity and the possibility of being regulated that is therefore considered mere speculation, the exercise of falsehood or exhibiting a predilection towards illusion.
However, there are other hermeneutic orientations of philosophy that emphasize the speculative imperative of unregulated discourse and creative thought housed in a challenging rigor of language that interprets the world as an enigmatic source relevant to fundamental questions of lived experience and dynamics of power. The world in its immediacy is therefore not just a closed totality of facts amendable to analytic scrutiny, but an open expanse of meaning that merits serious investigation and interrogation through methodological interpretation. To be sure, though such philosophy also embraces analysis, it understands that the horizon of Truth and meaning is not exhausted by or even limited to, the successful scientific application and technological efficiency of its methods.
Now, there are certainly variations of these main discursive divides of philosophy within the imperial mainstream of modernity as professionally entrenched in the Academy. And yet, within each philosophical fold there are even further sub-fields and orientations that, at least in principle, appear hostile to being grouped together under any form of conceptual unity, regardless of whatever epistemic harmony they may or may not encounter within the academic systematization of specialized knowledge.
For instance, there is a postmodern strain of thought that emphasizes the importance of deconstructing both the epistemic consensus and the totalizing scope of modernity, without however, calling into question western imperialist power as the very condition of possibility that both initiates and structures modernity itself. To the keen intellectual historian, it is not without irony, that so soon after an era of vast socio-historical unrest, wherein ideals of truth and narratives of universality, science, revolution, subjectivity and progress began to be stretched beyond and summarily detached from their monopolization by Empire, and were then discursively weaponized against a western imperialist continuum, that the epistemic dissolution of these very notions soon followed suit within the Academy.
To be sure, it is precisely this lived positionality to Empire that also introduces a set of discursive distinctions amongst contemporary modes of emancipatory thought as existing in either an oppositional or insurgent philosophical orientation towards established power.
Oppositional orientations of philosophy derive their fundamental epistemological precepts and core teleological conclusions from the imperial mainstream of modernity itself, and thus run the risk of replicating a western imperialist continuum even while confronting its contemporary guise of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization with socialist reforms or communist variants of the nation-state.
Insurgent orientations of philosophy arise from the socio-ontological underground of modernity, and confront Empire with constitutive potentialities of human ‘being’ and human liberation that ultimately introduce ruptures against the normative gaze of western imperialist power: destabilizing the very conditions of its possibility, while simultaneously opening up new horizons of emancipatory praxis at a geonational register for the wretched of the earth[1] as ascendant humanity.
As such, how does the insurgent positionality to the normative gaze of established power introduced through Black liberation discourse implicate the way how we can begin to engage the question of philosophy, especially in the face of an Academy, that with maybe some notable exceptions, actually promotes a discourse about philosophy that relegates it to the same status as just another specialized discipline amongst others?
With this in mind, we should certainly not be afraid of asking whether or not the manner of approach towards making philosophy relevant as an Academic discipline – ultimately risks demeaning its potentialities as a particular mode of engagement in the world – through Black liberation discourse by deliberately withdrawing entire constellations of lived experience from the horizon of philosophical interrogation?
In other words, is it true that philosophical engagement in the world is no longer even possible, and that we have somehow actually reached a point where we can justifiably speak about ‘the end of philosophy’[2] outside of its academic systematization as specialized knowledge? And what does this ‘end of philosophy’ mean for Black liberation discourse? For historically speaking, the Black radical imagination was never truly allowed to gain any genuine epistemic traction within the Academy due to the exceptional antagonism the question of Black liberation introduces against the normative gaze of modernity.
Indeed, it was not until the dire need of established power to appease the emancipatory imperatives of Black liberation praxis erupting in the streets during the massive socio-historical upheavals associated with civil rights/Black Power movements at home in correlation with decolonization movements abroad, that Black Studies programs started appearing with more frequency in the college curriculum.
However, the very proliferation of Black Studies facilitates its betrayal of the emancipatory imperative that accompanies its epistemic rise out of the exceptional antagonism that alone sustains its discursive legitimacy against the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum. Thus, academic assimilation misguidedly overdetermines the scope of Black studies as if the epistemic weight of Black liberation discourse can be lifted through attempts at Black cultural assimilation into the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, thus incarcerating the Black radical imagination within the normative gaze.
Aiding and abetting the epistemic policing of the Black radical imagination is an extreme positivist regulatory impulse of scientific classification for exclusive guidance to questions that would formerly have been relevant to be interrogated by philosophy that, as engaged in the world, thus derives its rigor from the lived discursive trajectory of such engagement. The fact that such a positivist orientation thrives in comfortable subservience to Empire is no accident. For there exists a paralyzing fear that the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation discourse introduces an epistemic rupture from which to interrogate the Real of a western imperialist continuum and thus enunciate a Revolt against established power that cannot be reacclimated by the normative gaze of modernity.
Perhaps we should reflect on whether it is truly the case that scientific classification no longer supplements philosophical endeavor, but has rather quite efficiently displaced it? Indeed, what happens when philosophy turns upon itself, disclosing a fundamentalist undercurrent towards an affirmation of ontology that negates the Blues metaphysic[3]of lived Black experience by the very refusal to call into question the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum? As such, what does it mean when Frederick Douglass discloses that “The work before us is nothing less than a radical revolution in all modes of thought that flourished under the blighting slave system”?[4] Indeed, how does the anti-slavery dialectic [5]overturn the easy accessibility of sensory immediacy as structured by the normative gaze of established power by asserting human ‘being’, not as a brute fact of materialist determinism, but as a dynamic of situated consciousness that speaks to the irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real?
Shouldn’t we be wary of positivist orientations of thought that refuse to overcome their conformist relation to the normative gaze of established power as exemplified in their devotion to an epistemic closure driven by the merely classificatory scope of their philosophical method? What happens when the intellectual tension that arises between philosophy and the positive sciences is discursively channeled rather than epistemically foreclosed? And what are the implications of ‘the end of philosophy’ as it speaks to an epistemic closure of philosophical endeavor in the face of what can only be described as the undeniable merit of scientific method and technological efficiency?
Well, if we are going to think through the possibility of ‘the end of philosophy’, we should probably first take a look at how philosophy actually begins. Now, just to be clear, by referencing the beginnings of philosophy, we don’t mean the actual historical genesis of philosophy, or Philo-Sophia as the Hellenic (Greek) Love of Kemetic (Egyptian) Wisdom in relation to the Pythagorian, Parmenidian and Socratic transmission of Afroasiatic thought through Plato and Aristotle, that later resonates in the work of Plotinus, then sustained through Saint Augustine before ultimately succumbing to the feudal theological decadence afflicting Christian Europe during the Dark Ages, only to then be resuscitated as the journey of Islamic thought through Asia and Africa that culminates in the work of Averroes (Ibn-Rushd) who initiated the epistemic rupture of modern philosophical rationalism from its theological foundations situated within the 700-year conquest of Southern Europe and occupation of the Spanish Peninsula by Afroasiatic Moors who ruled all the way from the Senegal River in West Africa to the Ebro River in Southern Europe.
No, what we mean here is not philosophy with reference to a narrative of its historical becoming, but rather philosophy as the venture of thought realizing itself as a discursive capacity to engage in a radical beginning out of an explicit historical situation. This brings us back to the question of the meaning of the Blues metaphysic, as a radical beginning at the socio-ontological crossroads of the disaster of modernity itself. And so of course, and maybe we are now being somewhat intentionally provocative, in the sense that we are concerned with what the epistemic conditions are for such a radical beginning, that indeed makes philosophy possible as a lived rhythm of praxis, a way of engagement in the world.
So, in order to find philosophy engaged in the world, right now, at this very moment, where do we look? Well, there is a certain sense in which you can find philosophy where it is frequently located, and where it often begins – radically: right at the crossroads of thought between authoritative claims of absolute knowledge by Science, absolute truth by Religion and absolute sovereign legitimacy by established power. As such, and insofar as the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum has historically enlisted Science, Religion and the sovereign legitimacy of established power against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, it should come as no surprise that the question of Black liberation discourse introduces an exceptional antagonism that speaks to an emancipatory imperative of philosophical endeavor.
And it is particularly in relation to this emancipatory imperative of thought against the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum that we often find ourselves asking, just what is the responsibility of philosophy in our contemporary world? For it is by this question, that we can then gain a telling foothold at the epistemic base of the Mountain of philosophical discourse to attempt a dangerous vertical climb guided by the Black radical imagination towards introducing insurgent thought as an act of rupture against the encroaching epistemic sanitization of existence from philosophy by the normative gaze of established power through the Academic specialization of systemic knowledge. This epistemic sanitization of emancipatory discourse by the Academy has the effect of limiting the exposure of philosophy from being stained by hands dirtied from the perilous venture of lived Black experience and kept from thus being altogether muddied by the scuffed workboots of socio-historical relevance.
So what is it really, that philosophy can actually tell us about the current global crisis that is characterized by a racist dehumanization that legitimizes imperialist wars internationally and neo-colonial police murder of innocent people domestically – not to mention immigrant internment, economic exploitation, international proliferation of refugees, mass incarceration, normalized torture and a totalitarian security culture of mass surveillance, all in the name of preserving an imperial mainstream-as-civil society at the expense of the underground of modernity?
That's right, the underground of modernity, by which we mean the global Black diaspora, the everyday people of the so-called Global South, as well as those displaced refugees and interned immigrants, or more directly put, those who merit no human consideration, ethical regard or legal redress under the normative gaze of Empire. Or as Frantz Fanon unapologetically discloses, “It is a question of the Third World beginning anew with a history of humanity that takes into account both the sometimes prodigious theses upheld by Europe, and the crimes of Europe against humanity, the most odious of which was committed at the heart of human ‘being’, and consisted of pathologically tearing apart its existential dynamics and disintegrating its social unity within the context of fracturing community and stratifying humanity through bloody tensions fueled by classes; on the immense scale of racial hatreds, slavery” and “exploitation.”[6]
As such, how is it that philosophy can assist us in coming to terms with the Truth of our shared ascendant humanity, even while we navigate existence situated within the midst of the Real – of all this racist dehumanization and the coercive structures of established power that guarantee the continuity and socio-historical relevance of coloniality[7] in the Raw?
Well, with this in mind, what we might want to confront is that the responsibility of philosophy exists in questioning the very framework of how the burning issues of our day are conceived. And as such, philosophy should not be confused with the often socially celebrated function of providing quick pragmatic solutions to officially recognized problems that have already been formulated and disseminated by the normative gaze of established power.
For if we want problems to disappear or go away, we should go find an expert, rather than a philosopher. And we should note that there is a qualitative and important distinction between the two that should not be overlooked. Experts do actually claim to solve problems. Now, that doesn’t mean that what they recommend actually works. It usually doesn’t, and you don’t have to be an expert to know that.
However what experts do is make us think that the way to solve any problem is to do something that is usually tangible, yet insignificant enough to barely make a dent in the status quo, which then allows us to behave in a manner that makes us feel good about ourselves, enough so as to then feel good about the civic virtues of social conformity to the normative gaze of established power. Because what the experts recommended was exactly what we wanted to hear in the first place, especially in the sense that it requires nothing from us and demands no true commitment or authentic engagement in the world.
Now, for some reason, and maybe this has to do with how they became recognized experts in the first place, experts never try and convince you to do anything other than what the ruling power elite has already determined is the proper course of action in any given situation. Everything is already rationally predetermined by so-called ‘common sense’, so the emphasis of experts is usually summed up in the following question - Why are we unnecessarily straining to try and think for ourselves rather than thinking through established structures of meaning that are already so easily accessible and practically amenable to whatever we could possibly want for in this world? So, we are often told, in the most logical of terms, to not worry ourselves about thinking at all for that matter. Indeed, why don’t we just let them, the experts, do our thinking for us, right?
Indeed, here we find the expert entrusted with the role of the clergy, albeit secular clergy, as authoritative apologists for the normative gaze of established power. So just be quiet and pay your taxes, but don’t think about the ruling power elite who don’t pay nearly enough of their fair share. Shut up and get out and vote, but don’t think about why it’s always a choice between a lesser of two evils. Recycle your plastic, but don’t think about why you are made to feel more responsible for the ecology of the entire planet than the globalized corporate monoliths of capital that have an exponentially more negative impact on the environment. Get in touch with your feelings of personal guilt and meaninglessness, but don’t think about your feelings of social indignation for the plight of everyday people and their daily suffering. Acknowledge the fact of your privilege within the imperial mainstream, and yet keep silent about the ongoing violent suffering of everyday people because these same people may rudely question your sincerity at any moment, and hence make you morally uncomfortable, but don’t think about how to weaponize that very privilege and be of service to the humanity of everyday people.
Indeed, how much has really changed since Jean-Paul Sartre disclosed the normative gaze of established power as suggesting that “you must not oppose the powers-that-be, you must not fight against superior forces, must not meddle in matters that are above your station. Or that any action not in accordance with tradition is mere romanticism, or that any undertaking which has not the support of given experience is foredoomed to frustration, and that since experience has shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm rules to restrain them, otherwise we shall have anarchy.”[8]
More to the point, as soon as the recommendations of these experts, these watchdogs, these imperial retainers of the status quo, begin to deviate from the normative gaze of established power, they often stop getting invited to the epistemic carnivals that brought them to the forefront of the pulpit of celebrity, if not eventually finding themselves being banished from social legitimacy itself.
No doubt, these kinds of neat expertly formulated preheated solutions, that rarely create a ripple of change within the status quo, have little if anything to do with philosophical endeavor. For they ultimately help misrepresent the responsibility of the philosopher as equivalent to the lofty advice of a sanctioned expert, meant to eliminate the risk of thinking for ourselves. Indeed, what makes philosophy vital and alive, is that it discloses how often the normative gaze of established power frames ongoing crises by asking the wrong kind of questions, and as such ultimately exacerbates the situation which makes finding authentic solutions impossible precisely by endorsing these quick pragmatic solutions to appease the need for immediate gratification by the bewildered herd of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.
In other words, experts are actually in charge of figuring out proper solutions that ultimately ratify and sanction the normative gaze, while philosophers interrogate the Real and enunciate Revolt against the normative gaze. Now, here let us not forget that the normative gaze, that unreflective background framework that situates consciousness in the world through a potent combination of coercion and deception, is not just the media, but it certainly includes the media, as well as institutional memory, political ideology, cultural tradition, religious dogma, legality, and even so called ‘common sense’.
As such, should we wonder why there is this idea that philosophy should be concerned with providing solutions to anything at all? This kind of idea functions to further compound the epistemic demeaning of philosophy into a subordinate role to and of specialized disciplines. You see, philosophy, which certainly need not waste its time seeking any kind of restoration to its formerly assumed epistemic preeminence, is still responsible for overcoming neatly sanitized formulations of problem and solution by engaging the Blues metaphysic of call and response to the disaster of modernity as imposed by western imperialist power. For instead of providing clear solutions to established problems, the responsibility of philosophy is to ask ever more difficult questions until the normative gaze – as the established structures of meaning, inherited frameworks and unarticulated value systems imposed by established power through objective violence and miseducation of soul, and by which we have come to look at ourselves, see one another and engage the world around us – becomes destabilized enough to allow our lived experience to become open to new rhythms of discursive movement and thus inhospitable to dogmatic perspectives of thought.
In other words, the responsibility of philosophy is to question the unreflective epistemic impositions of established power from which problems are officially posed. The responsibility of philosophy is thus, how we can create discursive openings as epistemic ruptures to think through better approaches to problems that keep resurfacing, problems that don’t appear to be going away anytime soon, not so much how can we solve immediate problems and make them go away. Nor should we forget that philosophy certainly reminds us that there are certain problems that have no way of going away, no permanent solution at all, in so far as they speak to the human condition situated in the disaster of history. Again and again, we find ourselves faced with the disaster of history, and as such, what happens when philosophy commits thought towards engaging in dialogue with the Blues metaphysic?
For even in the face of the seemingly permanent onslaught of particular crises, and in some cases specifically because of such an unyielding persistence of crises, how might philosophy work towards sustaining an equally undaunted persistence of questioning that sustains openings and ruptures against established structures of meaning by confronting the question of human ‘being’ in existential correspondence with socio-historical imperatives of Black liberation against Empire?
Let us here remind ourselves that it is the expert who makes sure to keep us clothed in good conscience, so we can get through our day without incident as an upstanding member of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society seeking socio-ontological validation from established power. And this speaks to precisely what it is that usually upsets and often annoys experts about philosophy that is engaged outside in the world, in particular when it refuses to be quarantined within the Academy as specialized knowledge.
Indeed, philosophy often does tend to stir things up, and certainly has a justified reputation of revealing even more problems than we thought we were actually dealing with. Might this not then be the very source of philosophy’s unpopularity? We can't expect any kind of lasting popularity when it is our social responsibility and unenviable task of reminding everyone about the shortcomings of purportedly easy and popular solutions, even while emphasizing the need to come up with more adequate approaches to these fundamental issues that such quick solutions sometimes take for granted and mistakenly overlook as beyond the needed scope of radical socio-historical change.
And yet, popular or not, at what cost do we ignore the Truth of how philosophy speaks to a radical epistemic freedom unencumbered by the coercive specialization that has been required of it to survive in our contemporary world as a distinct academic discipline amongst others? For as Theodor Adorno reveals, “in the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge. At the same time, by abstaining from all definite content, whether as a formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete societal goals. To be sure philosophy thereby merely ratified a process that is largely tantamount to its own history. More and more fields were snatched away from it and transformed into science; it scarcely had any other choice but to become either a science itself or a minuscule, tolerated enclave, which as such already conflicts with what it wants to be: a non-particularized pursuit.”[9]
Indeed, what happens when philosophy arises from the grassroots as an existential liberation critique that begins not with abstract formulations to impose upon life, but that starts from the question of the Blues metaphysic introduced through lived Black experience itself? What does an insurgent philosophy from the underground of modernity look like? How does such thought distinguish itself from an academic philosophy steeped in the imperial mainstream and cultivated to be wielded by the watchdogs of the ruling power elite?
In other words, what does it look like when the scope of philosophical endeavor no longer dismisses the exceptional antagonism that is called into being and brought forth by Black liberation discourse against western imperialist power? What happens when philosophy not only speaks truth to power, but also talks sh*t to power, and thus brings the sovereign legitimacy of Empire into disrepute, by confronting the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum with an intellectual rigor and socio-historical relevance that interrogates the Real and enunciates Revolt?
*this is a revised and expanded version of a lecture delivered at the Brecht Forum on February 6th, 2014 in Brooklyn, New York as part of a 12-week philosophical seminar entitled “Black Liberation Theory: Insurgent Philosophy and the Black Radical Legacy”.
[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963).
[2] Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, Basic Writings, (London: Routledge, 1972, 1978, 1993) p.311-325.
[3] A. Shahid Stover, “Yearning, Disaster and the Blues Metaphysic”, Being and Insurrection, (New York: Cannae Press, 2019) p.171-172.
[4] Frederick Douglass, “The Work of the Future”, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol.3, (New York: International Publishers, 1862, 1975) p.292.
[5] Stover, Being and Insurrection, p.50, 218-9.
[6] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963) p.315. Modified translation mine own.
[7] Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America”, Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3, included in Coloniality At Large, edited by Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), see also The Brotherwise Dispatch Vol.2, #17, Sept-Nov/2015.
[8] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, Essays in Existentialism, (New York: Citadel Press, 1946, 1993) p.33.
[9] Theodor Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?”, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963, 2005) p.6.
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