Decolonizing Philosophy without Further Delay: Acorn Editors Respond to the Oxford Student Collective

Philosophy as a Way of Black Life

Anthony Sean Neal

Mississippi State University

I am a free being of consciousness, but by vocation, I am a missionary of sorts, to language, history, and phenomena... attempting to convert them to the truth!

What is philosophy about for me? → the nature of perceptual frameworks and philosophical experiences

My interest in philosophy at the moment is strictly humanist. I would probably characterize my thoughts as existential humanist to be more precise. As Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “I want to live, to live well, and to live better.” This comes with the requirement that I focus time wrestling with the Augustinian queries: Who am I? and What do I want? I also take up the query put forward by Howard Thurman, “What will I do (to get what I want)?” However, my quest is not solipsistic in nature. I must also make an attempt to wrestle with the time and space of my existence. My first attempt to make such a philosophical assessment of the world along with a similar proclamation came when I was just nine years old. “Mommy, why do white people hate Black people?” She responded by saying, “that’s just the way the world is.” So then I retorted, “Well then, I am mad at the world!” This statement was made after taking a general assessment of my fourth grade class, of which I was the only Black male. Obviously, this statement is not in the format of any of the philosophy we are generally taught in a philosophy department but it cuts to the core of what I consider to be an important function for philosophy. Philosophy in some way should provide humans with the means to have a philosophical experience, that is to say an experience of being able to make sense out of our immediate and even distant space and time. In this sense, philosophy, particularly as metaphysics, is the knowledge required to live and thrive. While I agree with Rorty, that philosophy is not the only discipline able to perform this function, I do believe when done well, it is among the most complete and best at doing so.   

It is not necessarily true to say that it is natural for humans to philosophize well, but all humans seem to have the capacity to philosophize and most do from time to time. All humans have experiential moments of which we must use reason to define. The significance of analyzing the experience of the moment, or the experiential moment, has much to do with the emphasis that I wish to place on the development of humans, generally speaking, and the development of particular persons or cultures.

First, how does the experiential moment happen? Next, when does the experiential moment take place? And finally, what evidence exists to suggest that the scheme being depicted -- that there exists the ability to analyze and assess the experiential moment -- is a likely scenario?

In order to demonstrate a resistant attitude towards my own presuppositions, these questions require an attempt to understand not only what precisely is being asked, but also what kinds of questions are being asked. This will help to determine what kind of answer(s) might be best fitted for such a question. It is imperative to acknowledge at the onset that the description of the experiential moment is not an exact science and that the concern here is with the ability to bring precision to the description of the experiential moment and therefore to show with the greatest probability, the actuality of its existence. An approximation of the actual experiential moment is an acceptable end. The realization that all moments are undeniably bound to other moments is not being disputed. However, the ability to use abstraction as a tool of human reason for the purpose of analysis does provide an opportunity to form an approximated description. The development into particular persons or cultures is also largely linked to an awareness of the self as an individual, and is based on perception, or knowledge of experience. Therefore, the answers to the previous questions of how, when, and what, are tied to, or are reliant upon knowledge in a very foundational manner.   

Now it is necessary to respond to the previous first question, put forward here secondly, which was how does the experiential moment happen? In answering this question, I will explain experiential moments as they pertain to blackness. This will demonstrate the importance of the possibility for a singular experiential event or set of multiple experiential events being relevant and meaningfully responsible for the shaping of a unique people or culture. A variety of considerations must immediately come to the fore, in order that the active process of this moment can be clearly understood. These range from the temporal-spatial positioning, socio-political conditions, existential concerns, to the perceptual frameworks learned and used as tools of interpretation. Initially the definition of experiential moment will be exposed, beginning with simple terms, and then expand, such that the definitional clarity gained will create enough space for this conceptual notion to add the greatest amount of force to the ancillary ideas being associated.

The experiential moment is the moment when we become simultaneously aware of an intelligible object through our senses and intellectually aware of that same object. The things that are not sensed in this manner are non-sensed objects to the human and are not experienced. The things that are not sensed in this manner are non-sensed objects to the human. The possibility of the things which can be experienced through our senses and our rational faculties include persisting ideas, objects, and qualities which objects possess. When objects are sensed in this manner, the function of reason or the intellect is to raise the sensory awareness of an object, or that which is intelligible, to the point of knowledge. This is an immediate event in that the object which is knowable is known the moment it is perceived. Of course, there is always room for the improvement or clarity of knowledge, but the fact remains that the object is known the moment it moves from possibility of knowledge to actual knowledge, which also speaks to the status of the knower as a knower of something.  As it pertains to being Black, particularly in its connection to the modern era, the significance of the experiential moment is found in how this process unfolds. Being Black is a shifting set of cultural performances produced by the experience of being Black at a particular moment in time. It is very much a product of the lived experience. There is not now nor has there ever been an essence attached to what it means to be Black that is formed exterior to the lived experience of blackness. Because there is no essence in having skin of a darker hue, the individual has to come to the knowledge of blackness on their own. The other factors mentioned above (temporal-spatial positioning, socio-political conditions, existential concerns, the perceptual frameworks learned and used as tools of interpretation) become determinate factors in what a knower knows when they come to possess the knowledge of blackness.

The experiential moment of blackness is also what gave energy to the claim in my first book, Common Ground (Africa World Press 2015), that community development and social transformation might be possible grounded in the consciousness derived from the shared experience of the phenomenon which was being blacked by law and oppressed because of the color of one’s skin or the color of one’s ancestor’s skin.  In that work, the argument used did not clearly bring to the fore the sense in which I was developing the notion of blackness as resulting from an existential moment of experience. This created the problem of portraying blackness as an inner essence, as opposed to coming about in the physical world under certain temporal-spatial conditions. These temporal-spatial conditions give way to the experience of being bound by the social constriction (I prefer constriction to construction) which is blackness. It is the social constriction which forces one into a community, whether physically or ideological. The community is based upon the perceptual frameworks that develop within and without those who are blacked by law and custom, such that a sense of who Black people are is held by Black people and others. This shared sense of what it means to be Black or white for that matter, which is only an approximation, is what was meant by the idea of a shared consciousness in Common Ground.

When I consider those who do African American Philosophy, I approach my reflections from the understanding that everyone will not arrive at the same conclusions based upon the methods used to frame questions and also the subject matter considered to be important. Some focus on the legitimacy of the philosophical subject (African American Philosophy) and its continued existence and others focus even on the subject philosophizing (the individual philosopher) with a desire and aim towards creating a space in which to continue philosophizing comfortably by arguing for inclusiveness. I think this is a noble aim, one that can give great rewards to the particular philosopher. However, I feel this aim is problematic because so limited in effect: the individual philosopher has a difficult time explaining the worth of such philosophy to more than a few philosophers.  But this could be just my issue. I typically lean towards the communal and not the individual when thinking of benefit.

Still others, who do African American Philosophy, can be consumed with correcting or showing proficiency with the western canon. I don't fault anyone for this because I expect people to be products of their education, but not forever. So what then...what is an alternative? It is my understanding that without the existence of the black body in the American space there would be no need for African American Philosophy and to that point, I don't think it can be good to divorce African American Philosophy from the black body or the experiences of black bodies as detailed in written works, through orality, through observation, or through one's own lived experience.

Early philosophers never really divorced their philosophy from their experience. Their experience was always their launching pad for thought. Of course, not all who do African American Philosophy must be black and I don't think all African Americans philosophers should do African American Philosophy, but if African American Philosophy is done, I feel it is a mistake to divorce it from the experience of being black and the black body. Howard Thurman speaks of the sense of fragmentation fueled by such a divorce: , “How can I believe life has meaning if I don’t believe my own life has meaning?” This statement is reminiscent of the concept that DuBois put forth in The Souls of Black Folk,

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. (p. 2-3).

My Philosophical House (of Ideas)

The thing that plagues me most, in terms of philosophical thought, is how I can develop a reasonable notion of freedom in light of existence? What has Blackness done to me? How does a proximal relationship to oppression disrupt moral decision making ability and my ? I also find it necessary to state that I am against oppression and for life.

For me, as a humanistically focused (which pertains to my subject matter) (h)umanist philosopher (which pertains to my method of interrogating the problem), this problem begins as a problem of interpretation, one to be solved through a dialectical method of interrogating the past through a method of processual hermeneutic phenomenology.

African American philosophy or philosophy of the black experience seeks to discover definitions, categories, and the existential conditions of blackness, but also to provide a rigorous and robust treatment of the same, where none exists. The intent in doing so is not only one of discovery, but also to put forth empirical as well normative claims useful in addressing hindrances to whatever qualifies as a flourishing life. Existentially, the fundamental problem of any humanistically focused philosophy has to be human survival and flourishing. If this is true then the fundamental problem of blackness is survival as an object of oppression in an oppressive society. Examples questions the Philosophy of the Black Experience brings to the fore:

1.   What role does oppression perform in the formation of a culture?

2.   What are the necessary or sufficient tools for mitigating an oppressed reality?

The Philosophy of the Black Experience roots the study of black as a type, and not as a the color of skin…

Although the topic is often neglected as framed by the parameters as stated in the example questions above Philosophy of the Black Experience, neglect is not the same as irrelevance in this matter. In fact, the opposite claim moves more in the direction of truth, particularly when it is considered that within definitive claims of just what does philosophy do, or to what problems does philosophy attend, one salient response is to focus upon the problem(s) of human existence. To this end, Leonard Harris’s Philosophy Born of Struggle’s demonstrates how identifying categories can assist in making the subject and subject matter better known’ Stephen Ferguson’s Philosophy of African American Studies brings attention to the neglect of this subject as a direct result of institutional structures that inhibit work which suffers from the realization of legitimacy and justification by college and university administrators. Also, the book by Ferguson along with McClendon demonstrates how this work has historically progressed in spite of the lack of resources and recognition as relevant from the same administrators. George Yancy provides a similar scope, albeit abbreviated, focusing on contemporary African American Philosophers in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations.

References below.

Resisting the Death of Language

Greg Moses

Texas State University

My work today concerns the liberation of language. We begin at the portal of death: at the moment where language of the living calls out to those who cannot answer. In this moment language is abolished in the vacuum of someone’s final inability to cry out. Therefore, we speak of social death. When language is alive, there is a talk-back, a dialectic, and moments-to-come. In the social death of language, living authority speaks down, sentencing other voices to unheard death.

In the social vortex that howled around the murder of George Floyd, Jr., language was strangled first. Victim and witnesses spoke up and out, but they were not authorized to communicate anything of consequence. Centurions of social death guarded the corridor to death itself. Then Darnella Frazier, using the speed-of-light language of smart phone video and Facebook, spoke to the world. Between May 26, the day after Floyd’s murder, and August 22, as that summer drew to a close, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) recorded over 11,000 demonstrations linked to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement at more than 3,000 locations in all 50 states and Washington, DC (ACLED 2021). Creosote Mapper located 4,446 cities or towns worldwide that expressed protest, with heavy coverage in Europe (“Black Lives” 2020). In response to the strangulation of language and life on May 25 came an outcry.

As the global speak-out rolled across the planet, a collective of students at Oxford University on June 30, 2020, issued an open letter on “diversifying the philosophy faculty and curriculum at oxford.” With explicit appeal to the voices of BLM protest, the students pushed “for swift and systemic representational and curriculum change within the philosophy faculty.” And they shared their homework. The letter from the Diversifying Philosophy Student Collective, signed by more than 250 students, appended a document with suggested readings, topics, and methodologies for “swift and systemic” change (OxfordPublicPhilosophy.com). They argued in part:

“We understand that the path to change is complex; but we think the urgency of change supersedes the difficulties: we must do all we can to learn about currently under-discussed topics and to support minority academics, in structures whose curricula can either perpetuate systemic oppression and silencing or strive to envision a just future.”

“We must begin to take steps to remedy the effects of systemic racism, sexism, and much more that pervade our discipline. This might involve a learning curve. We understand student demand is also a deciding factor towards making changes. We want you to know this demand exists, and we want to help build active feedback and communication systems to promote faculty-student interaction in combating structural injustices.”

The student letter appealed to a liberation of language. Vivacious language, crying up from the streets, aroused students to a recognition that they could no longer not talk about key topics that had been languishing “under-discussed.” Structures of instruction perpetuated wary “silencing.” Students offered themselves up as peacemakers and healers; they presented themselves as interlocutors who could nurture language practices to life through “active feedback and communication systems” that would “promote faculty-student interaction in combating structural injustices.”

To assess the effect of the letter, students have brought a looking glass—the concept of structural injustice. With precise insight into structural injustice, any unflinching witness can gaze deeply into isomorphic connections that collaborate with the power of indifference and the death of language as was intersected in Minneapolis on the last Monday of May, 2020, near the curbside of E. 38th St. at Chicago Ave., on or about 8:20 PM GMT -5.

When and Where to Get Started

As for myself, when the student letter hit the term “learning curve,” I was transported to another city street just outside the gates of a university in Atlanta, Georgia. As a graduate student there, I stepped from that curb onto a city bus during one afternoon’s rush hour. With a head full of philosophy seminars gyrating my thoughts, I bounded up the stairs of that bus and turned to face two packed columns of seats filled with the tired eyes of Black workers going home. In less than an instant, a hard question was conveyed to my body entire. I could feel the structural force of an impact. An oracle paraphrased the great Socratic challenge: Who do you think you are? Soon after that turning point, I began to shift my philosophic center from Deweyan pragmatism to Kingian nonviolence. And part of this shift involved an intensive self-study in Africana philosophy. Thirty-five years later, I am still walking up that learning curve.

Since my early days as a novice college teacher in the late 1980s, I have used my syllabus, not only as a place for texts that were well taught to me, but as a place to explore other voices. Over the years, these other voices have included works by and words attributed to non-Europeans such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Ptah-hotep, The Eloquent Peasant, Vyasa, Gandhi, Laozi, Kongzi, Mengzi, Imam Ali, Al-Kindi, The Brethern of Purity, Buddha Shakyamuni, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Elk, Dekanawida, Gloria Anzaldua, or the Mayan authors of the Popol Vuh. But the learning curve also includes other voices within the European sphere, such as Hovamol, The Schleithiem Confession, Spinoza, or Marx.

As students have affirmed in their open letter, when you are on a learning curve you make mistakes. Re-education is complex and there are difficulties, but as the students go on to argue, “the urgency of change supercedes the difficulties.” With understated insight, the open letter observes that “it would be almost inconsistent reasoning to debar work in these philosophies by such a premise as not being adequately acquainted with their cultural milieu” (“open letter”).

How can we say it is unwise to get started today because we failed to get started yesterday? In college, especially, we must ever begin to teach curricula that we have never been trained to teach. And this is what the students want to see teachers doing in a “swift and systemic” movement. This is not a very difficult thing to do for college teachers, who should be on some kind of learning curve at all times. Look for other voices. Bring them to class. As students have argued, first you diversify, then you catch up. You keep trying to keep up. We have come to a world historical moment when we might sing out that those not busy with other voices are busy killing language.

As I once argued to a college teacher who was fresh out of graduate school, but who had not been prepared to teach other voices:  “Yes, you will get some things wrong. But what is that wrong compared to the wrong of putting it off?” Oxford students argue that they can’t wait. And yet, students are met with voices who, without irony, in the third decade of the 21st century, argue that there should be no hurry. Ethnographers can explore the cultural milieu of whiteness and its sense of time. Meanwhile, the wrong thing to do is to put off curriculum transformation until next term. Teaching only the voices of the existing canon subtracts language and life from philosophy and philosophizing.

Racism, Marx, and the Social Turn

To students and allies who are very new to these curriculum battles, I offer three brief groundwork advisories: (1) public language on racism is arrayed against you, (2) don’t forget Marx (or Wilderson’s Afropessimist caution about humanism), and (3) demilitarize how we imagine revolution.

Public language on racism suffers a great deal from dictionaries that must reflect common usage. Since common usage is embedded within racist structures of injustice, the dictionary is more likely to support confusion than dispel it. This is one reason why discussions of anti-racism are especially suited to philosophical discourse, where terms may be locally defined aside from their dictionary denotations. The open letter uses the term “systemic racism,” which the OED defines in a helpful way. But the dictionary should warn us that the unmodified term “racism” very nearly contradicts the term modified by “systemic.” As tools of analysis, each term has quite different uses. And their lexical ordering is crucial. In order to avoid all kinds of silly detours, the unmodified term “racism” must be understood as conceptually derivative of its “systemic” partner. And this is why I like to remember one of my favorite British philosophers, Karl Marx, progenitor of systemic critique.

I like to remember that Marx spent more than half his life in London where he wrote Das Kapital largely on the basis of archival research at British libraries, walking streets that were illustrated in the glorious fictions of Charles Dickens. I ask the reader’s permission, as I often beg my students, to please allow me to speak of the philosopher who was buried at Highgate some three and a half decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us take a moment to consider what communism meant to Marx before it meant many other things to the world after Lenin.

The young philosopher Marx defined our general terms of struggle when he wrote the ninth and tenth “Theses on Feuerbach.” In thesis nine, Marx discerned that even the materialists of his age were individualistic in their philosophy, conceiving of society as nothing but the sum of its individual members. Then, in thesis ten, Marx indicated a need to conceptualize “social humanity” (marxists.org). Today when we criticize the logic of neoliberalism, we reaffirm Marx’s insight. Or when we point out the contrary definitions of “racism” and “systemic racism,” what are we doing but minding the gap between theses nine and ten, insisting upon that social turn, too.

Since we have introduced the term “humanity,” and since we are on a learning curve with other voices, we cannot allow the term to stand uncontested. Frank Wilderson states the objection succinctly in Afropessimism:

“If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hobbled by a meta-aporia: a contradiction that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings.” (Wilderson 2020, 15)

The “social humanity” of the young Marx must be interrogated for its implicit participation in colonial whiteness. Who are the workers of the world? The language of critical dialectic thrives here.

Wilderson’s life is but one witnesses to a continuum of revolutionary activity, including the real-life power that comes from an ability to issue credible threats. So I will not today argue that revolution should be defined globally as nonviolent. However, I am arguing that there are quite a few local situations—some of them quite extensive in time and space—where resistance grows power by reversing cycles of violence. A new curriculum should not neglect to study the philosophy of revolution that demilitarizes the imagination. Authorities could include Dekanawida, Elizabeth Heyrick, Gandhi, Jane Addams, Bayard Rustin, MLK, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Cesar Chavez, Johan Galtung, Gene Sharp, or Erica Chenoweth, to name a few (The Acorn, n.d.).

The Oxford student collective is well begun. You are cultivating a new philosophy via Zoom and YouTube. You are contributing to a revolution in the history of philosophy. We can see that mountain top. Your initiative is necessary and urgent. The timing of it does credit to the memory of George Floyd, Jr. and Black Lives Matter. We can’t wait (King [1963] 2010).

References below.

Our text back then also wanted to address the need for social change and the philosophical debates about the methods of change. Drawing on applied Buddhism, Sulak Sivaraksa argued that ignorance and craving were at the root of contemporary problems of consumerism, corruption and militarism, leading to injustice and impoverishment. Enrique Dussel argued that a liberation philosophy distinguishes the violence of the oppressed from that of the oppressors, while Gandhi and King argued for nonviolent means to reach nonviolent ends. Philosophy, we hoped, could help to shed light on the world’s problems as well as suggest ways forward.

The problems of sexism and racism, misogyny, slavery and colonialism are not just in the past. They still permeate our contemporary world. In a philosophy class on ethics, these topics must be discussed. What good is ethics in our world filled with injustice, if it does not directly confront this injustice? Application alone is not the problem – the theories, theory-development process, and theorists are too. The theorists who came up with their seemingly abstract and universal theories were engaged in popularizing and defending views that justified slavery, colonialism and women’s subordination. Nowadays the same ideas disguise themselves as meritocracy, responsible governance, or good business practices. When we read philosophical texts from multiple perspectives, we can uncover white supremacist arguments  and hone our understanding of them in a centuries-long context. We can also see alternative philosophical theories that we may find more insightful and more life-giving. We can decide to embrace a different philosophical conception of the world.

References below.