Offerings, Plans, Reflections

Crises of Liberalism, Black Dignity, The Good Enough Body

Dear all,

Our Sunday newsletter is the main one of the week. We will often send shorter emails on the day of an event, but Sunday is when we give you a full sense of what is going on. As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, the format will be: 1) an overview of what we are offering this week, 2) future plans, and 3) some reflections from one of our editorial team or readers (today, it is me (i.e. Anthony Morgan, the editor) offering some reflections on the relationship between kindness and truth). This format is still in an early phase, so any feedback on how to improve it would be much appreciated.

Offerings

This week we are hosting two events:
1) “Liberalism and its Never-ending Crises”: On Monday, leading historian of liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt, will help us to get a sense of the ever-evolving scope of liberalism at a time when thinkers from both sides of the political spectrum are claiming that it is in crisis and is unable to speak to our political, economic, and social moment. 
2) “Deputization and Racial Violence”: Ekow Yankah is a legal scholar and philosopher whose work focuses on questions of political and criminal theory. On Tuesday, he will be introducing us to the concept of deputization in relation to racial violence, explaining why it is actually a more potent danger for Black Americans than more instantly recognizable state or vigilante violence. He will be in conversation with leading historian Elizabeth Hinton.

Your Sunday Read:
“Can Our Bodies Ever Be Good Enough?” At a time of the year when dieting and dissatisfaction with our bodies are at a premium, it seems like a good time to publish an edited transcript of a conversation we hosted last year between Clare Chambers and Brian D. Earp. Clare looks at questions of what is normal and natural in relation to our bodies, with a special focus on the moral and political aspects of living in a culture that places enormous emphasis on how we look.

Earlier this week, we uploaded “Have We Finally Become Ghosts in the Machine?”, an essay by Brad Evans and Chantal Meza that explores alienation and loneliness under technology.

Finally, we just uploaded the event recording and some short clips from Monday’s “In Praise of Failure” event featuring Costica Bradatan and Robert Zaretsky.
“In Praise of Failure” - an edited version of the whole conversation.
“Was Gandhi a Failure?” - short clip from the event.
“Why Praise Failure?” - another short clip from the event.
We will upload the recordings and some clips from the other events this past week shortly.

Plans

We have the first meeting of our new-look editorial team on Tuesday. Following this, we should have a clearer idea of which reading groups/classes we will be running in the spring. Do you have any groups/classes you would especially like us to set up? Please let us know in the comments below.

We will also have a clearer idea of which events we will be running in the spring. Confirmed speakers so far include Mariana Alessandri, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Lewis Gordon, Michael Hardt, Susan Neiman, Kieran Setiya, and Dan Taylor. Again, do you have any topics or speakers you would like us to add to our events or more general thoughts about the events series?

Finally, the deadline has arrived for our first print issue of the year, so the submissions are coming in every day at the moment. The topic is “Where is Philosophy Going?” It will be published in February, so more on that soon…

Reflections

I saw a t-shirt the other day that said, “If you have to choose between being right and being kind, choose to be kind and you will always be right”. It’s a nice idea, but is it just flaky quasi-spiritual bullshit? The quote opens up interesting questions about the relationship between morality/ethics and truth. Where do they overlap and where do they diverge? I will outline two thoughts that address this question in the context of thinking about ourselves, and then offer a tentative conclusion.

Firstly, the philosopher Ian Hacking distinguishes between natural kinds, which are the subject matter of the natural sciences and which are not affected by their classifications, and human kinds, which are the subject matter of the human sciences and which are affected by their classifications, such that once these classifications are known they “change the ways in which individuals experience themselves – and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behaviour in part because they are so classified”.

Second, and relatedly, humans are social beings who depend of the kind of recognition conferred by social relationships in order to emerge as fully-fledged agents and achieve certain freedoms. As Kristina Lepold put it in a recent issue of The Philosopher, “Persons generally rely on something we could call collective infrastructures of recognition to create the experience of true freedom in the social world”.

Taken together, these ideas suggest that who we are as humans is constantly shifting as a result of social influence, and that forms of social recognition, such as kindness and respect, can serve to liberate people in ways that would not have been possible by themselves. As the saying goes, we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

Some people wish to keep a strong division between what is true and what is kind when it comes to the human realm. For them, we should look to biology or statistics when it comes to understanding ourselves and not let these facts be contaminated by sentimentality. Facts don’t care about your feelings; what is should not be contaminated by what should be etc. But, as Amia Srinivasan has put it (in a discussion of Sally Haslanger’s “ameliorative” project), “ethical and political ends are just as legitimate metrics of conceptual aptness as the end of ‘cutting nature at its joints’”. There is a long history of forms of kindness and attentiveness serving to shift our sense of what is deemed true in a certain domain.

Consider our shifting attitudes to non-human animals in terms of what they are capable of and the status they deserve. The forms of kindness, attentiveness, and recognition to animals that we find in philosophers like Eva Meijer serve to reveal far more about their lives than those lacking this kind of relational stance. For Jean-Luc Marion, philosophers must “begin by loving before claiming to know”. In other words, the realm of thought can never be separated from our loves, our passions, the various dispositions we hold in relation to the world. Philosophy is said to begin in wonder (Socrates), angst (Heidegger), and so on, but if it began from kindness?

In short, it may not always be true that when we choose to be kind we will also be right, but it is far from flaky quasi-spiritual bullshit.

Ending

Thanks for reading this. If you would like to write one of the reflections in future, please email something over to us at: thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. Ideally no more than 500 words.

Comments and feedback about any of this always welcome.

Best wishes,

Anthony Morgan
Editor