Intellectual Imagination

Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy

Omedi Ochieng

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268103323
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Épistémologie en philosophie

The Intellectual Imagination unfolds a sweeping vision of the form, meaning, and value of intellectual practice. The book breaks new ground in offering a comprehensive vision of the intellectual vocation. Omedi Ochieng argues that robust and rigorous thought about the form and contours of intellectual practices is best envisioned in light of a comprehensive critical contextual ontology—that is, a systematic account of the context, forms, and dimensions in and through which knowledge and aesthetic practices are created, embodied, translated, and learned. Such an ontology not only accounts for the embeddedness of intellectual practices in the deep structures of politics, economics, and culture, but also in turn demonstrates the constitutive power of critical inquiry. It is against this background that Ochieng unfolds a multidimensional and capacious theory of knowledge and aesthetics. In a critique of the oppositional binaries that now reign in the modern and postmodern academy—binaries that pit fact versus value, science versus the humanities, knowledge versus aesthetics—Ochieng argues for the inextricable intertwinement of reason, interpretation, and the imagination. The book offers a close and deep reading of North Atlantic and African philosophers, thereby illuminating the resonances and contrasts between diverse intellectual traditions. The upshot is an incisively rich, layered, and textured reading of the archetypal intellectual styles and aesthetic forms that have fired the imagination of intellectuals across the globe. Ochieng's book is a radical summons to a practice and an imagination of the intellectual life as the realization of good societies and good lives.

CHAPTER 1

Radical Knowledge

Toward a Critical Contextual Ontology of Intellectual Practice

Intelligent practice is not a step-child of theory. On the contrary theorizing is one practice amongst others and is itself intelligently or stupidly conducted.

—Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

This chapter articulates a critical contextual ontology—that is, a systematic, comprehensive account of the nature and lineaments of knowledge articulation in actually existing contexts. As such, the idea of a critical contextual ontology offers a significant inflection on traditional epistemology. If epistemology is often understood to be the study of knowledge and justified belief in abstraction from actually existing contexts, a contextual ontology situates knowledge articulation as a practice embedded in political, economic, and cultural structures. At the same time, however, it is precisely critical not only insofar as it advances a resolute critique of the idealizing currents in standard epistemological accounts but also because it seeks to reimagine—but not discard—normative theorizing. The argument, rather, holds that normative theorizing should proceed only against the background of a thick social ontology.

In an earlier work, I proffered a critical account of what such a social ontology ought to look like.¹ This chapter will therefore not restate these arguments. Instead, it pushes further to investigate the contours and forms that intellectual practice would take if embeddedness, embodiment, entanglement, encounter, and engenderment were given serious consideration. In what follows, I proffer an account of knowledge as irreducibly contextual, embodied, rhetorical, and social. Such an account, I go on to argue, yields a critically normative revisioning of knowledge as the interanimation of historical, performative, empirical, rational, and imaginative practices.

MAPPING AN ONTOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge Is Embedded Contextually

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation

To speak of knowledge as embedded contextually is to affirm its emergence within a natural ontology—that is, that the world is a spatiotemporal entity that contains no sentient disembodied beings such as spirits or gods. Within such a naturalistic ontology, knowledge is contextual insofar as it is constituted in and by time, space, language, and practice.

The notion of knowledge as contextual cuts against Plato’s epistemological legacy. Plato proffered a conception of knowledge as that which is possessed when the nous achieves an identical, unmediated contemplation of the Forms, eternal and changeless reality. In the Phaedrus, Plato vividly paints his vision of the lover of wisdom (the philosopher) who possesses absolute truth. He tells Phaedrus:

Now a god’s mind is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge, as is the mind of any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it, and so it is delighted at last to be seeing what is real and watching what is true, feeding on all this and feeling wonderful, until the circular motion brings it around to where it started. On the way around it has a view of Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-control; it has a view of Knowledge, not the knowledge that is close to change, that becomes different as it knows the different things which we consider real down here. No, it is the knowledge of what really is what it is.²

Plato’s view is straightforwardly transcendental and absolutist. The absolutist ontology proffers at least three propositions about ontology. First, it conceives of ontology as singular, in the sense that it claims that the being of the world is ultimately foundational on a single thing, in this case the Forms. Second, the substance posited as ultimate being is transcendental. It denotes an entity that not only is completely divorced from matter and human activity but that in some forms is beyond human comprehension or understanding.³ Third, the absolutist ontologist claims that the substance underlying reality can never change and, insofar as it can ever be discovered, it renders the epistemic discovery itself unchangeable, certain, absolutely true. Plato’s absolutist ontology bears a weighty legacy in the epistemologies that have been claimed or appropriated by North Atlantic philosophers.

But to say that knowledge is “contextual” does not also mean a fall into willy-nilly relativism. The very notion of context means that there exist contours and constraints to knowledge articulation. Moreover, there is a mind-independent context—call it “the brute world”—that would exist without humans. This of course does not mean that the world is simply “given” and is thus passively absorbed by humans. Knowledge, within this account, is ineluctably entangled with agency.

Knowledge Is Embodied

If someone says, “I have a body,” he can be asked, “Who is speaking here with this mouth?”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Among humans, sentient awareness has often—but not always—found extension in three inextricably intertwined embodied capacities: that of language, emotion, and rationality. Language emerges from a human faculty to generate and develop auditory and visual symbols and signs for communication, expression, and action. Emotions, on the other hand, are embodied (conscious and nonconscious) qualitative states of being (which include sensations, feelings, and desires) that are experienced relationally and institutionally and that in certain cases yield particular forms of knowledge about the objective world (judgments). Humans share with other creatures certain emotions such as fear, anger, and revulsion. Moreover, some kinds of emotions are also intentional and cognitive, that is, involve evaluations about external states of affairs and, moreover, orient humans to the state of the world.

Emotions are deeply intertwined with another capacity within the human, that of rationality. Rationality is conceptualized in this context as the ability of humans to make inferences of logical and empirical entailment, implicature, and presupposition; inferences about probability and possibility; and inferences about cause and effect. Emotion is necessary to rationality insofar as certain inferences about creaturely intentionality can only be made on the basis of affective attunement to other creatures’ emotional status. Conversely, humans can significantly modify their emotional responses by means of reason and argumentation. As such, emotions are subject to rational critique as to whether they are warranted or unwarranted.

There are several salient implications that follow from taking seriously the embodiment of knowledge articulation and the capacities constituted by embodiment. Reckoning with embodiment—and the full panoply of embodied capacities—explodes the idealism/materialism dualism that has vexed the larger part of North Atlantic philosophy. It will be recalled that Descartes argues that the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) is the indubitable foundation upon which the superstructure of knowledge is to be built. The mind, in Descartes’ view, is self-transparent, yielding representations of innate ideas. Though Descartes is anxious to find an absolute foundation to prop up every other knowledge claim about the external world, in the end he has no answer for the thought experiment that an evil demon may be manipulating his thoughts. He therefore resorts to the claim that God guarantees correct access to his thoughts. In its appeal to God as the guarantor of external reality, the Cartesian project—though idealist in its starting place—rearticulates Plato’s transcendental ontology.

Cartesian ontology bears a weighty legacy in debates about epistemology in philosophical discourse. Even those who did without his appeal to God clung to his cogito as the irreducible starting point for epistemology. Moreover, it is not simply that North Atlantic philosophy—exemplified, for example, by Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and Fichte’s will—clings tenaciously to a residual idealism. It bolstered the “epistemology first” mythos that now dominates the discipline of philosophy; the assumption, within traditional North Atlantic philosophy, that epistemology constitutes the privileged core of philosophy.

The flaws of the Cartesian project, however, remain as glaring as ever. The mind, according to the Cartesian formulation, is posited as the executive “cause” of bodily behavior or actions. The first problem is that, insofar as the mind is posited by Descartes as a substance or entity of some sort, it remains a mysteriously ghostly cause that seemingly has no position in physical space.⁴ Gilbert Ryle famously diagnoses one possible source of Descartes’ error as a “category mistake”—the erroneous classification of a term or phrase that belongs in one logical category by classifying it in another category. From the fact that there exist “mental processes” and “bodily processes,” it does not follow that these are references to “two different species of existence.” Rather, the sense in which a person speaks of existence when referring to the mind differs from that in which she or he speaks of the existence of bodies.⁵ Consider, Ryle points out, a foreigner who, when watching his first game of cricket and having learned the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires, and the scorers, goes on to ask: “But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit. I see who does the bowling, the batting, and the wicketkeeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.”⁶ As Ryle points out, the foreigner’s mistake is in supposing that team spirit is another thing or entity that one can point to as supplementary to all of the other special tasks performed by each player on the field. Rather, it is “the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performed, and performing a task keenly is not performing two tasks.”⁷ Descartes, Ryle argues, commits a similar category-mistake: “The belief that there is a polar opposition between Mind and Matter is the belief that they are terms of the same logical type.”⁸

Of course, it does not follow that the problematic aspects of dualism thereby render an eliminativist reductionism attractive either. A physicalism that denies qualia—that there is such a thing as being a certain sort of organism that feels or experiences in an irreducibly particular manner—fails to engage with such a large dimension of the organic world that it loses any claim to naturalism, whatever its pretensions. Against then the inflationary claims of dualism and the reductionism of mechanistic physicalism, a critical perspective would argue for an emergent physicalism wherein the mental is emergent but not reducible to the physical. Such a theory has the virtue of indicating that the mind and the body are not two substances but one—a physical substance—but without denying the unique dimensions of the brain that make it central to consciousness.

Moreover, reckoning with embodiment also means complicating the dualism between an “internal,” “private,” and “individual” mental realm and an “external,” “public,” and “social” realm. Knowledge is thoroughly social because the mind is embodied. Because the brain does not subsist in a vat, the mind is shaped by the social world within which it is embedded. Through the processes of socialization, any talk of “external” social structures and “internal” phenomenological consciousness is rendered moot through the formation of a habitus. A habitus denotes a complex of dispositions that are durable—that is, that designate a person’s predisposition, tendency, propensity, inclination, and liability; a habitual bodily comportment; a way of being. Moreover, a habitus designates a complex of generative, transponsable dispositions.⁹

Thus understood, a robust and expansive conception of knowledge articulation as an irreducible dialectic of knowledge that (propositional knowledge) and knowledge how (performative knowledge) comes into view. Of all the legacies of Cartesian thought, perhaps none has been as dominant within the modern mind as the “intellectualist legend,” the supposition “that the primary exercise of minds consists in finding answers to questions and that their other occupations are merely applications of considered truths or even regrettable distractions from their consideration.”¹⁰ This model of the intellect casts theorizing as a private “internal monologue or silent soliloquy.”¹¹ The upshot is “the absurd assumption . . . that a performance of any sort inherits all its title to intelligence from some anterior internal operation of planning what to do.”¹²

The notion that intelligent performance is merely the application by the agent of particular regulative propositions runs aground under the scrutiny of logical and empirical critique. The first objection is that the claim that a private criterion or rule is ostensibly adverted to before any action can be undertaken raises conundrums of an infinite regress or vicious cycle: there’s an infinite regress in the claim that to act intelligently, one must master particular regulative propositions, but since such mastery of regulative propositions are in themselves intelligent or stupid acts, one must have had particular propositions about this mastery of intelligent acts, thus triggering another trailing off to the next propositions of propositions, or, looked at from another perspective, spinning the wheel of a vicious cycle. “The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle.”¹³ The upshot is that “when I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.”¹⁴

Thus, against the notion that practices are simply the application of rules, they are best conceived of as articulated performances. That is, competence involves less the mastery of propositions and more what Bourdieu calls a “feel for the game,” a holistic “flow” of conscious and unconscious bodily practices. Practices are textured competences, existing at the intersection of beliefs, perception, memory, and style. For that reason, they seem at once utterly familiar because they are repetitive, and completely new because they are innovative. Competent performance of a practice appears as a seamless flow of exigence, the kairotic seizure of time, and the perfect alignment of bodily comportment, gesture, expression, and tone. A paradigmatic example is the art and practice of telling jokes. There is many a wit who, when challenged to cite the maxims or canons for constructing and appreciating jokes, is at a loss of what to say. A person’s actions are a seamless “flow” of the conscious and the unconscious. Mental concepts such as heeding and minding involve, not the two-worlds legend of a mechanical doing and a spiritual or mental heeding, but rather the activation of a disposition to d...