Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity
Not to become slaves of the knowledge of others
Lewis Gordon
Speech held at the Icesi University in Cali at the
Third Colombian Congress of Philosophy, Cali, October 21,
2010 by Gordon Lewis, director of the Institute for the Study of Race and
Social Thought and director of the Center for Afro-Jews. Professor
of Philosophy at the Temple University and President of the Caribbean
Philosophical Association.
This University[1]
was founded with a business administration program. The wisdom of his
administration knew that you can not live only as a businessman.
Therefore, the expansion of knowledge means that students need education not to
become slaves of the knowledge of others.
Now,
much of my work involves brining to life things that are right in front of us
but that we often fail to see. That’s weird, isn’t it? Sometimes,
the things that are most obvious to us are the least visible. And I devoted my
work to the implications of that insight –which includes the things we
need to see across the ages. That makes my work appear very new. But I hope, as
I speak with you, that my work will also be very familiar.
There
is too much to cover in the topic of this meeting. So I am going to talk only
about some issues. My work tends to look at three themes. First, there is the
question of philosophical anthropology, which addresses the question of what we
are. The second is the question of freedom, which asks, what do we want to
become? And the third is very technical. It is the metacritique of reason, which
asks how to you justify the way we talk about what we are and want to become.
If we think about this program at ICESI, this question is central to the
institution, which has the responsibility to think through how to become a
university that is not simply a clone, an imitation of others. It also connects
to the question of the role of the social sciences and human sciences in
universities. Today I will focus on the third because it is about how these
different positions come together.
At
the center of my talk is the question of reason. When we hear about reason, we
often think that reason and rationality are the same
thing. But rationality requires consistency, and if you must be consistent, all
the way down the line you must be consistent with that consistency. Rationality
thus leads to hyper-consistency. And now the problem: Could any of you imagine
going out on a date with a maximally consistent person? Would you like to live
with a hyper-rational person? You see the immediate problem. If you are too
rational, you are unreasonable. And what this tells us is that reason is
broader than rationality. This struggle of the relationship of reason to
rationality affects much of the modern thought.
Much
of modern thought is an attempt to shackle reason, to change reason to
rationality. But the problem is that that collapses into unreasonability
and so the struggle has been how to deal with that tension. There are other
ways in which this comes about. For instance, I study philosophy, and when I
was in graduate school, I noticed that many great philosophers did not like
black people. Yet, some of my peers were unwilling to accept this. I had to
show them the exact racist passages. Disappointed, they often dismissed those
passages as either irrelevant, misunderstood, or of minor consequence. But I
objected: When we study great philosophers, we are taught to obsess over every
single word. So why are we suddenly expected to
abandon them when they betray their author’s racism? I call that
phenomenon of abandonment or rationalizing away the infelicities theodicy of the text. Theodicy is
involves accounting for the goodness of God when God is all-powerful. If God is
all-powerful, isn’t God responsible for Evil? Two classic responses to
theodicy are: first, that we human beings are limited and we cannot understand
God’s ultimate purpose. Second, God gave us freewill, we commit evil, but God remains fine. In
effect, this means: something is wrong with human beings. Now,
when some of my peers and professors were arguing there was nothing with the
texts but with how I was reading them, they were in effect treating the authors
of the texts as gods. And that is why it is a theodicy.
So,
the question emerges: Why did I see those things but they did not? The answer
is because of theodicy. When one reads the author as a god, one forgets that
human beings are imperfect. Books are written be people; people make mistakes;
our job as active thinkers is to understand those mistakes and improve our
knowledge. The error my colleagues made was that they thought what I was
arguing for was the dismissal of those texts on the basis of their racist
content. As with theodicy, where God becomes impossible because of evil, the
authors of those texts faced a similar disavowal. But what I was in fact
saying, especially as a black person who grew up in a world that did no like black people, was that I needed to learn how to
understand and respect other human beings even with their hatred. I never
expected to be reading the writings of gods. I expected to read those written
by people.
Now,
this is part of what I am talking about today. How do we have sciences, in
which there also is room for people? Some critics may ask why my response was
not to get rid of philosophy. Well, I am not a philosophy nationalist. And as I
speak you will see that I am committed to understanding how disciplines meet.
But I think there is an important question that everyone engaged in the life of
the mind must be able to answer: Why do you think? There is a world of
violence, poverty, and despair all around you. But you think: Why do you think?
When
some people find out that I am also a philosopher – I am not only a
philosopher; I also do sociology and anthropology – they often claim to
prefer the practical over the theoretical. Some people say they want
experience. But there is a problem with experience. Every one of us in this
room has had an experience of trying to figure out our experience. We have had
an experience of something happening to us and we cannot figure out what it is
or was. And what we end up doing is going and talking to someone, a friend, for
example: In doing so, we are trying to understand our experience. And what we
are doing there is bringing about a theory, meaning, and understanding to our
experience. If we rely, however, on others to tell us what our experience is,
then we become dependent on their meanings, their experiences, on them telling
us what is right or wrong with our life. I call that “epistemological
colonization”.
There
is another type of epistemological colonization. There is colonization on the
level of methods. It deals with not only colonization of what one thinks but also with how
one thinks. So we find these practices alive in the scenarios of what I call
disciplinary decadence. This is when a discipline turns away from what gives it
life. This is what it means to decay, to die. One form of that decadence is
methodological fetishism and fetishizing methods. This is where a scholar or a
student may study something, work hard on it, bring it to a community of
scholars, and the others are only interested in the methods. They are not
interested in whether the findings or argument is true or have any bearing on
reality.
The
other term is disciplinary solipsism. This is when we think our discipline
covers all reality. Examples of this are when a sociologist criticizes a
historian for not being sociological, when a literary theorist criticizes a
sociologist for not being a literary critic, when a natural scientist comes in
and say both are not being scientific.
So,
what is going on? Well, let’s speak of human beings. The African-American
philosopher and sociologist W.B. Du Bois noticed a problem when many
researchers study people of color. They ended up making the people into
problems instead of studying the problem faced by the people. When their
methods did not fit the lives of the people, they asked what was wrong with
those people? They did not ask what was wrong with
their methods. The fallacy of a Godlike approach to methods is that it is
premised on the presumption that the givrn method
already covers all reality. But human beings produce methods, and to my
knowledge no human being covers all reality. This can be called the
colonization of methods and there is an author who advocates a de-colonial
reduction: Nelson Maldonado-Torres. He argues for the de-colonization of
thought. I have a technical, ugly word or, rather, set of words for it. To
respond to disciplinary decadence requires a teleological suspension of disciplinarily. What this means is to be
willing to go beyond one’s discipline for the sake of reality. If people
do not fit one’s theory or discipline, one should have to change
one’s theory, discipline, and method.
Some
researchers in the social sciences and the humanities may think when I say this
I mean interdisciplinarity, but the problem with interdisciplinarity is that each of the disciplines treats
itself as complete. If they were complete, they would not have to communicate
with other disciplines because they already address all reality. So, I argue
for transdisciplinarity,
this is where disciplines communicate for the sake of reality. This may mean
creating new disciplines. Many of us forget that the disciplines we have
studied did not always exist. We created them. And it is up to us to take
responsibility for the knowledge we produce through them.
Two
questions of transdisciplinarity bring us back to my opening remarks. One of
them is social reality. In many countries, people actually do sociology but
they are not interested in the social world. This is very weird. Similarly, the
human sciences face the problem of human reality. Why is social reality
important? Social reality brings together communication, inter-subjectivity,
and collaboration. It is what it means to share a world in which evidence is
needed to assess science. But the word collaboration comes from the Latin word colabi, which
means to fall together. So what it tells us is that we depend on each other to
build knowledge, but when we fail we all fall down. The question of human
reality becomes even more complicated because human beings are always more than
the rules we place on ourselves. If I were to tell each one of you what you
will do next, you will look at me and do something else. And that is because
the human world is governed by questions of freedom. But the human world is
also created by human beings for their sake. Sigmund Freud put it this way: the
human word creates a prosthetic god and that prosthetic god is culture. Now,
what does cultue do? Well, its purpose is to
alleviate sources of misery. The first is nature. Culture offers us protection
from its contingencies. While reality, as that which is bigger than us,
threatens our existence; culture offers us a world for us.
The
second thing is our bodies. Many of you are vibrant and young now but there is
the future of back pain, arthritis, and other realities of aging. In nature,
this simply means dying. But with culture, we have created a world in which we
can age meaningfully and fulfillingly. And the next
source of misyer is other people. I remember a
student once came to me who lived in a coop. He said he was against privacy and
wanted always to be amongst other people. I smiled, looked at him, and said:
“You want Hell.” In order to love human beings, we need some timeout
from each other. But a complicated thing is that we always have human beings
around in a symbolic world of culture we have created.
So,
I give you now a short version of how culture is related to
transdisciplinarity. Although many of us talk about culture all the time, what
we are actually talking about are customs. Customs are part of cultures, but
culture is more radical. Culture is the world of meaning. It is the dimension
in which human beings live. It is a human world. And this means that culture is
always reaching beyond itself, just as human beings are reaching beyond
themselves, just as disciplines reach beyond themselves, and just as I argue
that living thought, living ideas reach beyond themselves. So the subjects are
built on culture that we must understand but not squeeze into a decadent model
that turns us from reality.
[1]
Editor's note: the author refers specifically to Icesi University, where he
held the conference. Which was translated into Spanish by
José Miguel Terán, Ricardo Adolfo
Coutin, Vladimir Rouvinski and Rafael Silva Vega, members of the Editorial
Board of this publication.