Heads Up On A Relevant Philosophy Series

 I have been catching up with my email, so I came late to When Philosophy No Longer Smells of the Earth from the Los Angeles Review of Books written by George Yancy, who is also the curator of the series.

Explaining the title, Dr. Yates only drew me in:

Critiquing a narrow understanding of theory in her provocative 1984 essay “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” Adrienne Rich writes that “theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.” The relevance of Rich’s point regarding how theory can lose the smell of the earth speaks to how philosophical reflection can function as a form of mere spectatorship (theōros), where there is no investment in the world other than to view it at a distance. In this context, I had become a young philosopher who lost his sense of smell, his sense of the mundane, the quotidian muck and mire of human existence. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I met philosopher Cornel West for the first time, not long after he was arrested and jailed for protesting the university’s investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. His actions spoke to what it means to be true to Socratic parrhesia (courageous speech) and how we mustn’t avoid what he calls the “raw funky stinky stuff of life.”

From David Hume, I long ago got the idea that theory must have practical application. Philosophy enhances life else it is just a circle jerk.

Then came his explanation of the series and its purpose:

These days, these trying times, these moments of existential ruin, where we are 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe, I find myself less and less moved by Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture of The Thinker. As a philosopher, I find myself immersed instead in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and, as a Black philosopher, located in the midst of what Christina Sharpe calls the wake, the horrid afterlife of slavery. Despite my bona fides as a professionally trained philosopher, this identity in no way keeps me safe from being racially profiled or prevents me from being shot by a police officer who mistakes my cell phone for a weapon. That prospective horror—and so much more—makes up the funk, the harsh reality, that philosophy must face, must engage with, must not avoid by abstracting from the smell of the earth.

The decision to curate this special series on philosophy’s importance at times like these was partly motivated by my own practice and understanding of the imperative to do philosophy as a mode of public-facing work. I wanted to demonstrate just how important and relevant specific conceptions of philosophy (implicit and explicit), and specific praxes of philosophers, can be in times of deep social, political, and existential trauma. The six philosophers gathered for this series celebrate what philosophy is capable of. Each is invested in philosophical plurality, which doesn’t mean that anything goes or that all views are equally well-thought-out or critically valid. These thinkers have no pretensions of being able to perform what Donna Haraway refers to as “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” Each embodied philosophical voice is deeply situated, invested not in navel-gazing but in bearing witness to other embodied voices that have been marginalized and deemed nugatory.

I have curated this special series because I see philosophy as asking of us nothing less than to face the reality of the world and of who we are with as much honesty as we can manage....

I call that compelling, and one more thing to be reading. Poor Carols Fuentes, I do not mean to ignore you.

sch  7:26 AM