Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland

Clara Fischer, Áine Mahon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429581298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This is the first book to bring a philosophical lens to issues of socio-political and cultural importance in twenty-first century Ireland. While the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary Ireland has inspired extensive scholarly debate both within and well beyond the field of Irish Studies, there is a distinct lack of philosophical voices in these discussions. The aim of this volume is to enrich the fields of Philosophy and Irish Studies by encouraging a manifestly philosophical exploration of contemporary issues and concerns.

The essays in this volume collectively address diverse philosophical questions on contemporary Ireland by exploring a variety of themes, including: diaspora, exile, return; women's bodies and autonomy; historic injustices and national healing; remembering and commemoration; institutionalization and containment; colonialism and Ireland as "home"; conflict and violence; Northern Ireland and the peace process; nationalism, patriotism, and masculinities; ethnicity, immigration, and identity; and translation, art and culture.

Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland marks a significant contribution to contemporary theorizations of Ireland by incorporating both Irish and transatlantic perspectives. It will appeal to a broad audience of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, Irish Studies, feminist theory, history, legal studies, and literary theory. Beyond academia, it will also engage those interested in contemporary Ireland from policy and civil society perspectives.

1 Crossing Ireland’s Boundaries, Real and Imagined

Áine Mahon and Clara Fischer

The social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary Ireland has inspired extensive scholarly debate both within and well beyond the interdisciplinary field of Irish studies. National and international academic research has struggled to stay apace with a rapidly transforming demographic where shockwaves of economic upheaval and rapid social change have complicated ongoing projects of identity construction. Remarkable about this scholarly work, however, is its distinct lack of a self-consciously philosophical voice. While scholars from literary studies to law have engaged comprehensively with the complexities of a post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, scholars from philosophy have, for the most part, neglected to intervene.

Acknowledging the important exceptions to this broader disciplinary tendency,¹ this book addresses this prominent scholarly lacuna by developing theoretical work on Ireland that moves beyond the especially dominant literary and historical paradigm. Bringing the resources of philosophy to pressing issues of socio-political and cultural importance, it is the first extended effort to place contemporary Ireland on the philosophical stage.

A central aim of the present collection, then, is to enrich the fields of philosophy and Irish studies by encouraging a manifestly philosophical exploration of contemporary issues and concerns. Thus far, one might say, the relationship between these disciplines has proven elusive. While Irish studies as an interdisciplinary research tradition remains overwhelmingly informed by historical and literary approaches, scholarship in philosophy has, for the most part, avoided any studied engagement with the contemporary socio-political and cultural scene. Part of our ambition as editors and contributors is to interrogate the sociological and disciplinary reasons behind this mutual avoidance. Has the field of Irish studies formed through the exclusion of philosophical work? Does the discipline of philosophy not easily lend itself to the study of contemporary Ireland? Have social, economic, or political issues arising in an Irish context simply not interested philosophers? Or have institutional structures and disciplinary pressures dissuaded philosophers from pursuing questions on Ireland? Conceiving the same set of question in more positive terms, the present collection asks whether philosophy might bring a different lens or body of thought to a rigorous theorization of Ireland—the considerable potential of which has, thus far, been largely overlooked. Given the dearth of philosophical work on Ireland, we thus follow recent calls in other disciplines, including sociology,² to broaden the scope of Irish studies by developing philosophical work on Ireland that moves beyond the literary and historical fields.

Of course, we are using “philosophy” here as though that term were entirely uncontested—when, actually, in Ireland (as elsewhere) the landscape of the discipline is characterized by marked variation of content, style, and method. We might think in this context not only of the distance between analytic and continental philosophy but also of the varied and ongoing attempts to legitimize a canon of philosophical thinkers that any undergraduate student might be expected to know (or, better still, that they might be able to critique). Exactly which figures are included and which excluded from this canon is the subject of ongoing and lively debate, as hitherto marginalized voices are finally being celebrated and heard.

On the topic of the definitively or the canonically philosophical, Stanley Cavell draws an insightful comparison between philosophy and modernist art. When it comes to modernist music or literature, Cavell writes (among his examples are the works of Samuel Beckett and John Cage), there is simply no stable authority or fixed framework of reference to help us distinguish between what is authentic and what is fake. Cavell underlines in a similar manner the lack of standing discourse for the procedures of philosophy. There is no special domain for philosophy, he urges, no “special class of persons to be called philosophers, who possess and are elevated by a special class or degree of knowledge”.³ Thus, given that we cannot appeal to a stable Platonic authority, attempts to distinguish between the genuine and the not-so-genuine never reliably get off the ground. Philosophy exists, in other words, in a modernist condition, and like all modernist artworks, it is highly susceptible to fraudulence. The implicit suggestion is that the discipline must continuously question and continuously re-affirm its own identity.

Recounting the reaction to his first books (Must We Mean What We Say? and The World Viewed as well as The Senses of Walden), Cavell himself suffers the spectre of fraudulence, venturing with painful honesty that his offerings “were treated more like thefts”,⁴ that “I had the unmistakeable sense of having said hello a number of times without anyone saying hello back”.⁵ It is clear from his own extensive oeuvre that Cavell wants both to bring into question the procedures of philosophy, to illuminate alternative modes for philosophy to take, and to remain within earshot of the analytic tradition which trained him. If such an enterprise strikes one as Sisyphean (and Richard Rorty, for one, has asked if the discipline of philosophy has caused Cavell so much trouble, why he doesn’t just leave it, why he doesn’t just “slough philosophy off” with happy abandon), one might remember again Cavell’s emphasis on the difficulty of philosophy in its modernist condition. Philosophy is no longer to be taken for granted as something with an accepted standard or style to fall back on with untroubled confidence. The writing of philosophy, rather, must be struggled and strained over as we struggle and strain over all authentic expression in our late modernist moment.

This brings us to the mottled history of philosophy as it developed as a distinct discipline in university departments in Ireland. As a general sketch, up until the 1970s most Irish philosophy departments were clerically dominated and typically underpinned by scholarship in a neo-Thomist vein. The ensuing influx of French and German phenomenology and existentialism made way in more recent decades for analytic, and more recently, pragmatist approaches to develop apace. And although individual schools might choose to align themselves with one philosophical tradition over another, for the most part, it is characteristic of Irish philosophy departments to allow all flowers to bloom. By and large, neither continental nor analytic approaches have been allowed to dominate; rather, philosophy departments in Ireland have demonstrated healthy aptitudes for collegiality and cross-pollination.

That much conceded, we would argue that it is still important for philosophy as a discipline to reflect on its practices of boundary setting and to question its openness to sister disciplines and scholarships. If we acknowledge the contingency of certain styles and tendencies (e.g. if we acknowledge that political philosophy might be considered a cornerstone of one philosophy department and barely mentioned at all in another), does this demand in turn a rethinking of the very idea of a philosophical canon? If one department teaches logic and reasoning and another doesn’t, are the students of the former better “trained” than the latter? To these considerations of teaching and learning we might add related conundrums regarding research. Does a philosophically informed work such as the present one—which rubs up at least against legal, historical, literary, and gender studies and incorporates empirical analysis as well as conceptual work—count as philosophy? Does it count for philosophy? And who might be in a position to decide? Arguably one of philosophy’s greatest gifts is its encouragement that we think not just clearly but differently—that we grow the confidence to imagine an alternative way—and in this particular instance such meta-philosophical considerations are paramount.

Given the questions raised in this introduction, it is clear that this book is primarily concerned with philosophically addressing social and political debates regarding contemporary Ireland, while simultaneously interrogating the boundaries set by Irish studies and philosophy. The process of assembling the present volume (which evolved from a conference organized at University College Dublin [UCD] in 2018), and our own (inter)disciplinary backgrounds, have provided us with some preliminary clues that might shed light on why it is that these two disciplines have mainly remained opaque to each other and why philosophers have, by and large, avoided engaging with the topic of “contemporary Ireland”. As editors of this volume, we are sensitive to the fact that philosophy as a discipline is—perhaps uniquely—obsessed with continuously ascertaining what philosophy is, much in the vein Cavell sets out as philosophy’s constant identity seeking. Indeed, as Cavell argues, there is no rigid distinction between philosophy and “meta-philosophy”, as it is definitive of the subject to continuously question its own remit; in his own words, “philosophy is one of its own normal topics”.⁶ From our own interdisciplinary vantage points, we view this task of questioning as fruitful should it result in efforts to redress a historically too narrow disciplinary boundary setting and in an attendant greater openness and inclusivity—as, indeed, sought in recent years by women and philosophers from minority backgrounds. Readers will note on that point a relatively high representation of women authors in this volume.

While we recognize the importance of having conversations about what constitutes a discipline, and thereby about the scholarly and material consequences of whose work should be viewed as canonical, who should be institutionally supported, and so on, we find some of these conversations restrictive and boundary setting in its most negative connotation, resulting in a policing, or, in a Foucauldian sense, a “disciplining” of the discipline itself. We both strongly urge an end to the traditional disciplining of philosophy as a discipline that eschews engagement with empirical contexts, that avoids interdisciplinarity, and that views reasoning and theoretical clarity as its sole and superior disciplinary preserve.⁷ Such disciplining can too often result in an intellectual impoverishment and a discouragement of projects such as the present one. Moreover, such unfortunate boundary setting is also sometimes institutionally underpinned, for instance, with policies that prohibit the hiring of people with interdisciplinary backgrounds and require terminal degrees from philosophy departments only, thereby perpetuating this cycle of the disciplining of the discipline. Taking these and related practices into account, we can therefore identify at least two disciplinary trends that may be responsible for the astonishing lack of philosophical work on contemporary Ireland: philosophy’s boundaries have effectively been drawn to eliminate an (interdisciplinary) focus on Ireland, while Irish studies’ boundaries have been set to mainly encompass literary studies and history.

Interestingly, such trends emerge from a consideration of what, exactly, each discipline is or should be, just as work on Ireland frequently examines the normative question of what Ireland—and Irishness—are. Again, we should not proceed as though this were straightforwardly given, and, indeed, several chapters of this volume call into question how Irishness and Ireland are and have been constructed over the decades. As with the disciplinary boundary setting of philosophy and Irish studies identified here, though, the boundaries circumscribing Ireland and what counts—or not—as Irish, are frequently defined in terms of difference, requiring an Other from which “true” Irishness distinguishes itself. Historically, this Other has often been the former colonial power and its ascribed shortcomings (Anglicanism, sinfulness, impurity), against which the “true” (or idealized) Ireland stood in superior relief. Much recent work on Ireland interrogates this Irish identification with recourse to a defined Other, especially in light of the negative consequences this has had for Others within Ireland, such as institutionalized women and children, whose failure to perform a certain Irishness resulted in their status as “fallen” or failed Irish subjects.⁸ Given this sorry history of hardships arising specifically from the narrow boundaries set around what it means to be Irish and what Ireland is, we hope that this book constitutes a resource for readers to critically revisit this question.

At the same time, we invite readers to re-examine those other boundaries explored in this introduction—boundaries set by the disciplines of philosophy and Irish studies themselves. We hope that the chapters presented here provide stimulating examples of how these two disciplines might speak to each other, and indeed, other disciplines. For in keeping with our aim of countering disciplinary disciplining, the chapters collected here are inherently interdisciplinary. We hope that they will appeal to scholars working not only in philosophy but in history, education, Irish studies, political theory, legal studies, feminist theory, and literary criticism. They have been commissioned to address a broad spectrum of concern—from thematics of migration, displacement, and exile; to complexities of historic injustice and national healing; to political realities of colonialism, conflict, and violence; and to considerations of the cultural, the artistic, and the possibilities of translation. Running strongly through these chapters are also recurring themes that arise as a direct result of the boundary setting already discussed, including shame and the construction of Others as shameful and the role of certain institutions and politico-philosophical commitments maintained by the state and the Catholic Church, in particular. Although our volume spans a large number of topics, explored across different disciplines and philosophical frameworks, it cannot encompass all of the important issues that may be raised by an examination of “contemporary Ireland”. Obvious examples that lie beyond the scope of the present volume include, of course, an interest in the environment, as well as the urgent need for, and increasing support of, green policies.

Our book is structured in five sections. Part I, “Memory, Trauma, and Recovery”, focuses on acts of remembering and remembrance, the coming to terms with traumatic histories, and the affective toil this may often take. In his opening chapter, “The Risk of Hospitality: Exchanging Stories, Changing History” (Chapter 2), Richard Kearney revisits a cluster of philosophical concepts long central to his academic career: translation, mediation, and narrative and linguistic hospitality. Specifically, Kearney navigates the complexities of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida to offer an insightful and imaginative commentary on contemporary Ireland. In highlighting the role of translation as a form of intellectual and emotional labour, Kearney defines this labour as “a dramatic human event” in the sense that its outcomes can neither be predicted nor contained. Rather, the work of translation involves an unconscious process of mourning; it is “a letting go of the egocentric or tribalist drive to reduce the alterities of our guest to our own totalizing fantasies”. In the second half of his chapter, Kearney moves from abstract theory to lived practice. He explores translation and its discontents with reference to two Irish-related cultural experiments: 1) the Guestbook Project of narrative hospitality (“Exchanging Stories, Changing History”) and 2) the Twinsome Minds project of “Double Remembrance”. Beginning as a series of academic seminars, and now operating as an international non-profit, the aim of Guestbook was to explore the translation of suspicion into solidarity through acts of narrative exchange. It explored, in particular, how young people might “welcome the stranger” through cultural and imaginative work. In a similar vein, the Twinsome Minds project brought together the narratives of 1916 (the Easter Rising) and 1690 (the Battle of the Boyne), arguing for a more complex appreciation of British and Irish histories. Throughout his chapter, Kearney advocates for narration and imagination as central resources for honouring history and transcending difference. For the Irish context, in particular, his conceptual analysis illustrates a move beyond simple dualities of host/guest or friend/enemy, showing how we might make courageous leaps of imagination towards reconciliation and peace.

Kathleen Lennon’s “In the Frail Way That People Assemble Themselves’ (McGahern): Feeling Shame About Tuam,” (Chapter 3) deftly explores the role shame plays in the constitution—or indeed the undoing, or as Lennon calls it, the “unravelling”—of the self. Prompted by her insight of feeling not just horror but also shame at the revelations of dead children’s remains discarded at Tuam Mother and Baby Home, Lennon examines shame both in the constitution of gendered Irish imaginaries and in diasporic experiences. Interestingly, Lennon’s reflections trouble the assumption of a straightforward diasporic Irish identity, instead preferring to elaborate upon a “sense of Irishness” that is complicated by hybridity. Lennon outlines the dominant, “shameful imaginaries” which have long structured Irish womanhood, noting that “no woman in the Irish state, or brought up within the Irish diaspora … is untouched by these imaginaries, the possibility of such shame productive of what it is to be an Irish woman.” While also mentioning an important alternative, progressive imaginaries, Lennon points to the damage shameful imaginaries have done in their effacing of especially “illegitimate” children and “fallen” women and their enabling of such atrocities as Tuam. Lennon carefully intersperses personal memories indicative of her sense...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Crossing Ireland’s Boundaries, Real and Imagined
• Part I Memory, Trauma, and Recovery
• Part II Citizenship, Injustice, and the Law
• Part III Nation Building and Post/Coloniality: Ireland North and South
• Part IV Irish Cultural Imaginaries: Dislocation, Diaspora, and Home
• Part V Language, Identity, and Erasure
• Contributors
• Index