Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life

Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy

Omedi Ochieng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315469478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What makes for good societies and good lives in a global world? In this landmark work of political and ethical philosophy, Omedi Ochieng offers a radical reassessment of a millennia-old question. He does so by offering a stringent critique of both North Atlantic and African philosophical traditions, which he argues unfold visions of the good life that are characterized by idealism, moralism, and parochialism. But rather than simply opposing these flawed visions of the good life with his own set of alternative prescriptions, Ochieng argues that it is critically important to step back and understand the stakes of the question. Those stakes, he suggests, are to be found only through a social ontology – a comprehensive and in-depth account of the political, economic, and cultural structures that mark the boundaries and limits of life in the twenty-first century. It is only in light of this social ontology that Ochieng then proffers an alternative normative account of the good society and the good life – which he spells out as emergent from ecological embeddedness; social entanglement; embodied encounter; and aesthetic engenderment. At once sweeping and rigorous, incisive and subtle, original and revisionary, this book does more than just appeal to intellectuals and scholars across the humanities and social sciences – rather, it opens up the academic disciplines to a whole new landscape of exploration into the biggest and most pressing questions animating the human experience.

1 “Think Relationally, Act Structurally”

A Social Ontology of the Good Society

1 Introduction

The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess.

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

A recent debate between Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Ajume Wingo, two of Africa’s most prominent philosophers, offers an illuminating entry into the state of politico-ethical theory in contemporary African philosophy. Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne rejects claims by Orientalists and postcolonial cultural nationalists that particular civilizations have ownership of particular values. In an insightful critique of the then Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, he skillfully demonstrates the tensions at the heart of the charter’s attempt to reconcile individual rights and communal rights. For Diagne, the charter’s insistence on “the duties of the individual vis-à-vis the community” raises the specter that freedom of conscience and speech will be subordinated or sacrificed to the dictates of the “community” (which Diagne notes is conflated in sections of the charter to the national security state). Diagne then brilliantly shatters the myth that African traditions univocally affirm a communal ethic. To do this, he turns to what he describes as the “most important and ancient document on human rights in Africa,” the thirteenth-century Malian document, the Oath of the Manden. Citing passages in the Manden oath, Diagne concludes that the Oath “is straightforwardly individualistic, because every life is individual and unique.”¹

The Cameroonian philosopher Ajume Wingo offered a sharp rebuttal to Diagne’s argument. According to Wingo, Diagne’s interpretation of human rights as “truly and naturally the rights of the individual” is possible only by adopting “the concept of an ahistorical person, who stands over and above prejudices and the relics of habits and cultures.”² Wingo argues that while citizens in Western liberal polities can afford to conceive of themselves as isolated individuals, such is not the case in many societies in Africa where familial networks are critical to survival and freedom.

What is notable about the debate between Diagne and Wingo is the manner in which it sharply brings into relief the conflicting commitments of two rival schools of thought in African political and meta-ethical theory. The first, call it the communal school, argues for a conception of ethics that is social, ultimately intelligible only against the background of a particular tradition or history. Against this, the second school, call it the transcendental school, advances ethical theories whose mode of address has been to the human individual and which claim universal reach to all humans. Nonetheless, the debate does more than simply rehash some of the commonplaces of the debate. Diagne’s close reading of the Oath of the Manden brings to light previously neglected documents that can reconfigure African philosophical debate. Wingo, for his part, shows that the communal argument is anchored in more than “tradition”; he shows the contextual exigencies in Africa that made communalism particularly attractive to many Africans.

Still, difficulties persist in both schools of thought. The communal accounts too often take for granted “tradition” without accounting for their constructedness and existence in time. The upshot is either a reactionary floundering against contemporary behavioral norms or futile nostalgia for a lost age. Moreover, these communal accounts construct monolithic views of “tradition” and thus cannot account for the contestation and conflict coursing through all cultural formations. Lastly, these accounts offer no convincing responses as to why moral responsibility and concern ought to be bounded by communal boundaries; that is, why morality ought to be demarcated by communal borders rather than, say, solidarity with all creatures.

But the second, transcendental accounts are not without difficulties either. The major argument of transcendental accounts is that it is the “individual” that matters. The individual matters qua human and not qua culture, or race, or ethnicity, or gender, or sexuality, or class, or able-bodiedness, or religion. This argument therefore is made plausible by abstracting from all the factors that are considered contingent about the human and positing a shared attribute that all humans purportedly share. The problem, however, is that this abstractionism ends up being an idealization of the human. For example, dominant transcendental accounts lay claim to certain capacities – such as rationality – as the genius loci of the human. Because humans possess rationality, it is claimed, they are endowed with certain rights. But the upshot, however, is that subjects deemed lacking in this attribute are either not engaged with as “fully human” or are the deviant foils against which moral agents are compared. For example, Africans and other oppressed groups – women, people with severe intellectual disabilities, the poor – have historically been characterized as lacking rational capacities. The result is that transcendentalism, for all its vaunted universalistic pretensions, is far more parochial than it lets on.

Of course, many transcendentalists will argue that capacities such as rationality are best seen not as idealizations but as ideals, what humans ought to aim for. There is still a problem with this, however. It is the case that to really account for vast swathes of human behavior, one needs to understand cognitive and motivational capacities and how these are deployed in actual, empirical contexts. By rushing too fast to proclaim particular principles as ideals, transcendentalist accounts prevent an engagement with humans as they are and, crucially, why they are the way they are. In other words, by deductively moving from what are taken as self-evident universal maxims, transcendentalists short-circuit empirical and historical contextualization that can inform us about actually existing human social behavior, the kind of detailed study of humans that may provide explanations – rather than simply commandments or imperatives – for human behavior and belief. Commentators who ignore the embodied capacities of humans and the earthly social contexts within which human behavior gains intelligibility and meaning thus end up hectoring mortal humans for constantly failing to live up to the moralist’s standards.³ The point, then, is that it is only on pain of windy moralism and empty formalism that structures of embodiment – of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, class, sexuality, ability – can be waved away.

In this chapter, I make a case for a critical and normative theory of the “good society.” The chapter begins by outlining a social ontology of society. I argue that an adequate political theory consists in the articulation of five analytically distinct but interrelated dimensions: structure; subjectivity; power/ideology; agency; and normativity. As the epigraph above indicates, my argument proceeds by seeking to shift the terrain of critical argumentation. I argue that it is only against the background of a social ontology that a normative account of the good society ought to be envisioned. Such a normative account of the good society – which I shall call a chronotopian political imagination – advances a new historiography; calls for a reimagining of political praxis; conceives of society in resolutely naturalistic terms; and proffers a vision of agency as oriented toward restructurative justice.

2 Mapping Social Ontology

2.1 Social Structure

In the beginning was relationship.

Martin Buber

Societies are emergent and are constituted through structures. By structures, I mean a complex of institutions that socialize and direct persons into regularized dispositional postures and patterns of behavior and response, conferring differential powers and distributing differential constraints on agents, and establishing contexts for the identification and contestation of material resources.

Social structures are therefore material institutions and behavioral complexes; that is, are not singular substances but rather consist of the interanimation of differing formations – institutions, material resources, subjectivities, fields of activity – none of which are reducible to one another. There are at least three salient dimensions of social structures that demand elaboration. First, social structures are embedded in historical time. The notion of being in time refers to the fact that structures exist within an ongoing diachrony. The second is that structures are situated in spatial relationships. In other words, structures are always complexly related to other structures. Third, social structures are constituted by agents’ practices – understood here as the distillation of agents’ self-understanding or intentions, ideologies, embodied activity, relationships with other creatures, and so on.

To be sure, time, space, and agency must be grasped as conjunctural. Mikhail Bakhtin offers a compelling description of this situatedness in time and space in his coinage of the chronotope “(literally, ‘time space’),” that is, “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.”⁴ However, Bakhtin’s term “chronotope” does not sufficiently capture the third dimension to the intersection of space and time: that of agency. By agency, I mean to refer to the ensemble of temporal and spatial events as these reverberate with differential effects, legacies and heritages; social and individual action; and agents’ phenomenologies, day-to-day meanings, understandings and practices.

History, in other words, has both an objective as well as a subjective dimension. It is both the causal events and objects that happen to people and, crucially, people’s stories, imaginings, interpretations of what happened and is happening to them. It is specifically because of the dimension of agency that I wish to modify Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” to chronotopia. This modification brings attention to the specifically normative aspect of agency by linking it to the term “utopia,” the moment at which experiences of space and time intersect in an embodied, performed praxis. Time is not simply “homogenous, empty time” – it is experienced and lived. Agents inevitably experience (whether or not they are conscious of this fact) their lives in a certain sequence, also again differentially described (for example, “birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death” or “young” and “old”). Similarly, space is not simply static nothingness – it is experienced, on the one hand, as extension, dimension, and infinity and on the other hand as boundaries, frontiers, and limits. Thus the portmanteau word chronotopia designates how structures are emergent from within history (time) as this is imbricated and bounded by horizons (space) of the possible (agency).

The first implication of a consideration of structures as chronotopian – at the intersection of history, space, and agency – is that structures are subject to a great deal of contingency. The finer grained explanatory dynamics in the constitution of groups are various. Causal reasons for the emergence of groups include functional ones such as security, coordination and division of labor, and social companionship. But such functionalist reasons neither exhaust the causal explanations for the emergence of groups nor are absolutely predictive of the particular structural form that govern the trajectory and stratifications of collective interaction. Emile Durkheim has pointed out, for example, that religious formations are explainable in large part not only to functional reasons – such as coordination – but also to the frisson of affect created by collective interaction.⁵ Durkheim’s argument is not, as it is usually interpreted, that religious formations are primary and more elemental than other social kinds of collectivities (which are then simply derivative). Rather, Durkheim’s point is that religious formations are fully explainable as emergent from social processes – coordination needs, deep-rooted socialization, experiential and phenomenological desires. And yet even Durkheim does not do justice to the fact that structures are also emergent from the sheer struggles for power and dominance and attendant conscription of subjects into identities through socialization, conquest, and inertia. Moreover, even though structures shape agents’ courses of action – in part through socializing agents to behave in particular ways and through exerting pressures on agents through incentives and punishments – such pressures are not absolute. Humans exist in time and live forwards and thus inevitably improvise and rearticulate “traditional” strictures. Moreover, they often contest imbalances in power.

Additionally, the causal explanations and trajectory of structural formations is by no means attributable solely to human initiative. Structures are also complexly impacted by natural history. Humans who establish societies are subject to a great deal of unpredictable vicissitudes – the availability of natural resources; natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, death and disease; and complex interactions with other organisms and creatures. The intersection of the emergence of structures from the flux of natural historical topographies and events and agents’ intentional actions means that no structure is therefore simply “natural” in the sense of being preordained by extra-historical or super-historical factors – be it supernatural gods or Hegel’s History. Creaturely history on earth is irreducibly inflected with luck, chance, randomness.

The second implication of embeddedness in time is that structures are, in effect, layered sediments from the detritus of previous structures and the innovative practices of agents. Structures are neither pure kinds nor natural kinds. Social formations are emergent from older institutions that are sometimes deeply in conflict with and at other times stubborn residual appendages of “newer” apparatuses of governance. This means that the layered sedimentation of structural formation is paradoxically durable and precarious. Older apparatuses are often drawn upon to stabilize or legitimate apparatuses of governance or can serve as fault lines for pitched battles over power and the distribution of resources.

Third, structures are interanimated. I use the term interanimation to refer to the complex connections and entanglements of structures with other structures. No structure, in other words, exists in a vacuum; no structure is reducible to another structure; and no structure simply “mirrors” or “reflects” another. Call the largest structures social vectors: these can be identified as the vectors of politics, economics, and culture. Within these vectors, there exist various institutions. The term interanimation captures the plural forms of connection among vectors (politics, economics, and culture) and the interanimation of institutions within and across these fields. Structures are embedded (in the sense that structures are emergent from particular ecological and historical contexts); sedimented (in the sense that the historical debris of previous structures continue to exert a residual force and power on the dominant and emergent contemporary structures); articulated (in the sense that structures are complexly entangled in relations of reinforcement, collision, and contradiction); inscripted (in the sense that structures leave imprints or traces on other structures, often by setting the terms, norms, or boundaries on participants); reticulated (in the sense that structures merge or absorb other structures); imbricated (in the sense that structures can overlap against one another in relations of mutuality and antagonism); dirempted (in the sense that structures can be split or cloven into ostensibly opposed yet mutually constitutive entities, for example, the “public” versus the “private”); homologous (in the sense that participants across differing structures can share affective resonances and recognitions); consilient (in the sense that structural relationships can go beyond homology and involve material solidarity or mutual reinforcement); contrapuntal (the resistance or discordance of a structure against other structures); and reificated (the naturalization and mystification of structures, including the increased opacity of structures and the manner in which structures grow increasingly closed off from entry or exit).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Groundwork for the Infraphysics of Practice: The Good Society and the Good Life in North Atlantic and African Philosophy
• 1. “Think Relationally, Act Structurally”: A Social Ontology of the Good Society
• 2. Chronotopes: Archaeologies and Landscapes of the Good Society
• 3. Creaturely Value: A Meta-Ethics of the Good Life
• 4. Emergent Normativity: The Good Life as the Articulation of Ground Projects
• Conclusion: The Owl of Minerva at Noon: Imagining Good Societies and Good Lives
• Index