Uses of Philosophy
Critical and Postcritical Interventions in the Philosophical Canon
Introduction
This paper encourages academic philosophers in the Netherlands[1] to consider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? The answer to the first question is no longer self-evident. For the past few decades, the canons operative in the humanities have been under attack for being too male, too white, and too Western. Within the disciplines of literature (Morrissey 2005), history (Grever and Stuurman 2007), and the arts (Brzyski 2007), the self-evidence of what is read, studied and taught is a thing of the past. Philosophy forms no exception in this regard: its canon has come under increasing pressure both inside and outside academia (Dabashi 2015; Van Norden 2017; Tyson 2018). In the Netherlands, the canon debate has been given a recent impetus by the publication of a series of articles about reforming the ‘dead white males’ canon for the history of philosophy (Ierna 2020; 2021; 2022). Responses to such a reform show great division between those who defend the canon as it stands, emphasizing the value of tradition (Molenaar 2020; Drayer 2021; Dros 2022; Doorman 2022), and those who agree the philosophical canon should be more inclusive, stressing the richness of diversity (Verburgt 2021; Booy and Varekamp 2021). Meanwhile, some have drawn attention to the limits of diversification (Dhawan 2017) and have instead challenged the very idea of a canon for philosophy (Bright 2020; Ierna 2022).[2]
To move this conversation forward, one needs to consider and respect the concerns of each of these parties. We cannot simply do away with Kant, for instance, but we cannot close our eyes to his sexism and racism either. Hence, we have to reconsider how we study and teach particular philosophers. And if we want to move beyond the canon, we also have to reevaluate why we study and teach certain texts in the first place. In the remainder of this paper, I address these two questions. First, how do we study and teach? This paper confronts three approaches that provide an answer to that question. The first is deconstruction: a way of reading initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that focusses on contradictory and marginal aspects of philosophical texts. The second is postcolonial-feminism: a critical movement within the humanities which demonstrates how the androcentric, ethnocentric, and Eurocentric biases of the philosophical tradition have led to the exclusion of various social identities. The Indian scholar Gayatri Spivak has critically adapted deconstruction for these purposes. Although both of these approaches focus on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in canonical philosophical texts, they recognize that one cannot do away with tradition: we still have to read Kant; we just have to read him in a non-traditional way. Hence in the first and second section of the paper, I provide a brief outline of what such a non-traditional way might entail.
Deconstruction and postcolonial-feminism are confronted with a third approach, which is called ‘postcritique.’ This is both a theory and method of reading and interpretation, coined by literary scholar Rita Felski, that opposes critical or suspicious forms of reading, and instead seeks to reveal how texts can be seen as actors which create various kinds of attachments in present-day readers. What if we would translate this theory within the discipline of philosophy? If we would transpose Felski’s project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy? That would certainly force us to reconsider why we study and teach certain texts in the first place. In the third and final section of this paper, then, I consider alternatives for the justification criterium of canonicity, such as the capacity of philosophical texts to change how we think and feel, to enchant, shock, or intrigues us, or to assist us in addressing problems we currently care about. I conclude by discussing how these criteria might reconcile the different parties in the canon debate.
Unity/Multiplicity: Derrida’s Deconstruction
How do we read, study, and teach? This is the central question of this first section and the next. I have selected the work of Derrida and Spivak to provide an answer to it, as they agree with those who argue for the importance of the philosophical tradition, but problematize a traditional way of reading it. While Derrida and Spivak continue to read and interpret canonical texts, they do so in a non-traditional way, by focusing on multiplicity rather than unity (Derrida), or historical and political context rather than just philosophical arguments (Spivak). Both have worked under the flag of deconstruction.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Derrida (1967a) coined the term ‘deconstruction’ for his project of interrogating and problematizing Western metaphysics, insofar as it attempts to master reality by theoretical means. According to Derrida, this desire for control manifests itself in a variety of ways. One of them is to demarcate that which is allegedly ‘proper’ to philosophy, and to exclude everything beyond these self-defined limits (Derrida 1972a). Another is the search for principles and fundamentals which create order and stability (Derrida 1967b). On several occasions, Derrida (1967a; 1972a; 1984a; 2019) has remarked that the traditional way of reading and interpreting Western philosophy is directed at gathering together the unity/essence of a thinking, a single text, or an oeuvre. For him, this is yet another example of a metaphysical desire for theoretical mastery.
Let us elucidate Derrida’s observation with an example. In each of the texts mentioned, Derrida’s standard case study is Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger has two seminal books on Nietzsche, that are definingly called ‘Nietzsche I’ (1996) and ‘Nietzsche II’ (1997), in which he presents Nietzsche as ‘the last metaphysician’, because, arguably, in the end Nietzsche develops a metaphysics of will to power. Derrida argues, in turn, that this interpretation of Nietzsche is guided by a ‘unifying’ tendency: what Heidegger tries to do, is to read Nietzsche in such way that in the end, everything he says can be reduced to one great thought, which is that of the will to power, or that of the eternal return—for Heidegger these are different expressions of the same thought. It is in this move, in this strategy of reading that tries to find the unity of a thought, that Derrida takes Heidegger to exemplify a desire for mastery and control, which he also refers to as logocentrism (1967a; 1984a; 2019).
It seems to me that this way of reading is still very much present within our current academic milieu. Take, for instance, a standard introductory course to Plato. Usually, this starts with a short biographical sketch of Plato’s life, and then turns to what is considered to be the guiding thread throughout Plato’s work, viz. his theory of ideas. Subsequently, some specific sections of Plato’s dialogues are selected to be studied by students, in which this theory of ideas is particularly well-illustrated (e.g., the allegory of the cave from the Republic, and the passages about the ‘ladder of love’ from the Symposium). Will we find something in these dialogues, then, that might contradict the previously established unity of Plato’s thought? It seems to me that we will likely find this ‘essence’ reflected in the dialogues—from which it was assembled or gathered in the first place. What if we would start from the heterogeneity of the Platonic dialogues instead (e.g., confronting parts of the Republic with parts of the Parmenides, where Plato, by voice of Socrates, undermines his ‘own’ theory of ideas), and then seek to determine Plato’s relationship to the theory of forms?
In my view, deconstruction can best be understood as a strategy of reading and interpretation that challenges this hermeneutic practice of gathering together the heterogenous elements of a single text or entire oeuvre into a coherent totality. In his seminal reading of Plato, for example, Derrida (1972b) has attempted to demonstrate how Plato’s dialogues structurally undermine ‘Platonism’, understood as a hierarchical system of divisions between ideas and representations, philosophers and sophists, body and soul, etc. Moreover, throughout his career, Derrida (1967a; 1984a; 1984b; 1994; 2019) has continued to contrast his own readings of Nietzsche, that highlight the multiplicity of positions, names and voices inhabiting Nietzsche’s works, with those of Heidegger. In a similar deconstructive spirit, Derrida has shown Freud’s corpus to be replete with contradictions and has drawn attention to the multiplicity of heirs claiming the name and heritage of ‘Marx’ (see Derrida 1993; 1997; 2002). What connects these and other cases is deconstruction’s focus on the written philosophical inheritance, where it discovers tensions, unthoughts, and above all, a multiplicity of voices that resists homogenization. In fact, this heterogeneity at the level of written texts is what animates all debates on questions of interpretation amongst philosophers—which means that as long as a unifying tendency within research and education prevails, the philosophical community structurally undermines its own conditions of possibility.
Exclusion/Inclusion: Spivak’s Postcolonial-Feminism
Let us turn to the second approach; a second answer to how we might study and teach. It is only after deconstruction has reoriented our attention towards the internal logic of texts, that particular philosophers may be problematized for the sexist, racist and/or imperialist gestures accompanying their writings, and that othertexts may be read. Now this two-sided project, I would argue, has defined feminist and postcolonial approaches to the philosophical canon. Since both sides of this project can be found in the work of the Indian literary scholar Gayatri Spivak, I would like to dwell on it for a moment. In the wake of deconstruction in the 1980s and 90s, Spivak has exposed dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in the relationship between the European tradition on the one hand and what she calls the ‘subaltern’ on the other. The subaltern is a concept borrowed from the Italian neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci to designate what Gramsci (2014) called ‘social groups in the margins of history’ (Spivak 2021), which can qualified in a variety of ways. From a feminist and postcolonial perspective, Spivak (1988; 1999) has shown how the androcentric, Eurocentric, and ethnocentric biases of the philosophical tradition continue to silence the subaltern. This tradition has systematically denied the Other the position of speaking subject, Spivak argues, and her texts are dedicated to finding ways for the subaltern to speak—and to be heard, for example in contexts of education (Spivak 2009; 2012) and translation (Spivak 2022).
Actually, Spivak first made a name for herself by a now widely celebrated translation of Derrida’s Grammatology (1967a) into English, to which she added a long and influential preface. In fact, I would say that the profound influence of deconstruction on Spivak’s postcolonial-feminist project can hardly be overestimated. Derrida, for instance, is the only contemporary French intellectual that comes of relatively unscathed in Spivak’s (1988) seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in contrast to Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. Moreover, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 1999), references to Derrida and deconstruction are paramount, both in the main text and its footnotes. The book also contains an appendix titled ‘The Setting to Work of Deconstruction’, in which Spivak attempts to reconstruct the development of deconstruction throughout Derrida’s works. Now since Spivak is explicitly engaged with canonical philosophical texts in the first part of this book (definingly called ‘Philosophy’), it will be my focus in the remainder of this section.
Let us return to our guiding question: how do we study and teach? The dominant reading of the history of philosophy is, arguably, one that dismisses signs of sexism, racism, and/or imperialism as somehow unimportant, inessential, or marginal. Usually, we bracket the historical and textual context of certain philosophical ideas, in order to focus instead on certain arguments we deem important to write about or teach students about (Krogh 2022). Some have called this the ‘streamlined version of the history of philosophy’, where the proper name of a philosopher is taken to be a placeholder not for what they actually wrote, but for what are deemed to be their best ideas or arguments (Bernasconi 2003). Spivak (1999) does something very different. Setting deconstruction to work in Kant’s third critique, she demonstrates how Kant’s system claims to be universal, but is actually founded on the exclusion of specific indigenous peoples. What Spivak’s reading attempts to show, are precisely the historical and political conditions of possibility for Kant’s claims to universality, as well as the ‘philosophical’ positions that contain what she calls an ‘axiomatics of imperialism’. When Kant claims that the existence of certain inhabitants of South-America and Australia is less natural than others, as he does, then this might serve as a legitimation for colonial subjugation.
Subsequently, Spivak (1999) offers us a parallel reading of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics on the one hand, and the Bhagavad Gita on the other, in which she seeks to supplement Hegel’s reading of the Hindu scripture with her own deconstructive one. This is already a remarkable intercultural dialogue in itself, but Spivak’s aim is to show that whilst Hegel invokes the Gita to exclude India from the teleological dialectics of history, the Gita itself contains dialectical elements which can be manipulated for nationalist and/or colonial purposes. Finally, then, Spivak turns to the afterlife of a notorious statement by Marx on ‘the Asiatic Mode of Production’, in order to render visible how Marx, along similar lines as Hegel, excludes Asia from his historical materialism. Since Asia does not have the capitalist system, so Marx’s reasoning goes, it cannot take part in the revolution and attain a state of freedom. According to Spivak (1999), this is also the kind of reasoning used to legitimate imperialist intervention in Third-World countries. In each of these readings, Spivak demonstrates how the philosophical theories of Kant, Hegel, and Marx are inextricably connected to the prejudices of their time, which, via these canonical texts, continue to influence the present.
To recall, I have selected these two authors—Derrida and Spivak—because they agree with those that argue for the inescapability and importance of tradition, but at the same time, they recognize the feminist and postcolonial concerns of those that have problematized the canon, and rightly so. What both Derrida and Spivak oppose is a traditional reading of the history of Western philosophy that starts from the putative unity and neutrality of the works of canonical authors. And what they oppose to it, is a deconstructive approach to what we read, study and teach. I am not arguing that we all have to become deconstructivists—in the next section I will explain why not. My point is rather that when we want to reconsider the question of how we study and teach, the work of Derrida and Spivak provides us with valuable, if not indispensable, resources.
Critique/Postcritique: Felski’s Postcritique
The attentive reader may have noticed that I announced I will confront three approaches that provide an answer to the question ‘how do we study and teach?’. This third approach is called ‘postcritique’. Within the field of literary and cultural studies—if not the humanities in general—the past decade is marked by an attempt to develop approaches to cultural objects that move beyond the dominance of ‘critique’ in its various manifestations. Within this context, Felski (2015) has recently coined the term ‘postcritique’ as an alternative for the omnipresent method and style she calls—drawing on Paul Ricœur—a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Felski joins two highly influential essays here—‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (2003) by queer theorist Eve K. Sedgwick and ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ (2004) by philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour —in challenging the hegemony of interpretative approaches that start from suspicion and critique.
In this endeavor, deconstruction is criticized for its emphasis on contradictions, instabilities, and foreclosures, as well as for its excessive vigilance and abundant use of scare quotes (Felski 2011; 2015; Anker and Felski 2017). Meanwhile, postcolonial-feminism is taken to task for its focus on ideological oppression and social inequalities, and for its persistent wariness of the reader’s own complicity (Felski 2008; 2015; Anker and Felski 2017). This position is all the more remarkable, considering the fact that Felski’s first books are all contributions to feminist theory. Nevertheless, Felski renounces feminist critique no less than deconstructive and postcolonial critique, because of their investment in denaturalization, their outright negativity, and their attitude of analytical detachment (Felski 2008; 2011; Anker and Felski 2017).
Yet, one might question whether this characterization is appropriate. Indeed, Derrida and Spivak are focused on destabilizing and denaturalizing, but both have resisted the idea that their approach would be negative (Derrida 1992; 2005; Spivak 2014). In fact, present-day critics have suggested that Felski’s postcritique may be based on caricatures (Robbins 2017). Conversely, one could ask whether postcritique could be regarded as a hermeneutics of trust? These doubts might compel us to consider what method or style—critical or postcritical—would be best suited to approach texts within and beyond the philosophical canon. Needless to say, critical readinghas yielded valuable results, also—or perhaps especially so—in postcolonial-feminist contexts, and it will maintain its relevance for the decades to come. But when it comes to reading texts from a diversity of authors and traditions, a largely critical or suspicious interpretative attitude seems to be less appropriate.
Besides a vigorous debunking of critique, Felski’s recent writings (from 2008 up until the present) are marked by a rather constructive spirit that tries to develop new forms of aesthetic engagement. From Latour (2007), Felski takes the insight that texts have agency: they are actors that can make an impact on the world by making connections, just like humans, animals, or things can (Felski 2011; 2015; 2020). It is because texts, like all artworks, are actors, that they can affect us and create various forms of attachment: they can move us to act in a certain way, make us feel a wide range of emotions, and change our ways of looking at the world (Felski 2008; 2011; 2015; 2020; Felski and Anker 2017). From the methods of Actor-Network Theory and phenomenology, Felski derives the inducement to describe these experiences, giving rise to novel ways of reading that take texts to be co-actors rather than reducing them to something they supposedly express. In fact, Felski replaces the explanation of texts or other works of art with an effort to describewhat she calls the ‘uses’ of literature (Felski 2008) and art more generally (Felski 2020). The guiding question of her postcritical project is thus not what works of literature/art mean, but what they do.
What if we would translate Felski’s theory within the discipline of philosophy? What if we would transpose her project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy? That would certainly force us to reconsider why we study and teach certain texts in the first place—which is my third, and last question. Usually, answers to this question resort to arguments of canonicity, whether in the form of historical influence (we read Plato because, as Whitehead famously said, the European philosophical tradition is nothing but ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’), or philosophical quality (we read Ryle and Wittgenstein because they proposed such innovative arguments). But could we not also provide justification criteria for our selection of texts without recourse to what Felski (2008) calls ‘the canon-worship of the past’? Such criteria would depart from the relevance of particular philosophical texts for the present-day reader rather than their canonicity. As Felski (2011; 2015) remarks, this would involve a rethinking of the relationship between past and present: we would no longer read texts because they belong to a certain historical period or context (such as ‘modern philosophy’ or ‘German idealism’), but because they appeal to us in the present, as they somehow affectively or cognitively transform us or assist us in addressing questions we currently care about.
Conclusion
The goal of this paper has been to invite academic philosophers in the Netherlands to reconsider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? I used the first question as an entry into the current debate about the canons within the humanities, and the philosophical canon in particular. In the past decades, the body of literature, philosophy, and works of art known as the Western canon has come under increasing pressure for being dominated by white male viewpoints. In the Netherlands, the canon debate has been given a recent impetus by the publication of a series of articles about reforming this ‘dead white males’ canon for the history of philosophy. I observed that responses to such a reform show great division between those who defend the canon as it stands, stressing the value of tradition, those who agree the philosophical canon should be more inclusive, stressing the richness of diversity, and finally those who have challenged the very idea of a canon for philosophy.
To answer my second question (how do we study and teach?), I turned to Derrida’s deconstruction and Spivak’s postcolonial-feminism, because they share both a sense of the value of tradition, and a sense for the concerns of those who have criticized this tradition for its limitations and biases. I have argued that Derrida and Spivak both oppose a traditional reading of the history of Western philosophy that starts from the alleged unity and neutrality of canonical philosophical texts. What they oppose to it, is a deconstructive approach to what we read, study and teach, which highlights a multiplicity of voices rather than a unity of thought, and historical and political context rather than merely arguments. Felski’s postcritique then enabled us to reflect on the hegemony of interpretative approaches that start from suspicion or critique, like the deconstructive ones practiced by both Derrida and Spivak. I briefly discussed Felski’s own approach to literature and art, which starts from the idea that texts have agency and can create various kinds of attachments in present-day readers, to subsequently describe these readerly experiences or ‘uses’ of literature.
Now, if we want to move beyond the canon, we must not only reconsider what and how we read, but also why we read, study and teach certain philosophical texts in the first place—my third and last question. I argued that by transposing Felski’s project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy, we may be able to develop new justification criteria for the selection of texts within research and education. These criteria would depart from the relevance of particular philosophical texts for the present-day reader rather than their canonicity. In some sense, this changes nothing: we can still read texts by authors that are part of the current canon, as long as we can justify their contemporary relevance, thus accommodating those that seek to defend the canon as it stands. In another sense, it changes everything: we are now unshackled from tradition, which allows for the inclusion of forgotten thinkers by making a case for the value of their work—thus accommodating those that emphasize the richness of diversity. To see how this might work, let me conclude this paper with two examples.
Returning to my initial question (what do we study and teach?): we might study and teach on the relationship between the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Franz Fanon; not because de Beauvoir is a woman, and Fanon is a person of color, but because each of them makes us think and feel in a different way. And if we want to teach a course on power, exclusion, and civilization, we probably do well to discuss Foucault, but we might just as well discuss Aimé and Suzanne Césaire; not for political reasons, but for hermeneutical ones, if you will; because their work can enchant, shock, or hook us—to use some Felskian terms. What I am looking for here, is a justification criterium that is neither founded on canonicity, nor on mere representation, but one that is founded on agency and attachment, or ‘use’. The value of philosophy, I would argue, lies at least in part in its uses—which are vital, but understudied. My hope is that transposing Felski’s project within philosophy enables us to fill this lacuna, since it may very well be a path on the way to reconcile the opposing parties in the canon debate.
[1] Since this paper was first presented at the 2023 annual conference of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy, its primary target audience is academic philosophers in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the issues it addresses extend beyond these institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
[2] Although these sources are in Dutch, they are not necessary to make this point: one can find more or less the same positions in the books quoted earlier (or in staff meetings about curriculum reform, for that matter): there are always those who urge for a diversity of perspectives and those who argue for the relevance or the quality of the current canon.
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