Decolonizing Our Thinking with Dr. Lewis Gordon

PJ is joined by philosopher and author Dr. Lewis Gordon. Together, they discuss colonialism, language and meaning.

Show Notes

In this episode of the Chasing Leviathan podcast, Dr. Lewis Gordon, head of the philosophy department at UCONN, answers the questions: What is colonization? What is decolonization? The conversation ranges from what is true philosophy to Sartre to gazing at the stars.

Dr. Lewis Gordon will return in the upcoming months to Chasing Leviathan to talk about his newest book, Fear of Black Consciousness. If you want to dig deeper into Dr. Gordon's thought, you can preorder the book here 👉 https://amzn.to/3FSktj8

Or check out our blog on www.candidgoatproductions.com

Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. When it rises up, the mighty are terrified. Nothing on earth is its equal. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud.

These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop.

Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.

What is Chasing Leviathan?

Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.

[pj_wehry]: Hello, and welcome to chasing the Viathan, I'm your host Pjary, and I'm here today

[pj_wehry]: with Doctor Lewis Gordon, Uh, he is the professor in department, head of

[pj_wehry]: philosophy of the philosoy department in Yukon, and he is the editor of the

[pj_wehry]: American Philosophical Association blog series Black issues in Philosophy with

[pj_wehry]: Jane Anna Gordon, and the book series Global Critical, Caribbean Thought, and also

[pj_wehry]: also Ja, uh, Jane Anna Gordon, the journal Philosophy and Global affairs, Uh, he

[pj_wehry]: specializes in Afriican philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, Philosophy of

[pj_wehry]: science, Um, race, racism, philosophy, culture, uh, Doctor Lewis Gordon, I mean,

[pj_wehry]: there's probably ten twelve more topics you know, Um, broad range, So happy to

[pj_wehry]: have you on here today. and Uh, want to discuss with you. You did a talk in Brazil

[pj_wehry]: on Uh, decolonizing black aesthetics and uh, just want to say one. Thank you for

[pj_wehry]: having you on here and two tells a little bit about yourself and uh. how you

[pj_wehry]: became interested in these various topics.

[lewis_gordon]: Well,

[lewis_gordon]: to begin with, delighted to be here.

[lewis_gordon]: and even though there are a lot of areas in which I specialize, they all

[lewis_gordon]: connect over.

[lewis_gordon]: they all connect on a very simple set of questions that are really difficult

[lewis_gordon]: to answer.

[lewis_gordon]: And

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: and, and the two basic questions are what is the human beings relationship to

[lewis_gordon]: reality,

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: And

[lewis_gordon]: what do we do about the many unfortunate ways we have of evading it.

[lewis_gordon]: So I do a lot on human invasion of reality.

[lewis_gordon]: And as as you could imagine,

[lewis_gordon]: it's not only in trying to develop our relationship to reality, why we develop

[lewis_gordon]: Phoy, science, et Ctera, but it's also in our effort to evade that we haveed

[lewis_gordon]: alls of pernicious things, ranging from racism to

[lewis_gordon]: sexism to colonialism. But there's an I, but there is more because.

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: Unfortunately,

[lewis_gordon]: we also use the sciences in philosophy to evade reality,

[lewis_gordon]: and the very fact that philosophy, science, and many other areas of research

[lewis_gordon]: were rallied in forces of human evasion, leads to a crisis for them, because

[lewis_gordon]: the question of that point is, are they still justifiable

[lewis_gordon]: And in my work I talk about the problem of justification

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: in need of justification,

[lewis_gordon]: in need of justification,

[lewis_gordon]: So you could see that that little metawist there, but in, but

[pj_wehry]: yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: in terms of me of if I am that you know, it's a very funny thing,

[lewis_gordon]: Um,

[lewis_gordon]: the way I do philosophy,

[lewis_gordon]: and not just. Philosophy, many other areas of thought

[lewis_gordon]: really connect through to what I just said, because part of

[pj_wehry]: mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: the arrogance and the problem of the sciences and of philosophy, is the

[lewis_gordon]: presupposition that other modes of addressing reality somehow do so in an

[lewis_gordon]: inferior way,

[lewis_gordon]: and this is part of a more pernicious colonial

[lewis_gordon]: view of knowledge.

[lewis_gordon]: Whereas, if you notice in my writings or even in my lectures, varieties of

[lewis_gordon]: resources,

[lewis_gordon]: including other disciplines and other modes of expression, come to the foure,

[lewis_gordon]: not as anciilliary, not as garnish, not as yetought been a decoration, but as

[lewis_gordon]: central parts of argumentation.

[lewis_gordon]: So,

[lewis_gordon]: and this is connected to

[lewis_gordon]: a a realization that goes all the way back to childhood

[lewis_gordon]: and that reality' just always greater than we are.

[lewis_gordon]: But the other thing about, but the other thing about realities were realities

[lewis_gordon]: Also wondrous.

[lewis_gordon]: Often when I am asked to talk about

[lewis_gordon]: who I am and what brought me to this,

[lewis_gordon]: I never at all thought about becoming a philosopher.

[lewis_gordon]: I was born in the island of Jamaica

[lewis_gordon]: and I was born, and you know life is a weird way of making everything

[lewis_gordon]: symbolic. I was born a year of Jamaica's legal independence. Nineteen sixty

[lewis_gordon]: two. I was born in May, and the island was legally independent in August,

[lewis_gordon]: and

[lewis_gordon]: in the interim it's funny how things go full circle because I was a child who,

[lewis_gordon]: um,

[lewis_gordon]: at birth, Uh, the pediatricians inform my mother that I would not live for

[lewis_gordon]: longer than two weeks because I had many disabilities,

[lewis_gordon]: so my

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: grandmother came down and expected to be at a baby's funeral.

[lewis_gordon]: A week goes by two weeks,

[lewis_gordon]: and then three months, and by three months I started speaking and so my mother

[lewis_gordon]: said, Yeah, but it it sounds like it's It's all unusual, but the thing Ive

[lewis_gordon]: subsequently learned is that many children if they are brought home to um,

[lewis_gordon]: households with a lot of women in them or a lot of girls tend to acquire

[lewis_gordon]: speech early. I've met

[pj_wehry]: huh,

[lewis_gordon]: many people who had the same story of speaking well before the age of one, and

[lewis_gordon]: they all have the same story. Uh, they were. They were in a

[lewis_gordon]: environment where the moment one woman or a girl puts down the child, another

[lewis_gordon]: one picks the child up and they start playing and talking with the child, And

[lewis_gordon]: this is enter entry into the world of speech.

[lewis_gordon]: So

[lewis_gordon]: one of the things from that

[lewis_gordon]: brush or struggle with death

[lewis_gordon]: is that, Um.

[lewis_gordon]: It, and acquiring speech so early it meant that I was processing a lot that

[lewis_gordon]: was around me and Re.

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: the world just seemed so vibrant, so extraordinary and I remembered, I

[lewis_gordon]: remember, so I. My memories go back to three months because of language

[lewis_gordon]: acquisition, but I, I remember

[lewis_gordon]: very distinctly when I was two years old

[lewis_gordon]: and we were visiting. At this point my grandmother had returned to Jamaican

[lewis_gordon]: was. uh. My maternal grandmother was living in an area of Jamaica that was

[lewis_gordon]: very dark. Uh, And and it's because you know Net backxes back in the sixties

[lewis_gordon]: islands, and if you're in Kingston in the main city you have street lights,

[lewis_gordon]: but if you go out into areas by the mountains, it's much darker and I remember

[lewis_gordon]: very distinctly when my uncles and I were walking there, we went through a

[lewis_gordon]: football field, which is the Caribbean way of what Americans call soccer.

[lewis_gordon]: And because all the lights were off in the, all the lights were often in the

[lewis_gordon]: football field. And is this open field?

[lewis_gordon]: Imagine just looking up at the stars

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: without light pollution. It is so amazing, so absolutely amazing that I was

[lewis_gordon]: caught in wonder.

[lewis_gordon]: and from that point on it really struck me how it just extraordinary it is

[lewis_gordon]: that we have the capacity to realize that to see that I could even remember

[lewis_gordon]: right now the way the ear smelled while I was looking up at the sky.

[lewis_gordon]: Now I say this because

[lewis_gordon]: subsequently

[lewis_gordon]: the many things becoming an immigrant to the United States at the age of nine,

[lewis_gordon]: living in the Bronx,

[lewis_gordon]: initial encounters with everything from racism to the violence is a very

[lewis_gordon]: violent

[pj_wehry]: hm, hm,

[lewis_gordon]: country. Ah, attitudes that are antiscial. You know, we live in a country. For

[lewis_gordon]: instance that, unfortunately, our values property over people. Uh, we? what?

[lewis_gordon]: This absurdity of privatevatized health care leads to situation where there

[lewis_gordon]: are people just dying in droves or getting inferior service all for the sake,

[lewis_gordon]: not simply of profit, but that's also connected to the country's racism,

[lewis_gordon]: because historically the people who have less access to the private are the

[lewis_gordon]: people who are black or brown, And so a lot of policies are designed to

[lewis_gordon]: maintain forms of exclusion, and these attitudes continue in the double

[lewis_gordon]: standards. even in school systems. I was speaking with a woman the other day

[lewis_gordon]: who was a physicist, and she and I were just relating this, this reality of

[lewis_gordon]: what it is to have children who are wondrous and love science. I loved science

[lewis_gordon]: when I was a childe. wasn't just thinking about the wonder of the skies. I did

[lewis_gordon]: experiments. I built things, because I was poor. I would create the tools

[lewis_gordon]: myself, and I remembered in the seventh grade when we were talking about

[lewis_gordon]: hydraulics, asking a science teacher about Um, the correlation between

[lewis_gordon]: the question of pressure and what would happen in something organic such as

[lewis_gordon]: muscles or the heart, and he asked me what hell you mean and I said, Well, if

[lewis_gordon]: you can distribute the energy in a certain way, there's going to be a

[lewis_gordon]: conundrum in the hard pumps, because it goes to capillary's veins and

[lewis_gordon]: arteries, And so when that force comes back, it has to have a way of dealing.

[lewis_gordon]: With it, because it's now distributed in a way that will have to create an

[lewis_gordon]: equilibrium back to the art, he said, What a hell you talking about? Could you

[lewis_gordon]: write it down? So I wrote a forty page paper. This was in the seventh grade

[lewis_gordon]: anded to him and he said Ah, A few days later, It's not like that And that was

[lewis_gordon]: it years later. When I visited at school,

[lewis_gordon]: the assistant principal said that that same science teacher had said, He

[lewis_gordon]: thinks he has won a a possible scientific genius or whis kid in the class, but

[lewis_gordon]: its one thesehetto kids, and it it's pointless to mentor them. Now there was a

[lewis_gordon]: little white kid who just simply does regular testing, and in my case, for

[lewis_gordon]: instance, I learn I learned mathematics on my own self taught, and that kid,

[lewis_gordon]: the teachers made sure he went to summer camp for science, music et cetera,

[lewis_gordon]: Whereas I learned music on my own and became a professional musician, I worked

[lewis_gordon]: in

[pj_wehry]: hm, hm,

[lewis_gordon]: communities of jazz musicians et cetera. And what I learned very quickly,

[lewis_gordon]: all right is that there's a profound level of injustice in in in many

[lewis_gordon]: knowledge communities because ▁ultimately, they're not interested in knowledge

[lewis_gordon]: or learning or education. they're interested in preserving a hegery in which

[lewis_gordon]: only certain people yet to represent knowledge, learning et cetera.

[lewis_gordon]: But in my adolescence I was among communities of jazz musicians and jazz

[lewis_gordon]: musicians Don't care what your race is. Whatever they just want to know, you

[lewis_gordon]: can play whether you could smoke.

[lewis_gordon]: And so I got these amazing experiences of getting to be on the stage playing

[lewis_gordon]: with Roy Elderyjr with uh, being being in in Harlem, with you know, people

[lewis_gordon]: around like Billy Taylor, Frank Foster, and this entire world that was based

[lewis_gordon]: on genuine excellence, and at the same time the

[pj_wehry]: hm, Hm.

[lewis_gordon]: contradictions of New York City. Because I was during a period of bussing,

[lewis_gordon]: I've come out of school of seen six blocks of white people with brass

[lewis_gordon]: knuckles, bats, and everything, yelling the end word to keep us out

[lewis_gordon]: all of those things. And but in the midst of it there were always these

[lewis_gordon]: moments that transcend stereotypes or rigid designations of separation. So,

[lewis_gordon]: for instance, even though I'm Jewish from Jamaica, in Jamaica, everybody

[lewis_gordon]: around you, Jes is just a Jamaican, and you see yourself as black people, even

[lewis_gordon]: though my family were from people all over the you know, over the world from

[lewis_gordon]: China, from India, from Jerusalem, Uh,

[lewis_gordon]: from Um. I say Jerusalem, because they left there the nineteenth century, so

[lewis_gordon]: that that time was just Palestine, Uh, from Shannon, Ireland, et cetera, So I

[lewis_gordon]: wasn't in an environment where I was raised with the idea of an ontological

[lewis_gordon]: absolute difference on the basis of our phenotype or looks between me and my

[lewis_gordon]: family members. So within that framework

[lewis_gordon]: one of the things that became very clear

[lewis_gordon]: is that

[lewis_gordon]: while we meet the rigid, there' also the fluid, and in those adolescent years

[lewis_gordon]: as a counterposition to that horrible science teacher was a social studies

[lewis_gordon]: teacher who by and I remember her name to this day Miss Farman, and she said

[lewis_gordon]: to me, there's a book you should read, And she handed me the autobiography of

[lewis_gordon]: Malcolmx

[lewis_gordon]: and I have that. I have many additions, but I have the one she handed me to

[lewis_gordon]: this day,

[pj_wehry]: Oh, of course,

[lewis_gordon]: and in addition to that, my Rostapharian uncles had books by Franz Fanond and

[lewis_gordon]: all everything Black liberation. Even if they were reading, it had in an

[lewis_gordon]: house, so I read em. So, and so what happens is is it showed the power of

[lewis_gordon]: education of learning and all of these people, whether it's how Malikal Shabaz

[lewis_gordon]: Malcolmx, or its Fraancefnona Cabral, or if we are going to deal with Angela

[lewis_gordon]: Davis and the autobiography of Mount of Angela, I'm sorry of Angela Davis and

[lewis_gordon]: Jola Davis, which is really funny because we're very good friends. So it's

[lewis_gordon]: bizarre later in life that I'm hanging out in her kitchen and drinking wine

[lewis_gordon]: with this woman

[lewis_gordon]: who played a central role in changing my life as an adolescent. You know,

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: but um, but the thing that became so clear

[lewis_gordon]: is that idea's matter

[lewis_gordon]: and people who really think reach out to others and I give you one more

[pj_wehry]: mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: story In ends quickly wrapped this part up. Um.

[pj_wehry]: No, it's been great. thank you,

[lewis_gordon]: it was. there's Um. There was a in a ninth grade. I had a a social studies

[lewis_gordon]: teacher by name of Sirquis, Now he was a gay man who, Uh to day I know you, a

[lewis_gordon]: gay bad bagdad. Nobody was walking round. Just say hi. I'm a gay teacher, but,

[lewis_gordon]: but he

[pj_wehry]: right.

[lewis_gordon]: required all of us to read the New York Times every morning to discuss in

[lewis_gordon]: class.

[lewis_gordon]: I was poor. I couldn't afford the New York Times yet, Evenv, at E you out. so

[lewis_gordon]: I told him that, And he thought I was biessing him, So he said Well, He had to

[lewis_gordon]: travel from Uh, the suburbs, Uh, from far Rockaway to come in. Uh, so he reads

[lewis_gordon]: a New York time. He read the New York Times on the train, or he will. I could

[lewis_gordon]: read his, but I'd have to come to school early to do so, so I came into

[lewis_gordon]: school. The I showed up there. I was at five thirty a. M. Ready to pick up to

[lewis_gordon]: read the New York Times, And and I read it very quickly, and after a while he

[lewis_gordon]: and I began to converse, and as our

[lewis_gordon]: conversations went on, he said,

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: So Have you ever read Hagel?

[lewis_gordon]: Have you read Mark? I was like, Who the hell are they?

[lewis_gordon]: and

[pj_wehry]: hotway. I'm sorry. How old are you Ninth grade?

[lewis_gordon]: at the Yeah, at this point I was just just heading on fourteen.

[lewis_gordon]: And and so

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: we started discussing dialectics, Philosophy of history, cons

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: all kinds of concepts about what reality is,

[lewis_gordon]: And God bless him, This was just a beautiful human being who just said, Look

[lewis_gordon]: the complete opposite of that side, opposite of that science teacher. It.

[pj_wehry]: right,

[lewis_gordon]: he. He saw a mind that needed

[pj_wehry]: Mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: to be cultivated, and he did that, And I've been lucky in life to have

[lewis_gordon]: extraordinary teachers. Uh, whether it's

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: music teachers, whether it's my undergraduate mentor, I studied classics with

[lewis_gordon]: him. I also studied,

[pj_wehry]: mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: you know, philosophy, politics, physics, and other things, all the way through

[lewis_gordon]: to my my Uh doctorate, where my advisor was also a man from Yiddish theatre,

[lewis_gordon]: who

[lewis_gordon]: who was absolutely brilliant, who did philosophy and psychiatry, and studied

[lewis_gordon]: medicine and philosophy and sociology, So

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: you could see already in this story as I, I lived in a very relational world,

[lewis_gordon]: But the thing that uh, I was going to say about philosophy the way I'm talking

[lewis_gordon]: about it, not the narrow professional,

[lewis_gordon]: um, um, crap that people do out there, which I argue is not philosophy. It's

[lewis_gordon]: just a market, commodified effort to maintain marketability in the academy,

[lewis_gordon]: but actual philosophy. The thing about actual philosophies,

[lewis_gordon]: the problems, so move you that you don't even realize you're doing it until

[lewis_gordon]: you have to reflect on how to give an account of what you're doing.

[lewis_gordon]: So I did not know throughout my life because we have a short time. I won't get

[lewis_gordon]: into details, but that I was doing philosophy all along all the way from being

[lewis_gordon]: a child looking up at the sky.

[lewis_gordon]: But the reality

[lewis_gordon]: was that

[lewis_gordon]: ▁ultimately philosophy does something very beautiful

[lewis_gordon]: And this is and I realized that when I was uh in the eighties, when I was a

[lewis_gordon]: high school teacher, secondary school teacher, I created a school called a

[lewis_gordon]: Second Chance program, and it was created for young people. Nobody want to

[lewis_gordon]: teach. I was informed

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: these young people are so difficult that if ten per cent of them could get a

[lewis_gordon]: high school diploma be a successful programme,

[lewis_gordon]: we ended up having a eighty five percent success rate.

[lewis_gordon]: And when you have that people want to know how, why, And so I wrote up a whole

[lewis_gordon]: elaborate study. But it struck me when I was writing to study that it was

[lewis_gordon]: something that wasn't

[lewis_gordon]: at that time

[lewis_gordon]: something I had access to that I could articulate in social scientific terms.

[lewis_gordon]: And and what that was is why the programe really worked.

[lewis_gordon]: The reason the programme really worked is because every young person who

[lewis_gordon]: stepped into that room stepped in as a human being,

[lewis_gordon]: and it struck me if you were to ask any of those young people, Are you a human

[lewis_gordon]: being? they'd say absolutely, But then it struck me if they know they're a

[lewis_gordon]: human being,

[lewis_gordon]: then why is it if they're not treated like a human being Day withither, and if

[lewis_gordon]: they're treated like a human being, they grow.

[lewis_gordon]: It seems to be if you know you're a human being, why should that matter? and

[lewis_gordon]: that had me interested in the question of human potential, and human potential

[lewis_gordon]: is linked to the human beings relationship to reality. but it's also limped

[lewis_gordon]: linked to dignity, respect and truth.

[lewis_gordon]: So ▁ultimately, then this is an ongoing theme you'll find in philosophy.

[lewis_gordon]: Not only the philosophy is conventionally understood all the way back to the

[lewis_gordon]: Greek speaking people twenty five hundred years ago, where there is the famous

[lewis_gordon]: Plato's allegory of the cave, right where you to get out of the cave outside

[lewis_gordon]: into reality, but also rather astutely keep going back and forth to persuade

[lewis_gordon]: others about truth and reality,

[lewis_gordon]: but also three two thousand years before them in East Africa, among ancients,

[lewis_gordon]: ranging from Hotep, to Antif, to

[lewis_gordon]: um, um hepset, to Neffraty, to Hadparture, and others, also over in the Peedal

[lewis_gordon]: Peneises,

[lewis_gordon]: what you find that connects all of them

[lewis_gordon]: is that the moment human beings can really think and really reflect, we

[lewis_gordon]: realize how awesome that is, and how

[pj_wehry]: Yeahm,

[lewis_gordon]: absolutely at the same time there is a responsibility that accompanies

[lewis_gordon]: knowledge, and so for me at that moment that is the deeper sense of philosophy

[lewis_gordon]: and connected to. Our topic to day, that is also why philosophy really being

[lewis_gordon]: philosophy is ▁ultimately. de colonial.

[pj_wehry]: so uh, first off, I mean a lot of what you said resonates with me, for instance.

[pj_wehry]: I'd like to loosely define philosophy just etymologically as the love of wisdom,

[pj_wehry]: Like it starts with that that desire that seeing after

[pj_wehry]: so that really strikes accord with me, Because there are things that are done in

[pj_wehry]: the academy that have nothing to do really with philosophy Right And then there

[pj_wehry]: are things that in the academy that do you have to do with philosophy. So it's not

[pj_wehry]: that it's in the academy that makes it philosophy. So that definitely

[pj_wehry]: yeah, I'm sor. I just like walking through this. Um,

[pj_wehry]: really, really, Uh, appreciate it. Uh, as we talk about, um,

[pj_wehry]: uh, you know, even you're talking about the stars. I.

[pj_wehry]: I. I. it's hard for me to explain like a, a lot of people have never truly seen

[pj_wehry]: the Milky Way, you know, like I, I lived in an hour and a half north of Green Bay,

[pj_wehry]: in Wisconsin, so very cold. I remember it being about thirty degrees out, forty

[pj_wehry]: degrees out, and laying on the driveway and looking up, and really seeing the

[pj_wehry]: Milky Way for the first time,

[pj_wehry]: And it's amazing how many people now miss out on that fundamental. What is really

[pj_wehry]: a fundamental human experience of seeing all the stars like that? and what that

[pj_wehry]: does to you? Um, I. I know that even as you're describing your pursuit of

[pj_wehry]: philosophy, I mean when I talk about chasing the Viathan, that's for me, I'm

[pj_wehry]: pursuing something too big to capture.

[pj_wehry]: And that's that's really the whole point of this podcast. So I

[pj_wehry]: again, so happy to have you on here, And it just there's so much that you said

[pj_wehry]: here that just really really resonates with me. So thank you. Um, as you look at,

[pj_wehry]: Uh, let's start with that deca, uh, colonial side of things right, and then we can

[pj_wehry]: move the aesthetics. Um. I loved what you said about. Uh. Specifically, there are

[pj_wehry]: different modes of knowing that are just as good as uh, explanation or philosophy,

[pj_wehry]: And I think that's kind of you know. if we talk about uh, decolonizing aesthetics,

[pj_wehry]: that might be Uh, Yeah, for me. At least that's a very interesting place to go,

[pj_wehry]: because a lot of what I've done is trying to justify art. And then you, The more

[pj_wehry]: you try and justify art, the more you realize Like. Why am I? Why do I have to

[pj_wehry]: justify in the first place? So um, it, do you have any? Is there is that a path

[pj_wehry]: forward that you can take us?

[lewis_gordon]: sure,

[lewis_gordon]: One of the things that it's striking that you mentioned ▁lying on your back

[lewis_gordon]: because the story I I told I was ▁lying on my back in the grass, and a lot of

[lewis_gordon]: people don't understand it standing up and and looking at it. Sts is not the

[lewis_gordon]: same thing as ▁lying in your back and looking at looking up at them and it,

[lewis_gordon]: and

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: in terms of the point about um,

[lewis_gordon]: about decolonization and the many other ways of of knowing, you see the thing

[lewis_gordon]: about it is

[lewis_gordon]: a w. One mistake we sometimes make there is that we bring to the way we

[lewis_gordon]: analyze reality a fallacy often, and it's not that all of us do this, but many

[lewis_gordon]: of us do this, which is, we're already on the path of a colonized mentality

[lewis_gordon]: about knowledge. When we

[pj_wehry]: hm

[lewis_gordon]: presuppose certain things and that, and the

[pj_wehry]: up,

[lewis_gordon]: things are one.

[lewis_gordon]: That ▁ultimately truth must be reductive, so we are in effect trying to

[lewis_gordon]: squeeze something as vast as reality into a subset, which is as whether it's a

[lewis_gordon]: discipline, a method or a language, or whatever it may be. That's already.

[lewis_gordon]: That's fallacy number one. Another fallacy is the presupposition of purity,

[lewis_gordon]: because by definition, if you're going to purify, you're pushing so many

[lewis_gordon]: things out, and if you purify enough, you're no longer in a relationship with

[lewis_gordon]: anything, so ▁ultimately reality disappears, So that's another fllousacy.

[lewis_gordon]: The other one is related to both of those.

[lewis_gordon]: I've noticed, for instance, that the grammar of the theological grammar of

[lewis_gordon]: Theosy, and for listeners who are not familiar with the Odyssy, the Odyssey is

[lewis_gordon]: when you try to account for the existence of God when there is the presence of

[lewis_gordon]: evil or injustice. So you know you

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: may have had a argument with your your parents when you your a kid, and say

[lewis_gordon]: you know you know. Um,

[lewis_gordon]: if God existed wise, you's so much evil. And and

[pj_wehry]: right,

[lewis_gordon]: a classic response from parentss, Either those who are Godfaring is usually

[lewis_gordon]: first who to hell are you to question God?

[pj_wehry]: four,

[lewis_gordon]: And and the second one If is, while God is really cool, God giveve you the

[lewis_gordon]: free will. It's just that you know people screw it up. But if you look at the

[lewis_gordon]: logic of both responses, they are meant to keep God intact

[lewis_gordon]: there. Now that kind of reasoning we bring also to our scienceists, or

[lewis_gordon]: disciplines, to lots of other things, their people will rationalize their

[lewis_gordon]: disciplines in such a way that they function as if they were created by God.

[lewis_gordon]: And so if they encounter contradictions things that don't quite work, they try

[lewis_gordon]: to uh, disavow or to deny or degrade,

[lewis_gordon]: though the those contradictions staring them in their face,

[lewis_gordon]: So, and they also do it with with countries with states. For instance, they

[lewis_gordon]: are people who want Uniteds to pretend the United States is perfect. So if you

[lewis_gordon]: look at the miserable lives of so many people around us, their response is not

[lewis_gordon]: to say well, maybe the state isn't functioning the way it should be, or the

[lewis_gordon]: country, is it? instead? The response is what's wrong with those people.

[pj_wehry]: yes, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: So so that's That's part of it, but all of those are collected to connected to

[lewis_gordon]: Um. colonial mentalities. One of the things about colonial mentalities is that

[lewis_gordon]: all colonial mentalities are also narcisistic and by

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: that theye presuppose the legitimacy of self reproduction. So it's an effort

[lewis_gordon]: to create their image in all all across reality, instead of relating to

[lewis_gordon]: reality. Its. in other words, another version of that point I made about

[lewis_gordon]: squeezing reality into a subset, and a subset is the self.

[lewis_gordon]: Now

[lewis_gordon]: this effort. this narcisistic effort then creates a form of a Um. Diluded

[lewis_gordon]: imperviousness, or impenetrability,

[lewis_gordon]: which then closes off the capacity to grow to learn. Uh, to give you an idea.

[lewis_gordon]: when I say a philosopher, K. a philosopher for me, is a perpetual student,

[lewis_gordon]: and in fact, when I teach my classes, I also say to my students that their

[pj_wehry]: hm, hm,

[lewis_gordon]: beginning students I'm an advanced student, But even advanced student can

[lewis_gordon]: learn from a beginning student. because we don't have the same experiences.

[lewis_gordon]: Someone could bring something special to it.

[lewis_gordon]: Well, the thing about, for instance, Philosapia, which translated is the love

[lewis_gordon]: of wisdom. A lot of people don't even know that it's not historically Greek.

[lewis_gordon]: Myphilia is Greek, but Sophia isn't. It's from Sabet, which is in the language

[lewis_gordon]: of Medunetta, which is an East African language that goes back at easy fifteen

[lewis_gordon]: to twenty thousand years before Greek, and within that language

[lewis_gordon]: what's striking Is there so many words for wisdom, but they all are built up.

[lewis_gordon]: Not all of them sorry. Most of them are built up from a basic word called say,

[lewis_gordon]: and from that you could get Abe it. say it, say it, say, I could go on and

[lewis_gordon]: notcause. I could read the language, but the short version of it is, it

[lewis_gordon]: survived in many forms. It survived not only in Sopha, because the Greek

[lewis_gordon]: speaking people pronounced a bu f, and that's that a got's affair. But it also

[lewis_gordon]: survived in some of the Latin languages, like Saba in Portuguese, or, and so

[lewis_gordon]: forth, but they also had other specialized terms for knowledge and learning,

[lewis_gordon]: like rooks from which you get recordcket, from which you get Rigel, from which

[lewis_gordon]: you get regulate. And those are terms historically that go back to

[lewis_gordon]: predominantly female communities, because as it turns

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: out, the earliest scientists and artists were female. seventy five per cent of

[lewis_gordon]: for instance, paleolific art art from antiquity were by women. There is a

[lewis_gordon]: logical reason. A lot of women also develop early mathematics and science,

[lewis_gordon]: because a lot of the light, the welfare of a community depended upon the

[lewis_gordon]: ability to regulate knowledge all the way from a w s Menstrel cycle through to

[lewis_gordon]: the to childbirth, through to knowing when to plant crops, which is one of the

[lewis_gordon]: reasons why archaeologist and anthropologs have also argue their women were

[lewis_gordon]: the inventors of farming.

[lewis_gordon]: So when we put all this together,

[lewis_gordon]: what we begin to realize

[lewis_gordon]: is that there are many ways to approach

[lewis_gordon]: reality

[lewis_gordon]: and acquire or think through what we call wisdom. But it's not something we

[lewis_gordon]: possess. The way we could put something in our pocket. It's something we

[lewis_gordon]: practe through an ongoing communication that makes us continue to learn.

[lewis_gordon]: So

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: this then,

[lewis_gordon]: but becomes the ongoing, The way of now thinking about decolonization,

[lewis_gordon]: But of course there is historical forms of colonization. For instance, the one

[lewis_gordon]: we mostly talk about is Euro modern colonization, but again, in order not to

[lewis_gordon]: be reductive, the mistake that many people make is that they want to find one

[lewis_gordon]: thing that makes it colonial,

[lewis_gordon]: and this

[pj_wehry]: right,

[lewis_gordon]: one thing that' mentality. It's connected to a particular metaphysics of a

[lewis_gordon]: reductive substance oriented wave. Looking at things fails to understand a

[lewis_gordon]: complexity of what the human world is. You see. The human being is an

[lewis_gordon]: emergence. We're animals, but we, we are the animals. Who? not who? who? when

[lewis_gordon]: we lay on our back, lie on our back and

[pj_wehry]: look up,

[lewis_gordon]: look up at the sky. We don't just do that. We also ask what does this mean

[lewis_gordon]: And

[pj_wehry]: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: that is a di. That means we have stepped out of the realm of saturated being

[lewis_gordon]: of being isomorphic with simply what is, and ask what is possible. What could

[lewis_gordon]: be, what might be, or how to rethink things. So at the heart of what a human

[lewis_gordon]: being is is also the impetus of freedom,

[lewis_gordon]: but sure,

[pj_wehry]: for give me one second. I just want to ask. What do you mean by the word word

[pj_wehry]: isomorphic? Um,

[lewis_gordon]: oh, isomorphic. Sorry about that. Want to

[pj_wehry]: no, no, no, it's fine.

[lewis_gordon]: want to one correspondent relationship with? So if you think of a table,

[lewis_gordon]: If your language only maps on to the table, then it's in a one to one

[lewis_gordon]: relationship with a table that's isomorphic.

[lewis_gordon]: However, the example I just gave shows that if we have to create the language

[lewis_gordon]: to put on to the table, we've already transcended the table.

[lewis_gordon]: So we,

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah. yeah.

[lewis_gordon]: so we have to lie to ourselves that we are at one with the table. When in the

[lewis_gordon]: truth is we have to create the language about the table,

[pj_wehry]: uh. so what we're kind of talking about is uh, how a map is smaller than the world

[pj_wehry]: to help us better understand it. Whereas, like for an animal, they just

[pj_wehry]: understand. the they just live in the world. Am I tracking?

[lewis_gordon]: The work you're tracking it right. The world is there

[pj_wehry]: Okay,

[lewis_gordon]: now. It doesn't mean that the what we can do is the end of the story. It's

[lewis_gordon]: just part of our story. There may be way more we can do. We might even evolve

[lewis_gordon]: if we live long enough as a species into creatures that can think of reality

[lewis_gordon]: in so many ways that we cannot even imagine now. And it's that creativity.

[lewis_gordon]: right. It is what colonialism wants to block, because you see

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: if we think about colonialism is not simply the material um conquest of people

[lewis_gordon]: in an effort to control them, but colonialism also creates economies of

[lewis_gordon]: control. Colonialism also creates knowledge of control. Colonialism also says

[lewis_gordon]: that you must be in the image of those who control you. Colonialism goes on

[lewis_gordon]: and on, but you notice every. The ongoing connection is about closure. What

[lewis_gordon]: colonialism has to convince colonizeed people off is the impossibility of

[lewis_gordon]: thinking outside of the colonial structure,

[lewis_gordon]: but of course, both for people who participate in colonial practices and those

[lewis_gordon]: who are subject to it, both actually know the elephants in the room, which is,

[lewis_gordon]: they both have the capacity to communicate beyond it.

[lewis_gordon]: So when I use colonialism, then one of the the the best ways if you are going

[lewis_gordon]: to close off people's capacity for action

[lewis_gordon]: is to fill them with lies to the point that they will believe the lies, And so

[lewis_gordon]: they would not even make the effort to open the door and wonder what's outside

[lewis_gordon]: right. It's the. It's a situation where you could lock a person in a cell and

[lewis_gordon]: convince the person to sell is all that reality is.

[lewis_gordon]: So the De colonial practice is the realization that reality is not simply what

[lewis_gordon]: we encounter.

[lewis_gordon]: Reality also emerges from the relationship we have with it in what we produce,

[lewis_gordon]: and the responsibility for what we produce. That is part of a de colonial

[lewis_gordon]: practice, But the thing to bear in mind is when I say a De colonial practice.

[lewis_gordon]: I don't mean it as exclusively something negative in others which you are

[lewis_gordon]: getting rid of. There iss a theoris by name of Catherine Walsh, she argues,

[lewis_gordon]: the colonial, for, but in my writings I describe, also call it colonial

[lewis_gordon]: epistemologies as what I call disciplinarly decadent, because they arere no

[lewis_gordon]: longer oriented to the reality. They have deluded themselves that they are

[lewis_gordon]: reality.

[lewis_gordon]: Whereas I argue to be released from that is a W is to take on the willingness

[lewis_gordon]: to go beyond our disciplines for the sake of our relationship with reality.

[lewis_gordon]: Thus,

[lewis_gordon]: philosophy paradoxically must be willing to go beyond philosophy in order to

[lewis_gordon]: have the integrity of dealing with truth in reality, and this could take the

[lewis_gordon]: form. as in some of my lectures, I demonstrate music

[pj_wehry]: I saw that

[lewis_gordon]: or poetry.

[lewis_gordon]: Ah,

[pj_wehry]: Mhm

[lewis_gordon]: or the very fact that the most that hu human beings have the capacity to think

[lewis_gordon]: philosophically without it the form, even when written of a government manual.

[lewis_gordon]: In others. If you look at most what's called professional philosophy today,

[lewis_gordon]: they peculiarly resemble bureaucratic manuals.

[lewis_gordon]: And so, if you're really thinking

[lewis_gordon]: right, it's not just about what you say, but there really is importance in how

[lewis_gordon]: you say things,

[lewis_gordon]: and also what's communicated at the many levels, whether they averbial,

[lewis_gordon]: whether they' are going to be illustrative,

[lewis_gordon]: more

[pj_wehry]: so much that you said there. If you don't mind me, just backtracking a little bit

[pj_wehry]: to make sure that I'm tracking with you a lot to unpack the. Uh, so as an example,

[pj_wehry]: and obviously, when you know you never want to make, uh, colonization and

[pj_wehry]: deconization one thing, But when you talk about the self reproduction, you're

[pj_wehry]: talking about that, uh, eighteenth, nineteenth uh century desire to civilize other

[pj_wehry]: nations.

[lewis_gordon]: correct,

[pj_wehry]: Right? Would that be? Yes? So that would be an example. Um, and uh, I couldn't

[pj_wehry]: help but notice that running theme that for you, you are constantly answering the

[pj_wehry]: question,

[pj_wehry]: um,

[pj_wehry]: uh, about how human beings evade reality and so kind of running through everything

[pj_wehry]: you've just said. If I'm tracking with you is that Uh, colonization is seeking to

[pj_wehry]: evade reality by constructing its own faximile, its own fake copy of reality.

[lewis_gordon]: correct, and in fact, and it does so in a more radical way because you see

[lewis_gordon]: one of the things

[lewis_gordon]: we have to take seriously that human beings are capable of, is what the French

[lewis_gordon]: call lamovesa, which is often translated into English as bad faith,

[lewis_gordon]: but, but

[pj_wehry]: H.

[lewis_gordon]: it's not bad faith like the legal notion. Of bad faith, because in the legal

[lewis_gordon]: notion it means you, something like signing a contract when you know you're

[lewis_gordon]: not going to come through K. but that in that case you know what you're doing.

[lewis_gordon]: you're just ▁lying.

[lewis_gordon]: The thing about Lamovis Fa, that's interesting,

[lewis_gordon]: right, is that you are ▁lying. but you' ▁lying to yourself,

[lewis_gordon]: the

[pj_wehry]: Yes,

[lewis_gordon]: liar and the lie too are the same. We human beings have the capacity

[lewis_gordon]: to make ourselves believe things paradoxically that we don't believe

[lewis_gordon]: and the evidence can be around us. You know what I'm talking about. We've seen

[lewis_gordon]: it,

[pj_wehry]: Oh, I know exactly. I know. I man, um, I personally have dealt with people who

[pj_wehry]: have very deep, uh, trauma issues,

[lewis_gordon]: Mhm.

[pj_wehry]: like, and to uh, and it's weird because you assume that something's really obvious

[pj_wehry]: and then I will like. Uh. One of the biggest gifts my dad gave me was uh, he like.

[pj_wehry]: I'd always rather over communicate than undercommunicate. So it was like well, I'm

[pj_wehry]: just going to say the obvious thing right like they already know this. But and

[pj_wehry]: then to say it and watch someone who has built up and they're evading right.

[pj_wehry]: Because because of the pain and just watch their eyes glaze over and that like

[pj_wehry]: they can't. they can't process it. I mean that's that's a psychological

[pj_wehry]: incognitive thing, but I mean it's a I. If I understand correctly, That's what

[pj_wehry]: you're talking about.

[lewis_gordon]: Correct, and the thing that one, The thing that's funny when we talk about

[lewis_gordon]: this is that you see a lot of people really get pissed off if you say bad

[lewis_gordon]: faith, because of course it has the word bad in it the English language, but

[lewis_gordon]: they don't there. dont understand that. Um, sometimes it could be very good

[lewis_gordon]: reasons for people to be in bad faith. So for in in my first book Bad Faith in

[lewis_gordon]: Antib Racism, I go through a really detailed analysis of the concept of bad

[lewis_gordon]: faith, and I've done so in

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: very variety of other contlicts. But but what? that? if we think about the

[lewis_gordon]: ways way have of evading reality, One of the ways of course is to disarm

[lewis_gordon]: evidence of its force, In other words, impose upon evidence the false notion

[lewis_gordon]: of perfect evidence. This is one of the re

[pj_wehry]: Yes,

[lewis_gordon]: ways in which people I to themselves say about the vaccine today, because I

[lewis_gordon]: mean you know their physicians. frustrated. there are people who have had

[lewis_gordon]: fifty vaccines, many of which are not as

[lewis_gordon]: um. What's the word? as as effective as this vaccine? Yet they take the less

[lewis_gordon]: effective stuff, but it won't take the effect of stuff. But so clearly right

[lewis_gordon]: th they're say, unless it's one that it's absolutely foolproof, which is not

[lewis_gordon]: what human reality is. So that's an example of how one can use misuse

[pj_wehry]: y.

[lewis_gordon]: evidence for bad faith. But there are others there.

[pj_wehry]: Well, it goes back to what you said about uh, purity, right,

[lewis_gordon]: Correct. Absolutely

[lewis_gordon]: you're right up. You're right on point. And so one. there's so many ways and

[pj_wehry]: yes, okay, sorry, just

[lewis_gordon]: I, I, we don't have time to spell out all of them, But but but but one

[pj_wehry]: there's a lot.

[lewis_gordon]: but one of them I would point out, which is you know. What's interesting is

[lewis_gordon]: when peop you can see somebody walking in bad faith. You could see it in their

[lewis_gordon]: embodiment. When somebody's asked to go to a meeting they don't really want to

[lewis_gordon]: go to. They. They walk differently That a person who is like anxious to get to

[lewis_gordon]: that date, you could find people who you know. I mean it. That's the way we

[lewis_gordon]: have conversations like you're not hungry. What's thw? your food? You know,

[lewis_gordon]: But

[pj_wehry]: Oh yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: so there's an embodiment of bad faith and what, And

[pj_wehry]: Mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: it can go into in in in at least two directions. One is you can try to claim

[lewis_gordon]: that you're not your body, which is absurd, because you know we have to be

[lewis_gordon]: located somewhere in order for there to be averir. or you can claim you're own

[lewis_gordon]: your body. You have no point of view, which is also absurd because for you

[lewis_gordon]: even to claim it, you have to have transcended it. Now, one of the examples of

[lewis_gordon]: where it's perfectly understandable to be in bad faith is torture.

[lewis_gordon]: You do

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: not want to be fully embodied when somebody's torturing you.

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: It's a good idea to be disembodied and say they're doing this to my body. Not

[lewis_gordon]: me. It's not true,

[pj_wehry]: yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: but it will help you survive.

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah, yeah.

[lewis_gordon]: So

[pj_wehry]: absolutely

[lewis_gordon]: yeah, and but where where it's so? The main point is Bad faith is a

[lewis_gordon]: description. that's not necessarily a moral judgment. That's the point. but

[lewis_gordon]: because it has

[pj_wehry]: yeah.

[lewis_gordon]: the word bad, a lot of people get defensive because they think it's a moral

[lewis_gordon]: judgment to say you're in bad faith. Ah, actually identifying someone being in

[lewis_gordon]: bad faith is a beginning to try to uncover why.

[lewis_gordon]: And and

[pj_wehry]: Mhm.

[lewis_gordon]: let's face it, want'. you going to create a narsistic image at your'

[lewis_gordon]: civilizing the world. You need to take the position at your good. You don't

[lewis_gordon]: admit that actually civilization is a concept that was developed by ▁urban

[lewis_gordon]: dwellers. To say to to to separate the roral for the ▁urban. You don't want to

[lewis_gordon]: say things like where the moment human beings had sign symbols in language,

[lewis_gordon]: human beings have always had culture. You have to

[pj_wehry]: hm.

[lewis_gordon]: invent crazy notions like people without culture. That it? it? wherever people

[lewis_gordon]: are there's culture you see or and and the list just goes

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: on and on so that Th that helps

[lewis_gordon]: with living with the brutality

[lewis_gordon]: that one is unleashed on people through colonial

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: practices. It it.

[pj_wehry]: Mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: it's right now, dear people who just a lot of people don't really get it that.

[lewis_gordon]: it's part, for instance, when we talk about, say, uh, white supremacy and

[lewis_gordon]: antib racism. You notice, I said ems, too. The reason is what supremacy is one

[lewis_gordon]: thing, But you could get rid of white' supremacy and still have antib racism.

[lewis_gordon]: You could ju you

[pj_wehry]: Yeah, absolutely,

[lewis_gordon]: right. so, but when you think about the combination of those things, the

[lewis_gordon]: defensive move to say, to give a critique of whites supremacy is to take the

[lewis_gordon]: position that white people must be intrinsically evil, which would of course

[lewis_gordon]: lead to the defs of white supremacy. That's not a good route. Whereas, if

[pj_wehry]: hm.

[lewis_gordon]: one took a position to say, what's wrong with any notion of any people being

[lewis_gordon]: put on at a notion of supremacy is that it is actually a contradiction of

[lewis_gordon]: reality, there is no such thing as being superior or inferior without action

[lewis_gordon]: performance, et cetera, and even those those are by the actions, not the

[lewis_gordon]: people. The notion of an intrinsically superior people is oxyeronic. and

[lewis_gordon]: similarly, the notion of an intrinsically inferior people, which is what Antib

[lewis_gordon]: racism is about, is also maronic.

[lewis_gordon]: What we have to deal with is how human beings, by virtue of our imperfections,

[lewis_gordon]: are constantly trying to find a way to to cultivate a livevable reality. So if

[lewis_gordon]: you get back to the example I gave about earlier with bad faith, one of the

[lewis_gordon]: things about bad faith to bear in mind, and this is a philosophical one.

[lewis_gordon]: In order to be in bad faith,

[lewis_gordon]: one must be free,

[lewis_gordon]: and one of the lies we tell ourselves in bad faith is that we are not

[lewis_gordon]: responsible for our freedom.

[pj_wehry]: Hm.

[lewis_gordon]: In other words, if you are really free, you're really really free,

[lewis_gordon]: then you must have the capacity to attempt to evade your freedom.

[lewis_gordon]: If you la that capacity, then you would not be free.

[pj_wehry]: Am I hearing John

[pj_wehry]: Paul'sart right now as something, but yes, like this sounds familiar.

[lewis_gordon]: Yes, you are.

[lewis_gordon]: Yeah. that's that's That's that. That was his argument in

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: Electrainnet, or what everybody knows as being nothingness is argument,

[pj_wehry]: Mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: And this is why a lot of people miss about as Way talks about evidence

[lewis_gordon]: criteria. All of these things is that once we really take the position by

[lewis_gordon]: freedom, not liberty in the United States. for instance, in Anglo world,

[lewis_gordon]: people confuse liberty and freedom. Do not the same thing. Liberty just

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: means the absence of an obstacle.

[lewis_gordon]: Freedom

[lewis_gordon]: requires the agency of taking responsibility for whatever liberty one has in

[lewis_gordon]: the absence of that obstacle.

[lewis_gordon]: This. this is one of the reasons I usually give this example wide, So easy for

[lewis_gordon]: Ah, the authorities to catch and escaped a convict,

[lewis_gordon]: because when a convict escapes right, the convict has liberty.

[lewis_gordon]: So why don' the convict then just go. Just keep running. But convicts

[lewis_gordon]: eventually try to go home.

[lewis_gordon]: Just stake out at their home. and the reason they eventually try to go home is

[lewis_gordon]: because human beings need to have a place we belong

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: and part of live. In other words, liability is belonging, but to a place where

[lewis_gordon]: you belong is not simply a physical place like a house, it's also something

[lewis_gordon]: like a discipline. It could be your profession. It could be whatever it is

[lewis_gordon]: that affirms your value is a human being. It could be what you're doing in a

[lewis_gordon]: podcast. You've found something that's part of your home. And and when

[lewis_gordon]: students discover their major, they're discovering a home.

[pj_wehry]: right,

[lewis_gordon]: And if they and and students were forced into majors, and in which they're not

[lewis_gordon]: at home, we know what happens to them. It's you know they sometimes do,

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: because your parents force them, Et cetera they don't perform well. They're

[lewis_gordon]: alienated et cetera because they're not free. They're not at home, So freedom

[lewis_gordon]: this is.

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: this is the part beyond start. This is morer. Thisus Lewiis

[lewis_gordon]: Gardon speaking now and so, that's why my writing's freedom is also about this

[pj_wehry]: yeah, yeah, sure, sir,

[lewis_gordon]: question of home. now. The thing is,

[lewis_gordon]: the thing is when you think about it really being at home symbolically also

[lewis_gordon]: means a place you can be

[lewis_gordon]: in in plain language, naked, right and

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: naked symbolically Right. you can. In other words, you can say what you really

[lewis_gordon]: believe. you don't now have to hide

[pj_wehry]: yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: behind false beliefs. you can express you Con. You could also admit what your

[lewis_gordon]: limitations are, but at the same time you could also admit your strengths

[lewis_gordon]: without being arrogant. There's a long list of wonderful things that can

[lewis_gordon]: happen if we are able to to affrm, living in in in living freely. But the

[lewis_gordon]: thing about it is if we recoil,

[lewis_gordon]: we also can use that agency to disepower,

[lewis_gordon]: even disepower ourselves of taking that responsibility. And in fact, what I

[lewis_gordon]: argue also about colonialism, racism, and all forms of demanization, is that

[lewis_gordon]: their practices of disempowerment

[lewis_gordon]: power.

[lewis_gordon]: A lot of people talk about power, but they never define it, though, The the

[lewis_gordon]: way I, what I mean by power is the ability to make things happen with access

[lewis_gordon]: to the conditions of doing so.

[lewis_gordon]: So if you have access, for instance, we have the power to communicate, because

[lewis_gordon]: we have the access called language.

[lewis_gordon]: Now we could use that language. the ability to communicate to facilitate more

[lewis_gordon]: communication. This potcast, for instance, is for people to learn something

[lewis_gordon]: that they may find useful, and if they find it useful, they could like those

[lewis_gordon]: students I had in the eighties grow.

[lewis_gordon]: But if

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: you and I are trying to disinform misinformed people, we could use that same

[lewis_gordon]: ability

[lewis_gordon]: to create practices of disempowerment to create practices where

[pj_wehry]: hm,

[lewis_gordon]: people now begin to close in on themselves for them to be them more invested

[lewis_gordon]: in bad faith to have a situation where ▁ultimately, there are policies that

[lewis_gordon]: create not only double standards of living, but also block people's capacity

[lewis_gordon]: to flourish. So oppression, colonization is about the use of power for

[lewis_gordon]: disempowerment,

[lewis_gordon]: Liberation, Freedom is about the use of power for empowerment. But you notice,

[lewis_gordon]: as I use us, I'm talking about power, the way I talk about bad faith, and or

[lewis_gordon]: the way I will talk about critical good faith. I'm not using them at this

[lewis_gordon]: stage as moral judgments, but as observations on capacities.

[lewis_gordon]: Now what we? there? other levels in which to deal with the ethical and moral

[lewis_gordon]: implications, but for now the basic points, we have the capacity to make the

[lewis_gordon]: world a better, in the sense of empowerment for growth, flourishing, and also

[lewis_gordon]: taking responsibility for everything from the climate to the question of

[lewis_gordon]: whether we arere spreading diseases to our neighbors, But we also have the

[lewis_gordon]: power to do the opposite of those and just destroy the planet and make this

[lewis_gordon]: conversation. You and I are having the last year of human life on Earth,

[pj_wehry]: Hopefully not.

[lewis_gordon]: Hopefully not,

[pj_wehry]: I think they' definite.

[pj_wehry]: I think there are some moral valuations built into that. Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: indeed,

[pj_wehry]: I would hope so. yeah, no, the. um. So a couple things, Uh one is, Uh, is you were

[pj_wehry]: talking about and this is a while back, but um, Part of the reason that you talk

[pj_wehry]: about being an advanced Uh student with Uh beginner students is because philosophy

[pj_wehry]: should be willing to transcend itself and it is about continually learning.

[pj_wehry]: Whereas that that locus of power in a teacher and an authority. the final word is,

[pj_wehry]: is kind of that Um.

[pj_wehry]: colonial mindset is that am I tracking there?

[lewis_gordon]: Yes, you are. In fact, this is why for me, great exemplars or philosophy are

[lewis_gordon]: people like Antif Hypatia, Socrates,

[lewis_gordon]: all the way through to people such as Francifnon Malcolmx, or Jumple Sat, or

[lewis_gordon]: John Dewey or Simove or Simon de Bourois or Agela Davis, Because,

[pj_wehry]: H,

[lewis_gordon]: but since a lot of people, because this context' philosophy immediately would

[lewis_gordon]: think of Socrates one of the things about Socratess, he always wanted to

[lewis_gordon]: learn.

[pj_wehry]: yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: He was never dedactic or condescending. He walked to streets. He would speak

[lewis_gordon]: with people, and he always always, he yeted profound faith

[lewis_gordon]: in his fell human being's capacity to teach him something,

[lewis_gordon]: and and to learn from them and Antft says the same thing. There's a letter

[lewis_gordon]: from Antiff, uh, he was. It was an ancient commenin Uh, that that country was

[lewis_gordon]: subsequently um colonized by Uh, Persians and Macedonians and was renamed

[lewis_gordon]: Egypt, but its ancient name is Kemmment

[lewis_gordon]: and he

[pj_wehry]: Hm, Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: has a letter in which he spells out that what a philosopher is, And he points

[lewis_gordon]: out that a philosopher is somebody who really profoundly wants to learn,

[lewis_gordon]: but also is overjoyed in others. learning.

[lewis_gordon]: In other words, it's about learning together, and if you think about it,

[lewis_gordon]: you know, One of the treacheries imposed upon philosophy

[lewis_gordon]: is to treat philosophy like warfare.

[lewis_gordon]: You come into a fight,

[pj_wehry]: Yes,

[lewis_gordon]: you knock down the other's argument to defend your argument, blah, blah, blah.

[lewis_gordon]: The problem with that is in a nutshell you can win a fight, but be wrong

[pj_wehry]: it's true for marriage, too,

[lewis_gordon]: correct.

[lewis_gordon]: But if you look at it as a communicative practice of learning together, it

[lewis_gordon]: means you're always accountable.

[lewis_gordon]: you

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: always, people. In other words, ▁ultimately, the evidence has to be such that

[lewis_gordon]: all who are communicating are able to see it, and this is shared across

[lewis_gordon]: philosophies from east to west, north, south different ages.

[pj_wehry]: and that connects to another question. I wanted to ask Um, or more an example. You

[pj_wehry]: know, you mentioned it in terms of racism, but uh, I see this all the time. Uh,

[pj_wehry]: when we evaluate evaluating actions over evaluating people

[pj_wehry]: and the way that we act in bad faith by evaluating people instead of actions. So

[pj_wehry]: for instance, in order to protect ourselves, we say

[pj_wehry]: such a good man. I don't see how he could have

[lewis_gordon]: Oh, yeah,

[pj_wehry]: done that or he, such. He's such a bad, they terrible person. They really do

[pj_wehry]: something good and it's like

[pj_wehry]: good good men do bad things all the time, and bad men do good things all the time,

[pj_wehry]: And it's our way of organizing the world into

[pj_wehry]: uh into camps and to protect ourselves.

[lewis_gordon]: yeah, not you, you. It's a great example, yet you're making. Yeah, what that

[lewis_gordon]: does, of course, is to ignore evidence, and the thing about evidence is

[lewis_gordon]: evidence as to be evidential.

[lewis_gordon]: Excuse me, and by evidential, what I mean

[lewis_gordon]: is that it must appear. Evidence by

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: definition is social. The idea that there iss evidence that absolutely only

[lewis_gordon]: you can see that's problematic. and even when you are the person who is

[lewis_gordon]: processing it safe, first you are processing it paradoxically outside

[lewis_gordon]: yourself. In other words, what you're realizing is what another person should

[lewis_gordon]: be able to see. Evidence is always social.

[pj_wehry]: yes, Yes, And and that's something. Uh, So there's an interesting uh connection

[pj_wehry]: here between what you talked about with evidence and with freedom. Is that in both

[pj_wehry]: cases you're talking in a communal and social context. Yeah, and maybe I'm reading

[pj_wehry]: too much into that when you talk about freedom, you freedoms ▁ultimately about

[pj_wehry]: belonging. And so freedom really doesn't exist outside of Uh. your the your

[pj_wehry]: community.

[lewis_gordon]: Absolutely

[pj_wehry]: Uh, you know when you talk about Bu. Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: correct. No, you got di nail in the head. You can have liberty. in isolation.

[lewis_gordon]: you could go out in the woods and build yourself a cabin and say you're all

[lewis_gordon]: that and everything is just a matter of whether whether they whether landslide

[lewis_gordon]: locks you in, or not. But that's not

[pj_wehry]: yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: freedom. That's liberty.

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: but it's not freedom. that. ▁ultimately, freedom is always connected to

[lewis_gordon]: others. There is always an accountability with freedom.

[pj_wehry]: is there a connection between evidence always needing to be social and freedom

[pj_wehry]: being social.

[lewis_gordon]: Yes, yes, there, yes, yes, there is because. ▁ultimately. Even if you go to

[lewis_gordon]: the log cabin example, it is no accident why many people in those situations

[lewis_gordon]: begin to create

[lewis_gordon]: echoes of a broader social world.

[lewis_gordon]: They begin to create things that could communicate. It's like that wonderful

[lewis_gordon]: movie that Tom Hanks was in When is on the isolated island? Why did he have to

[lewis_gordon]: cape create Wilson?

[pj_wehry]: It was my first thought as soon as you said echoes, I think I thought of Will

[pj_wehry]: said. Yeah, go ahead,

[lewis_gordon]: Yeah, no, no, no, that's exactly it. You see part of the language and part of

[lewis_gordon]: sociality. Even when we are physically alone, we talk to ourselves. even

[lewis_gordon]: though we are not outright saying words in our head, we are thinking ideas and

[lewis_gordon]: so forth, and that is something rather profound because you see from an

[lewis_gordon]: external point of view, there's just physical stuff there,

[lewis_gordon]: but the ongoing production of meaning that you know. That's where a lot of the

[lewis_gordon]: action is, because

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: at at a basic biomasss level, you and I are absolutely no different than any

[lewis_gordon]: any group of human beings that proceeded us thousands of years ago.

[lewis_gordon]: But we live in a world of constellations of meanings that are mind boggling

[lewis_gordon]: and and there could be subsequent generations that could wow us to come,

[lewis_gordon]: And part of that is because reality for us doesn't stop at our finger tips and

[lewis_gordon]: at our eyes and our feet in our nose. Reality, also,

[lewis_gordon]: and this is a a rather technical term. Reality for us, is also subjunctive,

[lewis_gordon]: and by subjunctive is, If you think in grammar is when is the difference

[lewis_gordon]: between we say, um, what there is and what their would could or should be,

[pj_wehry]: Mhm.

[lewis_gordon]: and our ability to deal with the subjunctive is amazing.

[lewis_gordon]: and our ability to deal with the subjunctive is amazing.

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: Why? Why it means? For instance, you and I just had a conversation that

[lewis_gordon]: actually was dealing with idea, ideas.

[lewis_gordon]: Ah, that we're put on the table by people that go back from about four

[lewis_gordon]: thousand years ago.

[lewis_gordon]: And if if this the radio signal from this conversation reaches some other,

[lewis_gordon]: you know galaxy, and it's able to be deciphered. somebody could say whatever

[lewis_gordon]: they talk about and then say

[lewis_gordon]: and then enter that conversation. Even though we'd be long dead and gone,

[lewis_gordon]: Thats

[pj_wehry]: M.

[lewis_gordon]: is extraordinary and that is what reality is about. Reality is not simply

[lewis_gordon]: about a reduction to being like a thing that you can hold in your hand. Those

[lewis_gordon]: are parts of reality, but the greater picture is going to be around these

[lewis_gordon]: complex ways in which we can produce what is real through what is meaningful

[lewis_gordon]: and what is true.

[pj_wehry]: Doctor Gordon has been absolutely pleasure to have you on. Uh, didn't get to the

[pj_wehry]: aesthetics part. That's fine. This conversation has been fantastic.

[lewis_gordon]: Well if you'd like

[pj_wehry]: Did want to end?

[lewis_gordon]: me to, if you like me to come back, I'd gladly have one where we just devote

[lewis_gordon]: to the aesthetic part in the future.

[pj_wehry]: Oh, that would be. that'd be great. I would love that the

[pj_wehry]: you mention the constellations of meaning and one of the questions I definitely

[pj_wehry]: wanted to touch base as we kind of wrap up here is how can we go back to Uh. How

[pj_wehry]: can we reclaim our history

[pj_wehry]: and not cut ourselves off from those constellations of meaning

[pj_wehry]: without Uh, without bringing the colonization into it. Where? how can we decnize

[pj_wehry]: the past in ways that allows us to move forward?

[lewis_gordon]: The short answer, because we have limited times is to ask the right questions.

[lewis_gordon]: You notice how differently you think of a classroom situation when I think of

[lewis_gordon]: the professor, not as Moses with the tablets, but as a person in a

[lewis_gordon]: conversation in an ongoing practice of learning. It means Now we begin to to

[lewis_gordon]: think of the past in different ways, And I just give you a good example. I

[lewis_gordon]: already said that one has to uh, make people believe in their incapacity,

[lewis_gordon]: their in their inability to be able to do anything about reality in order to

[lewis_gordon]: colonize them. Well among

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: those has been the false story. Al' Just picked slavery as an example because

[lewis_gordon]: we're in the U. S. contexts. The standard story brought to many people is that

[lewis_gordon]: in slave people were just brute labor brought over to just function like

[lewis_gordon]: machines.

[lewis_gordon]: That's well, if we asked the right questions, we realized that that doesn't

[lewis_gordon]: make any sense. for a variety of reasons.

[lewis_gordon]: First

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: one would have to know about what Africa was. Africa was a place of not only

[lewis_gordon]: states, it had doctors, it had lawyers, it had teachers. It had people, uh,

[lewis_gordon]: who could do all kinds of. In other words, the enslave people had skills, and

[lewis_gordon]: if you think about any way their skilled labor, if whether it's from recent

[lewis_gordon]: immigrants, any way you think about it, skill labor. bring their skills. the

[lewis_gordon]: places

[pj_wehry]: Yu,

[lewis_gordon]: that had those African skills. Because a lot of the Americas is a lot of a lot

[lewis_gordon]: of these. This part of the world is more like Africa than than Europe, and a

[lewis_gordon]: lot of people don't realize that Uh, for instance, if you are in Uh, northern

[lewis_gordon]: Europe, and because of the waters from the Gulf Stream, there is greater Um.

[lewis_gordon]: Precipitation, and so there are ways in which farming was developed in those

[lewis_gordon]: areas that was very different from what happens in places with droughts.

[lewis_gordon]: And so there are a lot of skill sets that were brought by those in slave

[lewis_gordon]: people. And what it turned out was that the plantations that had enslaate

[lewis_gordon]: people directly from Africa tended to prosper because of the technologies

[lewis_gordon]: Africans brought along with them. so I usually illustrated this way to my

[lewis_gordon]: students. Here's what your morningurning would look like if you took black

[lewis_gordon]: people out of American history. Uh, W. you wouldn't been able to turn on your

[lewis_gordon]: light this morning because the filament was developed by an African american,

[lewis_gordon]: not Thomas Eitizen. He was the person one. The company you wouldn't have your

[lewis_gordon]: cotton shirt. We you? you know, you know it because the cottonjin wasn't

[lewis_gordon]: developed by Eli Whitney. It was by an enslave person, Sam. It' just the

[lewis_gordon]: enslave

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: person. Enslave people couldn't own patents. Study the en slavers

[pj_wehry]: right,

[lewis_gordon]: and I, I will go through a long list. You can use the toilet, inveded, a black

[lewis_gordon]: person. the doorknob, the stop light. It keeps going. That's not that white

[lewis_gordon]: people need Vt things. The point is that people invent things. But but this

[lewis_gordon]: this weird dichonomy of passive brute labor versus thinking active owners of

[lewis_gordon]: labor. we got to get rid of that. and once we begin to understand that, now we

[lewis_gordon]: begin to understand our inters subjectective relationship to the past. Wegin

[lewis_gordon]: to ask, what would I do in that situation? it's important to learn that the

[lewis_gordon]: people fought. You know what change the Civil War wasn't that there were white

[lewis_gordon]: soldiers in the North, fighting Confederates in the South, and they just won.

[lewis_gordon]: The South almost won the war.

[lewis_gordon]: What made the what kept the Union together were two hundred fifty thousand

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: black soldiers entering the war and kicking the Butd at a South. And so again,

[lewis_gordon]: you think of your history differently. If you think of yourself as passive

[lewis_gordon]: instead of active. And and among those soldiers were women, there were black

[lewis_gordon]: women and men out there doing these things. so in a lot of history, Even the

[lewis_gordon]: conversation you and I had about women scientists in the past, we don't even

[lewis_gordon]: have to get into race with this. Think about what we do to women when we, when

[pj_wehry]: yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: we rewrite the history where so many women in history are rewritten as men.

[lewis_gordon]: The very fact that you and I

[pj_wehry]: Hm,

[lewis_gordon]: speaking in computers, the algorithm for the computer was written by A at a

[lewis_gordon]: Lovelace, the daughter of

[pj_wehry]: Mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: Lord Byron, When we go

[pj_wehry]: Mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: through thinking about the wireless technology we use, we need to think of

[lewis_gordon]: Hattiy Lamar, a Jewish act, female yellow actress of an actress, who you know,

[lewis_gordon]: was busy looking pretty or the scream to many people, But she was actually one

[lewis_gordon]: of the U S's greatest weapons. She was actually part of the technology teams

[lewis_gordon]: to really

[pj_wehry]: Oh, I,

[lewis_gordon]: of it. Yeah, so

[pj_wehry]: yeah.

[lewis_gordon]: I mean the. So the main point is we need to think outside of the box. We need

[lewis_gordon]: not to be afraid of the truth, and we need to

[pj_wehry]: Mhm, mhm,

[lewis_gordon]: remember we're studying human beings and human beings not only have great

[lewis_gordon]: triumphs, creative ideas, but human beings also do some F up stuff. And And

[lewis_gordon]: And and

[pj_wehry]: y,

[lewis_gordon]: we got to get rid of holier than thou, and we got to get

[pj_wehry]: Yeah,

[lewis_gordon]: into an understanding of what it is to understand that what it is to be in it

[lewis_gordon]: together, and to try to our best to build a better world.

[pj_wehry]: you know there's no other way I could. I would rather end this podcast Them with

[pj_wehry]: that Thank you so much, Doctor Gordon has been a pleasure having you one.

[lewis_gordon]: Thank you. So much and to all the listeners continue being safe and healthy

[lewis_gordon]: and do find moments of joy. They'll remind you of your humanity.

[pj_wehry]: thank bye.