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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:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Louis Gordon, distinguished professor and head of the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut. And we are here today talking about black existentialism and decolonizing knowledge, a small collection of his works for students in the global south. Dr. Gordon, absolute pleasure to have you on again.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
It's so wonderful to be here with UPJ. Thank you.
PJ:
And apologies, you were telling us earlier, you were telling me earlier about how this came to be. Do you mind repeating that for our audience? Why you agreed to this collection of works? Because I know that it's been proposed before.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Sure, in fact what's rather striking is if someone picks up this collection they will see that the preface is entitled, Why Yes, Why Now to this project. So the editors wanted the readers to know that I've said no over the years. In fact over 30 years of people wanting to do readers. on my work and I have regularly refused. And as you would see that there is a poetic forward by Gugi Watyongo, the famous Kenyan writer. And why, why yes, why not? Well, the short version is that this was an invitation by a scholar from South Africa, Rosina Mart. She's a philosopher, poet, social worker, feminist activist, et cetera, et cetera. And by Sayan Dey, he's from India. He's also a literary scholar, philosopher, activist. He does work in ecology, food, et cetera. And what they wrote me about was that their students really draw upon my work. And they wanted. to have a collection of my writings that would be accessible to their students. And as we know, instead of fishing all over the place for these, a reader would be good. So that made sense to me. I have a soft spot for whenever anything has to do with students. In fact, some people may mention that there are times students have written me even one of my greatest experiences was a student wrote me from the Arctic. And he was, I was like, wow, somebody's reading my work in the Arctic. And he was like,
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
but I know it'll be difficult for you to come, blah, blah. You know, and he thought I would do a remote thing. I was like, nah, I'm coming. And I went up, there's one of the most,
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
in fact, I'm going back, I had such a great time. And it's a similar thing when. I was invited by people in the Andes Mountains or in remote areas of certain other parts of the globe. So that was a soft spot. So I said, yes, I'll do it. Because this is a different, this is not a celebration of Lewis Gordon thing. This is a thing that is useful to those students. Anyway, along the way, they found a publisher. And the publisher said, great. You have up to 475,000 words. Well, they came back. And they said, Professor Gordon, it turns out you've published a few million words. So they had to make a decision
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
about, from a few million words, how to get 475,000. So this is not like the Lewis Gordon reader. It's a reader that connects to what would be of interest, not only to students in the global south, but across this country, people who are who are interested in what the title is. They focused on my writings on black existentialism and decolonizing knowledge. And what I like about it is they also decided because they wanted it to connect to the lives of everyday people, to include documents such as the testimony I wrote for the British Labor Party on black Jews, to certain letters I wrote to people who were going through periods of grief thought would be useful for other people in such difficult times. And they also included interviews, for instance, like the LA Review of Books interviews on aesthetics and violence and questions like those. Because you see, a Lewis Gordon reader would, I mean, just the phenomenological writings alone would have been, you know, just the technical writings on issues like those would have. bit of text or the writings on music alone, or if it were the writings on problems of theories of religion, or the writings dealing with things I'm doing around the complexities of language and physics and things like that. Those could be completely separate readers. So this one focuses, is a reader, on what it says, black existentialism and the decolonization of knowledge. And I'm very pleased with the job they did. And because it is my writings, you know, it's like if you put a collection together, it's your book. That's why you could see that I'm listed as a co-editor because they, I had to give all the permissions for those. And then I wrote the preface again of why I agreed to it. And I'm very pleased that Gugiwati Onkoh came in as well.
PJ:
And this is always, I just think it's so cool that your background in music often comes up, right? And you talk in great technical detail about music and to show and kind of even deconstruct some ways kind of, I won't say cultural appropriation because that's something you disagree with, but what has been termed cultural appropriation, And I see, you know, I'm sure you've written many other, like you said, it could be a whole reader in itself. Why Jimi Hendrix for this? And why do you think Jimi Hendrix was a good entry point to talk about kind of the Nietzsche's schema of decadence, the double consciousness, these sorts of things.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Oh, well, you know, I mean, first, who doesn't know Jimmy? Jimmy Hendrix, right?
PJ:
Right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
It's very important if you're going to talk to the globe to choose someone that
PJ:
Mm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
everybody has heard of, right? Whom everybody has heard of. So that's one thing. But before I get into some of the specifics of Jimmy Hendrix, one thing I should add that was a surprise for me, which was a lot of fun with this book, is we never know how other people read us. You see? And particularly in the US context, there are certain ways that people would read me without. In the US, people tend to be very reductive. There's a tendency to say you can only be black. It's black or white, this or that. But what was striking was that the editors of this book are aware of different aspects of my biography. And they brought all that to the fore, by interviewing me in the book as well. So for instance, for Shoyand Dey, who is in India, it was very important to him that I'm also Tamil. My background is not, you know, I'm not only, I mean, they talk about the different dimensions of who I am. And I have always argued everybody can be something and. OK? So I am black. I am a Miss Rocky Jew. I am a Sephardic Jew. I am Tamil Indian. I am Chinese. I am Ethiopian. I am Liberian. And I am Irish and Scottish. And there are people who treat all those things as if they, it's like a war with itself. I've never had a problem.
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
So, but the thing about it is that that the Tamil part is a complex. There are lots of complex things about India that people don't realize. There's a concept called the Kalipani, which if you cross certain waters, you're now polluted. And if you're descended from people like that, you're linked into the complexities of communities who are untouchable, or Dalits, et cetera. So we got to talk about that quite a bit in the book and why I'm a strong supporter of Dalit causes. OK? And this connects to Jimmy in a very interesting way, because his life is, first of all, in a lot of my writings, I don't collapse people to a narrow abstract formalism. For me, it's always been bizarre to me that there are people who write on aesthetics, on art, and they take the art out of art. They take the life out of it. It's as if you're watching paint dry.
PJ:
Yeah, yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Whereas as you may have already surmised from the interview, the LA Review of Books, but it connects to the Jimi Hendrix essay. For me, art is about life. We create
PJ:
Hmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
art to live. You know, one of the things I always bring up is you take art, even if it's down to just decorating a wall out of the lives of human beings, and we'll get up and walk off a cliff.
PJ:
Hmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
So it's about the livability of life. So Jimmy Andrich is a great case study for this in so many ways because as I talk about his life as well as his art, as well as his creativity. And I remember when I was writing that essay, and what's great, just to add to it, that essay was at first presented live in Seattle where Jimmy was
PJ:
Ah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
born. Yeah. And you already know I'm a musician. I play drums and piano and so forth. But I also just jammed. My son, my youngest son, is a gifted musician, Elijah Gordon. He's
PJ:
Mm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
just one of the most gifted musicians I know. I mean, he just picks up instruments. He could just go. And I remember we used to jam in the living room to Jimi Hendrix songs in addition to jazz songs and so forth. So there's this musical connection to Jimi Hendrix. But the thing about Jimi Hendrix, of course, is the sheer adversity of his early life, the conditions under which he was born, the poverty, the struggles. And also, he's not conventional in so many ways. The periods in which, for instance, their father, his father came to raise him and would take him and his brothers to Vancouver to visit other relatives. Because his mother had certain issues. And a lot of people are used to stereotypes, especially if you talk about people like Malcolm X or, you know, Amalie Bush or Buzzman, about, there's a complexity about the death of the father, et cetera, but this was not Jim Hendrix's story. But this is, but there is this complicated story about what happened to black mothers. I was watching the Quincy Jones documentary recently. It's a similar thing with his mother, you know, the absence and the struggles of mothers who go through mental illness and... other kinds of things. So these little boys had a lot of difficulty but it's so profound that Jimi Hendrix, you know, when he was helping clean out somebody's garage, saw a one string guitar, he said, yo, can I have it? And then goes and teaches himself it because before he wanted to learn the instrument he took rubber bands and put at the bottom of his bed and learned how to play with those. And this already tells you something, this is connected to something I talk about a lot with music. Part of the colonization of our value to have an aesthetic life is to make us think in a very narrow framework of possibilities. But I was speaking with, it's funny, I heard a funny interview on NPR recently where the fellow said, Paul McCartney told me not to name drop.
PJ:
Yeah
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
I just thought that, I thought that was so hilarious. But I was speaking with Thomas Smiley on his show. And we got into a wonderful discussion about the musicality of singing out of tune. In other words, the notes between the notes. And this is something, it's a paradox, right? Because we don't live in a small spectrum of sound. And our emotive, affective, complex life are all those notes between notes. And Jimi Hendrix was in touch with that. So, you know, he taught himself the instrument and learned how to read music, did the whole nine yards. You know, he was in the American military. He comes out and he plays with some of these amazing, amazing musicians from jazz to R&B, et cetera. And also the complexity of the fact that he was an androgynous man. You know, this was a period in which He had to deal with a lot of complicated issues about what people projected onto him about his sexuality and his way of being in the world. And the threat he posed for that, you know, I love the story of, for instance, when Eric Clapton met him, because Jimmy was playing, you know, he went to London to play and, you know, I forgot the name of the, I think it may have been somebody from the Who, one of these guys. basically said, you know, you got to check out this guy, Jimi Hendrix. Maybe you could let him come up and jam. So Eric Clapton is playing, you know, all of the adoring fans. And he thought, OK, let this black guy come up and jam. Jimi comes on the stage. And took no prisoners. Guitar over the head, the tongue, the this, the
PJ:
Yes.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
that. Playing notes people didn't hear before. And at the end, they, I forgot, it'll come back to me, but the fellow related how Eric Clapton responded afterwards. It was the dressing room. He was smoking a cigarette, really pissed off. And he said...
PJ:
Hahaha!
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
You didn't tell me he was that effing good. You know, he
PJ:
Yes!
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
was just shouting at vectors. He was so pissed. You know,
PJ:
Oh yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
and, but oh my God. But the thing about it with Jimi Hendrix, of course, and this is the thing, this is what Frantz Fanon talked about with art, with bebop as well, that... It's not just virtuosity on the instrument. It is to take things to a whole other level. There are people who would like us to be exclusively, I'm talking about black people now, for black people to just be entertainment. But it's a real shock. to a system that degrades, devalues us, try to de-intellectualize us, to deal with the fact that we create art. And art, I mean, it's the human condition. Human beings create art. So to block a people's connection to art is also to deny their humanity. So one problem I have with the way a lot of people talk about... music and other forms of art, is they don't dig into the deeper significance of dignity that's in the production of art. They just are locked into, I like it. It's so
PJ:
Hmph.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
cool, you know, that kind of a thing. But there is no moment of human revolution. And for what I'm using revolution in its proper technical sense. There are people who reduce revolution exclusively to whether you topple over governments and stuff. Nah, because there could be coups. You could topple over a government and create a reactionary society. But revolutions are what changes us in such a way that we can not imagine life without it. The first hominin to scratch out a symbol or to sing a wail. You know what I mean? or to find a way to blow a lute or to use the entrails of an animal or the husk of a gourd or a fruit and make a sound. That was a revolution. And we know it because humanity has never looked back. You know what I mean? Yeah. And Jimmy is that way. I mean, so he had a double fold. purpose. He became a good case study of the transformation, not only music, the instrument, he played through the blues, played through jazz, etc. But he also challenged, and you brought this up, some of the reductive moves that are made as societies go through processes of decadence. And this In my writings, I've always, I find myself always going back to Nietzsche's great, great book. You know, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. There are a lot of people who don't like that book, you know, lots of other things by Nietzsche. And there are some people who don't like Nietzsche because he's a political conservative. And I'm like, come on. Yeah, there are lots of things that, yeah, you can have disagreements with somebody. But, and take a moment to think through a great thought. And Nietzsche in his 20s
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
thought this through, thought this through, right? And I've always returned to that essay because I see it all over the place. in different art forms. I was talking with someone about the Blues Brothers movie, you know, it's in its 43rd anniversary. And there is this, there's so many great scenes in this movie. I mean, this movie is, this is art. I mean, it's comedy, but it is art. But one of the great scenes, of course,
PJ:
It's so good.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
is the scene with Aretha Franklin. where she sings, you better think, you know, because they want the guitar player to leave the little restaurant they have there. She tells him off with the song, think about what you're trying to do to me. But the important thing in it is not just Aretha Franklin's knockdown performance, but it's her sisters. Her sisters, one dressed up as a postal
PJ:
Hmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
worker, you know, and the other one, you know, working class dress. where they're in the background, the chorus, when she says, you better think, they're like, think. Right, they're telling him off, the chorus is
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
speaking. And there are all these moments, similarly in the James Brown church scene with Shaka Khan and all of them, where the chorus is there talking to the Lord, you know what I mean? And he's seized by the spirit. Nietzsche understood the political significance of the chorus. And in blues music
PJ:
Mm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
and in a lot of other music, the chorus. Sure, there's the person wailing about his miseries or her miseries, her soul. But the repetition from the chorus, the chorus is the community of accountability. The chorus is telling you that you have responsibility to a community. And Nietzsche understood this in his analysis of, for instance, the Oresteia. He understood Aeschylus among the tragedians as really drawing on the importance of community accountability, the chorus, the family, the friends, your neighbors, all of that. But as we know, Nietzsche also brought up that in this moment, there is dancing. The chorus, the celebration, that music and dance are linked. And if you look at a lot of music forms, they started off with that link of dance and connection. Jimi Hendrix, with all of the technical stuff he does, he also wants you to dance. He was bringing in those elements. But then the next stage is the egotistical stage. And Nietzsche actually, contrary to a lot of other critics, saw the move to Sophocles, which was Socrates is favorite poet as actually decadent. And the reason he saw it is because it began to focus so much on individualism, on the self. It's all about beginning this me-me stuff, you know what I mean? It's all about me and my suffering and this and that. And Nietzsche, I think correctly, is critical of that. Because as you, and there is a longer argument, there are a lot of others, there's a wonderful Chinese political theorist and philosopher by the name of Xu Chengqiang, who also talks about this. In Greek society, it's the movement away from the connectedness relationality into the concept called ousia, which is called substance, which is the notion that you can be a reality by and onto yourself. And the moment you begin to imagine yourself is not needing anybody, anything, so forth. You are delusional, but you're moving into decadence. And Nietzsche talked about that. But then Nietzsche, and well, there's a third stage of decadence, which he saw in Euripides. Now, this is going to be something that is difficult for our times to swallow, okay? Because Euripides is known as the poet of women. And
PJ:
Hmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Euripides was at the point at which Greek society was becoming more democratic, which meant you have to ask the obvious question. How are you going to call yourself a democratic society if you're going to have slaves and you're going to treat women as property? And in Euripides' writings, in his tragedies, women are at the forefront. Okay? But the thing that Nietzsche saw that as bad, Nietzsche hated democracy, et cetera. That's where his conservatism came in. He wanted a tradition over democracy. However, I don't think it's as simple to write off his analysis by saying he's a misogynist, he's anti-democracy, et cetera. We have to ask ourselves. What I looked around over the past, my God, I can't even believe it's that many, nearly 50 years since I've encountered the writings of Nietzsche.
PJ:
Hmph.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
I've looked and I've noticed he's onto something. He may have problems with his analysis about women and democracy, but many art forms, if you look at them, especially in music. early rock, early rock and roll, people were dancing. Then it went to a stage of just these long solos where, you know, it's all about the individual star. And then it went to a stage where everything was, as they said, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was, you know what I mean? It was all about sex and androgyny and all of that stuff. You look at hip, you look at other forms. You look at hip hop. Right? Again, early hip hop was dancing. It was people at a party. The MC came, boogie de boogie, boogie de the beat, you know? And then more and more, it became the rapper. And talking about himself, I'm the baddest, I'm the biggest, I'm the this, I'm the that, I'm the that. And then you notice after that, then it became hypersexual. Everything was, and people were treating it as if it's liberation and saving the world. If you talk about booty and this and that and women's bodies and B words and W words, and you know what I mean? And then you began to look at even Jamaican music, right? You look at reggae. Right? Reggae started off with ska, you're dancing, rock steady, blah, blah. Then you got into Bob Marley politically talking about, you know, focus on the individual and the problems, even though he's making a liberation message. And then you have dancehall. What is dancehall? A group of women, the booty, the this, right? So,
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
so that analysis is there and I think we need to answer that. We need to
PJ:
Hmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
have... And I, in a lot of my rings, I try to give an answer to that. And even in that essay and elsewhere, which is, I'm not giving up on democracy. I love democracy.
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
OK.
PJ:
I'm a fan. Yes.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Yeah, I think the danger is when democracy becomes antipathetic to political responsibility.
PJ:
Mm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
If you
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
take collective responsibility for power out, then you're left with your individual celebration of your body. Right? You have to treat yourself as if you individually are so powerful in your identity, which is what is happening. Right? People want to be powerful as women, as black, as white, as whatever. But that's not real power. That's not political power. That is a situation where it is actually, in psychoanalytical terms, locked at the adolescent level of libid middle drives. It's where you just want to be safe and have pleasure. But that's
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
a child. To become an adult, you need to take responsibility and to realize that your actions affect others. And I do think there is another conception of art that brings political responsibility in it. while not sacrificing the joy and the celebration of the aesthetic dimensions of life. And as you know, I argue that what art's about... is about making us at home in a reality that has absolutely no reason to give a damn about us. The, what every one of us know is that there were billions, maybe trillions of what we call years before we came into being. And there will be billions and trillions when we're dead and gone. And in other words, what we call the universe or the multiverse has no reason to care about us. But we have a reason to care about ourselves and one another. And we do so in art.
PJ:
And I think as you talk about art, one of the things is that democracy dies through this antipathy, right? And what I see a lot of people talking about, they are looking to politics for answers to that antipathy. But even as you're talking here, it sounds like art. the creation of dignity. You mentioned art as freedom in the LA Review interview. And you also talk about the communal responsibility, accountability of the chorus. And as you talk about the fact that we are responsible in these sorts of things, as I look at a splintering nation in the United States, I think it was always splintered, but the splintering seems to be more apparent now. What we're looking for is not, we're looking for political solutions to when really it's not politics that's going to save us, or it's going to be something else that could reinvigorate politics if I could put it that way, that could remove us from that antipathy. Is that a fair reading of what you're saying?
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Well, the thing is, in all my writings I'm very critical of reducing anything to a single variable.
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
The mistake we often make is we're looking for a single thing to save us, and that's a big error. We need to have, in fact, the very notion of communal means that it's more than one. We need quite a few things. One problem we have... is that we confuse moralism with politics. You see, moralism is a search for a form of purity, a form of perfection. But politics is very different. Politics is about how we negotiate power. And the moral issue is when you're thinking about working with another morally. The fundamental question for you is, is that person moral? Is that person good? Is that person's actions representing a certain form of ultimately purity? But the political question is very different. It's not whether the person is moral, good, et cetera. The political question is about a negotiating having to work with people whether you like them or not.
PJ:
Hahaha
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
That's the fundamental political question. And the mistake people make in this country is they think you've got to like the people you work with politically.
PJ:
Yeah,
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
And
PJ:
yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
that's completely false, you see, because politics is about necessity. There is no individual moral likeness solution that's going to deal with the climate problem that we have right now. It is going to have to be to work with people we don't like, so we can collectively do something about the heating temperatures of this planet. Similarly, if we're going to deal with racism and sexism, it's not going to be about whether there are people individually racist or sexist. It's whether we can agree with the basic conditions through which people can live together with dignity. And for us to have institutions in place that can make sure that certain efforts don't have more power than others to do something about them. And so, you know, the problem I have is this very distorted view. right, makes us overly obsess about people even when, say, they don't have power. You see, if we, for instance, get rid of white supremacy, it doesn't mean that there won't be individuals who are white supremacists. Now, if I'm going to obsess over them when they don't have power anymore, at this point I have a problem. Because whether we like it or not, the people we call rights, white supremacists, are human beings. And they have a right to live as everybody else. And if we're going to obsess about that, we're going to reach a point where, and we've seen that scenario before, it's called cleansing.
PJ:
All right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
And similarly, if we are obsessed with anti-black racists, which is a different thing, right? You can get rid of white supremacy and have anti-black racism. Again, if you're obsessed with anti-black racists, then you know what you're gonna have to, you're gonna find, you're gonna find yourself having to get rid of your grandmother, your brother, your sister, and so forth, because, you know, news alert, there are black people who hate black people. So
PJ:
Mmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
there's a certain point where The cleansing model, the purity model doesn't work. Politics is about how to work together with our imperfections. I'm, for instance, I've been in leadership positions many places. I'm the head of a department, and I've been president of places. I don't have to like or love my colleagues, but I'm committed to them being treated with dignity and respect. And this is what I'm getting at. And so the political question becomes how to organize things in such a way. Our institutions, our laws, our distributions of wealth, all of those things around understanding the value of people, period. And then we can individually let the therapists and the spouses and families battle out their stuff, right?
PJ:
Right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
But that's the big confusion. So yeah, so to get back to what you asked earlier, it's not that I think politics saves us. It's that what I do think is for us to save ourselves, we need to learn to work politically.
PJ:
um... And that really creates the politics creates the conditions where we can be human. That's kind of the goal of politics, like should be the end goal of politics. That find this kind of this, because you could live apolitically in some sense, but you could not live without some form of art.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Correct. In fact, right, in other words, if people rally around politically and they're eliminating art, you're eliminating the livability of the society you live in. You know, there are certain easy ones if we talk about food and shelter and safety, true. But ultimately, political work is about producing a livable society.
PJ:
I in the past as we talked about white privilege and you dissected that into license and you talked about social goods which are just good things that everyone should have, right? And so, you know, you talked about access to education was one you said that time. And so one of those would be space for art too, right? And obviously, like that list is going to be hotly contested, you know, when people talk about what are like, what do we need for a livable society, but When you talk about the livability side of it, how does that tie in with the things you've said about dignity and freedom, the dignity and freedom that art give us?
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Well, there's something I also point out that surprised some people. All right. I actually make a distinction between good narcissism and bad narcissism. Okay.
PJ:
Okay, I am excited to hear this one. Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Okay, humanity is a narcissistic species. We are.
PJ:
Yeah,
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
And
PJ:
yeah, I'm not gonna lie.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
we are. Human beings spend most of our time looking at other human beings. We look at our reflection. We transform the world into a human world, whether it's gardening, whether what, you know, that, I mean plants by themselves. Nature doesn't look that way. We created a version of it that's a reflection of what is suitable for us. Similarly, what we do with dwellings, it's right, we even live in a world called language. Right? That language that we've created discloses our inner lives, dimensions of us. That is, so whether we like it or not, there were two million years at least of hominins. Homo sapiens, about 300,000. By the time we popped up, they were already art and technologies and all that. So we have never existed outside of a framework of a reflection of ourselves. Now when that reflection is healthy there are good reasons for that reflection. It provides us with communication, tools and learning about how to survive, express. and extend and have possibilities. If we didn't have that creativity, we'd have gone extinct a long time ago. So in the healthy sense, there is a pedagogical dimension to our narcissism. If you think about, for instance, how you learn a musical instrument or you learn to paint, you imitate another painter, another musician. In the beginning, we imitate people with language. That's how we learn. So that duplication of cells is a healthy narcissism because it makes us grow and it makes communities grow. So we should get out of our heads. I know I tend to have a controversial position. It's just like before.
PJ:
No, no.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
I reject privilege as the category. I prefer it be a critique of license. Similarly, I make a distinction between narcissism and narcissistic disorder. Okay? Ferenc Fanon did the same, the psychiatrist, Ferenc Fanon. And here's the difference, okay? Good narcissism is what I just spelled out. It discloses reality, it discloses a world of others. It makes us accountable. It has evidence, responsibility, all of that. Bad narcissism, narcissistic disorder, erodes that extension. It turns away from the reflection of humanity into reducing value to a specific member of humanity, the self. In other words, it moves from us to me. Narcissistic disorder is enough of this humanity stuff. What about me? The narcissist, the person with narcissistic disorder doesn't care if they're suffering in the world, only cares if he, she, or they are the ones who are suffering. That's narcissistic disorder. Narcissistic disorder cannot celebrate the achievement of another. It has to be only their individual achievement. You see what I'm getting at? And so narcissistic disorder... is also anti-politics because ultimately narcissistic, because politics can only work if it's shared. Narcissistic disorder doesn't want to share it. Narcissistic disorder wants to dominate it. Okay. I make a distinction similarly between authoritative and authoritarian, right? A person with authority is a good thing to have in a society, authority. But authority, if it's accountable, is authoritative. In other words, if you could say that person is an authority because of the legitimacy of her, his, or their actions, that's authoritative. The authoritarian doesn't want to be accountable, doesn't want to be authoritative. The authoritarian wants to say, I'm intrinsically better than everybody else, bow down to me because I am the authority. That's an authoritarian. You could see the mirror of that, right? That
PJ:
Yes.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
an authoritarian is a person with narcissistic disorder. So the thing about art, if we bring it back full circle, it's an expression of that first narcissism. It really is. It is for us to have a sense that there is an extended humanity that cares for us. OK? And it really makes us at home. It makes us valued. It does all kinds of other things. And the negative narcissistic disorder destroys that capacity. And it really gives us a clue to what good versus bad art is. Because both are ultimately expressions of being human. But bad art cannot reach beyond itself in a universalizing effort. You see, it cannot think about others. And by others, what I mean is, it's not only others who preceded us, the ancestors, but others who succeed us, the descendants. We don't know them. A person with narcissistic disorder would say, F them, who cares about them? They're not here yet. It's about me.
PJ:
All right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
But a person who doesn't have narcissistic disorder say, yeah, but you know, we are the conditions for their possibility and the world we leave them will make, will matter. So the person with narcissistic disorder would say, when I die, it's the end of the world. I don't care about others. A person without narcissistic disorder would say, you know, when I die, I become an ancestor and I set the conditions for others to have the role to become ancestors themselves or descendants. And I'd rather set the conditions that people actually appreciate that we have existed rather than to set the conditions for people to lament the fact that I've ever existed because I didn't give a damn about anybody else. You know, Tagore has a great quote
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
on this. Tagore says, you know, a person who plants a tree that will provide shade, that person will never experience, because by the time that tree is grown, that person will be dead and gone. It's a person who truly understands the meaning of And I think Tagore is right.
PJ:
I saw some bonsai tree that was over 100 years old on YouTube. And it's just absolutely gorgeous. And you see this work of living art. And it's just like, I immediately bought bonsai seeds and tried to get my kids to make them with me. And they haven't sprouted yet. It's probably they're rotting because there's been too much rain outside. But it's a good shot. But this idea of like. um, seeing ourselves as part of links in this chain. And I think that responsibility, um, is really important. And even as you talk here, like, uh, I actually wrote down, uh, before you said it, that makes me happy like that. I'm tracking the, that we are building a home with art. Right. And that's versus what you call and I mean, and this is the particular pathology of our current culture, the what Brad Evans calls the commodity fetishization. Right. This like, this is mine. This is a thing I own. And even in terms of certain aspects of copyright law, we see that right that art is not something like it's really hard to copyright dance music. Right? Like what makes dancing work, but as you make it more egocentric, it becomes more important. So, and I think, and I keep returning to this question, but this idea of the freedom we find in communal responsibility, is that kind of where that ties in?
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Oh, totally, totally. You know, freedom is different from liberty. Right? Liberty is the presence or absence of a constraint. Okay? If you're shackled, you don't have liberty. If they break the chains, you have liberty. However, simply having liberty is not the same as freedom. Okay? Freedom is going to be the connectedness and the responsibilities that, and remember, it's not one variable. It's many, right? Freedom is about
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
being valued, being at home, being able to live with possibility, all kinds of things. And it's really striking. I remember one time I was in a very fierce argument with a friend in New Zealand. We were in a car, she and I were going at it because she was one of these singer type animal rights people. And...
PJ:
Ah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
and she was just, yeah, and I was saying to her that I have a lot of problem with many animal rights people mainly because they don't realize how cruel they are. Because you see what they're really doing is trying to force animals to live under human conditions. And if you think about, if a lot of us human beings were to live under many animal conditions, we would suffer. Because back to that point about good versus bad narcissism, we don't belong in that world. We belong in the human world. That of language, affirmation, values, etc. But we drag animals into these worlds and subject them to, for instance, our sense of a comfortable... temperate room, which for a very furry animal is just horribly hot. Our conditions around went to defecate and urinate and some people even, you know, are so obsessed with their veganism. They give their carnivorous animal... you know, vegan food. I mean,
PJ:
Right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
and again, the animal suffers, gets sick, et cetera. So ironically, so at a certain point, as we're in this heated debate, right, we were going through the hills that had a lot of sheep farms. And we drove past one where the fence had broke, and the sheep got out. And the thing that was bizarre in the middle of arguing with this friend was that the sheep that got out were just a few feet on the other side of the fence grazing. That was it. And the thing is, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a sheep. It's perfectly fine.
PJ:
That's what they do. Yep.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Right. And so you could see this thing is this freedom concept is a very human concept about living a human life. You see? And so, right? What we share with that sheep. is liberty, the people who tend to focus on liberty over freedom are trying to degrade humanity into a singular realm. And it's true, we are animals. We share the liberty versus lack of liberty with many other animals. We also share signification with animals, right? We can communicate with many animals at a signifying level. But Ernst Casera was very right. the philosophers, when he talked about, but we do not share with other animals the symbolic level. The symbolic level is internal. That is where we live. We live in the symbolic world and that symbolic world is human produced. And within freedom is a function of the symbolic world. It's a world, and I don't mean it the reductive notion of, you know, only symbolic. What I mean is It is the world of meaning. So when I say a livable life, I'm also meaning by it a meaningful life.
PJ:
Right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
And freedom is about that. It's about a meaningful life.
PJ:
Even as you've talked about bad narcissism and you're talking about this reduction to of people to animals. It's also interesting to see people appropriate animal habitats. I still chuckle about once every couple months thinking about your example of the white lady who went swimming in a stagnant
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
A Billy
PJ:
pond
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Bong.
PJ:
in Australia at midnight. Yeah, a billabong, that's what it's called. And you always ask yourself, what did you think was going to happen? So their understanding is reductive.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Yeah, well we also get a lot of propaganda that really misrepresent what we call human-animal relations, you know. You know, it creates, and I think a lot of that is connected to, I mean I've talked about elsewhere, I find heavily racist societies tend to want to valorize animals. because they're so afraid of fellow human beings. Because you see the relationship to animals is an asymmetrical relationship of being things they could control. But it's often wrought with cruelty. And it's funny, because I remember many years ago when I was an undergraduate, I had a roommate and he really wanted to get a cat. And I'm allergic to cats, the dander and all that, but he really wanted to get a cat. And he got a cat, even though I didn't want him to get a cat. And then, and so we, so there was the cat and the cat, and there's a thing about me, you know, a lot of people, I have strong ol' factory senses. I could smell things that other people can't. And so do many other animals. And boy, do animals love my smell. And so this cat, this cat was just. with my allergies and everything was constantly jumping onto me, rolling my clothes, pee on it, you know. And, but then one day the cat peed on his clothes. And he was so livid. I was like, what are you doing? He had the cat in his head. He said, he's taking the cat away. I said, what are you doing with her? And he was going to go and find a junkyard and leave the cat there. And I was like, I got in your mind? And so what happens? I, the person with the allergies, the person who didn't
PJ:
Ha
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
want
PJ:
ha
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
the
PJ:
ha!
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
cat, took the cat.
PJ:
Yeah. And then you had to do
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Wicca!
PJ:
all the training that he didn't do to have it. Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Yeah, because I absolutely hate cruelty, right? But a lot of people don't know. I just absolutely hate cruelty. There's such a thing as cruelty. So it was, you know, and my roommate would absolutely swear he loves animals and he loved a cat. But he sure loved his clothes more. But anyway, but the thing is, it's not, of course, as that simple, you know, with these issues. Deep down, the point that ultimately, I think, the people who are thinking about animals are about is we do meet on something, our concern about cruelty.
PJ:
Hmm. All right.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
The concept of cruelty is not intrinsic in a world outside of us. Lions who hunt antelopes are not thinking about how gently they're going to rip its throat out and eat it. Lots of rats and other creatures, if we drop dead on the street, we'll nibble. They're not, cruelty is not an intrinsic notion to nature. Cruelty is a concept that's part of our world. So it's not just freedom and symbols and all these other things. There are lots of other things that are a function of our world. And in it, we bring upon ourselves the obligation, just as we do when we talk about art. We also bring upon ourselves the obligation for an ethical life in which we're committed to reducing as much as we can cruelty in the world.
PJ:
Mm. I want to be respectful of your time and I actually think this is pretty interesting as you talk about the even branching out into the animal world and not being cruel to the animal world. I was very struck and I appreciated just the personal note of the letter to a grieving student. And with everything that we've touched on like. embracing diversity, like the diversity of knowledge is, right? This idea of embracing, the fact that you had come out and it was one of the most crushing days of your life coming out from your friend's funeral, and then you saw the two girls skipping by with the ice cream cones, and you realize for them is one of their most joyous days. And A lot of what I prize about your work is the fight against reduction and the fact that those two things could happen at the same time and be equally valid.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Absolutely.
PJ:
and uh... Go ahead.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
No, the worst thing to say to people grieving is you'll get over it. The right thing to say to people grieving is you have a right to your grief. But at the same time, the right thing to say to people enjoying an ice cream cone on a 98 degree day is you have a right to your joy. We have a right to our grief and we have a right to our joy. And they're not incompatible. They were there simultaneously. Yeah, it was a profound moment for me. I was carrying my best friend's corpse in the coffin. And as we're there, I thought it was the worst day ever. And then a breeze blew and I looked up and I saw those girls skipping along, smiling with the joy. They were having one of the best days of their life. And I thought to myself, you know, they do have a right to that. And again, a malignant narcissist, a person with narcissistic disorder, would want to go and kick the ice cream cone out of those girls' heads. Say, don't you see my best friend died?
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Right? Yeah, you know, but there's so many examples, there's so many examples of that, right? Yeah. Our ability, part of our ability to acknowledge the simultaneity of so many dimensions of life. Yeah, we need to get rid of the reductivism and understand the connectedness, right? The affirmation. And I remembered while going through my grief, how happy I was for those two little girls.
PJ:
And when we're resisting reductionism, if we do that by our own form of reductionism, we still lose, right? And that's the point
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Yes.
PJ:
of reacting in anger to this ulterior, this other, this different experience.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Absolutely, absolutely. That's the connectedness, you see. And that's, if we go full circle back to what I like in Nietzsche's work, right? Here's an example, right? I mean, I'm a politically left-wing person. Nietzsche was a right-wing person. I love Nietzsche's thought, right? I love his humanity. And there are certain aspects in which, I think some of what he says is distorted. But at the same time, He was a human being trying to figure out very important questions. And I tried my best to understand him. And the thing that I appreciate is that he knew the value of that first moment of dancing and celebrating together as fellow human beings. And it's not only he who knew that. Many ancients knew this, you know. One of the most ancient texts is... 4,000 years ago, a dispute between a man and his soul in ancient East Africa, you know, a guy was in despair, wanted to kill himself, and the soul is like, wait a minute, let's think this through. You know, and they debate.
PJ:
Hehehe
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
And the very fact that they're debating is already a relational thing, right? There's the, you know, the eloquent peasant from 4,000 years ago where... There's this fellow who's treated so unjustly. And he goes and he argues with all the powers that be. And the very process is a community working it out. And it reaches at a fever pitch level where he expects to die because he's from the lowest class. And he expects the aristocracy to, you know, the higher classes to kill him basically for standing up for Mayat, which. It's often tried to say it's justice, but it's not. It's greater than justice. It's about having things right, including life, you know? And the point at which with all courage, he stands up to it. And, you know, they finally just say, look, he's persuasive. But there's so many examples of these things, you know, we think of and Teganese speeches to Creole, you know, we think of some of the texts that we see across, you know, ancient India, ancient China. I'm right now reading the discourses from the elders among the Aztec. Aztec is actually not a people. To say Aztec is like calling Greeks Olympians. The Aztec is supposed to be the ideal place. It's a variety of different peoples, including the people from Mexico, the Mexicans, and different areas of Central America. But the idea, discourse with the elders, it's the entire text. These are ancient. texts from the people, right, Nahuatl-speaking peoples. It's elders talking to youth. Again, that's relational. It's not elders saying, yo, we're elders, shut up. We'll talk with one another. No,
PJ:
Yeah.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
you see what I'm saying? That cross- generational thing, that is really crucial, because that's the chorus. And so, um,
PJ:
Mm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
I don't, I think it's an injustice to lock a thinker like Nietzsche simply into himself, but to connect him to humanity trying to work this thing out. How do we be accountable to one another? And I see it in ancient East African texts. I see it in... I see it in the writings of Falani texts that were for a few hundred years ago. I see it in what I just mentioned in Nahuatl language. And I see it also in the way I read Torah. I see it also in what I read as a Jew. When I read Jewish texts. There's always this thing
PJ:
Hmm.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
in Judaism about accountability to the community. And also, you know, full disclosure, I fully support the idea that the holiest of holy should never be named. The idea that you take the responsibility for ethical life and that it is a degradation of the sacred. to act as if it can be subsumed under a name. That's a kind of hubris, a kind of arrogance. That's a point at which our narcissism moves into the level of disorder, to think that we can subjugate God. And again, this applies even with atheism.
PJ:
Right?
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
You don't have to believe there's a God. It's just the idea of thinking of yourself in that. It's like, please. So I think the beginning of a heathenical life also has a form of humility in it. And humility, of course, is a word like, it shares the same roots with humus, and hominin, and human. They're all related words, right? It's, in a way, our humanity is about us coming down to earth.
PJ:
Dr. Gordon, I can't think of a better note to end on than the reminders of home and of humility. It has been an absolute pleasure once again to have you on. Thank you.
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
Thank you too, it's always a pleasure PJ. Thank you.
PJ:
I think
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
in
PJ:
we
LEWIS RICARDO GORDON:
it.
PJ:
have a delay between...