2015 Lewis R. Gordon Disciplining As a Human Science

3|2015 Lewis R. Gordon Disciplining as a Human Science Abstract The author argues that disciplines are human phenomena that produce knowledge without having to collapse into anthropomorphism. Dying disciplines turn away from reality; living disciplines reach to reality without attempting to capture, colonize, or constrain it. The author refers to the former as “disciplinary decadence,” which, he argues, is the dominant model in much of the academy. The situation need not, however, be moribund. The author outlines this concept, explores possibilities for its transcendence, particularly through resources of phenomenology from the global south, and devotes much attention to the question: Is even human transcendence, disciplinarily understood, a human relationship? Résumé Dans cet article, Lewis R. Gordon soutient que les disciplines sont des phénomènes humains qui produisent de la connaissance sans craindre de sombrer dans l’anthropomorphisme. Alors que, vivantes, les disciplines approchent la réalité sans la coloniser ni la domestiquer, les disciplines qui meurent s’en détachent, cédant à la « décadence disciplinaire » qui, selon l’auteur, est le modèle dominant de l’Université contemporaine. Pour autant, celle-ci n’est pas pour autant moribonde, comme l’analyse de Lewis R. Gordon en atteste. Toute en explorant les possibilités de dépasser cette situation, à l’appui notamment de ce que les phénoménologies du Sud peuvent offrir, il pose la question essentielle de déterminer si la transcendance humaine, telle que les disciplines l’envisagent, ressortit encore à la relation humaine. Références électroniques Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplining as a Human Science, © 2012 Quaderna, mis en ligne le 28 janvier 2016, url permanente : http://quaderna.org/?p=416 Tous droits réservés Disciplining as a Human Science Lewis R. Gordon UCONN-Storrs Disciplines are formed. And they are produced as such by human beings. This is not to say their content is anthropomorphic. But it is to say that, as human creations, they come into the world, enjoy some vibrancy, decay, and die. A “living discipline,” I will argue, is animated by a form of humility: that its methodological resources reach to reality but do not capture, colonize, or constrain it. Forgetting this leads to disciplinary practices of attempting otherwise. This problem leads to the question of what it means for such efforts—even in the natural sciences—to be a human activity in which and through which is also formed the human relationship of being, classically, “for-itself.” In disciplinary transcendence (that is, disciplines reaching beyond human reality) are, then, a variety of questions posed to its presuppositions: Is even human transcendence (that is, attempting to go beyond human reality to achieve what is often called “objectivity”), disciplinarily understood, a human relationship? Such is the task of this investigation. The “human problem” The human problem, basically, is a performative contradiction. The human being as knower attempts to know what is beyond human perception, what in principle requires the absence of human interaction. In effect, it is an attempt to achieve objectivity through a vision, a point of view, of the world without at least human beings, what could be called a view from nowhere since wherever human beings are automatically becomes a somewhere. That human beings are involved in such an enterprise already announces the failure of such a project. Yet there is an extent to which failing needn’t be the outcome if the appropriate understanding of human relationships to reality were brought forth. This could be clarifed in the basic effort of “point of view” with which to begin. In effect, we seek insight from the origins of such projects in the frst place—namely, theory. Some etymological refection could be useful in this regard. The word theory emerges from the Greek word theoria (contemplation, speculation, viewing, seeing), from theoros (spectator), from thea (a view, interestingly from which we also get “theater”) and horan (to see), which in the Greek infnitive is theorein (to see, consider, or to look at). The interesting double moment of viewing what one sees occasions refection: not only to see, but also to see that one sees. It is a meta-refective move of double comprehension. To see what is seen and to see also that one sees offers the impression of seeing all. The primordial model of such is already embedded in the root theo, which refers to god. As gods, especially when fully invested with power, bridge gaps between potency and conceptual reach, the conclusion should be clear: embedded in theory is the effort to see what a god would see. Theory, then, begins with a rather lofty goal. Human beings are not, however, gods. Thus the stage is set for the human problem of attempting to see from the perspective of a god or the gods. Such is the human epistemological condition. It doesn’t follow, however, that it must be a futile one. The metaphor of the gods’ point or points of view occasions not only questions of human imaginative or conceptual reach but also a level of self-refection and realization that at least places our conceptual relation to acts of viewing. The act of seeing what is being seen, including seeing that one is seeing, raises considerations of self- awareness in acts of relating that brings the self into question. This problem of self-questioning is exacerbated by the consideration of its emerging from a relationship of reaching beyond the self in the frst place. Thus, even to reach for the initial relationship is one of transcending it as an isolated, complete reality. Put differently: the human knower could not emerge from a point of initial self- knowledge. It is a boomerang effect of realizing the act of reaching for a greater reality. And since reaching inward raises the same problem—of attempting to hold down a relationship that is established through transcending itself—the consequence becomes one of a reality greater than the effort to contain it. We could call that human reality.1 That formulation may seem at frst particular enough to be contained, but that wouldn’t work, as the whole point of its relationship is that it was never complete in the frst place. It is thus an open category, an ill-formed formula, an incomplete sentence, so to speak. This metacritical refection makes the question of theory in human terms a very different project than that of gods. It involves seeing what one sees while realizing its limitations, which, ironically, is akin to transcendent seeing in the form of also seeing one’s non-seeing, of realizing the limitations of one’s sight. There is, however, more. Realizing the limitations of one’s sight, reach, understanding, comprehension, is not the same as the limits of such efforts. For a limit, as a boundary, is also simultaneously a transcendence of itself. Put in existential terms, realizing a limit raises the anguish of deciding whether to accept or challenge it. Should we choose the latter, we (human beings) would struggle with contradictions of what we initially accepted. Engaging those contradictions is nothing short of movement through realization of false completeness. It’s an expansion through reaching beyond without prior-knowledge. Contingency becomes key in movements that are never accidental. The result is the meeting of the phenomenological (consciousness-of relations) and dialectical (movement through realization of contradictions) movements of thought. Let us know explore these two developments. Phenomenological Dialectics or Dialectical Phenomenology The human epistemic problem is in effect a problem of orientation to reality. In some models of addressing this problem, the goal is agonal in the classical Greek sense of agonia (struggle for victory): that of fnding an argument through which one could overcome or defeat that which stands in the way of conquering reality (in epistemic terms). There is a presupposition in this model of a clearing wrought from knocking obstacles out of the way. What is missing, however, is the understanding that the obstacles are often other forms of arguments born of human experience and understanding. Thus, what is being overcome is one human model over another, and in the course of it, the “winner” isn’t necessarily in touch with reality any more than the “loser,” or, even worse, the so-called loser may have been in touch and the supposed winner, simply, wrong. Much of this is well known in the history of thought, where seemingly commonsense models prevailed over what turns out to be correct. For readers familiar with Antonio Gramsci’s thought, the concern here is between common sense and critical consciousness.2 And for those more versed in the history of ideas, the domination of Aristotelianism in the course of the study of nature reveals that a persuasive story is not necessarily a right one, as developments ranging from natural selection to that of a cataclysm from initial high temperatures into the explosion we call the universe or possible pluriverse attest from evolutionary biology to quantum physics. Our concerns could go further into how we think of thought in historical terms as well, for realizations of imposed categories on the past in terms of geopolitical ones of the present would suggest that even the neat model of thinking from ancient Greeks to Euromodern scientifc thought is skewed in an ethno-epistemology of ethnically and racially legitimate movements of knowledge. The ancient Greek world of Socrates didn’t see itself as alien to that of the great ancient architect, astronomer, and philosopher Imhotep in KMT or ancient Egypt, and as human 1 I make no pretense of the originality of this term, as debates around it, as manifested particularly in Heidegger’s objection to Sartre’s use is a well-known part of twentieth-century debates in European philosophy.

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