Thursday, January 18, 2024

Baldwin and Wittgenstein on White Supremacism and Religion

Display on James Baldwin at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC


My article, “Baldwin and Wittgenstein on White Supremacism and Religion,” has just been published on the JAAR website; I’m not sure when it will be assigned to an issue, but I guess it will be within one of the (somewhat delayed) issues of 2023.

The article is an exploration of the relevance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on forms of knowledge and certainty in On Certainty (1969) to understanding the intertwining of white supremacism and religion in the United States, especially as understood by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (1963). In so doing, the article also lays out some possibilities for the relevance of Baldwin to philosophy of religion.

Here is the abstract:

This article contends that James Baldwin’s exploration of racism and resistance to it in The Fire Next Time may be put into conversation with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s consideration of fundamental epistemic commitments in On Certainty. Out of this constructive engagement, I argue that white supremacism in the United States may be interpreted as being like a Wittgensteinian grounding or “hinge” commitment and that this viewpoint illuminates some of the ways in which white supremacism may interact with various kinds of religious commitments. This combined analysis depicts, first, the extent to which fundamental commitments about race deeply affect people, including the formation of their ethical and civic values, existential and religious commitments, and range of empathetic capacity and, second, similarities between Baldwin and Wittgenstein when it comes to their contentions that there is ethical value in the clarification of language and work on oneself.

Wittgenstein’s grave at Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge, U.K.


To a significant extent, the article orbits around two quotations, one from Baldwin and one from Wittgenstein.


Wittgenstein’s remark from the Investigations conveys a picture of philosophical problems and their origins that I have long found illuminating. Philosophical problems are not simply given or classic; they arise out of particular circumstances that lead to “not knowing one’s way about.” Baldwin’s remark from The Fire Next Time draws out both his robust sense of moral faith—in the possibility of becoming “a truly moral human being,” one who is “larger, freer, and more loving”—as well as his stringent, prophetic critique of Christianity, especially in the ways it has embraced white supremacy or otherwise been indifferent to white supremacy (particularly but not exclusively in the United States).


This article has been in the works for a good while. I wrote the preliminary version in 2021, a pivotal year in American society, and added a few revisions the following year. The re-emergence in the last decade or so of right-wing populism in the U.S. and elsewhere and the related appeals to racism and white supremacism have left me feeling perplexed and dispirited. While ideas relating to what would become the paper have been with me for some time, the paper took this form because it was the paper I needed to write, in striving to imagine what it might be to find “one’s way about” in times of crisis.


Two sources of inspiration for the paper I’d like to mention are a discussion that took place on Duncan Richter’s blog Language Goes on Holiday in 2020 titled “Absolute Guilt” and an interview with Eddie Glaude on The Religious Studies Project podcast in 2021.




References

Baldwin, James. 1998. James Baldwin Collected Essays. Edited by Toni Morrison. New York: The Library of America. 


Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Revised edition by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte. London: Blackwell Publishers.




Tuesday, December 26, 2023

"Virgin and Child"

"Virgin and Child," from Fujian Province, China (17th/18th Century) -- at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Chinese Religious Diversities and Philosophy of Religion

Statue of the Buddha triumphing over Mara (c.850-900, India)
 San Francisco Asian Art Museum

Earlier this month, I took part in my first face-to-face conference since 2019--the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. I've given a few papers during the interim, but those conferences have all been virtual. 

The SACP conference took place at the University of San Francisco. As I walked across the campus, I saw a Pro-Palestinian solidarity demonstration being held; I paused and listened to a student's speech, remembering anti-war and anti-Apartheid protests I had taken part in while an undergrad at Occidental College. 

This was, of course, quite different from the milieu of last SACP conference I had attended in 2017 at Beida (北大) in Beijing. Most of the papers at that conference had to do with Chinese philosophy, as one might imagine. (My paper was on Wittgenstein and Xunzi.) In San Francisco, the papers ranged across South and East Asian philosophical traditions, with a significant amount of engagement with Buddhist philosophy in particular; I was especially impressed by a pair of presentations on Buddhist ethics. 

For this conference, I presented a paper titled, "Chinese Religious Diversities and Philosophy of Religion." It's a paper that has long been in development. For the last seven years, I have been teaching at CUHK-Shenzhen, and one of my standard courses is Philosophy of Religion. Given the context, I approach that class in a globally-engaged, critical way. After spending three weeks getting acquainted with some of the central approaches in the history of Western philosophy of religion (especially theistic arguments and arguments concerning the logic of divine attributes), we spend the rest of the semester problematizing that approach and expanding together our understanding of what philosophy of religion could be in a global context. This involves explorations of South and East Asian philosophies and religions and their respective concerns, concepts, and arguments.

Wishing Ribbons at Hongfa Temple (弘法寺) in Shenzhen

Over the years, I have had numerous conversations with students on forms of religious engagement in China, and out of these conversations--and my continual study of Wittgenstein's writings--came the idea for this paper. Essentially, the paper is about challenging expectations about what religiosity in China is (and thus what religiosity may be in many other contexts). A key idea in the paper is that preconceptions about what religion must be and must entail can prevent scholars (and students) from seeing some of the ways in which people in China engage with religious ideas, practices, and institutions. Inspired especially by Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," the paper challenges common assumptions in philosophy of religion by advancing five themes about religions in a Chinese context: 

(1) The relevance of the reception and use of concepts of religion to globally engaged philosophy of religion; 

(2) The plurality of ways that religiosities may be combined; 

(3) The pragmatic ways that people may adopt religious practices, beliefs, values, and institutions; 

(4) The plausible combination of atheism with non-theistic religious ideas and practices; and, 

(5) The forms of state power over social manifestations of religions as well as what even may be classified as a religion. 

I got some good questions on definitions of "religion" and "atheism," but overall my sense was that this is a paper that has an audience. It was challenging to condense the manuscript into a conference draft. (My full draft is already over 8,000 words.) I have some ideas on what to do next with the paper, but first I've got to get through the rest of the semester.

As indicated above, the paper isn't just about China; the phenomena of Chinese religious diversities challenge several assumptions that remain fairly common in philosophy of religion today. First, there is the assumption that there is a single, relatively simple to grasp concept of religion that is capable of capturing what everyone means by the term (usually something to the effect that that religions essentially have to do with belief in supernatural beings). Second, there’s the view that avowed atheism is logically or existentially inconsistent with the holding of religious ideas or performing of religious rituals. Third, there is the prevailing perspective that religious observance/practice/belonging is just one sort of thing and always is mutually exclusive with other forms of religiosity rather than being potentially pluralistic. Fourth, there is the intellectualist presupposition that participation in religious rituals logically implies belief (or should imply belief, if the participation is sincere). Fifth, there’s the autonomy assumption that religions simply are what they are separate from the political or cultural influence and interference. Taking note of Chinese religious diversities reveals in vivid detail the distorting impact of assumptions like these. 

SACP 2023 Conference Program