Ideas - Philosophy from the Pub, with Lewis Gordon

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

Lewis Gordon is an academic. But he argues that confining thinking to the academy has resulted in people forgetting that philosophy “has something important to say.” He helps remedy the situation with this warm, funny, vital talk, recorded in a historic pub in St. John’s, Newfoundland, by Memorial University.

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. This is a CBC Podcast. Philosophy is actually extremely practical. It doesn't really have that sense to the public eye exactly. But

what we do in philosophy is talk about, you know, what it's like to be a person, what it's like to interact with other people, and to learn how to be a person through interactions with other people, what reality is, you know, what it's like to live inside of a culture. So I think that's the spirit of the public lectures on philosophy, just bringing philosophy to the public as this eminently practical activity. That's Shannon Hoth. She's Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. She's talking about a long-running lecture series that her department participates in, one that recently saw a well-known philosopher

making his way through a blustery night to one of the city's best-loved bars and music venues. The Ship Pub is in this little tiny alley on a hill that is just a bunch of stairs between the two major streets in St. John's. And it's dark and kind of grungy in a good way. And it's quite packed. Like we've managed to get the word out effectively. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. People are at the pub to hear Lewis Gordon, a thinker who is totally at ease talking philosophy outside the classroom. In fact, he thinks it's vital. We're in a world where there is such a suppression of the life, the humanity in thought, that people are forgetting even why many disciplines,

including philosophy, have something important to say. Gordon is someone who frequently crosses time zones, academic disciplines, including philosophy, have something important to say. Gordon is someone who frequently crosses time zones, academic disciplines, and personal identities. He's Jamaican-American and Afro-Jewish. He sees himself as a world philosopher and a political thinker, not to mention a cook and a musician. not to mention a cook and a musician. He's the author of the 2022 book, Fear of Black Consciousness, an award-winning scholar, head of the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut,

and someone who tours all around the world. So on this particular St. John's Night last March, Lewis Gordon has come in from the cold to give a warm and casual public talk at the Ship Inn. It's relatively dark and there's a light shining on a painted wood stage and Lewis is characteristically comfortable and eager to connect with people. The title of his talk? From the Kitchen and the Pub. So I just stick my phone on a music stand and press record, and then he just goes. Good evening.

Bonsoir. Akira Dje Dje Dje. Hotep. Shalom. Assalamu alaikum. These are all ways, as you know, of saying hello. You could also, if you want to be Zulu, say saubona, which means I see you. I have a little advantage here because I'm a person of many backgrounds,

and across my family, we say hello through all of those. The other thing is I take my shoes off whenever I speak, and there are many reasons for that. First, I'll give the profound reason. The profound reason is that to speak, especially in a context like this, the audience and the speaker have an obligation in the spirit of truth, and truth is sacred. And when one deals with the sacred, one takes one's shoes off, or you could do something symbolic. Some people cover their

head, whatever it may be. And in many communities, when you are accountable, you're accountable not only to the people in the room, but the people beyond the room. Truth is accountable to all, all life. That means then there's accountability to ancestors. And one of the things, if one is accountable to ancestors, is that, well, for there to be ancestors, there got to be descendants. And we are the descendants. But at the same time, if you take the value seriously of what it is to have descendants, then you have to become an ancestor. And to be an ancestor or a descendant is not about, say, if you have children. It's also about whatever community with whom you may communicate these ideas. The main thing is there is that commitment.

these ideas. The main thing is there is that commitment. Now, of course, we already start with something very complex here because there are people who don't care about ancestors, and there are people who don't care about descendants. And when there are people like that, that means the only thing left is themselves. And those are very dangerous people because for them, when they die, it means the end of the world. How do you reason with people who think their death is the end of the world? So ultimately, if you're going to be accountable, there's a sense, there's already something implicit about worlds to come. And so the shoes come off for the sacred. The other thing is, of course, when you have your feet, even though this is on a stage, there's a connection to the earth, to the ground, and that is sacred, to the communities,

the varieties of communities who preceded us and those to come. And so that's one thing. But I also don't eat with my shoes on, and I don't teach with my shoes on because I consider them sacred acts as well. Of course, there's another explanation. The other explanation is I'm from the island of Jamaica and you could take the man out of the island but not the island out of the man. And then there's a third one, which is it's comfortable. Now here's the point. All are valid. This is one of the

problems of our times. We tend to treat the world as if there's only one vote, you know, and we don't understand that many can meet in ways that are not actually frivolous. I've only been here a few hours. As I said, I was born in Jamaica. I grew up in New York. And when you look at the map and you say you're coming to St. John's, the way it looks on the map, my wife was like, yo, you see, yo. And then my good friend who's from Rio, Brazil, but is now in Bahia, was like, yo, yo.

And I said, look, I've been almost in many places, and I have a sense for special places. And this is a place I'd like to visit. And I said also, it's an island, and the thing I know about the seas and so forth, it would be wonderful to be with a community here, you know, to come. And I got to tell you, the moment I landed, I smelt the air here. It's a wonderful fragrance. The complex mixture of kelp, the sea, the different life forms. I have strong olfactory senses. I was just mentioning that with some friends.

And so that's already wonderful. But also, also the invitation is connected to why we're here today. Because you see, I mean, there are many ways to talk about philosophy. There's something that people don't understand. And that's a lot of what I'm going to be talking about. And part of it is because we're in a world where there is such a form of suppression of the life, the humanity in thought, that people are forgetting even why many disciplines, including philosophy, have something important to say. And when we get to a point where we begin to lock it away into the narrow mechanisms

of the very systems that degrade humanity, we're in deep trouble. And I've got to tell you, I've been all over this planet, and one of the things I could tell you right away, right away, is we live on a tiny planet. It's something people don't realize, but today we live in a world in which if it's going to take you more than 24 hours by plane to get somewhere, you're pissed off. It used to take, people used to be, what are you talking about? It's going to take me more than three years?

And then it was like more than six weeks? Then more than a month? And as you know, we communicate with one another in a nanosecond. know we communicate with one another in a nanosecond. And if the time to traverse space is shorter, space shrinks. So we, we, 2023 humanity, live on a tiny planet. And as I go around it many times, what I've learned is not only how small it is, what I've learned is not only how small it is, and it's really bizarre in this tiny planet that people are always fighting it and creating all kinds of nonsense when it's like, yo, you know, if this lifeboat flips over, we're gone. Yet people forget that.

But also, there are ways in which people don't know people. But also, there are ways in which people don't know people. And what I say about this is, we're always hearing how people are strange. But everywhere I go, there's this familiarity. And that familiarity that connects us, it's something that makes it without a question for me, not only why I'm here. When Shannon said, well, you know, would a pub be okay? I was like, right on. Rock and roll.

That's my jam. So I'll begin. First, I said a kitchen and a pub. So why did I say a kitchen and a pub? It's because I love cooking. I'm from a long line of women who cooked for communities going back hundreds of years. It's just my mother had no daughters, so they said, put all that spirit in him. But the thing that many people don't understand, so I'll start with the first thing, because this is about philosophy, okay? The first thing you should bear in mind is most

philosophy is never written down. The action in philosophy is the communication, the thinking through the ideas. Most philosophy is actually done when you're walking with a friend. It could be along the harbor, the beach, wherever it may be. Most philosophy can be done if you can't fall asleep that night and you're talking with someone. done if you can't fall asleep that night and you're talking with someone. Most philosophy is done in when you're cooking and you're talking in kitchens. In fact, I have a big kitchen. And most of the time when I mentor students or colleagues, et cetera, they come and I'm cooking and we go for hours. Sometimes we don't make it to the dining room because the ideas are just so rich that we end up eating while I'm cooking and we think of things. So that's the life of thought.

So much philosophy came out of the kitchen. Think about it. Right now, for instance, an archaeological site was dug up near Jordan. an archaeological site was dug up near Jordan. And this 14,000-year site, which means they were Nefutlians, basically ancient, today we'll call it African peoples, all over the Levant. And the site is of an oven.

And the site revealed that they were cooking, they were making meals, they were breaking bread. Okay? And I've often wondered, what were those people 14,000 years ago talking about as they circled this oven in the ground and these foods? And it takes time. If you think about it, we cook. A lot of what we eat and do takes time. And in that time, we talk, we go through ideas, we develop relationships to our food, etc. We also have disagreements. In the islands, they'll say, what are you going to talk about?

Please, and they go back and forth. You could imagine an ancient person holding up a rabbit bone, you know. What are you talking about, right? And of course, the metaphor for it is its sociality. That is something that humanity has been doing for thousands and thousands of years. And in fact, there's so much about us that is often misrepresented that we forget how much everywhere we go, somebody is going to ask us to come in, sit down, and whatever they have, even if it's just some boiled rice with a pinch of salt, and give you a conversation.

Okay? But of course, there's also the pub, the wine, the rum, the spirits. And within that framework, there is a lot. I mean, look, I'm sure the bartenders could tell you, it's not only that they are high-functioning therapists, but they also get to listen to important philosophical conversations from people who are not even thinking they're having philosophical conversations.

Quite often people, when they think about philosophy, of course, all of you may have heard this, that it began 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. But that's absolutely false. Okay? When I teach my philosophy classes, for instance, I begin, I often put right in the syllabus, right in the beginning, a paragraph from 4,000 years ago. And already when I say from 4,000 years ago on the African continent, that already makes you say, huh? And it was by a fellow by the name of Antif. And Antif reflects on philosophy. Antif reflects that, you know, a philosopher is someone who's thinking about something so much that it's hard to sleep. Anteph thinks that there are ideas that create a sense of wonder and humility about how vast reality is.

Anteph says this person tries so hard, and this is really wild, that the person ends up becoming wiser than a sage. And last I heard, sages are pretty wise. So that's a whole lot of wisdom. In addition, Antep talks about the person loves learning. And this is crucial because, you see, when you say you're a philosopher, it's just like if you say you're a professor. I often have conversations with my students about this. They think you're saying you are like Moses with the tablets. But I usually say, no, no, no, no.

I define a professor or a philosopher, not all professors are philosophers, but some are philosophers and professors. But I define all researchers, all teachers, as people who fell in love with learning. And they fell in love with learning so much that they continue to learn even to the point of trying to teach themselves. That's what research is. And a student comes to the table as a co-learner and she, he, or they may not have had the experiences of the teacher or the researcher. And that is why every one of you in this room who teaches or researches know this, that you

always learn something from a student. Because they may bring in a perspective you didn't have. And you should have sufficient humility to learn from this. And this is what Antep was saying 4,000 years ago. Antep also said something that blew my mind. Antep said, and also consults ancient texts. Now, if I just mentioned

that Antep was 4,000 years ago, a whole lot was burned down in the Library of Alexandria all right so I don't need to proselytize when I open my classes that way because my students have read if they go out there somebody says philosophy began in ancient Greece 2500 years ago I said well I just read something from 4,000 years ago and engaged it philosophically. End of story. Now, first doesn't mean best.

It doesn't mean worst either. It just means that Antep told us there were others. There were a lot of women who wrote in the ancient world. Persehat, among them, Hypatia. There are all kinds of ideas. And so Antep brought that out. So Antep, of course, when he talked about not being able to sleep at night, tells you it's not only the kitchen and the pub, but it's also when you're going to bed. Okay? But as we know, there are enduring legacies. For instance, one of the most famous was by Plato, Plato's Allegory

of the Cave. And many of you know it, you know, people are enslaved, chained up, not in this case, they're shackled, they look at the shadows, they think it's reality, somebody gets out, walks out, and says, I see the light. Now, what's interesting is that person could turn back and say, see ya, and goes. But it's an interesting story because the person goes back and tries to persuade others to come out. And that's called edukare. It's the beautiful value of education. So to get them to come out. And Badu, Alain Badu, argues that that activity, he calls it politics.

Because it has to be by persuasion. And it empowers people. But there's another text by Plato that I love to teach. And it's called the Symposium. And if you know what the word Symposium means, Symposia, it means drinking party. symposia it means drinking party i often remind my students that most of the great thinkers we read were athletes and good drunkards okay but drinking drinking is a social activity the spirits loosen you up and the symposium took

place at a drinking party and if you haven't read it, go and read it. It's a great text. It also challenges a lot of the way people today would think of the past. There are many things. For instance, it starts off in a very patriarchal way. The one woman in the room is told to leave. There are all these dudes talking. And they're going on. They talk about love. And they talk about the male body and all of this stuff. And then it comes to Socrates. And, you know, everybody knows that at that time Socrates was the mag daddy of the philosophers in Athens, right? I mean, if Socrates is coming to you, you know, if you're going to a drinking party and you bump into Socrates, you're like, yo, where are you going? I've come to your house for a drinking party.

You're not going to say, okay, let's just drink. If Socrates comes, you want to have some conversation. And so it comes to Socrates and Socrates announces that he learned philosophy from a woman, Diatima. And when he says this, he goes through all the details of how ignorant he was and how she taught him and the ideas he had to offer. And then another twist comes into this story because one of, well, Socrates' lover, Alcibiades, he crashes the party. And Alcibiades was, you know, the beautiful guy and everybody wanted to be with Alcibiades. And Socrates says, yo, he's very jealous. Protect me. And then Alcibiades gives a speech and he says, why isn't there any drinking going on? And then he gives a speech

on Socrates. And if y'all haven't seen a picture of Socrates, I mean, the portrayals of Socrates. Take a look at them. By many standards, he's butt ugly. Okay? And, but he talks about how all of his effort to seduce Socrates, trying everything, nothing was working. And then finally he thought, you know, maybe I should engage him in some philosophical banter. And so as they start talking philosophy and so forth, then Alcibiades begins to realize something, and he refers to it, in Greek it's pharmakon, like a toxin, intoxicated, to be intoxicated.

And he said that Socrates is intoxicating. And then he said something even more. The intoxication made him look at this but ugly man and saw the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. But if you think about that, that is what love is, right? People always say love is blind and that is false. Actually, love enables you to see someone. When some people, you have all noticed this.

You've walked down the street and see a couple and say, what the hell does she see in him? Or what does he see in her? Or what does he see in him? Or she in her, et cetera. But what they see is, man, you know, I love your eyes. I love your nose.

I love that pimple on your forehead. I love your fourth chin as that pimple on your forehead I love your fourth chin as it jiggles when you laugh think about it right when you're in love you have non-conversations with somebody who's taking a dump if you love your child

you hold up the baby the baby barfs on you you wipe it off your face and you just kiss him right And if you love somebody enough, one day they could be incontinent and you will change them and wipe them. You see the beauty even in their filth. And so Alcibiades was saying that philosophy is initially ugly, but if you invest in it, you see its beauty. And so he used, metonymically, Socrates to talk about philosophy.

And many of you, it doesn't have to be philosophy, the disciplines you're working in, you fell in love, you can see its beauty. In fact, the hard you're working in, you fell in love. You can see its beauty. In fact, the hard work you've done, the struggles, and it's not just that with disciplines, it's that with relationships. It's with your partner. It's with your friends. All of that, it tells you something about existence, that we commit ourselves to struggling through what is worth it. And we see that beauty. And when we do this, we now face something very crucial.

And this is now where I'm going to make the transition into Africana philosophy. But before I do it, I need to make one more meta-philosophical point. In fact, all I've been doing so far is meta-philosophical. Meta-philosophical means to talk about philosophy. There is a very problematic view of how to do philosophy. Philosophy is treated like a fight. People show up and say, I'm going to knock down her argument or his argument or their argument. I'm going to defend this position. But the problem with fight, fight, fight, fight is even if you win the battle, you can be wrong. There are a whole lot of people who beat up people, who dominate people, and that is wrong. So simply the question

of knocking down another's argument is insufficient. But there's another way of thinking of philosophy a lot like this pub. And what that is is to say, you know what, I am NOT a god. I don't know everything. I need a community to work together to enable the appearance of what would enable us to understand things better. Philosophy is a communicative practice of community understanding. Helps us see what we fail to see, hear what we fail to hear, understand what we fail to understand. And these other things that could appear often connect us greater to something that many of us, many people are afraid of. And it is called

reality. So, one second, some water, and I go to part two. You're listening to a public talk, a public house talk, in fact, by philosopher Lewis Gordon. He spoke on stage at The Ship, a bar in St. John's, presented by the Philosophy Department of Memorial University. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together, they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. Essential reading for everyone. Health for All is the instant number one national bestseller by Jane Philpott, former federal minister of health and Ontario lead on primary care. With over 6 million Canadians lacking basic health care,

Philpott offers a prescription for a healthier society focusing on hope, belonging, and purpose. Available in hardcover and audiobook. Narrated by Jane Philpott. Last March, Newfoundland's Memorial University invited philosopher Lewis Gordon to visit. On the itinerary was a public talk at a local pub, where he riffed on what he called four Africana philosophical themes for our times. Graduate student Antoine Gillette, co-organizer of the event, explained that term. So Africana philosophy is the era of philosophy

that looks at the discourse that comes from people of Africa and their diaspora and from continental Africa, and it draws on the different themes, discussions that happen in the U.S., in the Caribbean, in Latin America and in Africa too. And all these discussions come under the branch of Africana philosophy. Antoine Gillette first encountered the work of Lewis Gordon at Memorial University, where he came to study from his home in Belize.

Born and raised, I moved to Newfoundland in December 2018 to do my undergrad in philosophy and political science, and now I'm doing my master's, finishing it up. Gordon became the first guest of Antoine's new project, gathering together a diverse and cross-disciplinary student group calling themselves Philosophy from the Margins. Ten of us, we came together to create this group with the idea of bringing into focus discussions based on the philosophy of race, gender, identity, Indigenous thought.

We have students from sociology department, political science department, the psychology department, and two individuals from nursing. So as to really show how philosophy, we get caught up in it being an academic discipline to go on what Shannon had said earlier, the practical aspect and each and every one of us have something to learn from it. Antoine's group was inspired by Lewis Gordon's approach to thinking about a constellation of issues. It's a move away from this centrality of Western thought.

And for myself, I guess, it allowed me to look to different sources. As for lesser-known international thinkers from the margins? Their influence, though it might be lost to the historical record, sometimes can always be found if you take the time to really excavate it and to really look to what this can say, what insight this can give you into the human condition and what it means to be a human being. A lot of questions we're asking, we've always been asking, and we've been asking them in different cultures, different parts of the world, and these are central questions we ask when we look at, well, what it means to be a human being.

We interact with teams such as justice, existence, and what is real. Big questions of justice, reality, and humanity are at the heart of the second part of Lewis Gordon's talk. But the philosopher considers them in a typically approachable way. For example, he began a meditation on the nature of reality with a rhythmic illustration. Gordon is a drummer,

and he showed the audience how seven beats can be drummed out in quite different ways to the same goal. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. to the same goal. From the stage of the ship in St. John's, philosopher Lewis Gordon explains. I don't like the word objectivity. And the reason for it is that for something to be objective, it has to be in relationship to something subjective.

And for something to be subjective, it has to be in relationship to something objective. And the mistake people make is that they think they could have their subjective without the objective and the objective without the subjective. But every instance was seven. But we collectively was able to understand each differently. And not only that, we were able to do it together. That is the evidentiality. And by the way, that's in musical form. You just had a music lesson on bars.

But the, no pun intended. but the basic point is that that is also a transcendental argument a condition of possibility of intelligibility of what I did is that we live in a shared world we live in the world of communicability okay and that world becomes jeopardized

because for a variety of reasons there are people who are afraid of the reality of that world. And that has taken certain forms. Among them is a form that really distorts an understanding, not only the history of philosophy, but the history of humanity. only the history of philosophy, but the history of humanity. And among them, we have an old avalanche of lies premised upon stereotypes that misrepresent our species and who we are. And among them, even though I'm talking about Africana philosophy, it can be connected to a variety of global southern thought. It can be connected to feminist theory. It could be connected to a lot of areas. But I'm focusing right now on Africana philosophy because it can contextualize it. And because I began with Antep, who was in ancient Africa, there are certain obvious problems that emerged from what we call the Euro-modern world. And you notice I said Euro-modern world. The reason I say that is because the Euro-modern world is all around us, yet it's based on something that is false.

Okay? The first one to think about is most of the time you say modern, people think European anyway. But there are many moderns. All modern means is to belong to the present. And to belong to the present, if you ever try to say now, the problem is you have to anticipate it, which means there has to be a future. So to say only certain people could be modern is to say only certain people have a future, which makes a lot of other people locked into a past. So if we're going to say modern, we should specify which modern.

If we say Euro, that's even complicated. Because what in the world is Euro? What is Europe? You know, you ever look at a Mercator map and people say Europe, but they're like, isn't it attached to Asia? The truth is, there's Asia, there's West Asia, and East Asia,

and Middle Asia. But it's the forces that created Euro-modern colonialism that make us say Europe versus Asia. Because of a lot of problematic stuff around racial logic and stuff, Europe is believed to be the homeland of white people.

That is also problematic because there's never been a homogeneous only one kind of a race people in Europe, even in antiquity. Even, you know, it's funny, people don't even realize that right now

with a lot of the scientific work we're able to do, we can even tell you that the people who morphologically look like what we call Europeans today didn't even pop up till 8,000 years ago. So that means all of those ancient peoples we're looking at prior to 8,000 years ago in what we call Europe were all my color or darker. Though some of them had blue eyes and so forth. But what this does tell you is that, okay, there's an investment in trying to separate. And actually, even the notion of continents actually emerged out of the British Isles when they would point to the mainland, and that was the continent. They just didn't know if you keep walking in it, you'd end up in Korea, okay? And so that's how they got that consciousness. But for our purposes, by the 15th century,

when Euro-modern colonialism happened, it led to a set of attacks on humanity that raised some very important questions. And these are questions, if we examine them, it doesn't mean we're not being philosophical. It doesn't mean we're not being theoretical. It doesn't mean we're not being theoretical. It doesn't mean we're not being other categories of political, sociological, etc. And the reason it doesn't mean that is because already from the stories I mentioned,

whether it's Antep, whether it's Plato, there's an understanding that thinking is most healthy when it's in the open, when it's willing to take the risk of going beyond itself. And so here are the four thematics. That's the subheading of tonight's lecture. The first one is obvious. If you're going to colonize people, if you're going to enslave people, if you're going to go through anything that's going to tell some people that they're not equal to you, that is called dehumanize you, if they say you're less than human, then you face the question, well, what does it mean to be a human being anyway? And that's called a philosophical, anthropological question. What does it mean to be human?

And the reason that's a philosophical question is because, let's think about it. If someone walks up and says, hey, hey y'all, none of y'all are human. Only I am. Human here, baby. Many of you would say, well, what the hell makes you say that? I'm as human as you are. But if you were to say that, you would have lost the argument. Because you would have made the person who challenged your humanity the standard. What if he, she, or they were a very low standard?

Should you make a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, the long list of a classist, whatever, the standard? So you say, okay, I'm going to be the standard. But the same problem emerges. What makes you the standard? And after a while, you begin to realize, wait a minute, we need to interrogate the very standards by which we're able to meet as human beings. That is a theoretical and a philosophical problem. That's a question. The next one is easy.

If some extraterrestrials were to come here and enslave this entire bar, this entire pub, getting the hell out of that would be on your mind. So liberation and freedom, that's a fundamental issue. If you're going to make an age dominated by colonialism and enslavement, exploitation, etc., then liberation and freedom is on the mind of people. But the question is, what are liberation and freedom? Well, there are many answers people give, but a little teaser can be understood if you could imagine if you're an incarcerated person and you escape.

If you escape, you have your liberty. But are you free? And the answer is no. Because a fugitive existence is not a free existence. And in fact, one of the things that police officers always say, I have a whole lot of critique of the police, but they always say it's always easy whole lot of critique of the police, but they always say it's always easy to catch people when they escape from prison. Just go to their home.

Just hang out and wait long enough. They'll try to contact someone at home. And the reason this happens is because freedom and home are connected. To be free is to be in a place you belong. To be free is to be in a place you belong. Think about it. Many of you may have the memory of your first apartment or your first room that's yours. You start doing things like you can run around with the scissors, right? You walk around naked. It's your place, damn it.

You can be bare. It's home. But there's something else. Then you begin to realize, wait a minute, but if it's your home, you have responsibilities. And in fact, this is part of human mythic history. There are many versions, but everybody knows the Adam and Eve story.

The Adam and Eve story is basically in a nutshell, I mean, there are many versions. But check out this one. There's this being called God and this being creates these two creatures and say, you can partake of all in this beautiful garden. Just don't eat the fruit of that tree.

Now, you all know this. If you had children and you say you could do whatever you want in the house, just don't eat the cookies in that jar. You know what's going to go down. There'll be a conversation pretty much like this. Where are the cookies? I don't know.

Why are there crumbs on your lips what what comes right so but here's the interesting part many people thought the fall in that story was the eating of the fruit that's absolutely incorrect think about it if god, and let's not be masculinists here. Maybe we should give God, let's like, what happened to that fruit? You see, but here's the thing. God Almighty, with her, his, or their power, can do anything absolutely powerful. Gives you a rule. And you, a puny human being, a speck of dust to this creature.

If you look at the galaxy, we're full of ourselves about our planet. Our planet is like dust. And we're just like a speck. Yet we have the ability to disobey God. That's an extraordinary power. We can obey or disobey God. That's an extraordinary power. We can obey or disobey. And the point isn't whether there is a God or not. The point is something different, is that in that choice is an articulation of responsibility for our actions, our freedom. And that implicit is the distinction between liberty and freedom.

In the initial example, they had liberties, but now they face freedom. And freedom is connected to our maturation. If you look at all issues of dehumanization, they also have infantilization. It's to stall your capacity to grow. Indeed, the relationship between the philosophical, anthropological question and the question of freedom is the realization in the human world, it's about always, what are we to become? What do we want?

It's a word of meaning. And when you block those capacities, that's called oppression. So we come to the third. The third, and it's a subtext of the meta-philosophy I've been articulating. The third is straightforward. It doesn't take a lot of effort for many of you to just go right now to look at. You could do it through any book, article. You all know that a lot of

the resources of science, philosophy, literature, history, etc. were rallied for the services of it's just a fact and what that has done is to create a crisis in the legitimacy of knowledge because the question that happens to justification is that if reason is being used in an unreasonable way, that is to rationalize the degradation of humankind

through selling, supporting, presenting a false reality, how do you respond to that? The philosopher, psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon had an elegant way of putting this. He said reason had a habit of walking out the room whenever a black person walked in. And what is he to do with that? If he tries to force reason and in French it's, you know, la rayaison, it's in the feminine

it's violence. know, la rayaison. It's in the feminine. It's violence. So he has this challenge of having to reason with unreasonable reason reasonably. And once we see this, we begin to realize, oh, there's something more complex. And now we're getting to what we call hardcore down and roll up your sleeve philosophical thinking. But I'm not going to put it in an abstruse way. I'm going to actually put it in a very simple down-to-earth way. In the Euro-modern world, there's been an effort to conquer reason with rationality. But what is rationality?

Well, rationality requires consistency. Rationality, particularly in logic, means there is no contradiction. So if you have a sentence, it mustn't contradict the next sentence, nor the next, nor the next. And then you could go infinite series and you have maximal consistency, maximum rationality. Got it? Now, I'm going to ask all of you right now, all of you, in your heart, I'm going to ask you, would you like to be married to a maximally consistent person? you know what you call that right hell because there's a certain point and i said philosophy does happen in the bedroom there's a certain point in the bedroom you're arguing and the person turns around and say you know you're so consistent, you are unreasonable.

Reasonability is not identical with consistency. Rationality and reasonability are not identical. Because reason is not only about knowing how and when to follow rules, it's also knowing how and when to break them. It's about knowing when it's not working. And that's a different kind of conversation. So I come to the last one. The last one is called redemption. Redemptive narratives.

You know, when you talk about colonialism, racism, and all of these things, there are people who get defensive. They really personalize it. And that's also connected to a larger issue. Because, you know, part of what those historical phenomena have done is to construct in a set of people a lie of their perfection. If you believe you're like God, then you're the one in control of everything. So if something's wrong, it's as if you're being blamed. But there's a distinction between blaming a player and blaming a game. Many people think they can make the world better by just changing the players.

But if the game stays the same, we have the same problem. the world better by just changing the players. But if the game stays the same, we have the same problem. If the argument is about the game, the question is, is this a good game? And some people, the game is designed for them always to win. And that's why they personalize the game. But in effect, when they defend that, what they're really saying, and this is the redemptive narrative, the real question when you raise the question of redemption is, is it worth it? Is it worth it to say that the societies we have are justified despite the genocide, the degradation, the misrepresentation of history, the long list of things that have happened. And I don't mean this in a moralistic sense, because there are problems I have with moralism. Moralism seeks a kind of purity that makes somebody say, well, I'll make myself nice and moral, but everybody goes home to the same. Okay?

It's a political question. same. Okay? It's a political question. The political question is really, what can we do to make a better game? And this begins to transform if we think back to the questions that were initially asked. Because the task now, if we talk about truth and reality, is about saying that because we're not gods, because we're not complete, it doesn't mean when we make the decision to address the wrongs of history, a decision to address thought that misrepresents our lives, it doesn't mean we have to pretend they didn't happen in order to make things better. Part of an adult existence is to be able to live both and, is to be able to understand that being a human being, that's why that philosophical, anthropological question is so important,

is part of being a human being is to understand how to communicate the truth, but also how to understand where we go wrong when we're arrogant. In fact, the word humility and human are connected. They actually link to humus, dirt, clay. And so once we deal with that, we see that tasks return, whether it's through Antep or Alcibiades, whether it's through Hypatia Simone de Beauvoir, but all of them connect to

something that I already hinted at, and that is the concept called love. Colonial understandings of love tell you the lie that you could only love those who are like you. And if logically similitude is a condition of love, then logically you ultimately could only love yourself. could only love yourself. But what we do know is humanity has the capacity to love other than the self. Many of us do it all the time. Instead of narcissistic disordered forms of love, there are forms of love that are premised on seeing the imperfections, the complexity, the difference. Not only in our partners, our friends, etc., we also love other species. We can love things and we can have ideas. We don't have to be the object of our love.

Love can be the celebration of our relationship to life and reality itself. And when we think about bringing that love to power, instead of coercive power, which is to force others to be us, there's also another kind of power, which is the ability to make things happen with the conditions of doing so. with the conditions of doing so. And that means sharing those conditions, sharing them to build nothing less than a better world. And those who inherit it are people we'll never know. They're anonymous. But if we do our work right, you know what we'll receive.

It's not that we ourselves will receive it because we don't know. But what they will be able to say are those proverbial powerful words. Thank you. Misei buku. I'm done. You've been listening to a talk by the American philosopher Lewis Gordon, called From the Kitchen and the Pub, Four Africana Philosophical Themes for Our Times. It was recorded at the Ship Inn in St. John's, Newfoundland.

You can find more information about Lewis Gordon on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Thank you to Shannon Hoff and Antoine Gillett from Memorial University, to the philosophy from the Margins Group, and to Memorial's Scholarship in the Arts program. When I talk about philosophy, I make a distinction between this thing called professional philosophy and this thing called professional philosophy is connected to a variety of institutions, one of which came out of Bologna, Italy, 1,000 years ago called the university. But that's not actually philosophy.

That's more the scholarly training to do an activity that permits one to work in certain institutions, publish in certain, and you publish in journals, etc. Okay? And I wrote a book called Disciplinary Decadence about this issue. And disciplinary decadence is when the discipline is treated in such a way that the practitioners are so locked in it that they no longer pay attention to reality. So that's one thing. Now, within there, there's some people who actually do philosophy. But I actually argue that any discipline, philosophy included, is alive when it's willing to go beyond itself for the sake of reality. I often

when I teach philosophy classes, ask students, give me a list of the most important questions you can possibly ask. Just give me them. And we talk about them. But, you know, sometimes we've reached a point where we create a boundary line and we don't realize that we should be asking those questions. And here's one. How many of you have had a conversation about the 22nd century

now I gotta tell you since the 21st century has begun this is the first time I've ever seen three people raise their hand isn't that something maybe we need to now say in philosophy have different kinds of questions about technology and about our planet. I may have earned myself a pint, so I'm going to go to the bar and come over.

Episode producer Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Danielle Duval is technical producer. Ideas senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.