Re: Should we embrace or reject our differences?
We should find a middle ground to moderate the our extremes of identity.
Filed under:
Identity
Posted at:
08:35 PM on December 26, 2007
Question: Should we embrace or reject our differences?
Transcript:My general philosophical, as it were, temperament is to find a middle ground between . . . between extremes. This is something that Aristotle also recommended. And I think there are two natural thoughts about identity which are both wrong. One natural . . . but they are sort of at opposite ends. One natural thought which has been taken out by much identity____________ is this is really great stuff. It’s important. It’s wonderful. We should . . . No human life can be made sense of without lots and lots of identity stuff. And at the other end is the view that no, what really matters is that you’re a human being. And all these other things merely divide us from one another. And we should focus on our common humanity. And that what it is to lead a good life is to lead a good human life; not an American life; not a good gay life; not a good straight life, whatever; not a good Christian life, but a good human life and so on. I think these are both wrong. That is to say, I think that it is important that identities can be a source of limitation and constraint; and that therefore we shouldn’t celebrate them unreservedly. But I think it’s also important to recognize that they can be a source of liberation and freedom and meaning; that they can help us make sense of our lives. And so neither of the view according to which all identity is sort of ethically and politically to be escaped from, nor the view that we should settle into our given identities and just sort of live through them seems to me quite right. Now that’s a very abstract way of charactering a contribution; but I think that it pays off when you start thinking about some of the things that I’ve written about like, you know, how religion should fit into politics; or questions about racial identity and belonging; and the balance between accepting that racial identities are important for historical reasons in our societies on the one hand, and on the other hand recognizing that they can be sources of limitation and constraint; and that they therefore need to be modified and developed . . . changed in ways that allow people to do good things with them.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanian-American philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist. His interests lie primarily in ethics, political theory, African intellectual history, and the philosophy of language and the mind. Born in London and raised in Kumasi, Ghana, Appiah attended the Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, later earning his PhD in philosophy at the University. He has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at University of Ghana, Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard and, most recently, Princeton University, where he is Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy. In 2007, he was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and he now serves as Chair of the Executive Board of the American Philosophical Association; and he is also currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. In March 2009, he succeeded Francine Prose as President of the PEN American Center.
While his early work dealt mainly with problems of semantics and structuralism, philosophically, Appiah is influenced by the cosmopolitanist tradition and issues of race and identity. He has published three novels, including Avenging Angel (1991), a murder mystery. His many nonfiction books, for which he’s better known, include In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1993), winner of the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), and his most recent Experiments in Ethics (2008). He lives with his partner, Henry Finder, in Chelsea, Manhattan.
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