On Being This (Arab-)American Doing Analytic Philosophy in Belgium
Jonathan Shaheen
My contribution will address some intertwining topics from the perspective of an Arab-American working in his native English in an analytic department in Belgium. The unifying theme will be that philosophy everywhere is parochial, and that being a foreigner is one of many ways to experience the kind of alienation that brings people to that realization. That is, being a foreigner brings with it a certain epistemic advantage. The unifying theme is, of course, rather abstract, and what I am really going to do is present some of its concrete manifestations, to (as Nancy Cartwright might say) ‘fit it out’. I want to acknowledge at the outset that being an American in Europe doing analytic philosophy in English is the least alienating way to be a foreigner that I can imagine. Some of my non-foreigner colleagues are as much trying to navigate my territory as I am blundering around in theirs. But I will make some hopefully interesting points about the diversity of English; about becoming a foreigner; about what it’s like to be a foreigner (in any arena); and about intersectionality as a foreigner who is also professionally and societally privileged in many ways. What I called the unifying theme of the talk informs its lesson: the lesson is that, to do philosophy as the Kuhnian normal science many people take it to be, one has to become parochial, to stop being a foreigner, and to become an insider. That’s a lesson, but not a prescription. Shto delat’?[1]. Hypotheses non fingo[2].
To begin fitting out the theme, I’ll argue that no one speaks a language that isn’t parochial. Consider the grade-school facts that London and Istan- bul are in Europe. Despite the obviousness of these facts, it turns out that many people speak an English in which the primary meaning of ‘Europe’ is a political entity rather than a landmass delimited by nothing except wa- ter and the positions of continental shelves (or whatever I was supposed to believe in school). Many native-speaking linguistic insiders have no idea. I conclude from examples like this that everybody’s language is parochially accented, and I will try to cast doubt on the idea that the parish ever really has a population greater than one. (Consider, for instance, that my increasingly obnoxious patois includes the last two sentences of the previous paragraph.)
I’ll then argue that no one does a philosophy that isn’t parochial, either. My kind of philosopher prides herself on presenting arguments clearly. But it happens that one gets referee reports that diverge wildly on their evaluations of the clarity and argumentative structure of a paper. It can seem like one of them must be wrong, that reliance on such reports must be unjust. But that is to impose standards of clarity and argumentative structure outside of their parish. I say this not to reject the possibility of objective standards, but in deference to the fact that the standards that different philosophers actually use vary wildly.
Turning more explicitly to the foreigner, I’ll observe that it takes foreigners time to acclimate to new parishes. Not only that, but being a literal foreigner means that you have to get permission to cross borders, while be- ing a philosopher means that you recognize Kafka novels when you are living in them. So I’ll discuss some of the times I became a foreigner, sometimes by moving to Europe, but sometimes by happening to live in a place when nearby events placed people who look like me under suspicion.
Then, to further fit out the theme, I will present some observations concerning the discourses that dominate highly respected journals, which are in many ways friendly to my approach to philosophy, and unfriendly to that of some of my Belgian colleagues. Despite being a foreigner in Belgium, I retain the privilege of having the right accent, of already being parochial in one of the right ways, to have a chance at survival in academic philosophy, and therefore also the privilege of being able to acclimate by subtler transformations.
Let me mention some more categories, with an eye towards an intersectional coda: I am an intermittent émigré, a person who will, during the workshop, be feeling like a foreigner in his native country, trying not to pepper his speech with Dutch interjections; and one of the world’s very few Arab-American academic philosophers. Each of these categories marks a way to be foreign. Certain of them lend themselves to particular distrac- tions and particular ideological distortions, and in that way may serve as epistemic stumbling blocks. But none strikes me as essentially inimical to doing good philosophy. Indeed it seems to me that being a foreigner in philosophy is in part to bring an outside perspective that may have substantial epistemic benefits, if also in part to find yourself at the mercy of whether the prevailing local and professional standards can be brought into sync with your own.
Notes
1. What is to be done? (The title of a Chernyshevsky novel and later a Lenin pamphlet.)
2. I frame no hypotheses. (Newton’s denial of going beyond what he observed.)
To begin fitting out the theme, I’ll argue that no one speaks a language that isn’t parochial. Consider the grade-school facts that London and Istan- bul are in Europe. Despite the obviousness of these facts, it turns out that many people speak an English in which the primary meaning of ‘Europe’ is a political entity rather than a landmass delimited by nothing except wa- ter and the positions of continental shelves (or whatever I was supposed to believe in school). Many native-speaking linguistic insiders have no idea. I conclude from examples like this that everybody’s language is parochially accented, and I will try to cast doubt on the idea that the parish ever really has a population greater than one. (Consider, for instance, that my increasingly obnoxious patois includes the last two sentences of the previous paragraph.)
I’ll then argue that no one does a philosophy that isn’t parochial, either. My kind of philosopher prides herself on presenting arguments clearly. But it happens that one gets referee reports that diverge wildly on their evaluations of the clarity and argumentative structure of a paper. It can seem like one of them must be wrong, that reliance on such reports must be unjust. But that is to impose standards of clarity and argumentative structure outside of their parish. I say this not to reject the possibility of objective standards, but in deference to the fact that the standards that different philosophers actually use vary wildly.
Turning more explicitly to the foreigner, I’ll observe that it takes foreigners time to acclimate to new parishes. Not only that, but being a literal foreigner means that you have to get permission to cross borders, while be- ing a philosopher means that you recognize Kafka novels when you are living in them. So I’ll discuss some of the times I became a foreigner, sometimes by moving to Europe, but sometimes by happening to live in a place when nearby events placed people who look like me under suspicion.
Then, to further fit out the theme, I will present some observations concerning the discourses that dominate highly respected journals, which are in many ways friendly to my approach to philosophy, and unfriendly to that of some of my Belgian colleagues. Despite being a foreigner in Belgium, I retain the privilege of having the right accent, of already being parochial in one of the right ways, to have a chance at survival in academic philosophy, and therefore also the privilege of being able to acclimate by subtler transformations.
Let me mention some more categories, with an eye towards an intersectional coda: I am an intermittent émigré, a person who will, during the workshop, be feeling like a foreigner in his native country, trying not to pepper his speech with Dutch interjections; and one of the world’s very few Arab-American academic philosophers. Each of these categories marks a way to be foreign. Certain of them lend themselves to particular distrac- tions and particular ideological distortions, and in that way may serve as epistemic stumbling blocks. But none strikes me as essentially inimical to doing good philosophy. Indeed it seems to me that being a foreigner in philosophy is in part to bring an outside perspective that may have substantial epistemic benefits, if also in part to find yourself at the mercy of whether the prevailing local and professional standards can be brought into sync with your own.
Notes
1. What is to be done? (The title of a Chernyshevsky novel and later a Lenin pamphlet.)
2. I frame no hypotheses. (Newton’s denial of going beyond what he observed.)