My Top Philosophy Pieces in 2019, #1

5. Christopher Menzel, “In Defense of the Possibilism-Actualism Distinction” . (Post)

4. Edward Zalta, “Essence and Modality”. (Post)

3. Aaron Cotnoir, “On the Role of Logic in Analytic Theology: Exploring the Wider Context of Beall’s Philosophy of Logic”. (Post)

2. Language Turned on Itself: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Metalinguistic Discourse, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore. (Post)

1. Paul Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics.

This was the most impressive, impactful book I read in 2019. The reasons for that are complex. You’ll need to know a couple things about the author and his training, but the content is extremely complex on its own. I should also mention that this was my top pick before meeting Dr. Taylor. I (and a handful of others) had the privilege of spending almost a whole day with him when he visited here in a seminar, a colloquium talk, and at dinner that evening. He could not have been more gracious, insightful, and pleasant to be around, and it was one of the hallmarks of the semester, if not the past year or so.

Paul Taylor was trained at Rutgers, which, for those outside the profession may not mean much, but the Rutgers philosophy program is recognized to be one of the top five or so philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, competitive with places like Harvard and Oxford. It’s also a department that leans heavily in the analytic philosophical tradition, which means there is a particular body of literature and particular topics one focuses on when doing grad work there — technical training in logic is fundamental, there is a focus on the structure of arguments and precision in using language, and the works that are read from that tradition typically come from late 19th century through the present, mostly from America, the U.K., and a few from the continent. Of course there are exceptions to this description, but that’s a broad overview.

In mainstream analytic philosophy (and within the Continental side as well, so I hear, though I can’t speak to that side of things), only a tragically minuscule amount of analytic philosophers in the last thirty years have a familiarity with the field of Black Aesthetics. So Taylor found himself in a weird (but unfortunately familiar) position: excelling in the training he was being given, but finding a major lack of anyone who was interested in the kinds of things he was interested in and the kinds of topics he found important to focus on.

Those are all reasons why the book was important for him to write. As he says,

My hope in this book is to use resources in and near the dominant traditions in Anglophone philosophy — which is what I will usually mean when I refer to “philosophy” here — to reconcile the black aesthetic with the contemporary race‐theoretic consensus. If I do this properly, I will have written the book that I wanted, and could not find in graduate school, when I began to read Du Bois and Morrison through Danto and Dewey. And I will have given people who share my intellectual upbringing an accessible way into the study of black aesthetics. (xi)

As he also says elsewhere, he is interested in both “ring shouts as well as in Twin‐Earth arguments” (27), which are representative of black aesthetics and analytic philosophy, respectively (and both worth looking up). As one who shares his intellectual upbringing in some way, I can say that this truly is an accessible way into the study of black aesthetics

The reasons why this book was so important for me to read are numerous, but I’ll try to condense them. A couple main reasons it would likely impact anyone is it is simply a brilliant piece of philosophy, and there is nothing else like it. It is written with such clarity, with such a natural flow and structure, with humor, with keen cultural awareness, with such levels of depth and insight, that it stands on its own as an undeniably excellent piece of philosophical literature.

But Taylor’s book struck me in particular after having read thousands of pages of black aesthetic literature and experiencing an undeniable and almost involuntary change in the way I understand the historical period of the last 250 years in America. After reading works like Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Locke, Hurston, Baldwin, Wright, Morrison, and others, I was overcome with a sense of loss because of my lack of exposure to these authors and works prior to recently, and at the same time a sense of gratitude that I had finally stepped into this neglected world. Part of why Taylor’s book is so important is because it is a bridge between two very different spheres, where he uses the tools from the analytic philosophy sphere and communicates to those who are in that sphere many of the crucial figures and ideas from the sphere of Black Aesthetics.

It’s impossible to read the history of black aesthetic literature with a reasonable disposition and not come away affected in a profound way. Reading firsthand accounts of what slavery was like from Douglass and Jacobs is tragically eye-opening, not because some of the ‘facts’ of slavery were previously unknown to me, but in reading firsthand accounts you get a sense of the psychological, spiritual toll that the crushing system takes on its victims all day every day. And that reality worked its way into American culture during Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights Era, and into today, manifesting differently in those different periods. In the post-Civil Rights era, these manifestations are not as glaring as segregationist laws on the books, which confuses many who think that fact means we are now living in a post-racial society.

Here’s an example to illustrate the point: when someone white watches a commercial for Ancestry.com, they might think something like, “Cool, I’d like to look into where my family comes from beyond just my grandparents.” Maybe their great-great-grandfather worked at a steel mill. Maybe their great-great-great uncle married someone from Maryland. Interesting. But the otherwise innocent act of looking into one’s genealogy can be a deeply painful experience if you’re black, for two reasons: 1) the genealogical records from the 19th century and back are either missing or partial, and often don’t extend to Africa, and 2) whatever records exist are records of family members either in slavery or feeling the oppressive effects of slavery. Genealogy means something different for some people than for others.

Part of the brilliance of Taylor’s book, at least for me, was his penetrating analysis and interpretation of aesthetic products and events. Here’s a place to start: our culture assigns particular meaning or a range of meanings to public events and objects, and many of these interpretations are inherited in some way from others. Things that seem meaning-neutral to whites like hairstyles, swimming pools, hoodies, awards for aesthetic pieces like music and film, and so on can be charged with meaning within the black context. It should be obvious that the vast majority of meanings and interpretations for public objects and events come from the dominant, white culture. Ads for genealogical services portray the services in a way that caters to white audiences, for example. If you’re black, you’re keenly aware of this reality all the time, and Taylor addresses this theme of black invisibility within aesthetics:

Du Bois provides the template for many later invocations of invisibility. The Negro, he says, is gifted with second‐sight: African Americans are burdened by the peculiar “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” and are enjoined by white supremacist culture to limit themselves to this way of seeing. They have taken liberties when and where they could, formulating what we will soon call “hidden transcripts” for ordering their lives and esteeming themselves.This is one way to credit the idea of second sight, and the idea that this sight might be a gift, a way of seeing more, rather than simply of seeing poorly. But the two ways of seeing are in tension; the seer is burdened by double‐consciousness, and by the sense of “two‐ness” that comes from being both American and Negro. (39)

To take another example, if I as a white person watched The Chappelle Show (it was never my thing, but that’s besides the point), I’m probably just passively watching the comedy unfold through impressions, some slapstick, and maybe some in-your-face cultural commentary. But there is more going on there for those who pick up on the racial context:

While some saw his program as a contemporary form of minstrelsy…others took him to be offering a subtle and sophisticated manipulation of racial stereotypes and racialist themes. Chappelle, on this account, belongs to the family of post‐black thinkers, or new black aesthe­ticians, for whom racial meanings are objects of study, to be exposed, deconstructed, and creatively redeployed. (57)

If something as ‘simple’ as a sketch comedy show can have that many levels of (sometimes conflicting) meaning, the focus on double-consciousness through the lens of aesthetics is important and apt. Taylor leads you through an aesthetic tour so that contests over meaning and “struggles over meaning and symbols” appear before your eyes. He makes the point better than I can:

The question of black visuality is a useful place to begin because some of the basic philosophic assumptions of this book have essentially to do with the phenomenon of perception. My sense is that perception is an essentially ethical, and hence political, phenomenon, and that aesthesis is the key to understanding the ethics of perception. (69)

Too often conversations jump immediately to value, skipping over the hermeneutic or interpretive questions that inform value. Taylor helps supply meaning and interpretive options that can then inform those questions surrounding value.

I could go on and make this post quite long, but I’ll make just a few closing points. Taylor has clear, insightful analyses of other aesthetic phenomena like the relation between aesthetics and politics and between cultural conceptions of beauty and their reception within the black experience. Read the book for his analyses, the categories and structure he gives that help interpret cultural artifacts, and for his specific takes on things like black hair and beauty, the complicated context in which Halle Berry won her Academy Award, King Kong, and jazz, to name just a few.

Finally, a note for those within the theological context. Within any online community that discusses complex topics, you always have the provocative trolls; I’m aware that this post has the potential to be completely misinterpreted and that some will draw all kinds of unwarranted and unnecessary implications. Given the climate these days, that would be the case if I wrote on “The Best Puppy Chow of 2019”; if someone is unceasingly outraged, then they’ll be outraged by anything that crosses their field of vision. But for those who have ears to hear, I could not recommend this book more highly. I’ll be re-reading it for years. If there are important books to read within philosophy, this is certainly one of them. If one can glean from Aristotle, one can certainly glean from Taylor. Like no other book I read in 2019 (and even prior to then), Black is Beautiful has given me helpful categories to understand much of the broader culture and has revealed a rich, historical narrative of the complex aesthetic world. It’s a brilliant and accessible piece of philosophy that should be read by those both internal to and external to the discipline.