One-time Harvard Professor Explores Clashing Identities

There was one question I really wanted to ask the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah when I spoke to him over the phone last weekend: how do you convince the rest of us that what you do really matters?

Appiah’s answer, like most of his answers and like The Ethics of Identity, his new book on the philosophy of individuality and cosmopolitanism, was wide-ranging, thoroughly thoughtful, and peppered with caveats.

Most arguments in life, Appiah says, “have hidden assumptions, hidden premises.” It is these premises and assumptions that philosophers examine and reexamine, in search of new truths. “Things get discovered if you go carefully over the tracks,” Appiah says.

And as he examines the tracks of the luminaries before him who have thought about identity, Appiah’s “traveling companion”—as he puts in the preface—is John Stuart Mill, the 19th century’s most influential liberal thinker. Mill’s philosophical framework becomes a sort of itinerary for Appiah’s journey.

“Part of what Mill meant by individuality is captured in the idea that each of us has to manage in the business of our own life, that it’s a grand thing to be doing, that there are ways to evaluate whether we had done it well or badly,” Appiah told a packed audience at the Harvard Book Store last Thursday night.

AN INTRICATE IDENTITY

The standing room-only audience spilling out of the room at the Harvard Book Store where Appiah spoke, reflected his prominence in academic circles worldwide.

Appiah rose to the post of African Studies Department chairman by the end of his 11 years at Harvard. But in a move that grabbed headlines around the nation, Appiah left Harvard three years ago to join Princeton’s star-studded philosophy faculty.

While his resignation came only weeks before Cornel R. West ’74 left Harvard after a now-notorious dispute with University President Lawrence H. Summers, Appiah has always insisted that his primary reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the Summers-West flap. Instead, Appiah said he saw the move as a way to eliminate his weekly commute between Boston and New York, where he still lives with his partner.

Despite his status as a veritable academic superstar, Appiah showed up at the Book Store last Thursday—a stone’s throw from his former office, in an unpretentious navy-blue suit, with tortoise shell glasses perched on the end of his nose. He spoke carefully and delicately, with an accent that reflected his own complex identity—Appiah would draw out the “ir” in circle as an Englishman, but would pronounce the “er” in “mother” in the American way.

Appiah’s father was a Ghanaian independence leader; his mother, Peggy Cripps, was the daughter of a British knight. Of his own many identities—a U.S. citizen, an African-American, a gay man—Appiah refuses to prioritize any one in particular. Echoing his argument in “The Ethics of Identity,” Appiah told me he believes no identity should be “determinative of absolutely every choice” one has to make.

“The basic position I hold in the book,” he said, “is that while we do have responsibilities to certain identities and that we’re not free to do, as it were, absolutely anything in terms of them, people are responsible themselves in the management of different identities and their priorities in different contexts.”

The Ethics of Identity wrestles with the instances in which these different identities clash.

In a chapter on “Rooted Cosmopolitanism,” Appiah tries to make philosophical sense out of the fact that most people are averse to female circumcision but not to its male counterpart. Appiah uses this apparent contradiction to ask the larger question of how the liberal cosmopolitanism he advocates “might justify tolerance for illiberal practices that are grounded in local traditions.”

He comes to the conclusion that the harm done by involuntary circumcision must be weighed against its “contributions to the meanings of particular African…identities.” Appiah spends pages analyzing the alternatives and justifying his own notion of cosmopolitanism through the lens of the liberal philosophical tradition. He makes philosophical sense out of common sense, bending and plying theories of great thinkers of the past and present to assemble a comprehensive assessment of the meaning of identity.

Appiah weaves extensive quotations and citations of philosophers from Socrates to Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel (to whom he respectfully refers, on first reference, as simply “Sandel”) into his very readable and occasionally colloquial prose—dotted with words that go untransliterated and untranslated.

This direct approach to philosophy brought to mind Appiah’s most persuasive defense of his profession. He likened the process of reading and developing philosophy to admiring a great painting in a museum—its real claim to your attention is not its history or the greatness of its creator, but simply that very act, the “engagement,” of looking at it.

“The intellectual worth of cultural productivity is worth studying,” Appiah said, “and it’s worth studying in itself, not because of what it does for our mind or even that it teaches us about reality, but because interacting with works of great achievement is valuable.”

And in The Ethics of Identity, Appiah does even more than celebrate the achievements of the liberal intellectual tradition. He adds one more.

--Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.