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Alexandre Kojève, Frantz Fanon, gender, Georg Lukács, Greg Lukianoff, Karl Marx, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nancy Hartsock, Noah Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Peggy McIntosh, race
I’ve expressed plenty of disagreement with the Social Justice movement and will continue to do so. I also believe that there is truth in everything, an important reason to listen to all one’s foes. So I want to engage with that movement’s ideas in more philosophical depth, in a way that starts with sympathetic understanding. A couple years ago I tried to list those ideas neutrally and descriptively. Now I’d also like to go into the background, as neutrally and descriptively as possible, of one of the key ideas I mentioned there.
I’m referring specifically to the idea that because marginalized people have the lived experience of being marginalized, they naturally understand the nature of that marginalization better than privileged people ever can. This idea underpins Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the invisible knapsack”, whose concept of privilege underpins so much of the movement’s thinking. Various forms of privilege, for McIntosh, are contained in an “invisible knapsack” which is invisible only to those who have the privilege; marginalized groups, by the fact of their marginalization, are able to see it perfectly well.
Such a view animates the artist who took down her picture of flowers coming out of a gun because “I have absolutely no right to decide whether or not my artwork is offensive to marginalized communities—nor does anyone else in a position of privilege, racial or otherwise.” I think it is also a reason that, for better or for worse, my views on racial and transgender topics get a hearing that a white cis person’s views wouldn’t. It is an underlying commonality that unites the different parts of the larger movement – #MeToo, BLM, the trans movement, the Canadian indigenous reckoning, movements for gay rights and undocumented immigrants. In each of these cases there is a clear binary drawn between privileged and marginalized, and a claim that the marginalized are intrinsically better able than the privileged to understand the situation. Today I want to explore the roots of this claim.
The general term for the claim in question is standpoint theory. Greg Lukianoff once described “underdogging” as a logical fallacy: “Claiming your viewpoint is more valid than your opponent’s because you speak for the disadvantaged.” The key to standpoint theory is that it does not view that “underdogging” as a fallacy, but as epistemologically productive or even accurate. Or almost: in standpoint theory your view is not at all more valid because you speak for the disadvantaged… but it is more valid if you are the disadvantaged. Members of marginalized or disadvantaged groups have an epistemological advantage: it is in the nature of their situation that they see and know important things that those outside the groups do not.
Standpoint theory has its roots in the early 20th-century Hegelian Marxist writers Georg Lukàcs and Alexandre Kojève. It is in this regards that the Social Justice movement could be meaningfully called “cultural Marxism”, as many of its critics do. (I say that not as a criticism, but from a view broadly sympathetic to Marxism as a whole. People who describe the term “cultural Marxism” as a “racist dog whistle” are just bullies employing the now-expected tiresome tactic of deploying the R-word to silence anyone who wants to think too carefully about their ideas.)
Noah Smith is correct that many Social Justice activists aren’t reading Marxist thinkers like the Frankfurt School as a key intellectual resource, they’re reading black authors like Patricia Hill Collins or Frantz Fanon – at least when they are thinking about race (which is only one part of the movement). But the next question should be: where are those authors getting their ideas from?
Collins’s most influential article, the 1986 “Learning from the outsider within”, is known for the claim that black women’s “‘outsider within’ status has provided a special standpoint on self, family, and society for Afro-American women.” (p. S14) And she explicitly draws the lineage of this “special standpoint” idea back to Nancy Hartsock’s 1983 chapter “The feminist standpoint”, which gave standpoint theory its name.
The explicit goal that Hartsock sets herself in that chapter is to reformulate Marx’s “proposal that a correct vision of class society is available from only one of the two major class positions in capitalist society” (284), applying that claim to women’s lives. In her later explanation “The feminist standpoint revisited”, she notes that she did so “following Lukács’s essay” (228) from History and Class Consciousness on the standpoint of the proletariat – which is where she gets the term “standpoint”.
As for Fanon, the core theme of his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks is how racism structures a black person’s everyday experience, especially of the body. Fanon’s teacher, the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, had proclaimed that “to have a body is to possess a universal arrangement”. Fanon’s life experience in Paris to continually look for that human universality while continually being excluded on the basis of his particular body: “The nègre is universalizing himself, but at the Lycée Saint-Louis, in Paris, one was thrown out.” (143-4) Thus he closes the book with the words: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (181) Being a victim of racist segregation requires that one ask questions that do not occur to universalists on top like Merleau-Ponty: this is a core theme of standpoint theory. And Fanon draws a major portion of the analysis in Black Skin, White Masks from what he thinks is Hegel but is actually Kojève: the so-called master-slave dialectic, in which the slave, who can stand in for an oppressed group in general, understands his situation better than the master oppressor. The influence of Lukàcs on Fanon is not quite as clear, but Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism speculates that Fanon read Lukàcs’s work – which had just come out in French translation – while he was writing his next (and more materialist) work The Wretched of the Earth. (270-1) Fanon, like Hartsock, takes from Lukàcs and Kojève the basic idea that marginalized groups understand their situation better than privileged ones. So it is in these thinkers, above all, that we find the Social Justice movement’s deep intellectual roots.
I also think there is something that Hartsock’s later thought comes to lose as it departs from Lukàcs, in a way that weakens the whole project of standpoint theory. But I’ll take that point up next week.
Thanks for this. I knew of standpoint theory but not its cultural Marxist roots. so this is very helpful.
This may not be the place for criticism of standpoint theory, since, as you explained, you here want to explore its roots. But I’ll ask my questions anyway, since they are also motivated by genuine curiosity….
Did any of the theorists you discuss consider the possibility that *all* standpoints confer special insights? I.e. just as the marginalized may have greater understanding of marginalization, could it be that the privileged enjoy greater insights into some aspects of privilege?
Conversely, did any of them consider the possibility that one’s standpoint may also blind one? This seems to be what they thought about the privileged, but I wonder if they also applied it to the marginalized themselves?
In short, did these thinkers apply standpoint theory universally/symmetrically, or did they posit a basic asymmetry in its effects?
Yes, as noted, the point of this post was not to criticize standpoint theory. That said, I do have plenty of criticisms: both the way I think it internally falls apart, which I’ll get to next week, and also my own criticisms of it from outside. And the latter are very similar to the points you’re making here. That is, they do seem to think asymmetrically in a way that is to the theory’s detriment. I think there are truths that one learns from being in a position of power that one doesn’t learn when one is excluded from it, as well as the converse. And I don’t think that that’s a point that standpoint theorists really grasp.
Amod, since you have portrayed the movement as dogmatic, it may not be irrelevant that what came to mind for me when you mentioned Georg Lukàcs was how Walter Kaufmann, in his chapter “Against Theology” in The Faith of a Heretic (1961), compared Lukàcs (unfavorably) to a theologian:
I remember that Kaufmann passage, and I talked about it in a post five years ago. In that regard I’m actually more on the side of Lukács – or really Bultmann, the self-proclaimed theologian whom Kaufmann criticizes along with Lukács. I think there’s something to be said for inquiry within a paradigm that takes a lot for granted (which, in several respects, is what scientists do in their own way, as Kuhn and Lakatos have shown). But one does need to recognize that one needs a different language to talk to people who don’t share the paradigm and its assumptions.
I would emphasize the difference between scientists and (Kaufmann’s kind of) theologians, and this difference seems to be relevant to the movement that you criticize as well.
Philosopher of science Robert DiSalle (following Michael Friedman’s 2001 book Dynamics of Reason etc.) argued that Kuhn missed an important mechanism of rational philosophical development in science because Kuhn didn’t pay attention to the development of scientific philosophy (metatheory) in addition to lower-level scientific frameworks. The clash of frameworks (paradigms), or of inconsistencies within frameworks, can be rationally resolved at a higher philosophical (metatheoretical) level in a rational process that doesn’t belong to any particular framework and that permits rational criticism of the frameworks themselves, and this can happen in Kuhn’s normal science as well as in his paradigm shifts.
Kaufmann, later in his chapter, says that the kind of theologians he criticizes “are really closer to lawyers than they are to either philosophers or scientists”, which in DiSalle/Friedman’s terms is like defending a framework in spite of a rational need to discard or radically transform it. Whether Kaufmann’s criticism of Bultmann or Lukács is fair at any point in their careers, I don’t know; his criticism would seem to be most relevant to pre-Enlightenment traditionalists. Post-Enlightenment liberal institutions should function more like philosophically self-criticizing scientific inquiry than like Kaufmann’s theologians, and I would guess that many modern liberal religious institutions function in such a way. In contrast, as we noted in comments on a previous post, in those people whom you’ve considered to be under the influence of the movement, there seems to be a tendency similar to Kaufmann’s theologians: a certain deficiency in rational philosophical criticism, at least in relation to a certain framework, resulting in epistemic immunity to threats to that framework, like a less sophisticated version of defense lawyering. The three points that Kaufmann notes about Lukács are just symptoms of such a deficiency. (Again, whether they indicate that Lukács truly has such a deficiency at any point in his career, I defer to those more knowledgeable.)
Interesting ideas. Where does DiSalle spell the point out? Or would you recommend I read Friedman instead?
Both Robert DiSalle and Michael Friedman are specialists in the philosophy of mathematical-physical theories of space, time, and motion.
As far as I know, DiSalle’s publications don’t venture beyond his specialty, but he has a concise summary of Friedman’s challenge to Kuhn in: Robert DiSalle, “Reconsidering Kant, Friedman, logical positivism, and the exact sciences”, Philosophy of Science, 69(2), 2002, 191–211. This article probably has the most direct answer to your question.
By the way, and not as relevant, Friedman considers the wider cultural context of his history of ideas, touching on some European religious history, in: Michael Friedman, “Extending the dynamics of reason”, Erkenntnis, 75(3), 2011, 431–444. There’s a helpful schematic summary of Friedman’s multi-level model of scientific knowledge in the first chapter of Boris Grozdanoff’s book A Priori Revisability in Science (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). These probably aren’t worth your time to read; I just mention them for completeness.
Throughout Friedman’s work, neo-Kantianism is a major reference point, but there is a comparison to Hegelianism that might interest you in: Alan W. Richardson, “Ernst Cassirer and Michael Friedman: Kantian or Hegelian dynamics of reason?”, in: Friedman, M., Domski, M., & Dickson, M. (eds.), Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science (pp. 279–294), Chicago: Open Court, 2010, where Richardson wrote:
It is great to know the philosophic basis of this movement as well as the critiques presented. It is intellectually freeing but makes me wonder about the basis of our ideas.
Thank you all!
I echo Meskill. A standpoint is more-or-less =a belief, ideology, etc. It sounds/reads like another way of talking…a different means of expressing the same thing. Standpoint is an old term, in western lexicon.