Standpoint theory begins from a genuinely important insight: people’s knowledge comes above all from their life experience, and so different people will have different insights and recognize different things. Our life experience does shape what we see and don’t see, and can blind us to things that others see in their position. This difference can in turn become a problem in the context of power relations, when only the experience of the powerful is represented, and other perspectives are ignored and therefore become missing. Standpoint theory’s best moment was probably Patricia Hill Collins’s 1986 sociology article “Learning from the outsider within“, which pointed out that sociological generalizations at that time were generally made by white men, and thus missed things that were clearer to black women:
I recently read Shadi Bartsch‘s Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. The book’s topic is fascinating to me: the ways that modern Chinese intellectuals have taken up classical Greek philosophy. In some ways it made me feel oddly hopeful – that even under the totalitarian régime that has run China since 1989, it turns out that classical learning, even foreign classical learning, gets more respect than it does in the anti-intellectual United States. Unfortunately the book itself takes a highly unhelpful method of dealing with the topic: Bartsch spends a great deal of time telling you what’s wrong with the views of Chinese pro-government intellectuals. A Western audience really doesn’t need that: we’re already predisposed to be suspicious of that way of thinking. I wanted to learn about how the Chinese intellectuals themselves think – something I can’t get for myself, since my Chinese isn’t nearly good enough – and the book gives them very little time to speak in their own worlds.
But there was one thing the book sparked in me, which I don’t think was the author’s intent: an appreciation for the work of Leo Strauss.
Jürgen Habermas during a discussion in the Munich School of Philosophy. Photo by Wolfram Huke, CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence.
It’s not often that a philosopher makes the top entry of Wikipedia’s “In the news” page – I don’t recall that ever happening before – but that happened last week with the death of Jürgen Habermas. I think that status is well earned. Habermas was one of the few philosophers to earn respect from both the analytic and “continental” sides of the philosophical tradition, engaging in reciprocated debate with both John Rawls and Jacques Derrida. We might even say that his death marks the end of the great era of German philosophy, an era that begins with Immanuel Kant – for while through his early life there were other major German figures leaving an impact on philosophy, he was really the last remaining German philosopher to have made such a significant mark. I think the only later philosopher of arguably comparable stature who is carrying on the German philosophical tradition is Slavoj Žižek – who is not himself German but Slovenian.
There are plentyofobituaries appropriately reviewing Habermas’s overall contributions. But for me personally, Habermas’s death brings me back to an earlier time of my life, and makes me think of roads not taken.
Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore what goes wrong with standpoint theory on its own terms – noting a key tension internal to standpoint theory which I do not think it resolves.
Namely: the main justification for standpoint theory – the reasoning that gave it plausibility – was materialist, in a sense drawing on Karl Marx. But as it grew, standpoint theory lost that materialist justification, leaving it with little grounding. We can see the loss of standpoint theory’s materialist underpinnings just within the work of Nancy Hartsock, one of its key founders.
Hartsock’s original 1983 chapter, “The feminist standpoint” states what I think was standpoint theory’ in general’s core underlying claim: “If material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” (285) The key word in this claim is material: for Hartsock as for her predecessors Marx and Georg Lukács, one’s viewpoint is deeply structured by the material conditions of one’s life. What Hartsock’s feminist analysis adds to Lukács and Marx is the materiality of household work and childrearing. She cites Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room to illustrate how this materiality works:
Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed; they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. (quoted on Hartsock 292)
I’ve expressedplentyofdisagreement 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 privilegeunderpins 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.
I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promises to be really fun and stimulating. If you can make it, I’d love to say hi: registration isn’t cheap, but you can use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.
I’m especially excited because my talk is really experimental, the kind of broad comparative work that would have got frowned on when I was in grad school. I’m still aiming to exercise scholarly caution to avoid saying anything false, trying to stay reasonably close to what’s in the texts, but I am writing about multiple thinkers whose source languages (classical Chinese and old German) I don’t know well: something which I think one has to do in order to investigate human cultural commonalities, but which would have raised every eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the kind of project that an aspiring professor only undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it because I’m no longer trying for a faculty job.
My photo of an elderly MacIntyre speaking in 2019 at “To What End?”
Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output significant enough to be in competition for the title of “greatest philosopher of his age”. Few indeed are the 20th- or 21st-century philosophers who have an entire learned society – in his case the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) – devoted to pursuing the implications of their work. It seems that MacIntyre himself was a little uncomfortable with that society’s existence. The one time I ever saw MacIntyre in the flesh was at the society’s 2019 conference, held on the University of Notre Dame campus near his home, in honour of his 90th birthday – but, I was told, he only participated on condition that his name not appear anywhere in the conference title. (Thus, given his focus on teleology and the aims of human life, the conference was called “To What End?”)
Even now, MacIntyre still sits outside what is usually considered the philosophical mainstream. Though he was trained in the English-language mainstream of analytic philosophy and taught in analytic departments, he refused to confine himself to the analytic mode of philosophizing, always writing in a way broader and less precise than analytic departments were usually willing to count as good philosophy. That experience surely shaped one of MacIntyre’s more powerful philosophical insights: the recognition that philosophy itself always operates within the context of historical tradition – the conception of tradition at issue being close to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. Kuhn and MacIntyre recognized that different paradigms differed not just on what claims they believed to be true and false, but on the standards by which one judged them true and false; MacIntyre knew that within philosophy, analytic philosophy’s standards were never the only ones available.
Thus MacIntyre is the sort of philosopher whom one often first encounters in unusual ways, outside being taught him in a classroom. Thus one colleague at “To What End?” helpfully started conversations with “What’s your MacIntyre story?” – imagining, rightly, that everyone had their own personal story of encountering his ideas, more interesting than being simply taught him in an Intro to Ethics class. (Now that I think of it, the one place I remember being asked a similar question was on a long tour around the Laphroaig whisky distillery in Scotland, which also began with the guide asking “What’s your Laphroaig story?” – a comparison that would likely have pleased MacIntyre, as he always took his philosophy to be deeply informed by his Scottishness.)
It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor in spirit”, is
so much of one will with God that he wills everything that God wills, and in the fashion in which God wills it. And therefore, because in some way or another it is God’s will that I should have sinned, I should not want not to have done so, for in this way God’s will is done “on earth,” that is, in misdeeds, “as it is in heaven,” that is, in good deeds. (Book of Benedictus section 2, pp. 216-17 in Meister Eckhart)
Or, as Eckhart’s accusers put it in the papal bull accusing him of heresy, “A good man ought to so conform his will to the divine will that he should will whatever God wills. Since God in some way wills for me to have sinned, I should not will that I had not committed sins; and this is true penitence.” (p. 77)
That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be saying: it sounds like Eckhart is saying it’s good to be doing evil. That idea is as alarming to us as it would have been to the medieval Church.
There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.
The discussion was triggered by Joseph Heath’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.
Nescio13 agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast Ben Burgis, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.
I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.
My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.
anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.
Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.
I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.
