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- Welcome to a conversation
with history, I'm Harry Kreisler
of the Institute of International Studies.
Our guest today is Professor
Kwame Anthony Appiah
who is Professor of Philosophy
in Law at New York University
and lectures frequently
throughout the world.
A leading moral and political
philosopher, professor.
Appiah is a prolific writer.
Whose publications both
academic and popular span
a variety of disciplines.
He also has published widely
on the topics of African
an African American literary
and cultural studies.
In 2012 he was awarded a
National Humanities medal
by President Obama.
He is visiting the Berkeley
campus under the auspices
of the graduate lecture series
to deliver the Howitzson
lecture in philosophy.
Professor Appiah, welcome to Berkeley.
Where were you born and raised?
- I wish the answer to that was one place.
But I was born in one place
and raised in another.
I was born in London where my father
was a law student at the time
and that's where he met
my mother who was English.
And then by the time I was
about one we were in Ghana
and I basically grew up
there in the town Kumasi
which is the capital of
an old empire, Ashanti
which is now part of modern Ghana.
- And looking back how did your parents
shape your thinking about the world?
And this is a very complex story
so we're gonna take a little
time talking about it.
- So my parents met in London.
My father was a law student
but also he was president
of something called the
West African Students Union
which was an organization of
colonial students from Africa.
This is in the late 40s early 50s.
My mother was working for an organization
it was actually called Racial Unity
which was run by the
anthropologist Colin Turnbull.
And they were working
with colonial students.
Looking after their welfare in London.
And so that's how they met.
Well, I think the very fact that my mother
is a sort of upper middle
class English woman
was working on racial harmony in Britain
in the 1950s made her a bit unusual
because it was still a
somewhat, I don't want to say.
I don't know what the right word is.
Racist is the wrong word
but moderately condescending
towards foreigners,
let me put it that way.
It was the sort of standard attitude.
And she, her father was
the finance minister
of the chancellor of the
Ex-Chair-Co so she came
from a respectable family
and as did my father.
Who's father was the brother-in-law
of the King of Ashanti,
lets put it that way.
So they came from these,
in their each place, elite families.
Both of them places where
there was a long tradition
of sort of proud independence, I suppose.
And so each of them made a decision
as it were to extend out.
And when they were married, you know
it was sort of big deal in both societies.
So the fact that they set
off on this enterprise
of what was a relatively
rare thing at that point
which was a so called
interracial marriage,
was a reflection I think of
values that they both had.
They were both very open people.
My father had obviously
traveled from Africa
to Europe to be a student.
He came to Europe by way of Sierra Leon,
he was born in Ghana.
And he many friends not just
from Africa and from Ghana
but from South Asia and the Caribbean
and other parts of the British empire,
what was going to turn into
the British Commonwealth.
My mother had traveled a fair amount.
Her father had been the
British Ambassador in Moscow
in the 40s so she'd lived in Moscow.
Her mother had been
involved in raising money
for Chinese relief in the late 40s
and so she had visited China.
My grandmother is one of
the few people who knew,
not very well, but knew
slightly both Chiang Kai-Shek
and Mao Zedong and my mother
was with her on that trip.
So she traveled a bit.
She'd worked in Persia during the war.
She was, you know, widely traveled.
And as she told me much later
in life, actually happier out of England.
She'd never felt, despite
the fact that she was born
in the country in England to a very sort
of normal family as it were.
She said that when she first
got to Ghana she thought, okay I'm home.
This is where I was
supposed to be all along.
So they were a bit unusual, each
of them in their own societies.
But they came from families
that were open to the world.
- So both came from established families
in their national setting
but as you describe
it were really citizens of the world
or became that even early in their life
and then later of course.
- Yes, no very much so.
You know for my father
the intellectual framing
of this came out of one of
those great 20th century
movements, pan-Africanism
which was very much
a movement about working
together across nationalities.
It was about bringing together people
of African descent from
the Caribbean and Africa.
And elsewhere people who
were in other places.
And allowing them to build
together a new future
for black people in the world.
But that was not a vision of the life
of the Africa diaspora
as kind of excluding
its neighbors, excluding other people.
My father followed
closely politics in Asia,
in India and so on.
He had a lot of Indian friends in London
in the 40s and 50s and
actually my mother's family
had a lot of Indian connections
because my mother's
father had been involved
as a friend of Nehru's in negotiating
the terms of Indian
independence from Britain.
So they were both sort of
embedded through family life
and through their many
friendships in a world
that was very much a world of people
from all around the world.
And they enjoyed that
even though I would say
they were both interestingly
in their own ways intensely
loyal to a very local identity.
My father was, lived in the
city that he'd grown up in.
Even thought he'd been in
many other cities on the way.
And he loved the city,
he loved the traditions.
He was a loyal servant of the king who
was my great uncle when I was a child
and then, his brother-in-law.
And yet he was also a very
active patriotic Ghanaian.
Very active in the African
Unity organization.
And for a while at the UN
as a delegate from Ghana.
Very active in global politics.
And he regarded all of these things
as completely consistent with one another.
Just as my mother's deep attachments
to Ghana never stopped
her having a deep sense
that she was also a woman who'd grown up
in the west of England and who loved
the English countryside and
Wordsworth and English poetry.
- What do you attribute
their self confidence
and ability to be flexible in dealing
with these multiple identities?
- So I think its different things.
In my father's case I think it was coming
from this old imperial center.
So the people in my home
town, in Kumasi, despite
the fact that they were
defeated eventually
by the British in the early 20th century,
had a sense of themselves as people
in the world who were entitled
to the respect of the rest of the world.
And they had done things.
They had created a powerful culture,
and tradition, and empire.
They regarded, I think the British,
as people who'd beaten
them fair and square
in warfare but still not
really their superiors.
And after all we only had
a period of colonial rule
that lasted, my
grandfather was born before
the colonial period and
died after an independence.
So not many people lived
just in the colonial period.
It was a very short period
in historical terms.
So we hadn't been sort of
bullied or pushed about too much.
So I think that, and
the town itself was full
of people from everyone because it was
a major trading center
in the mid 20th century
it was the largest market in west Africa.
And it had people not
just from all over Africa
but it had Indians, people
from the middle east, Lebanese,
Syrian traders and so on.
Greek timber merchants, all
kinds of people from all over
and they all lived
perfectly happily together.
In a framework set by
the culture of Ashanti.
So I think for him, he
grew up around people
from all over and he
was curious about them
and that's a temperamental
thing as a matter
of intellectual temperament.
And so he very, and he was educated,
actually by Irish teachers mostly.
Irish and Ghanaian teachers.
And he acquired from that education
a great interest in European culture.
There were two books, three books actually
on my father's bedside table.
One was the Bible, another
was the meditations
of Marcus Aurelius, and a
third was something by Cicero.
It wasn't always the same thing.
He loved Cicero, he loved Marcus Aurelius,
he loved his Bible.
He thought of Kumasi as
being in many ways like Rome.
He used to say that like Rome, Kumasi
is built on seven hills.
And he used to refer, when you grow up
in Ashanti at a certain age you're allowed
to wear a full, its called
a cloth which is like
a large piece of beautiful fabric
which you wrap over your left shoulder.
And he used to refer to it as our toga.
And so when I was first
given one of these he said
to me this is your toga virilis
which is the Latin expression
for the toga of a man.
So he very much sort of
thought about Ashanti
in terms derived from
a classical education.
- So he embraced the world while
retaining closely his local identity?
- Yes, I mean I've always thought
that the great, the most misunderstanding
of the slanders against cosmopolitans
is that cosmopolitans are people
who have lost their roots.
And I think the best
remark about this was made
by Gertrude Stein who said, what's the use
of roots if you can't take them with you?
So she was a Californian
lady who undermined
the metaphor of roots
but in the right way.
My father never lost his sense of himself
and he loved, he spoke the
language, you know happily
with his friends and he was
very good at speaking in it.
He knew many proverbs
so he could talk like
a traditional Ashanti speaker
but he would also quote,
you know as I say Cicero
or Horus to you, or English
poetry that he loved as well.
Though not as much as my mother did.
And he was, I think his openness
to the world was rooted in
his strong and confident sense
that he knew where he came from
and he was happy that was
where he did come from.
- And what about your mother's profile?
Was it a different trajectory
but in a way ending up in the same way?
- Well yes, so I think you know, I say
that part of my father's
openness came from
the city that he grew up in.
My mother grew up in a tiny village
in Oxfordshire so you couldn't say that.
And a very nice place.
I spent much of my childhood visiting it
and they're very nice people
but they were not cosmopolitan at all.
Her parents were, though, her family was.
She knew her parents, when my grandfather
was in the mid 30s thrown out
of the British Labor Party
for being too left wing
one of the things he did
was travel around the world.
So he was involved, for
example, in the creation
of the Jamaican Labor Party
and by the time he came
to be involved as a member
of the British cabinet
in dealing with Indian
independence he had known Nehru
for a long time just as a friend.
Indira Gandhi and my
mother knew each other
when they were you know,
10, and 11, and 12.
I mean they were kids.
So his my mother's family was
by British standards quite,
I would say sort of non-racist.
I mean they had genuine friendships
at a time with people who
were not English or white,
at a time when that
wasn't terribly common.
And as I said she was,
because of my grandparents involvement
in Russia and China and
so on, that she had spent
a fair amount of her childhood,
and Jamaica for that matter.
She'd spent a certain amount of time
in Jamaica, in Moscow,
traveling around in China.
And she worked for a
while in Persia, in Iran.
So she had, was exposed as
a child and as a young woman
to a wide variety of cultural experiences.
I'm leaving out the fact
that they spent time
in Germany, and Italy,
and Switzerland in Europe.
- And so now let's go back to your story.
You were born in England did you say,
and then so where were you raised?
Did you move from one of your
parents home to the other?
- So my parents were both
in England when I was born
and when I went to Ghana I went with both
of them around about the age of one.
And so our home from then on until
I left college was in Ghana.
They built a house.
We lived somewhere else before
that but the first place I remember
is this house that was still have.
So they were, and at that point my father
was in Parliament, in the first Parliament
after independence in the
opposition to Nkrumah,
the first president.
Who had been a very close
friend of his in London
but they had disagreed
about political questions
and when my father came
home he didn't join
the government party he
joined the opposition party.
And this led pretty
swiftly to a serious break
with Nkrumah and by
the early 60s my father
had been, was a political prisoner.
He'd been locked up.
In fact, my father had the good fortune
to be put in, well it wasn't good fortune
to be put in prison, but
it was a good fortune
that when he was put in
prison Amnesty International
had just been founded that year.
And Amnesty, people don't remember this,
Amnesty's first international
trip was to Ghana
and so my father was one
of the first prisoners of conscience.
He was one of the first
people Amnesty helped
to get out of prison.
Because he was in for a year and a half.
So he was very much involved
in the political life
of the country and at
that point because he was
and because my father
was in prison they tried
to deport his wife and children
just as a kind of harassment.
My mother wasn't going to leave
the country that her
husband was imprisoned in,
so she told them that they could try
and get rid of her but
they'd have to carry her
to the airport and that 150 miles away
and they didn't like the idea of carrying
an English woman 150 miles
so they didn't do it.
I was ill at the time and, quite ill,
and just by chance during the course
of my recovery I was in a hospital bed
that the Queen of England
walked by on her first visit
to Ghana as a foreign head of state.
And unfortunately her
husband the Duke of Edinburgh
had been in Kumasi before
and had met my mother.
So when he looked back and saw the picture
of my mother on the bedside table,
he said oh give my regards to your mother.
The president now knew that he was walking
with a foreign head of state who knew
that she had just talked to the child
of a political prisoner
and he was really upset.
And my doctor was fired and
various other things happened.
And at that point my mother thought,
and it was all over the
papers in Britain and Ghana.
And at that point my
mother thought, better put
this child somewhere out of the way.
Because its hard enough dealing
with your husband in prison
and being followed around
by the security police so I was sent
to my English grandmother and put
in a school near her house just
to allow things to calm down.
And I was eight.
So from the age of eight I was
in English boarding schools
with a home in my grandmother's house
but going home when my father
was released eventually,
going home for the vacations to Ghana.
So I lived from then
on at school in England
and at home in Ghana mostly.
- As a young person growing
up how, what was it like
to experience these different worlds
but be comfortable in them?
- Many people in England found my parents
marriage unintelligible,
they couldn't understand
how two people from what they regarded
as such remote civilizations
could possibly get on.
And every time my mother went to England
the journalists would say,
oh so have you left him?
And she would say, no I'm
just visiting my mother.
And you know, and they stayed together
until my father's death
and then my mother lived
on in Ghana and died there.
So I, the answer is I think
that its, if you are embedded
in two extended loving families
it doesn't matter where they are.
So we were very much at home in England.
My sisters didn't spend as much time
because they didn't have to.
- [Harry] You have three sisters?
- I have three sisters and
they're younger than I am.
And they had the good
fortune not to be ill
and be visited by the Queen of England
so they didn't have to go
through what I went through.
But we went often to see my grandmother.
My mother obviously loved her
mother and liked to visit her
and my English grandmother,
by the way visited us
and knew Ghana quite well.
So and the house, my grandmother's house
was next to the house, it
was very, it was in a village
but the house next door
was my uncle Robert
and my aunt Theresa.
My aunt Theresa had been
born in this village.
We were, everybody in the
village knew who we were.
If I went into a store people said hello.
It was a very friendly place.
No doubt because it was a
normal English community
there were some people
who didn't like brown
and black people but they
wouldn't have said so.
So we were very comfortable
there and in the village
that my mother grew up in,
which was you know 30, 40 miles away.
Where we spent Christmas very often.
And my mother's family with one exception
and he was somebody I never
met, were enormously welcoming.
She did have one uncle who
didn't come to the wedding
but you'll see why if I
tell you that he emigrated
to South Africa in 1950s.
He had a very different
politics from the rest of us.
So, but the rest of the family some
of whom were quite socially conservative
were nevertheless, they weren't bigots.
They were not racists and once you're
in the family you're in the family.
And the schools I went to.
I was the head boy of one of
my English boarding schools.
And I was protected as one
is by the fact that my,
though my grandfather
was dead, my grandmother
was the widow of a prominent statesman
and I discovered after she died that she
had written very stern
letters to the headmasters
of these various schools
saying if anything ever happens
to my grandchild you'll hear from me.
So I was sort of protected in a way.
In a way that everybody can understand
by the fact that, well by I
suppose you could say by class
to a certain extent in England.
So really it was not difficult.
We were bilingual.
We, my parents were both devout Christians
so there wasn't a sort of religious issue.
And I just never remember
finding it at all difficult.
The only thing I found
difficult about England
and I can remember this to this day
is that when I first arrived there when I
was sort of eight or
nine, it was in the middle
of the winter and they opened the door
of the plane and I got
out and it was so cold.
And I remember thinking,
maybe this is a mistake.
I can't believe how cold it is.
So the weather was a problem to begin
with but I adjusted to that.
- When one reads your
many books, in addition
to being very lucid they
have narrative quality
that really brings the reader in.
Did this ability to tell
stories, to give us narrations
that explicate complex
philosophical problems,
did that come from your parents?
I get the sense that both
in way, were story tellers.
- Yes, my father was a famous
oral teller of stories.
He wrote an autobiography,
which is quite a good book
but that was his only big book project.
But he, people loved just to come listen
to him tell stories.
And he told wonderful stories
about his time in prison.
Which you would have thought
is the most wonderful place
in the world from the way
he told stories about it.
He apparently had great fun there.
In part because he enjoyed telling stories
to the other prisoners.
He was a great narrator
and we would love listening
to him when we were children
and the first fiction book
that my mother published
and she became quite
a well known writer of children's books
and then adult novels, in Ghana.
The first book she published
which Pantheon published
in New York, was Tales
of an Ashanti Father.
So it was re-tellings
of Ghanaian folks tales
that she had heard my father tell us.
And then she collected more beyond
that and she published
a whole series of them.
So my father was this
great teller of tales
and my mother was a novelist
and a children's book writer.
And more important perhaps
than either of those,
my mother was a great teacher of reading.
Every time I came home from school
on my bedside table she'd
selected some novels
that she really loved for me to read.
It might be Tolstoy, it
might be D.H. Lawrence,
it might be Dickens and
we were a bookish family.
We had more books in our house
than probably anybody else in our town.
And many of the kids in
the neighborhood would come
and sit on the veranda and read.
'Cause we were a kind of lending library
because there wasn't a
proper library nearby.
And so it was a bookish
place and we read a lot.
And I think, you know when
my students ask me how
to improve their writing I say, read more.
Read good writers,
that's the way you learn.
You learn not by sort
drawing abstract principles
but by learning the feel
of a style of writing
and then you have to
develop a style of your own.
And if you read a lot
and think a lot you will.
So I think I was lucky to be
raised, we were allowed during
the summer vacations,
I was allowed to retire
to my room and read all
day and there'd be knocks
on the door occasionally to remind me
that I was due for a meal.
But if I wanted to read that was okay
and then I would be asked
what I'd been reading.
So I think it was a mixture
of living among people
who cared about narrative and also
being exposed very
extensively to narrative.
- Before we talk about your
formal education I wanna,
in your book, In My Father's
House you end the book
with his funeral and in a way that funeral
is a summation of all
we've been talking about
in the sense of the people who came,
the traditions that were
deployed in the undertaking
of the funeral, even the internal conflict
within the family.
So touch on that a minute
because in a way the very act
of the funeral summed up all
that we've just talked about.
- Yes, I mean I was
writing this book anyway
as my father was dying
and so, and then he died
and I hadn't finished it
and I went home obviously
and these things happened
which seemed so much
to be a way of talking
about the various issues
that were at the heart of the book.
So its a very complicated
story but basically my father,
so my father was head of his family.
In Ghana that means that he was head
of a group defined by shared
descent not from a man
but from a woman so all all his family,
the word is (speaking
in foreign language).
His family is all the
descendants of his grandmother.
- So it was matriarchal?
- This is a matrilineal family.
He was having a row at the
time he died whose content
I never discovered with
his favorite sister.
A woman I'd grown up
with as someone I went
to see all the time.
And who looked after me and
fed me when I went to see her
and gave me gifts, and whom I loved.
But they were not speaking.
And she didn't come to
see him while he was dying
and I think that was both a sign
of how deep the rift was and something
that made him unhappy.
So he wrote a will, a
codicil to his will close
to his death saying I want my funeral
to be conducted by my children.
Now in a matrilineal
system a man's children
don't belong to him.
He doesn't belong to
them and the right people
to conduct the funeral
are his matrilineal kin.
So this sister would have
been the lead person.
So he was sort of repudiating them.
So I arrived back and I
thought, I've got to do,
my father instructed us to do this.
He's my father, I'm
gonna do what he wanted.
I don't know whether
its a good idea or not
but he's my father and its his burial.
And so it was very complicated
to do that, to get it done.
Because my sister, my aunt,
his sister obviously took
this to be a public repudiation.
She was the wife of the King of Ashanti
so it was to some extent a repudiation
of the whole royal elite and so on.
And just as it were, getting
his body, making sure
that his body wasn't
literally taken away by them
involved keeping it in a secret place
and flying it up on a plane
without telling anybody
where we were going and so on.
Anyway, we succeeded
in organizing a funeral
and he had, another thing
was he had been President
of the Bar Association
and the Bar Association
by tradition buys a coffin for presidents
of the Bar Association who die.
And he had said to us,
I want a simple coffin.
Well the Bar Association didn't want
to buy a simple coffin for the President.
So we had another fight
with the Bar Association.
We said look, we're sorry
but this is what he said
and its kind of you to buy the coffin
but we want to buy the coffin
that he wants to be buried in.
So there were various things,
it was as if he'd set us a bunch of tests.
- Right which, and actually as
you resolve these one by one
its almost a test of your theory.
That is even when you're
overruling tradition you
are respectful of the tradition.
- Was as respectful as we can
be and we're trying very hard.
We're polite, even my aunt's eldest son
who's now a very
important chief in Ashanti
was astonished by the way
in which my aunt spoke
to me when I first came to her
as I was duty bound to do, to tell her
that her brother had died.
Instead of you know, consoling
one another she gave me
a great lecture about
bad things he had done.
About which I knew absolutely nothing.
- This is just family everywhere.
- This is just normal family behavior.
But it was embedded in this context
and everybody in town, of
course because she was married
to the King was gossiping
about it, and so on.
So we tried very much to do,
on the one hand we hung together.
My sisters and my mother and I.
We were a matrilineal group.
A little matrilineal group.
On the other hand we had many
friends who stuck with us.
Including my mother's church, for example.
And in the end we were able to conduct
a respectful funeral for my father
which was attended by the King
and by the President and so on.
And in the course of it
I learned a great deal
about, I'd never done
anything as an adult, really.
Anything important in the family context.
Now it was a baptism of fire.
And by the time my mother
died many, many years later
we knew how to do it and also there wasn't
a conflict going on.
So my mother's funeral was calmer
but also a respectful affair and she had
the privilege also of having a funeral
where both the King and
the President visited.
- Now the other part of
your work demonstrates
the rigor of analysis that
you learn in philosophy.
You got a PhD in philosophy at Cambridge.
What was your work on in the beginning?
- Well in the 70s in England
both, I was gonna say
both in Oxford and Cambridge,
that's a terrible way
of putting it 'cause that suggests
that there's nothing
else going on in England
but in philosophy those are the two main,
those were at that point
the two main departments.
And Oxford was much bigger.
The central topics, the things as it were
that the smart students
were working on were
in the philosophy of language.
And I was interested in this anyway.
I started reading philosophy
of language in high school.
We didn't have classes so I just read
it with friends and on my own.
And I ended up writing a dissertation
that was about a set
of connected questions
of the philosophy of language
which I thought you could
illuminate by applying
the mathematical theory
of probability to thinking
about questions in semantics.
So the technical word for what
the sort of technical part
of it was that it was
probabilistic semantics.
Which was a somewhat
nascent field at that point.
That was also drawing on tradition
because Cambridge has
the distinction of being
the place where the major
work in the philosophy
of probability in England had
been done in the 20th century.
John Maynard Keynes wrote
a treatise on probability
which is an important work.
Frank Ramsey his friend and
colleague who died young
wrote probably one of
the most important papers
on the philosophy of
probability in Cambridge.
Ian Hacking who's a Canadian but studied
at Cambridge and who was
one of my teachers wrote
a book, well more than, at
least two really important books
on the philosophy of probability
and my own dissertation
adviser had written
a wonderful book called
the Matter of Chance
which was about the roll
of probability in physics.
So I was well trained to
think about probability
and I was applying it to
questions that my teachers
hadn't applied it to, but
where I thought it was useful.
So that was sort of technical work,
but the driving set of
issues were not technical.
They were issues to do with thinking about
how you can understand the relationship
between mental representation,
the way we form
and develop beliefs and
how we express them.
What is the relationship
between language and thought?
Which is one of the old
questions in philosophy.
But applying these sorts
rigorous technical methods
to thinking about it.
In the course of doing
that I became convinced
that there was something
I could say about one
of the big disputes that was going
on in the field at the moment,
which was between two broadly
contradictory approaches
to thinking about meaning.
One of which derived from the thought
that to explain what a sentence means
is to say what the world has
to be like for it to be true.
And another had to do with saying
that what's really important
is, in understanding
a meaning of a sentence,
is figuring out under what conditions
its appropriate to utter it.
And those are different approaches.
I guess its typical of
me that what I argued
was that there was truth
in both of the approaches
and that the right way to understand
the approach that dealt in terms
of what conditions made it appropriate
to utter sentences was to see
that the task of sentence
utterance is to say what's true.
So the stuff about the world is important
and the stuff about
the mental is important
then you have to figure out
the relations between them.
That was a big dispute between
so called realists and anti-realists.
Its still going on.
And I wrote about the major figure
on the anti-realist side, Michael Dummett
in my second book and
argued that he was wrong
to reject the basic insights of realism.
In the course of doing all
this work I learned something,
I think, about how to do
philosophy implicitly.
Though I didn't make it explicit
to myself until much later.
Which was that my method,
which I developed in doing this work,
which derives from
something that Frank Ramsey,
whom I mentioned the great philosopher
of probability had done.
My method was to when I was thinking about
an important concept was
to ask three questions.
Which he always asked.
When do we apply the concept?
Having committed ourself
to it's applicability
what does that make us do?
And how does it interact
with other concepts?
Those are the three interesting questions
I think about a concept.
And basically since then
whatever I've worked
on I've tried, when I'm
thinking about identity
or race, or gender,
nationality, cosmopolitanism,
I'm asking these questions about when
do we apply the concept?
If we apply it what does
that make us want to do?
And how does it interact
with other concepts?
- I often like to ask
my guests what skills
are involved in what they do
and what is the temperament?
As they offer offer advice to students.
I think you've given us
an idea of the skills.
The temperament must be one of patience
and flexibility, and
confronting what you thought
were truths which aren't truths.
- Yes, I think you've
gotta eventually be willing
to give up the things you started with.
You know, I have a sort of joke
that people on airplanes
if you sit next to them
and you say what you do
and you're foolish enough
to tell them that you're
a philosopher they ask you
what your philosophy is.
Well I used to say well that's not how,
that's not what philosophers are.
They aren't people with a philosophy
but now I say, I do have a
philosophy and my philosophy
is everything is more
complicated than you thought.
And I think that you,
and that requires sort
of both patience and
willingness to change your mind.
Because whatever question you start
with you have some initial
intuition about it.
And it may turn out to be wildly wrong
and you've gotta be willing
to face that discovery.
But I should say that I think
one of the powerful resources
of the modern community of
philosophy is that its composed
of people with many, many different styles
of mind and many, many
different temperaments.
And that its the
interaction of people coming
at things from many different angles
that I think has sort of
produced the modern efflorescence
of interesting philosophical work.
So for example, I am really interested
in taking things that I've learned
in my discussions with other philosophers,
including philosophers I read,
and trying to make them available
to a wider world of people who
are not reading technical philosophy.
And that I think is a
really important role
but I don't think everybody
needs to be doing that.
And I think that if there
weren't people doing
the stuff that I read that isn't
for the general public,
I couldn't do what I do
because they're making progress in a way
that depends upon
preceding with technicality
and precision in way that's just boring
for most people who don't have
a philosophical training and temperament.
Nevertheless their work
can feed into the work
of someone like me who is interested in.
There's so much in the world
that I think profits from philosophers
helping the society to
try and understand things.
I don't think the job of philosophers
is to tell people what to think.
But I do think the job of philosophers
is to give, provide for the society
a richer, and clearer
vocabulary of concepts
for thinking about things.
I don't care whether my
students end up believing
as I do, in the powerful
value of liberalism.
But I do want to know, I
do want them to understand
that liberalism is not the
thing that gets talked about
on the television, that there
is a powerful intellectual tradition
and I want them to know what it is.
I want them also to know
what the critiques of it are,
and I want them to know that there
are other powerful intellectual traditions
and that they have to
make their own choices.
In more, at a less
abstract level when people
are thinking about things
like racial justice,
again I think we need to have a society
in which more people
have a clearer picture
of what we mean by race.
What racism is, what's wrong with it?
I think most people on
the street in our society
think that racism is wrong
but they couldn't give
you a sensible answer
to the question either what
it is or why its wrong?
Well we can't make progress
in deciding whether
a policy is racist if
we can't tell each other
a good story about what racism is.
And the same thing when we're thinking
about international questions.
What obligations do I as
an American citizen have
for thinking about the welfare of people
in Angola or in Bangladesh or in Russia
or in Brazil, or in China?
Well, you need tools
for thinking about that.
Its not something you're
gonna have a sensible line
of thought about if you
just take that question
and don't have any framework
for thinking about it.
I think philosophers can
provide the rest of society
with useful ways of framing
and thinking about concepts.
But its not my job to
tell people what to do.
- You've written, one piece
of your work is writings
on identity and writing on cosmopolitanism
and talking about the
interface between the two.
For you and we've actually picked that up
in the conversation about
your own background.
Identity is based in the local, basically.
And even when one thinks one knows what
the local means, you
really have to reflect
on what those terms mean.
- Yes, yes look everybody has
the privilege of being born
into at least one place.
Some of us like my family and I were
to some extent born into two places, but.
And without doing any work
as a normal human being
you're gonna grow up with a strong sense
of that place as part of who you are.
You're gonna know your way
around a certain geography.
You're gonna know how to say
hello to people in the place.
You're gonna know how to
tell when someone's hostile
and when someone's friendly.
You're gonna know that everybody
around here likes skim milk
and everybody over their likes
their milk full of cream.
I mean, you're gonna know
weird stuff about the local
and that's, you're sort of
embedding in that locality
as part of what the first way you learn
to be at home in the world.
So that's going to be for most people
the start of who they are.
But as my parents showed,
you can have that deep sense
of a place, which
neither of them ever lost
and still go somewhere
else for long periods,
as my father did or for the rest
of your life as my mother did.
And build a life that
starts with those roots
but then connects with
another place or other places.
And on the way you'll get
connected with identities
that are not geographical.
My identity as a philosopher
isn't a geographical identity
it means that I can parachute into Tehran
and find people to talk to who
know what I'm talking about,
its a terrific privilege.
You know, when I go to
Hong Kong, or Sao Paulo,
or Paris, or I'm just
thinking of places I've been
to recently, or Abu Dhabi,
in all of these places
it turns out all around the world there
are people who have
this sense of themselves
as philosophers engaged in a
massive longstanding global
conversation about important questions.
- When you talk about cosmopolitanism
and you apply this rigorous analysis
to what that means you're really coming up
with two propositions.
One is that you have to care
about the other no matter what
the national boundaries are
but on the other hand you have
to respect what they are and the challenge
then becomes negotiating
that for you and for them.
And I think you say, you
use the term conversation
in the sense of identifying with coming
to understand the experience of the other
so then there can be
conversation about where there
is disagreement and how we might agree.
- Look I think the key insight
of the cosmopolitan tradition,
going back a very long way.
Going back essentially to the beginnings
with you know, Dah-Jah-Knees
in the fourth century
before the common era, is that ache,
the obligation, the
fundamental moral obligation
to understand that we must
each do our fair share
to make sure every human
being has a possibility
of a decent life so we
care about everybody.
Has to be combined with the recognition
that people are different
and that therefore what
the good life for them is different
and that to the greatest extent possible
we should allow people and communities
to figure this out for themselves.
Now someone of a cosmopolitan,
that's the sort of theory,
but if you have a
cosmopolitan temperament you
are interested in how the other
people are working it out.
You don't, I can't be a muslim
because that requires beliefs
that I don't find myself having
but I'm interested in how
muslims are handling the world.
And I'm interested in recognizing
that there are many, many
different kinds of muslims
from Morocco to Indonesia
in the old muslim states
and many of course, muslims now
in Europe and North
America and Latin America.
And they're engaged as I am,
in an experiment in living
as John Stuart Mill again said.
They're trying to figure out
a way to live in the world.
They have beliefs, they have practices,
they have ideas about how to live.
They produce art, they produce literature,
they produce wonderful
poetry in the case of Islam.
Things that I can, that I
value and can profit from.
They also do things that
don't make sense to me.
I don't understand everything about every,
I couldn't understand everything
about every muslim
tradition and they are many
of them committed to things
that I am deeply opposed to.
If I'm in a conversation with people from
a muslim society about
with whom I disagree
about some important things
but with whom I can share my admiration
for Rumi as a poet or for Un-Kel-Tung
as a singer or whatever.
And also our shared interest in soccer,
or tennis, or Hollywood
movies, or Hong Kong movies,
or Turkish movies.
Against the background of
that shared conversation
we can then come upon the
things we disagree about
and handle them more effectively.
I think we can agree to disagree.
We can find practical points of compromise
without agreeing in theory.
So one of my favorite
examples from this comes
from a British television
program about teenagers.
And I'm not going to remember its name
but in which there's a young man
of Pakistani origin, a
British Pakistani who
has a good friend of
his own age who he goes
to school with who's
English and white and gay.
And the Pakistani boy's
father is a very devout muslim
and he won't tell his
father, he's straight,
but he won't tell his father
that his best friend is gay.
And they're waiting
outside a birthday party
and the young gay boy won't come in.
And the friend comes out and says,
why are you standing outside?
He said, because you
promised to tell your father
that I was gay and you haven't told him.
So the father comes out at this point
and he says what are you doing outside?
You know, my wife has made
your favorite Indian dishes.
He says well because your son hasn't
told you something I
asked him to tell you.
He said, well why don't you tell me?
He says well I'm gay.
And the father looks at him and he says,
you know what Islam is
really important to me.
I love my time in the Mosque on Fridays.
But I don't know everything.
And here's something I do know.
You are my son's best friend.
That's not a concession
about the wrongness
or the rightness of homosexuality.
That's saying, look we live together
in a world of people
who have different ways
of doing things and I
don't know everything
so I can accept and love
you as my son's friend
without our settling between
us some, from my point
of view, theoretical moral question.
Conversable people, people
that are in conversation
with each other can do that.
They can continue to respect
one another while disagreeing
about something important,
important to both of them.
And I think that is sort of a model
for how we can live in the world knowing
that we won't agree about
really important things.
He's not asking the young man
to accept that he's a sinner or whatever.
He's just asking him to
bracket it for the moment
and accept that what's going on here
is a birthday party at which family
and friends are gathered together.
And I think that's sort of a model.
You know philosophers often, one
of the jokes about
philosophers is that we say,
that works all very well in practice
but does it work in theory?
But in many contexts what matters
is what works in practice.
So its the philosophers
who think that, as it were.
Its fine to pursue the
theoretical question
but at a certain point cohabitation
is not a theoretical matter,
its a practical matter.
And I'm just recommending
that as one element
of our armaments in the
struggle to cohabit peacefully
is to say lets just talk to one another.
Not most of the time about
the things we disagree about.
Lets talk most of the time about soccer,
and music, and art, and science,
and the things that are interesting to us.
Lets go fishing together.
Lets go mountain hiking together.
Lets do things together, lets
be together in the world.
Lets work together to improve
our children's schools, right.
Understanding that we
won't always agree about
what they should be taught.
Lets do all these things together
and then against that
background when I say
to you, you know what I think its not good
that you keep assuming its more important
for your son to get
educated than your daughter
you don't think I'm some
hoity-toity condescending stranger.
I'm a friend of yours who's
just expressing his view out
of love for you and your children.
And that's more, that's
something you can accept.
And by the way, of course, if you say
that to someone you should expect them
to feel free then to say,
well okay since we're talking
about our children, do you really think
its okay that you're daughter's
dresses are so short?
Don't you think there's
an ideal of modesty
that's appropriate to women
and to girls and so on.
So the conversation, its not just about
finally getting to the point
where you can tell somebody off.
Its about having a constant dialogue.
- As I think back about your life
and try to relate it to your research.
What just struck me was
that you were privileged
to experience this
cosmopolitanism, lets call it.
And it just came to you naturally.
And that what you're
helping to do in your work
is understand the
complexity of these issues
because many people weren't blessed
with the same background and we have
to work at it through thinking
and analyzing and so on.
And coming to a respect for the other.
Is that fair?
- No, no I think, I do feel
that I've had a blessed life.
I mean I was incredibly lucky
in my family and our circumstances.
And I say this despite the fact
that my father was imprisoned three times
as a political prisoner, you know, lots
of bad things happened on the way.
But the basic thing was we
grew up in a loving family
that was in many places.
And you know you my sisters now live
in three different countries
and none of them is the United States.
So together we live in four countries.
So yes, I think, and
their children you know,
I have nephews who speak
Norwegian and English
and German and Portuguese.
I mean one set of nephews.
Not a lot speak English in the Or-Oo-Bah.
So they have too this wonderful privilege
and I do think its a privilege.
And I think that the main thing that those
of us who've had the privilege can do
is to disabuse people of
the idea that its difficult
because against a background
of a loving family its not difficult.
And to disabuse people of the idea
that there sort of terrible
intellectual challenges.
No, there are wonderful
intellectual resources, I think
that one derives from these things.
Now I mentioned the Amish earlier.
I'm not saying that I have the, I think
of my life as in these
respects privileged.
I understand that there are people.
People have different
temperaments, who want
to live a more monocultural life.
I understand that there
are people who want
to retire into a Trappist monastery
and live a simple life as a monk.
Or a Buddhist monastery, or a nunnery.
I understand that there are
people who feel threatened
in their religions in
Switzerland when somebody says
they're going to build a
mosque, 'cause they like
it the way it is.
They like the church of
the one denomination.
They like the view of mountains and so on.
I'm not denying that any of that is real
or that it should be wiped out.
But I would like to
talk, if they invited me
to the village in Switzerland
to talk I would tell them about
the pleasures of a different
way of living in the world.
A way of living in the world
that I think works better
now given the way that the world is.
Look one of the things
that's happening in the world
is that because of these now
massive global conversations
though people remain incredibly
different from one another
there are many points
of convergence, right.
So the people who were horrified
by the treatment of that Jordanian pilot
were not all in one place.
They weren't all Jordanians.
They weren't all English
or American or Chinese.
All around the world we
have a shared sense now
that which was the sort of thing
that in this country crowds gathered
to watch when they watched
lynchings 100 years ago, right.
Its not so long ago that we
stopped doing things like that.
There's just a developing global concerns.
Its the same thing around
questions of women's rights.
You know even in Saudi Arabia
which doesn't allow women
to drive there's a growing recognition
that there's a point to the thought
that the lives of women like the lives
of men require large areas of freedom
that women are entitled to, and so on.
So the world is very diverse
and its growing more diverse
in someways, there are
new forms of diversity.
But around certain important
ideas we're moving slowly
and with great difficulty
towards consensus.
And that's the great achievement I think
of the kind of human rights revolution
is to say look, we can
all live in our own ways.
We don't all want to
live in the same society.
We want to have different
countries, different nations,
different political systems.
But there are certain basic
background assumptions about
what human beings need to flourish
that should be guaranteed everywhere.
We can disagree about the boundaries
of freedom of expression.
In Germany you cannot publish
a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Its against the law.
In the United States
that would be an offense
against the first amendment.
But Germany's history's
different from ours.
We didn't build any death camps inspired
by Mein Kampf, right.
So you can sort of see even if you're
a first amendment
fundamentalist you can see why
in Germany this might be, but the thought
that in Germany they should
stop people discussing
issues about the citizenship of muslims,
which they wouldn't do.
Well of course they shouldn't do that.
So, and we wouldn't think they should
and we wouldn't want people to not be able
to discuss that here.
So there are local contours I
think, to these global values
but we're coming to a consensus
that the core of these things,
these values are there.
Even in China where there's a problem now
because they're increasingly making
it difficult for people to
express themselves freely,
even in China their constitution
guarantees freedom of expression.
Now they interpret it in a way
that I can't make much sense of.
But we can appeal to them
to live up to this value
because its their value as well.
I'm not telling them, oh you
should live up to this value
because its in the UN declaration
or because its in the
United States Constitution.
I'm reading an article of
the Chinese constitution
that says that people in China are allowed
to talk to the government about
what they do and don't like.
That guarantees them
freedom of expression.
I'm saying, we agree with you about that
so lets see if we can do it.
And if you wanna criticize us for failure
to live up to this standard, go ahead.
Because I'll probably join you.
I don't think the United States
is perfect in this respect.
And if you want to criticize us
about other things, go ahead.
If you wanna help improve
the United States remind us
that we call ourselves the home
of the free and we have a quarter
of the world's prisoners.
A quarter of the world's
incarcerated people
are in the United States
and we only have 4%
of the world's population.
Anybody, anywhere in the world looking
at us with our claims of freedom ought
to be saying to us, we ought to be saying
to ourselves, how did that happen?
How did the home of the free become
the home of the massively incarcerated?
I think that people from
other countries looking
at us and asking in us,
not in a hostile way
but just in a friendly way.
We admire America, but
we don't understand this.
Is helpful to us and we
should be helping other people
by asking similar questions about them.
- Professor Appiah, I
wanna thank you very much
for being on our program
and helping us understand
these complex concepts that
can be seen as very simple.
Once we actually analyze them.
Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- And thank you very much for joining us
for this conversation with history.
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