Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes

Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead

A value is like a fax machine: it’s not much use if you’re the only one who has one.

In short—to overstate the point only slightly—because people don’t really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else’s, and in many circumstances actually less so.

In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing

It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.

I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question ‘‘Did the professor respect you?

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.

(And, like many philosophers, I am of the school that what goes without saying often goes even better with saying.)

Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes His little bit the whole to own.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.

I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University makes the point that, “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you are playing.

This is, of course, an easy Berlinian riposte. Start with some graceful hand waving about incommensurability; declare that nothing could reconcile these great goods; and (with a tip of trilby) commend liberal pluralism for living with the contradictions.

Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn’t a ground for me, unless it’s a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn’t matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.

And though upper-class status doesn’t always entail having money, it does entail some social proximity to money. Real poverty, it has been observed, is about social isolation as much as it is about material deprivation; the poor don’t have the sort of friendship networks that the advantaged draw upon.29 That’s why we may balk at calling a penniless graduate student “poor.” Class is one way that you benefit from the money in the pockets of friends and acquaintances.

if relativism about ethics and morality were true, then, at the end of many discussions, we. would each have to end up by saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.” And there would be nothing further to say. From our different perspectives, we. would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People often recommend relativism because they think it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn't a way to encourage conversation; it's just a reason to fall silent.

Som vi på flera olika vis nu har sett så härrör alltid hävdandet av en identitet ur en kontrast eller en motsättning ...

Så här uttryckte Publius Terentius Afer det för mer än tvåtusen år sedan: Jag är människa: inget mänskligt är mig främmande. Och det är en identitet som bör kunna förena oss alla.

Jag vill hävda att det inte finns några naturliga gränser för det folk man anser sig vara en del av.

the assertion of an identity always proceeds through contrast or opposition;

Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true.

In the world of identity, utterances have functions, separate from their meanings.

We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best.

Self-regarding considerations can be as universalizable as other-regarding considerations: we owe things to ourselves as well to others

More recently, the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has maintained that justice, reason, and the love of humanity “are, in fact, predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values.”19

What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better.

Vissa människor är smartare eller mer musikaliska eller bättre poeter än andra och tillsammans med miljön är generna utan tvekan en del av förklaringen till det. Men dessa gener är inte nedärvda i rasvisa förpackningar.

Att vara ett folk är inte bara en fråga om hur man ser på sig själv. Vad andra utanför gruppen tycker är också viktigt. Identitet, som vi lärde oss i det första kapitlet, är en överenskommelse mellan insiders och outsiders.

Without reflection, without sorrow, without shame, they’ve built around me great, high walls. And I sit here now and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate consumes my mind: because I had so many things to do out there.3

Varje generation människor i ett specifikt samhälle kan bygga vidare på det som generationerna före lärde sig; i motsats till det finns det bland våra fantastiska apkusiner inte mycket till kulturellt arv och när det gäller de flesta andra organismer inget alls.

Identities can be held together by narratives, in short, without essences: you don’t get to be called “English” because there’s an essence this label follows; you’re English because our rules determine that you are entitled to the label—that you are connected in the right way with a place called England.

This view is an instance of what my friend Skip Gates has called "cultural geneticism,"80 It has, in Bertrand Russell's wicked phrase, "the virtues of theft over honest toil." On this view, you earn rights to culture that is marked with the mark of your race— or your nation—simply by having a racial identity.

The story (...) suggests that we can't help caring about the traditions of "the West" because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that *would* be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a Western destiny.

The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordial consciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less magic. The Romantic state could boldly identify itself with a people’s Will; liberal states must content themselves with a general willingness. The romantic state rallies its citizens with a stirring cry: “One people!” The liberal state’s true anthem is: “We can work it out.

In each of my five test cases, we fall into an error I’ll describe in the first chapter: of supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together. Not true, I say; not true over and over again. How plausible I can make this thought will depend upon arguments, but also upon details and upon the scores of stories that illustrate my claims. There’s no dispensing with identities, but we need to understand them better if we can hope to reconfigure them, and free ourselves from mistakes about them that are often a couple of hundred years old. Much of what is dangerous about them has to do with the way identities—religion, nation, race, class, and culture—divide us and set us against one another. They can be the enemies of human solidarity, the sources of war, horsemen of a score of apocalypses from apartheid to genocide. Yet these errors are also central to the way identities unite us today. We need to reform them because, at their best, they make it possible for groups, large and small, to do things together. They are the lies that bind.

But it does not in general make sense to suppose that a legislature has an intent in passing a law. Legislation is a political process, in which deals are cut and compromises made. In both the public and the private deliberations about any statute many inconsistent reasons will be offered for framing a clause one way or another; many suggestions, not all of them consonant with one another, will be offered as to what the overall aims of the statute are. To extract from this mishmash of mixed motives a singular coherent intention will usually be impossible.46

People have long known in America what many in Europe have come to grasp—that we can hang together without a common religion or even delusions of common ancestry. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, various independence movements gained traction in Europe, from Caledonia to Catalonia. Neither the logic of territorial integrity nor that of national sovereignty can resolve such matters. But let the arguments not be made in terms of some ancient spirit of the Folk; the truth of every modern nation is that political unity is never underwritten by some preexisting national commonality. What binds citizens together is a commitment, through Renan’s daily plebiscite, to sharing the life of a modern state, united by its institutions, procedures, and precepts.

Being deluged with trolley problems is one of the professional hazards of modern moral philosophy.

And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of what we say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up (though quite sincerely) for ourselves and in response to others. In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.1a

Yet in making our choices we must sometimes start with a vision, however inchoate, of what it is for a human life to go well. That was one of Aristotle's central insights. It is my argument that we should be free to avail ourselves of the resources of many disciplines to define that vision; and that in bringing them together we are being faithful to a long tradition. In the humanities, I think, we are always engaged in illuminating the present by drawing on the past; it is the only way to make a future worth hoping for.

Nuförtiden vet många människor att vi alla faktiskt tillhör samma art och inser att rasskillnader från ett biologiskt perspektiv är illusoriska. Men det urholkar sällan betydelsen för dem av raslig identitet och tillhärighet. Runt omkring i världen har människor försökt och även lyckats uppnå positiv särbehandling för sine etniska grupper.

I USA vill nativister definiera landet utifrån hudfärg och tro (nämligen vit och kristen). Å andra sidan är den fortsatta materiella oj'mlikheten ett skäl till att behålla rasidentiteter, för hur ska vi kunna diskutera ojämlikhet som beror på hudfärg utan att referera till grupper som definieras av hudfärg?

Jag hoppas starta samtal, inte avsluta dem.

Vi antar att i varje identitets kärna finns något slags djupliggande likhet som binder samman de människor som delar den identiteten. Jag menar att detta inte är sant, och det upprepar jag om och om igen.

Av dessa skäl borde vi låta bli att använda uttrycket "kulturell appropriering" som en anklagelse. Allt kulturellt bruk och alla kulturella objekt är rörliga ... . De som man förmodar är ägare till en företeelse kan i ett tidigare skede själva ha approprierat den.

Det behöver knappast sägas att Marx tanke med en grundläggande indelning i två klasser utelämnade ett stort antal människor. ... Marx föddes i en tysk-judisk medelklassfamilj i Preussen. ... Var passade Marx själv in?

I stridens kyla [under det kalla kriget] skapade vi en storslagen berättelse "Från Platon till NATO" som handlade om atensk demokrati, Magna Carta, den kopernikanska revolutionen och så vidare. Västerländsk kultur var i sin kärna individualistisk och demokratisk och fritänkande och tolerant och progressiv och rationell och vetenskaplig. Strunt samma att Europa före den moderna tiden egentligen inte var någonting av allt detta och att demokrati fram till föregående århundrade var ett undantag i Europa, något som bara ett fåtal av de ståndaktiga anhängarna av det västerländska hade haft något gott att säga om.

Jag ska erkänna att jag ibland har undrat om konceptet kultur, precis som den ljusalstrande etern som fysikerna på 1800-talet antog var det medium som ljusvågorna färdades genom, förklarar betydligt mindre än vi kanske har hoppats på.

Vanligtvis, när det finns ett problem som är värt att uppmärksamma, involverar det bristande respekt i kombination med orättvis maktutövning, men då är kulturell appropriering vanligen fel diagnos. ... Men återigen, problemet är inte stöld, utan respektlöshet. ... Brottet är inte appropriering; det är att förolämpa människor genom att trivialisera någonting som de anser heligt. De som tolkar dessa försyndelser som en sorts stöld av äganderätt har accepterat ett kommersiellt system som är främmande för de traditioner som de vill beskydda. De har tillåtit ett modernt äganderättssystem att appropriera dessa.

Kristus säger själv i Bergspredikan att han har kommit för att "följa lagen", inte för att forkasta den. Och ändå var Paulus, den icke-judiske lärjungen, tydlig med att icke-judiska män inte behövde bli omskurna för att kunna följa Kristus, vilket annars var ett av Torahns tydligaste krav. ... Jag vill bara understryka det som determinismen förnekar - nämligen att det är oerhört komplicerat att med anspråk på seriositet tolka vad Jesus säger.

Att vara expert på de religiösa texterna innebär att man vet precis vilka stycken man ska läsa och vilka man ska hoppa över.

Men människor kan tycka att en gemensam härkomst har betydelse ... utan att vilja leva under en gemensam regering. Sionism är bara ett tänkbart sätt att vara jude på. Det är därför som det finns nationaliteter utan nationalstater.

I Nya Testamentet finns till exempel liknelsen om den barmhärtige samariern. ... Hur kan vi tillämpa den principen i våra stressiga liv på 2000-talet? Innebär det att var och en av oss borde ta hand om en familj med syriska flyktingar?

I don’t think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the African. He once wrote, ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto’ or ‘I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.’ Now there’s an identity worth holding on to. Kwame Anthony Appiah

Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’. Some others began to think, after close observation of European and American politics and history, that Voltaire and Kant, after all, might not hold the key to redemption, which may lie closer to home, in indigenous religious and cultural traditions.

In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.’ – Kwame Anthony Appiah

För det bästa i Arnolds kulturbegrepp skär rakt igenom hudfärg, tid och rum. En av Goethes mest betydande diktsamlingar har titeln Väst-östlig divan och är inspirerad av den per¬siske rjoo-ralspoeren Hafez, vars grav i Shiraz man fortfarande vallfär¬dar till. (Diwan är det persiska ordet för diktsamling, så Goethes titel "Väst-östlig diktsamling" är uttryckligen tänkt att överbrygga denna klyfta.) Matsuo Basho, den storartade haikumästaren på 1600-talet, influerades till stor del av zenbuddhismen, och på det sättet är en indier - Siddharta Gaurama, Buddha - en del av Bashos arv. Kurosawas Blo¬dets tron - med sina dimhöljda mörka slottsmurar på berget Fuji - är en stark filmtolkning av Macbeth. Av dessa skäl borde vi låta bli att använda uttrycket "kulturell app¬ropriering" som en anklagelse. Allt kulturellt bruk och alla kulturella objekt är rörliga; de gillar att sprida sig och nästan alla är i sig själva skapade genom impulser från olika håll. Kentetyget i Ashanti gjor¬des först av färgad sidentråd som importerats från öst. Vi tog någon¬ting som andra hade gjort och gjorde om det till vårt. Eller snarare så var det människor i staden Bonwire som gjorde det. S 206

Om man vill bygga stater av nationer så räcker det inte att samla ihop ett existerande folk och skriva en författning. Man måste först skapa en nation, genom att välja ett folk som till största delen av någon anledning vill leva under en gemensam regering, och sedan, efter att ha befriat dem från de stater där de nu bor, måste de vilja anamma ett gemensamt tänkande som gör det möjligt för dem att leva tillsammans på ett produktivt sätt.

Man skulle kanske ha kunnat hoppas att under 2000-talet få se tecken på att rastänkandet och den fientlighet som har sin grund i det - pro¬blemet med hudfärg - skulle vara på väg att försvinna. Men tron på att det finns en essentiell skillnad mellan oss och dem är fortfarande utbredd och många tror att den är nedärvd. Självklart kan skillnader mellan grupper som definieras av en gemensam härkomst vara basen för en social identitet, oavsett om de uppfattas bero på biologi eller inte. Som ett resultat av det fortsätter etniska grupper att vara viktiga inom politiken på nationell nivå och rasidentiteter formar människors politiska tillhörigheter.

Pocos han tratado la tensión entre nuestras diferentes identidades —local, nacional y global— con tanta profundidad como el filósofo Kwame Anthony Appiah. En esta época de «desafíos planetarios e interconexión entre países —escribió en respuesta a la afirmación de May—, nunca ha sido tan necesario como ahora el sentimiento de un destino humano común».48 Es difícil no estar de acuerdo.

The boundary of your state is not the boundary of your moral concern.

Nations matter morally, when they do, as things desires by autonomous agents whose autonomous desires we ought to acknowledge and take account of, even if we cannot always accede to them. States, on the other hand, matter morally intrinsically. They matter not because people care about them, but because they regulate our lives through forces of coercion that will always require moral justification.

Many historians have concluded that one reason for the increasingly negative view of the Negro through the later eighteenth century was the need to salve the consciences of those who trafficked in and exploited enslaved men and women. As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, “People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them. . . .”14

Each novel is a message in a bottle cast into the great ocean of literature from somewhere else.

The story of sacred texts has always been the story of their readers: of shifting and often clashing interpretations.

(with religious denominations conceived of as a species of ethnic group).

most people would have multifarious possible rewarding lives, if we made a world that respected a life well lived: a life in which a person gave others their due, had rewarding relationships with family, friends, and fellow citizens, and pursued projects they had elected with passion and purpose.