Thinking as Decolonial Praxis

In our phenomenal world, engagements across cultures in critical dialogue, forming concepts in language towards projects of building intelligence and sharing wisdom, have historically been troubled by misrepresentation and thoughtlessness. This makes intelligibility of the phenomenal world difficult. In spaces that constrain our efforts to be seen by others, globally and locally, how might we realize each other outside of dominant, socially fragmenting systems of knowledge and representation to produce new meaning and visibility in our thinking about self and world?

Taking knowledge systems as social and dynamic, this presentation addresses thought and appearance as connected phenomena in the production of knowledge. It articulates an account of thought as relational and actional among beings in the world of appearances to “engage the relationship between consciousness and our social and cultural situatedness.” [Martinez, J.] It understands knowledge as epistemē—in the Greek sense of ἐπῐ́στᾰμαι—as beyond information itself to include understanding and belief standing for knowledge in appearances (wissen und kennen). Often, knowledge is conflated with recognition or information. These are necessary but insufficient components of the intellectual faculty. A concept rooted in Latin, the intellect includes an aspect of discernment, perhaps even judgement, and along with thought requires a notion of experience as embodied; spatio-temporality. The approach is comparative and interdisciplinary. The perspective is decolonial and feminist critiques of modern epistemology as extractivist. [Alcoff, L.] The method is philosophical dialogue that understands thought as a dwelling amidst non-dominant differences in projects of knowledge and supports creative movement in oppressive knowing systems as epistemic liberation.

Thought is an important mode of organizing human life and the natural world. It begins with embodiment and exists in language. [Arendt, H.] It is not outside the realm of appearance and does not take us out of the world. Nor is it the supreme characteristic of the human condition. It is a particular faculty of being that can reasonably guide the thinker, as Aristotle described, toward wisdom—or Weisheit—as the state of having good judgement. Whereby the faculty of understanding synthesizes data and data-representations of the natural world into sense or meaning, thought arrives as a sort of communicative aspect in the phenomena of being and appearing. [Erkenntnis, Kant, I.] As a relational and active function, its logic is semiotic. [Pierce, C.S.] As a linguistic function, it includes misrepresentation.

Without awareness, many times, familiarity with our linguistic systems fosters thinking and communicative codes that act as hostilities in oppressed–oppressing relations. [Foucault, M., Lugones, M.] This includes the communicative world that we call digital and how we code the bots as objects of intelligence in relation to the natural world. To be sure, philosophic and scientific representations of natural world phenomena are problematic, especially when claiming to be singular and universal truths. The idea of a nation, for example, is hard to define and sustain. It appears as a known entity but is fixed politically in a significant effort to sustain itself; its language and border are made official, its linguistic and territorial nationalism often violently defended. [Barbour, S.] As we respond to the appearing phenomena and give meaning to everyday life experience, monologic and single-axis perceptions engaged by our knowledge systems miss intersections of identity and multiplicities of experience. [Crenshaw, K.] From within thinking systems as fixed and habituated, phenomena are made hidden. The outcome in the immediacy of human experience is thoughtlessness and unintelligibility. Among us, thought does not solve an immeasurable problem or provide a universal truth, it creates finite, provincial meaning. Yet, its “metaphysical fallacies on the contrary contain the only clues we possess to what thinking means to those who engage in it.” [Arendt, p. 23]. I take thought as less about uncovering truth than about making meaning. And, I understand thinkers as appearing beings who live in semiosis at the intersections of a multiplicity of confounding identities. [Spillers]