The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Any legitimate body of knowledge must at the minimum point to some good.
That is the principal reason why academic disciplines and their pursuant professions make loud claims to be solutions to the problems of the world and challenges of life. Ingrained in the unwritten manifesto of every academic theory and concept is the promise or claim to provide strong answers to the strong questions of life and the world.
Disciplines and their children, the professional occupations, are narcissist beyond repair. They look at themselves with a lot of love, honour and fear. So into themselves and about themselves are the disciplines to the extent of being idolatrous in the way they recognise and worship themselves as important to life. It is for that reason that disciplinary rules and codes of the professions are received and applied as some kinds of commandments and unquestionable dogmas that must be observed at all costs. We are now used to encountering academics that carry themselves, in the university and outside, as disciplinary and professional police officers, magistrates and judges whose role is to enforce the rules and regulations of the discipline and its profession. Even the name “Discipline” invokes law and punishment in the academic and professional order of things.
The policing and judging that takes place in the disciplines and professions is justified with claims for the good of the discipline and profession, and for the life of men and women in the world. The question that haunts my deliberations today is what fundamentally are the goods that thinking and knowledge must deliver. In other words what is excellence in thought and practice in the knowledge economy? There are no easy answers to this question.
My intention is to elaborate the decolonial stand point on excellence. What is prevalently referred to as quality and standards in academic thinking, speaking and writing is not a settled matter that is the same for everyone. One person’s excellence can truly be another person’s nonsense. Every excellent idea is nonsensical somewhere. Time also matters. What is excellent this evening might wake up tomorrow overtaken by time and being the very definition of nonsense. And that means that the relevance and timeousness of an idea is also important. An excellent idea must be an idea of the times, an idea whose time has come, or that which answers the pressing questions of the day. Feasibility also counts. A great idea that cannot be applied and practised with success is as good as dead.
The Examined Life
That “the unexamined life is not worth living” is a philosophical dictum that was uttered by Socrates before the judges that sentenced him to death. For Socrates it was better to die than to abandon the vocation of philosophical investigation and thoughtful reflection. A life lived thoughtlessly is as good as death was the suggestion of his dictum.
For Socrates that made famous the dialogic or question and answer method of thinking, teaching and learning, asking questions itself is excellence which leads to reflection and the search for answers that may and may not be correct. Investigation and interrogation as methods of searching for truths and meanings held much sway in the western world. Up to this day the excellent philosophical life is the examined life that is lived through thoughtful reflection or what Immanuel Kant later called “public use of reason.”
After Socrates’ death his dutiful student Plato popularised dialogues as Socratic methods of searching for truths and meanings. Throughout the world the courts use Socratic interrogation to question and seek to convict accused persons whose answers to the questions are weighed for their truth and falsehood. The standard used to measure the truth or falsehood of answers in court is “reason.” To be believed and given the benefit of doubt by the judges and the magistrates the accused person must provide answers that are “reasonable” and therefore believable. The accused must convince the court or be convicted. Believability is truth and is therefore excellence, otherwise.
The trouble with the Socratic understanding of excellence in ideas and the communication of them is that we have been in the world enough to know that some of the most convincing thinkers, speakers and writers are actually the liars. As a genre of fiction lies and falsehoods can be beautiful and persuasive. Investigation, interrogation and reflective dialogue may be turned into a performance in which the liar excels in stating fibs as facts, and convinces his audience with pure wind. An idea might be true, correct and believable but very wrong.
The Marketplace of ideas
Such thinkers as Albert Einstein are remembered for their theories, concepts and discoveries that led to great inventions, although he was no inventor himself. Technological inventions have been one of capitalism’s source of capital and pride. In the present modern and capitalist world system the market value of ideas takes a front seat ahead of their truth value and even human value. In capitalists logic, ideas must sell and be bankable even if they are not necessarily true and important to human life and happiness.
The primacy of the market value of knowledge ahead of truth and human value is one of the problematics of colonial and modernist thinking. Like other goods and services in the marketplace we presently have labelled and branded ideas, designer thoughts if you like, that are sold and consumed as brands in the marketplace. It is through racist and capitalist branding and commodification of thinking and knowledge that we have been made to generally think that philosophers and scientists must be white men with long beard. White men from mainly the United Kingdom, United States of America, Germany, France and Italy enjoy the monopoly of epistemic privilege in the present world knowledge economy. Ramon Grosfoguel has storied the tyranny of “white men from five countries” that are supposed to be the horse-men of the apocalypse in terms of thought and ideation. As part of the commodification, marketisation and branding of knowledge, scholars and the universities that they are based in are ranked and standardised.
The number of articles that they write, conferences that they attend and present in, the keynote addresses and media appearances that they make are counted and graded as products that are used to rate the scholars and measure their productivity. Quantification of the times a scholar is cited and mentioned by other scholars is another measure of excellence. The quantity and quality of ideas in so far as they can be sold and bought in the marketplace of ideas and the world knowledge economy is for some the excellence of thought and ideation. Public good, interest and happiness, takes a lousy back seat behind the bankability of ideas and some profitable modes of thinking.
The Good, the True and the Beautiful
The trinity of western philosophy and science is summarised in what is good, true and beautiful. Scientific inventions, for instance are good in so far as they better the world. Light brought brightness where there was darkness and medicines bring healing and life where disease and death are a threat, so they are good. And as treated above good things get to be priced and sold in our world, so only those that can afford it can buy the good things.
Otherwise the rest can wallow in darkness and die of disease. That is inequality of access to ideas and things. The truth is also another goal that is used to measure excellence. Some ideas are accepted as true and others dismissed as false, based on their reasonableness or provability. Pursuit of the truth through the use of reason is the pride of western philosophy and its claim to fame.
The reasonable truth must not only be said but must be said beautifully. Beauty is another grand goal. Because of beauty of rendition, statement and presentation, William Shakespeare is regarded as a genius and legend of all the world and all the time for his manipulation of the English language. Reason must also rhyme, otherwise. Philosophy, poetry, music and even prophecy are all tested and consumed or not, for their beauty. Some of the most nonsensical ideas have found currency and purchase in the world purely for their beauty not their truth or human value. The sound of music frequently overtakes the sense and the message of the song in the landscape of ideas. Most songs, in terms of ideas, become famed for their sound not message, their noise if one can put it that way. The good, the truth and beauty of ideas, in my view, is not enough. Thoughts and ideas need human value and power. An idea might be good but unavailable, true but not correct, not right, beautiful but powerless or even dangerous.
Decolonial Excellence
How far an idea enhances and liberates human life and nature should be the first measure of excellence. Truth, goodness and beauty can make an idea achieve power but not glory. Glory means magnificence and grandeur of an idea that is just, fair and also right.
Truth and correctness are not enough but right is the ultimate excellence of an idea. So many ideas are true, correct, beautiful and even legal but are not right. Right should be might. The liberatory potential and ethical stamina of an idea should be the measurement of its excellence. Without passing the test of right, an ethical test, an idea can be true, very good, correct and beautiful but still evil and costly to humanity. The potency of an idea in the preservation of life and the protection of right is its power. The power to change life and things for the better, to prevent and undo evil, to negate oppression and suffering is the power of a relevant and therefore excellent idea.
This leads us from mere theory and philosophy to praxis. An idea, therefore, is as powerful and as right as the purpose for which it is used and applied. Mathematical science and reason are neutral to start with but become evil when used to measure and calculate the poor out of the economy. Political philosophy can be beautiful and true but can be instrumentalised for evil in sustaining tyrannies and despotisms of the world. Ideas are not excellent for the sake of excellence, in the decolonial universe, but they are excellent for the right reasons for which they are used and applied. Excellence in ideas is the ethics of liberation and the rightness of ideas.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria: [email protected]
