2124th Stated Meeting | April 18, 2024 | House of the Academy, Cambridge, MA and Virtual
On April 18, 2024, Kwame Anthony Appiah received the Academy’s Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies. Established in 1975 as the Award for Humanistic Studies and renamed in 2017 in honor of musicologist Don M. Randel, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to humanistic scholarship. The award ceremony included opening remarks from Academy President David W. Oxtoby, a reading of the prize citation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., acceptance remarks from Professor Appiah, and a conversation between Professor Appiah and journalist Margaret Sullivan. An edited transcript of the program follows.
David W. Oxtoby
David W. Oxtoby completed his term as President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in June 2024. He was elected a Member of the American Academy in 2012.
Good evening and welcome to our program honoring Kwame Anthony Appiah with the American Academy’s Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies. As President, it is my privilege to formally call to order the 2124th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
It is wonderful to see the House of the Academy so full for this very special occasion. I am pleased to welcome many of Anthony’s friends and colleagues. We are also joined by Academy members and loved ones from around the world via our virtual audience. Thank you for tuning in. We encourage you to share ideas, questions, and messages of congratulations throughout the program.
The Don M. Randel Prize is named in honor of musicologist and former Chair of the Academy’s Board Don Randel. It is one of eleven prizes awarded by the Academy under the leadership of Prize Committee Chair Pauline Yu. I would like to thank Pauline as well as the other members of the Academy Board, Council, and Trust for their dedication to this organization. Our governance met earlier today under the leadership of Board Chair Goodwin Liu, who will join me in conferring this prize in just a moment.
I am so pleased that my final Cambridge Stated Meeting as President of the Academy is this opportunity to honor Anthony Appiah. Anthony is among the most prolific and influential thinkers of our time. Whether it is in his role as professor of law and philosophy at NYU, through the advice he offers in “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, via his regular book reviews and magazine pieces, or as author of major works like Cosmopolitanism, Honor Code, and Lies that Bind, you have almost certainly encountered his writing or his ideas.
It is difficult to capture the depth and breadth of Anthony’s contributions. His scholarly work in African and African American studies helped define the discipline. As “The Ethicist,” he elevates the business of being a friend, neighbor, colleague, and family member to its proper place—taking the concerns of the day-to-day seriously and inviting readers to move beyond abstractions and snap judgments to give deep thought to what we owe one another. And his public writing—on race, on identity, on inheritance, on our global responsibilities—helps us make sense of the world even as it changes under our feet.
The influence of Anthony’s lifelong dedication to humanistic inquiry can be felt across our society, including—and perhaps especially—here at the American Academy, where he has been a member since 1995. Anthony served on the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, which focused on the future of the disciplines in an increasingly interconnected world. He was also a member of Stewarding America, a project that sought to increase public confidence in American leaders and institutions. Other recent Academy initiatives like our commissions on reimagining the economy, accelerating climate action, elevating the arts in American life, and reinventing democracy for the twenty-first century grapple with questions around dignity, ethics, inequality, identity, and community. Throughout these endeavors, Anthony’s work has been there to guide our thinking, reminding us of the human stakes of the decisions we make, both as a society and as individuals.
As a member of the Academy’s Board and Trust, Anthony has been an excellent steward of this institution, encouraging us to live up to our historic mandate while pushing us to consider what exactly that looks like in the twenty-first century. As Chair of the Committee on Anti-Racism, he took the lead on drafting the Academy’s 2020 Statement on Anti-Racism, which continues to serve as a guiding document as we “seek to undo the wrongs and move us forward in the search for racial justice, advancing the ongoing project of perfecting our Union.”
Reflecting back on the founding of the Academy, and of America itself, the statement is characteristically lucid, clarifying, and motivating. Like all of Anthony’s work, it trusts the reader to embrace complex concepts and competing ideas, exploring how our pride in this organization is real and earned, how that pride must be tempered by shame, and how shame is not the same as guilt.
The statement ends with a call to action: “We accept that the Academy like the nation has much to atone for. A statement, of course, barely atones for anything. Acting on it is what will. We expect the members of the Academy and the wider world to hold us to these commitments.”
Our anti-racism work is ongoing and takes many forms, but one worth highlighting is the Legacy Recognition Program, an initiative that invites Academy members to honor the legacies of individuals from the past whose accomplishments have been overlooked or undervalued due to their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. The first cohort of honorees will be announced in September 2024—a direct result of Anthony’s leadership.
Tonight’s ceremony is designed to provide a taste of what collaborating with Anthony is like: a reflection of his humor, his generosity, and his unparalleled thoughtfulness. I am grateful that Academy member Margaret Sullivan, Guardian columnist and Executive Director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, is here to lead a conversation with Anthony and invite audience questions.
But first, the award. It is my pleasure to invite the most recent recipient of the Don M. Randel Prize and friend of Anthony’s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to read the citation.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. He was elected a Member of the American Academy in 1993.
It is my pleasure to read the award citation.
Established in 1975 to recognize superior humanistic scholarship and renamed in 2017, the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies is presented to an individual for their overall contributions to and influence on the fields of Humanistic Studies.
For his distinguished achievements, the American Academy confers the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies on Kwame Anthony Appiah.
Your groundbreaking work spans a diverse array of disciplines, including moral philosophy, political theory, and cultural criticism. Through your prolific scholarship and thought-provoking insights, you have enriched our understanding of identity, morality, and the complexities of multiculturalism in today’s globalized world. As a distinguished philosopher, you have explored the fundamental questions of human existence, challenging conventional wisdom, and offering innovative perspectives that transcend cultural boundaries. Your work has not only advanced philosophical discourse but has also provided invaluable guidance in navigating the ethical dilemmas of our time.
Beyond your academic achievements, your commitment to fostering cross-cultural dialogue and promoting tolerance underscores your dedication to building a more inclusive and harmonious society. Through your advocacy for cultural exchange and understanding, you have inspired countless individuals to embrace diversity and celebrate the richness of the human experience.
Scholar, ethicist, teacher, and global citizen, your enduring legacy will continue to inspire generations to come, reminding us of the transformative power of ideas in shaping our shared humanity. We celebrate not only your intellectual brilliance but also your unwavering dedication to fostering a more just and compassionate world.
Awarded this 18th day of April, 2024.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He was elected a Member of the American Academy in 1995 and served as a member of the Academy’s Board of Directors from 2016 to 2024.
On such occasions, there are two obvious strategies. One, as at the Motion Picture Academy, is to acknowledge a few of the many people who made your work possible—until the play-off music starts. I shall do some of that. The other, which they don’t give you time for at the Oscars, is to offer an apologia, a formal defense of something you believe in deeply. You honor me now with an award for a life in the humanities. So, I’ll try in the few minutes available to say why my life has left me believing in the humanities so deeply.
I’ll begin, though, with gratitude. My parents were lovers of the arts and letters. Dad, growing up in what was then called the Gold Coast and later training as a lawyer in England, had not only a love of Asante tradition but of the classical Roman one. As a political figure trying to help build a new independent republic, he felt a particular kinship to Cicero and to Ciceronian ideals. “Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis, in errore perseverare,” he would admonish me. Translation: Any man can make a mistake; only a fool will persist in error. He was a Ghanaian patriot, but his nationalism was cosmopolitan. He loved to listen to Um Khultum and the Ink Spots; Gilbert & Sullivan brought a smile to his face; Sophie Tucker, a tear to his eye.
Mum, who grew up in England, was shaped by her reading of European novels and English romantic poetry, but she also learned Russian when her father was the British ambassador to Moscow during the Second World War. As they made a life together in newly independent Ghana, a rather global library started to fill the house. At the beginning of each summer vacation in my teenage years, she placed a pile of books for me to read by my bedside, fiction and poetry: plenty of Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, and Jane Austen. But our home library also started to fill with a new generation of African novelists and poets, some of whom were my parents’ friends. And when my father, who had decried creeping tyranny, became a political prisoner, he asked for a collected Shakespeare to read in his cell. The warden refused; he had heard Shakespeare was a “well-known British subversive.” So, my father craftily asked the prison doctor to write a prescription of Shakespeare for his mental health. That prescription was filled. My father is the only person I know who got his Shakespeare on prescription.
In the meantime, my mother became a writer. Her first public literary act was a children’s book of Asante folktales, called (since this was how she knew them) Tales of an Ashanti Father. The book was meant for children everywhere: it was an act of translation, a sharing across cultures of something valued in one but valuable for them all. Later I worked with her on a volume of more than seven thousand proverbs in my father’s language, translating and explaining them; again, something valued in Asante but valuable, my mother and I judged, for all.
I think of translation as a central humanistic metaphor: we take artifacts from a place and time that may not be our own and interpret them for an audience here and now. Since every culture is constantly in motion, the work of the humanities is never done. Even if a play by Shakespeare has been read and re-read over centuries, the humanist who reads it now is engaging it for a reader now, in the age of Lynn Nottage, elected to this Academy in 2017. For cultural innovation has always emerged in dialogue with the past. As the Asante say, Ɔbadwemma hwε adedada so yε foforɔ, na ɔnto adedada ntwene nyε foforɔ. Translation: A wise person looks at an old thing in order to make a new one, and does not throw away the old before making the new.
There are, of course, many kinds of humanists, some dry-as-dust pedants like Casaubon; some with slashing wit and deep minds, like Nietzsche; some gently liberal-minded like Montaigne; some visionary, like Margaret Cavendish. Because of my father’s Ciceronian predilections, when I think about the meaning of the humanities, I begin with Cicero’s regular repetition of the word humanitas in his Pro Archia, his defense of poetry and of the poet Archias. The relevant passages actually live in my memory, thanks to one of my high-school teachers, a classicist who encouraged me to learn Latin prose and verse by heart to take part in Latin oratory competitions.
I have explained my thinking about these matters in Dædalus, so I won’t repeat that here. Yet our conception of humanistic knowledge owes much to the German notion of the Geisteswissenschaften, scholarship about, or pursued through, the Geist—that encompassing word that has the sense of mind and spirit. Wilhelm Dilthey brought the word into wide circulation, but he seems to have encountered it first as a translation of John Stuart Mill’s expression “moral sciences,” by which Mill meant the scientific study of society and human behavior. Mill thought that, while the laws of the moral sciences might be inexact, these disciplines were still aimed at the discovery of general laws derived from reflection on historical evidence. Dilthey rejected what he saw as Mill’s positivism. Instead, he argued that the Geisteswissenschaften—belonging to the realm of meaning, experience, and cultural context—had to be understood through the sort of empathetic engagement he called Verstehen, the German word for understanding.
But it was another nineteenth-century philosopher, considerably less well known than either Mill or Dilthey, namely, Wilhelm Windelband, who pushed the argument in another direction. Windelband invented the word “idiographic” to describe the way in which humanists pay attention to particular past artifacts. Where natural scientists are mainly interested in what he called the “nomothetic,” the lawlike, as in laws of nature, a humanist might attend to an artifact for precisely what’s singular about it. When I teach Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or ideas from Mencius or Al-Ghazali or Mill’s On Liberty, as I do most years, it isn’t because they develop or defend general laws of human nature or society; it’s because they reward the careful attention of modern people in their peculiarity, even though grasping their peculiarities requires grasping context and commonalities. For humanists, the rewards of learning to pay disciplined attention are not exhausted by what some artifact teaches us, where what it “teaches” means some general truth. You cannot tell in advance what a poem or painting will mean to you in some particular moment.
I was lucky—I am coming to the end of my too-few expressions of gratitude—that, when I was still an undergraduate, I met Dorothy Emmet, a philosopher who felt that academic philosophy had become overly narrow, and that it should help us navigate complex social realities and see the interconnectedness of our individual actions. Then I encountered Skip Gates, who was studying literature at my college in England for a PhD. I was a medical student who had switched to philosophy; my doctoral work would be on probabilistic semantics. My orientation, then, was toward the nomothetic. But Skip had an electric sense of mission. He wanted to expand the humanities beyond the curtailments of their past. In particular, he wanted to bring scholars of every relevant discipline to the study of the African diaspora, and he persuaded me to come to this country and see what a philosopher could contribute. He prescribed a diet of cosmopolitan engagement in service to a particular cultural mission. And always, in our many joint projects, he exemplified the ideal of humanistic collaboration. I’m delighted to follow Skip in receiving this award.
We needn’t choose between the idiographic and the nomothetic. Because of my work in African American studies, I was in daily interaction with colleagues in art history, literature, economics, history, and sociology, who kept me in touch with the full range of the Geisteswissenschaften, including the more nomothetic ones like economics and sociology, without scanting the Naturwissenschaften, where they were helpful. These many conversations led me to reflect more deeply on theoretical questions in ethics and political philosophy and the role in ethical life of identities, like racial identities, which became a central theme of my later work.
Ah. But I think I hear the play-off music starting up. So let me remind you, returning from gratitude to apologia, that humanistic knowledge is knowledge about ways of being human. These ways stretch across the globe, and across time, from the classics of the Axial Age to an Asante Father’s tales . . . to creations that will be forged by those yet unborn. We have a vested interest in treasuring the past, of course, because we will very soon join it. But those voices from history prompt us to care about the future. To expand the reach of the humanities is the work of the mind; to expand our responsiveness to the human is the work of the heart.
And speaking of the heart. Just thirty seconds more. I am conscious that the work for which I am honored this evening was made possible only by a life of immense privilege: beginning with being born into the bosom of a nurturing family, spread over many religions and nations. That privilege has been deepened by the companionship over nearly four decades of my husband, Henry. All I have done since I have known him was better because I knew him and would have been better still if I had been wise enough to take more of what he has to give. And so, like everything good in my life, I’d like to share this honor with him.
Margaret Sullivan
Margaret Sullivan is Executive Director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School. She was elected a Member of the American Academy in 2023.
Congratulations, Anthony, on this wonderful award. We are thrilled to be here and to celebrate with you.
As a lifelong journalist, I can’t help but bring something of a ripped-from-the-headlines feeling to some of my questions. There’s a lot going on today at Columbia University, the place where I work every day. Yesterday, after the president of the university testified before Congress, students who were demonstrating on campus were cleared out of an encampment. Some of them were arrested. There’s a lot of turmoil on campus. How do you look at the questions that are arising at this very fraught time? And how do you put them in the context of a larger ethical framework?
KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: One of the larger themes of my column, “The Ethicist,” is to encourage people to feel that we must continue to talk to one another across the vast partisan and other differences that are currently dividing not just our society, but our world. And the worthwhileness of talking to people who, in your mind, are wrong about everything.
When my English grandmother grew older, I spent a lot of time in England. She sold her house to a very right-wing member of the English Parliament and moved into the cottage next door. So my home in England was from then on next to a very right-wing member of the English Parliament, a person named Knox Cunningham. And he became a friend. Back then I had a subscription to the Soviet News, the little red book in my pocket. I was a leader in my high school, participating in student protests and so on. And Knox was introducing Enoch Powell to a constituency in Ireland. But he and his wife were very nice to me and my grandma. So I spent a fair amount of my childhood in conversation with a much older, very reactionary person whom I liked. And just to be clear, Gordon Brown once said to me, “You are Labor Party aristocracy.” My family helped found the Labor Party. My great-grandfather was the first Labor leader of the House of Lords. So we were on the other side. And this friendship with Knox was incredibly good for me, because I couldn’t help but like him. He taught me trout fishing. He took me to boxing matches, which I didn’t enjoy so much, but he had boxed for Cambridge. And it was because of him that I went to Clare College because he was a Clare College alumnus. And that’s where I met Skip.
So I had this useful experience of liking and spending time with someone who I just thought was wrong about absolutely everything. When I went to Cambridge for the first time for a college visit, he took me because my parents were in Africa. That trip was the weekend before a vote to reintroduce capital punishment in England. I spent that whole trip trying to persuade him not to vote for the reintroduction of capital punishment. Sadly, he was the first person who spoke in the debate in favor of the reintroduction.
SULLIVAN: So you did a good job.
APPIAH: I did a terrific job. And it didn’t console me very much that what he said to me as I was getting out of the car was, “You won all the arguments, Anthony, but I’m still going to vote for the reintroduction of capital punishment.” I grew up thinking that it is okay to hang out with people who are just wrong.
SULLIVAN: But don’t expect to change their mind.
APPIAH: The point of conversation is not to change minds. That’s advocacy and preaching, which both have their place. When you’re in conversation with people, you may or may not change their views, but that’s not the point. Knox could have been racist. His party was. I think one of the reasons he wasn’t was because he knew me. And even though he worked with politicians who were explicitly racist, like Enoch Powell, he himself never was. The point of our conversations wasn’t to change him, but he certainly changed me. He made me realize that a person could be a nice person and just wrong about everything. My mother used to say, “Like your grandfather, you think that if you win arguments, you change people’s minds.” Knox taught me that wasn’t so, but nevertheless, I could be in conversation with him. So that was a life lesson. Turning to what’s happening on college and university campuses, it is absolutely crucial that we listen to people who we think are wrong.
SULLIVAN: And are we doing that? Or are we doing it less?
APPIAH: I’m not sure. I find it difficult to interpret the evidence about that. The people I know are not doing it less, though some say they feel more at risk now than before when they say certain kinds of things. I don’t feel that. But if it is true that we are not listening to people whom we disagree with, if we are not explaining our views and giving them an opportunity to explain theirs, then we are not doing what we should be doing, especially in a university, where young people don’t know where they stand. They need to hear all of the arguments.
SULLIVAN: One of the things that I think about a lot is the idea that there is a value to objectivity. And that is a concept that’s under siege now. We see it in journalism and in our newsrooms today. The public tends to think it’s a very good thing, but many journalists, particularly women, people of color, and those who stray outside the traditional norm, think that it needs to change because whose objectivity are we talking about? You have defended neutrality and objectivity, not because people don’t have a point of view, but because there’s a value in presenting things from a neutral or objective perspective. Could you talk about that and address, in particular, the deep concern that the groups that I’ve mentioned have about this.
APPIAH: Everybody has a point of view, not just in the sense that they have views that are theirs, but in the sense that they see the world from a particular place. I see the world from the place of a person who grew up between Africa and England, who is gay, who was raised a Christian but isn’t a Christian anymore. Everybody comes from somewhere. But it’s really important to hold onto the idea that when you are discussing something, you are taking an angle on what’s there. And when you make a claim about what’s there, if it’s clear enough, it is either right or wrong. And if it’s wrong, anybody who says it’s right is wrong. And if it’s right, anybody who says it’s right is right. So part of the struggle of living with our complex epistemic situation is to get hold of the truths that you can. Objectivity is best thought of not so much as a feature of people, but of institutions. Institutions generate objectivity by having rules about how you test claims.
SULLIVAN: How do you know that?
APPIAH: If the journalist’s interpretation of what they’ve heard is too far away from what the editor thinks is a reasonable interpretation of those words, the editor will say, “I can’t publish that.” Our paradigm institutions of objectivity are obviously academic and scientific, and include institutions like peer review. Their function is to say, though you may have a Nobel Prize in physics, we are going to test your claims against the standards that the profession has developed over time. Now that doesn’t mean that physicists will agree about everything. They don’t. But it does mean that any claim you make as a physicist should be tested against those standards.
I remember reading in the 1970s about debates in the late 1960s between people who were moving toward the now standard view of plate tectonics and those who held onto the earlier views. This didn’t mean that the geosciences weren’t objective. Particular people had their own subjective investments, but the institution tested the new theories against the old ones and the new ones won. So what objectivity means depends on what it is you’re doing. We have institutions whose objectivity—to the extent that it exists—consists in their having standards for assessing judgments and mechanisms for critique and ways of making an argument against a position if you think it’s wrong. And journalism is one of those institutions. There’s nothing wrong with a journalist having a point of view. Everybody has a point of view. But the institutions are supposed to do some work to constrain that.
SULLIVAN: Is it important to give those who are not very closely tethered to the facts their moment in the sun? Is it important to listen to all sides, even if one of the sides is false? Is that objectivity?
APPIAH: People say that everybody is entitled to their point of view. That’s not true. Some people have points of view that they’re not entitled to because they haven’t spent two minutes thinking about it. But everybody is entitled to express their point of view. And if somebody says something that you think you can show is wrong, then the honorable and decent thing to do is to say to them that it is wrong, and here’s why. As I learned with Knox Cunningham, this doesn’t work very often, and so sometimes you just give up. But it’s worth trying. I think everybody in this room will admit that they have changed their minds about some things, and sometimes it’s because somebody made a persuasive argument. So even if we’re not as responsive to reasons as we’d like to be, we’re not totally non-responsive either.
To return to objectivity, one reason why the skepticism about objectivity often lies with the dispossessed, as it were, is because the institutions that were supposed to be testing when they were run by one lot of people didn’t run the full range of tests. Of the late-nineteenth-century brain scientists, 99.3 percent were men and they said all kinds of weird stuff about women’s brains. If there had been more women, they would at least have tested those claims. Lots of people in African American communities knew that Thomas Jefferson had Black descendants. That was part of the common sense of the African American community. White people, on the other hand, including some historians, thought it was preposterous slander. And it took a long time, hard work, and studying the evidence, including the availability of new kinds of evidence, to show that some of the Black descendants are genetically related to some of the White descendants.
The point is that these mechanisms of objectivity produced the wrong theory in geology until the late 1960s, and they produced the wrong picture of what happened in the Jefferson household until relatively recently. But I don’t mean to imply that objectivity is the same as truth. Lots of these institutions have failed to find the truth. And one of the reasons why they failed is that they didn’t carry out the full apparatus of objectivity, which is to attend to how it looks from everywhere.
SULLIVAN: You mentioned that it is difficult to change people’s minds, that you’ve encountered situations in which you would have liked to have changed someone’s mind, but were unable to. In your experience and in your work, what is it that allows people to change their minds?
APPIAH: To the extent that Knox and I changed each other’s minds, it wasn’t because we immediately began our conversations about the things we most disagreed about. We first built a relationship of trust, both personal and intellectual trust, and then we approached the hard questions. And by that point, it was possible to talk about them.
Let’s say I show up in a town in West Virginia, near where Skip grew up, and I stand on the street and offer to explain to people passing by why Donald Trump is wrong. Those people don’t know me from Adam. So why on earth should they take any notice? Now, if I lived there and got to know some of them, then I might be able to have conversations with them. A lot of our actual practices of attention to argument and evidence presuppose relationships of a certain sort. And one of the difficulties we face in our society now is that trust is absolutely essential. Why are we a successful species? Every human being knows things that they got from long ago, from far away, as well as nearby from other people.
I have a flock of sheep that I love. They each know some things, but there’s hardly anything they can tell each other. So each group of sheep has to figure out the world for itself. We don’t do that. We have to be able to trust each other, which is our distinctive achievement as a species. When you get to the point where there are people who think that just because it’s in The New York Times, it must be false or just because it’s on MSNBC, it must be true, and they don’t do any checking on any of that, then those people are fools. MSNBC can tell them anything. Suppose people could fool you by saying not P when they believe P in order to get you to believe P. But we can’t use this beautiful mechanism of exchange and sharing, which is our epistemic distinction. We desperately need not to respond in that way. And the fact is that on many topics, the people whom we disagree with about vaccines or global warming are as reliable as anybody else. If you ask them where is the supermarket? they’ll tell you, and you can go there and there will be a supermarket. So I suppose it’s important to remember that even the people we trust the least, we use them as reliable sources of information about lots of things. We need to figure out how to build the trust that makes this mechanism work as well as it can. And we don’t have that right now.
SULLIVAN: It seems as though we’re so separated from other people’s points of view because of the kinds of bubbles that we live in. And some of that comes from with whom you identify. And I know you’ve thought a lot about the question of identity, how prevalent it is, and how important it is, especially to young people today. Why is that? And is it a good or bad thing?
APPIAH: Margaret Fuller used to say, “I accept the universe.” And Thomas Carlyle’s famous reply was, “Gad! She’d better!”
SULLIVAN: Because there’s no choice?
APPIAH: I accept identity, but we know that both terrible things and good things can happen in the name of identity. It’s like being against nationalism on the grounds that it led to Nazism. Yes, it did. But nationalism also produced the welfare state, and the willingness of citizens to pay the cost of helping other citizens depends upon a sense of national identification. In places where national identification disappears, it’s really hard to do politics. So I think we need identities. And, of course, at the moment, people are very conscious of how identities get in the way of things. But think of all the things in our lives that are made possible and simple by our identifications, ranging from small-scale things like knowing what section in the Gap store I can find jeans that will fit me.
My point is that there are lots of little things in which identity helps, and there are also the big things in which identity helps. Being an evangelical Christian helps you to support missionary work in Tanzania and maybe sends you to Tanzania to build cross-cultural relations. Being a philosopher allows me to talk to people in Brazil, Shanghai, and India—and a few in the United States too. There’s lots of stuff that comes from this that is good.
One of the things that happens with identities is that they depend upon our capacity to signal our identity to one another. One of the ways in which we signal our identities is by the propositions we utter. And right now, for example, you can signal a conservative identity by expressing skepticism about vaccines. And you can signal a liberal identity by expressing friendliness to masks. Now, neither of those is a left wing or a right wing thing. Masks are a good idea in pandemics and vaccines are a good idea too when they work. But once these things get associated with identities, something happens. If you are of a certain identity and you don’t believe that thing, then you have to be quiet about it, because people will take you to be betraying the identity. And this is true on the left and right. It is not a conservative thing. So we should try not to let too many important things become signals of identity in that way. Because once they are, the capacity for a shared conversation about them diminishes very fast. One of the striking things about religious identities, for example, is that you signal religious identities by saying things that people of other religious identities think are obviously false.
SULLIVAN: Like what?
APPIAH: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God. Begotten of his father before all worlds.” What does that mean, and how could it be true? Creeds are often about signaling that you are so serious about this identity, that you’ll say things that sound crazy to people of other identities. “This is bread and this is wine; this is the body of Christ and this is blood.” Well, that takes commitment to say things like that in a world where most people don’t think that bread can be the body of any mammal. I don’t mean that the people who say these things are insincere; that’s not my point. My point is that they’re willing to bear the cost of saying things that seem crazy to people in order to secure their identity, to be in solidarity with the people who are saying these crazy things.
SULLIVAN: I have to ask about the column that you write in The New York Times Magazine, “The Ethicist.” Would you talk a little bit about how this came about and how you approach the challenges of this work?
APPIAH: My involvement with the column started when I joined a podcast, a conversation among three people. And then someone at the Times would listen to the podcast and write the column. But the column wasn’t working well because it didn’t have a point of view.
SULLIVAN: It’s one thing to have a conversation. It’s another thing to write a column.
APPIAH: We were about to ask the editor of the magazine if he would allow us to continue to do the podcast, to have the conversation, but every third week each one of us would write the column. And we were just about to send one of us off to do that and I got a call from the editor, who said, “This isn’t working. I’ve decided to ask if you would consider writing the column. I am going to give you some past questions. And I would like you to write some columns this weekend. If I like them, I’ll hire you.” And I did just that. After sending the columns to him, he called again. “I like what you did. I’m giving the column to you.” My only stipulation was that he had to talk to the other two guys before I next saw them.
SULLIVAN: And did he?
APPIAH: Yes, he did. And the other guys were very generous about it. So, that’s how my stint as “The Ethicist” came about.
SULLIVAN: How does the process work? Do you choose the questions that you respond to?
APPIAH: The editor of the column reads the letters and sends me the ones that are answerable. By that I mean answerable in the sense that they are about a problem someone is facing. I don’t answer questions like, “Do you favor deontology or consequentialism?” I don’t answer theoretical questions about the shape of ethics. If you have a problem that seems to have an ethical dimension, the editor will pass it on me. Some of the questions I don’t get are about tax law, even though tax law raises many ethical questions. But straight tax law questions should be sent to a tax lawyer.
So the editor takes the first pass. I used to answer all the ones I was sent, but I can’t do that anymore because there are simply too many. I’ve written 403 columns now, and I have said what I want to say on a bunch of topics. If a question is too close to one that I have already answered, there doesn’t seem to be much point in my answering it again. But amazingly, people keep coming up with new ways to screw things up.
SULLIVAN: It’s encouraging in a way, isn’t it?
APPIAH: It’s encouraging. It’s the crooked timber of humanity.
SULLIVAN: Let’s now turn to some questions from the audience.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you give us an example of when you changed your mind?
APPIAH: I started out as a young analytic philosopher. I thought that if you win the argument, you’ve won the day. If you just told the world the truth about Black people, racism would go away. But I changed my mind. I used to think that it was a plausible view that the correct account of the semantics of indicative conditionals was that “if A then C” is assertible if and only if the probability of C given A is greater than one minus E for some small E. I don’t think that anymore.
SULLIVAN: And neither do I.
APPIAH: I should say that not many people ever believed that. But I was one of them. And I was persuaded that that was wrong, not by very complicated arguments, but just by convincing examples, which is one way to be persuaded of something. I was a very devout evangelical Christian until a certain age, and I changed my mind about that.
SULLIVAN: That’s a big change.
APPIAH: It was. And I have to say that that change was like the breaking of a piece of glass. It was flexed and flexed and flexed. And then there was a moment when it went. I spent a lot of my late teens reading theology and philosophers, thinking about God and questions that you might think couldn’t change your faith, like whether existence is a predicate—which philosophers think about. And it wasn’t that any one of those arguments was the cause. I just felt that the whole structure of thought fell apart. Also, it was becoming clear that I was gay, and I didn’t like the attitude of the church about that. So that probably played a role. While that isn’t an argument for the existence or non-existence of anything, it shaped my attitudes. And then one day, I was playing a hymn I was composing, and a close friend said, “I don’t think I believe that anymore.”
SULLIVAN: The words in the hymn?
APPIAH: Yes, the godly words. And I thought for two seconds and said, “Nor do I.” It took me some time to figure out what that meant in my life, because my life had been organized around prayer and communion with other members of my religious group. I changed my mind about that. When people say they were born again, I know exactly what they mean. There was this moment when I suddenly saw the world in a new light; it was like a Gestalt switch—the duck became a rabbit.
SULLIVAN: And did you then become an atheist?
APPIAH: Yes. I am willing to listen to arguments, but right now, that’s my view.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Anthony, your talk was a very powerful discussion of what the humanities mean. And I’ve been pondering it, and I wonder when we juxtapose the humanities and the sciences as we often do, are we saying that the sciences are less of a humanist activity? What does it mean to have that stark juxtaposition?
APPIAH: I don’t think we need to choose between the nomothetic and the idiographic. There’s plenty of scope in the humanities for the nomothetic, especially if by the humanities, you mean the Geisteswissenschaften, which includes economics and sociology. But I think that an important part of understanding the human is scientific. It’s knowing how our brains work, knowing how cultures work, knowing how economies work. And all of those are nomothetic-type explorations. And they’re absolutely part of understanding.
There’s a way in which the natural sciences contribute to the human, which is that we are enriched by understanding the universe we live in. And that’s a service that the natural sciences provide for us, especially when they’re willing to communicate with us about scientific understandings of things. I’m on the promotion and tenure committee at my university, and I do not understand everything I read in the science dossiers, but I don’t understand everything I read in the humanities dossiers either. But I am very grateful to the scientists and to the humanists who are willing to talk to non-experts and enrich us by sharing with us what they know.
I do not mean to imply that the more nomothetic of the Geisteswissenschaften do not contribute; they absolutely do. And it’s not that I’m against them, but there’s a thing that we do in the humanities, which I describe in my Dædalus essay: we pay attention to a particular thing, say an ode by Horace or a poem by Keats, which might be about a Grecian urn. And the point of that attention is not to produce some general statement. It’s hard to know in advance what the point of that attention will be. What will we learn by studying Keats’s ode on a Grecian urn? What can we find in it? We need people who know enough about the language of the time and the poetic forms available—and not everybody agrees with this—but also the biographies of the creators so that we can look for the interesting things.
The promise I’m making to my students when I force them to read a bit of Nicomachean Ethics is not that they’re going to learn some general truth from it. Maybe I think that the passages that we’re reading in Aristotle are wrong. It is more that it will reward their intelligent attention. When scientists think that studying something will reward their intelligent attention, they’re thinking that they’ll learn some general truth: some fact about chemical bonds or some general fact about the evolution of ants. And that’s just a different reason for paying attention. I think that was Wilhelm Windelband’s point in talking about the ideographic. And the thought that it’s worth paying attention to these things without any promise that you’ll get any general discovery out of it—that’s the humanists’ bet.
But, of course, it may turn out that you do discover something general, and that’s fine. It’s not that you’re against finding general things, but that is not the point of that form of attention. People who look at the way English prose develops discover that there are in fact general principles for the general drift of a language. And that allows people to predict in advance some of the vowel shifts that are currently going on in English. There’s a piece of nomothetic stuff that might come out of the study of English prose. But that isn’t why we’re doing it. And if the thought is that there are rewards to be had from paying disciplined attention to these particular things, then one of the things we’re doing as teachers is trying to persuade our students that that’s true and picking for them things that do reward that kind of attention, so that they can then apply their habits of disciplined attention to other things that we haven’t shown to them, and which they can choose for themselves. We don’t have to give them a list of the objects to which they must apply this attention.
So the thought is absolutely not that we don’t learn something very important about the human from the normal nomothetic stuff. Absolutely, I think we do. But there’s a thing that humanists are committed to, which is that it can be worth doing that even if there’s no nomothetic payoff.
SULLIVAN: Thank you, Anthony. We have focused on some important topics in our conversation. I appreciate the questions and very much appreciate Anthony’s thoughtfulness and his work. Congratulations again on this richly deserved honor.
APPIAH: Thank you.
OXTOBY: What a wonderful conversation! Thank you, Margaret, for your moderation. Thank you to our virtual audience for joining from around the world. Thank you, Skip, for reading the citation, from one Randel award recipient to another. And thank you, Anthony, for your remarkable contributions to our society and to this organization. Congratulations again. I hereby adjourn the 2124th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
© 2024 by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Margaret Sullivan.
To view or listen to the presentation, please visit the Academy’s website.