Be cautious! On writing philosophy on culture wars topics

Philosophy is not harmless. Should it be?

I've been thinking about Spinoza's seal. We can find it impressed on his letters. Below is a clean SVG version from Wikipedia. It has his initials (B D S from “Benedict de Spinoza”, the S is mirrored), a rose, possibly referring to his name (which means something like “thorny” in Portuguese), and the word “Caute.” This could either mean “Be cautious,” or be a motto along the lines of “I am cautious.”

Now given the rather combustive nature of Spinoza's work, even at the time, the best interpretation is probably “Be cautious.” Philosophy can be dangerous. The idea that philosophy is somehow inert or separate from society is relatively new as Eric Schliesser's (

digressionsimpressions’s Substack

's) recent post indicates, where he writes,

At this point one may well be tempted to argue that if one gives up the Humean -- billiard ball -- account of (practical) agency or the self, the inertness of philosophy's fruits cannot be assumed. I think that's right. And if a cool-hour, meta-philosophical discussion were possible in the midst of a culture-war controversy (which it is not), it would be possible to distinguish among those who disagreed over the nature of moral psychology and/or the nature of philosophy from those that disagreed about the substantive underlying moral and political issues. In reality, of course, the substantive moral and political disagreements will shape renewals or doubling down on meta-philosophical commitments.

Philosophy's not harmless. How then should we treat culture war topics? To shut up about them? Or pretend they don't exist? I think we should do neither and instead broach them, but to use Spinoza's motto, with caution.

A lot of philosophical debate gets shut down as beyond the pale, or inherently harmful. Perhaps my most IDW-coded trait is that I do not think this is helpful, though I understand where it's coming from. So here just some thoughts to demonstrate what I mean.

One might think of similarities/analogies between being transgender and being “transracial” as in the case of Rachel Dolezal. A piece by Rebecca Tuvel, published in Hypatia elicited a lot of outrage and angry responses, although also some thoughtful reflection. But even there, as in this piece by Robin Dembroff and Dee Payton the idea is no you should not compare being transgender to being transracial.

At the time, I remember a lot of attacks on Tuvel and the piece, and complaints about Hypatia, and I do agree that the piece was not as well researched as it could be.

However, there is a relevant context in which transracialism comes up, namely, in biracial or racially ambiguous people, or in cases of transracial adoption. These are situations within people's lived experience where you are practically presented with a choice of how to identify, a choice that has large implications.

If you grow up not white-passing (like me), and you have a white parent and live in an almost 100% white community, how to identify? You're not white enough and you will inevitably be subject to racist prejudice, physical and verbal attacks. How do you identify? I early on thought “I am not white,” but my sister (who is physically similar) chose “I am white. Not only white, but also white.” So there is some room for negotiation of personal identity.

How about people (like my kids) who are white-passing? How can they identify?Policing racial authenticity has an unfortunate side-effect the anxiety about being “white enough,” or “black enough,” or “Asian enough,” to call yourself that, or to identify with certain ethnicities (e.g., being Latina as someone who does not speak Spanish, being Asian without having lived in Asia etc). Transracial adoption adds further complexity to this.

The following video, by Jane Austen Youtuber Ellie Dashwood gives good insights into the questions of racial and ethnic identity, specifically on what it is like growing Native American and mixed race.

She has a white mother, a Native American father, grew up in an urban environment mostly raised by her mother, and is white-passing. She also, as a kid already, decided “I am Indian [the term used often at the time for being Indigenous or Native American]". She had this strong sense of identity even though it was negatively valued by other kids in the class.

I know it's hard to feel positive about your racial identity if people around you deprecate it and openly trot out racist stereotypes. And, it is an identity you develop over time and that you navigate the world with. It has an affective dimension, an affirmation, an acknowledgment of who you are and also who you aspire to be.

This gets left out by well meaning (mostly white) people who say "We humans are all Africans." I am sympathetic to this claim, as I am not a racial realist, certainly not in the biological sense. But at the same time we have this social perception and Umwelt, and aesthetic, affective etc. dimensions of racial lived experience. I find there are many parallels indeed with gender, notably, in the aesthetic dimension (gender and certain racialized ways of presenting yourself) that are interesting to explore.

Maybe we can be racial realists in the sense Sally Haslanger says in her classic paper in Nous. If race is a social reality at all, then it's socially enforced and then a post-racial society is possible. Given the enormous violence, inequities, colonial history, etc. that go with racial discrimination, in the US and elsewhere, it is perhaps desirable to do so and to move away from race altogether. But it's difficult to do this top-down as the French have recognized: their concept of post-revolutionary equality does not allow for taking governmental census data regarding race, yet racism remains a reality in French society.

At the same time, I recognize that with race, as with gender, there are affective, aesthetic, personal identity dimensions that make me wonder if it's desirable to have the abolition of race (or gender). There are complex relationships of identity and belonging, community identity and particular. Added to this (as someone helpfully pointed out on Twitter to me), there is so much violence in these concepts and how they've been weaponized, notably against women and against people of color throughout history, “part of the violence was the deliberate erasure of whole peoples, cultures stories, and w/ it a deep alienation from the social fabric & story of ourselves.”

Precisely because we are so alienated, and society is so messed up we should not hold off. I have a deep faith in the power of philosophy to be not only socially relevant but salutary, both for ourselves and for society at large (see this recent co-authored paper of mine and Johan De Smedt, where we make the case), and so we should not avoid the difficult topics.

In doing so, we should be cautious. That is to say, we should not ignore or pretend our seminar rooms and papers are in a politics- and value-free environment. At the same time, we should recognize that our philosophical ideas can be deeply dangerous, deeply transformative, and that we should create the space to engage with them with intellectual honesty and clarity. That should give us room to explore ideas, even if they are difficult and cannot be divorced from a context of violence and oppression (precisely in fact because they cannot), within the laboratory of a seminar room or paper.