Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life

Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life is an important recent work of African materialist thought. Ochieng’s is not a naïve materialism that arbitrarily focuses on land, natural resources and profits. Instead, it is a sophisticated materialism committed to the reality and ethical salience of our institutions, social networks, and projects as they modify and limit our relationships to a physical world that we share with each other. The project is rich, detailed, and ambitious. This level of ambition and scale of thought matches what I believe is called for—and what we’re owed as Africans—given the scale of what we’re facing politically, economically, and otherwise.It’ll be noted that I didn’t say that “Africanist” scholars or philosophers owe it a close look. That’s as it ought to be, and furthermore, as Ochieng would have it. In the introduction, Ochieng characterizes what we have previously called “the West” as “the North Atlantic.” This is no mere semantic or linguistic shift, but is part and parcel of a larger critique. Ochieng sees himself as “breaking decisively from other schools of thought that carve up the world in civilization blocs” and “critiquing the essentialist search for an ‘authentic’ tradition, as measured by the extent to which a person, concept, or social practices originates or is indigenous to a . . . mythical past”(4–5). This is expanded upon at length in chapter 2.Ochieng’s critique is not simply that the search for authenticity is imprudent or leaves more useful options unexplored. Rather, the search for an authentic African conceptual past without European influence fails on its own terms—he claims that North Atlantic and African philosophies are neither separate nor incommensurable but rather have responded and reacted to the presence of each other throughout the ages. This criticism even implicates “comparative” philosophy, if conceiving of the traditions being compared as separate from each other is a background commitment of such projects (5).Ochieng’s contribution is strong on the negative side: the book effectively shows the limitations, elisions, and mistakes of older or more established views. Consider the divide Ochieng points out within African political and metaethical theory, framed via a debate between Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Ajume Wingo (Wingo 2010; Diagne 2009). Ochieng contrasts a “communal school” that argues that any system of ethics requires an interpretive background of a particular social tradition or history with a “transcendental” school that addresses human individuals as such, often via some form of universalism (11). The view Ochieng goes on to advocate does not ground ethics in any particular social experience or tradition but instead opts for spelling out—in often exhausting detail—the particular exigencies and contingencies of social life. The former aspect of his theory aligns with Diagne and the transcendental school, the latter with Wingo and the communal school.The book intervenes in a lot of debates in this way throughout but especially in chapters 1 and 2. It offers an array of correctives from topics as diverse as restorative (preferring “restructurative”) justice to the intricacies of social power and ideology. For example, on a single page of the book we are offered twelve ways of describing the entanglements and connectivity of the social structures in which people find themselves reasoning ethically: structures are interanimated, embedded, sedimented, articulated, inscripted, reticulated, imbricated, dirempted, homologous, consilient, contrapuntal, and reificated (15). In adopting this strategy, Ochieng offers new terms and new distinctions between kinds of old terms that offer new resolutions or ways forward in those debates, and that demonstrate a certain carefulness and exactitude of thought. However, a negative result of this approach is that it is often difficult to see how the different interventions fit together or are guided by any principles other than the metaphilosophical ones offered in the book’s introduction—which seems a better guide to how we should come upon and refine the ideas we choose than an explanation of what justifies their content. But we need the latter for deciding whether or not we want to adopt Ochieng’s theory itself, as opposed to his method for theory-generation.Contrast that with an approach to ethical theory where the moves at lower levels of abstraction radiate from a guiding principle or concept like ubuntu, or ujamaa, the categorical imperative, or an Aristotelian unity of virtues (Metz 2011; Nyerere 1979; Kant 1993; Rowe and Broadie 2002). This may be a feature rather than a bug. After all, if the goal is an empirically and historically responsive philosophy; adjudicating some of these disputes may require the kind of engagement with the social and natural sciences that precludes the kind of pronouncements from on high that philosophers may feel entitled to. To his credit, Ochieng considers and rejects some of these specifically, arguing persuasively that both ubuntu and a similar communalist ethic offered by Kwasi Wiredu fail to satisfactorily account for cultural heterogeneity (128–30). The coverage of the depth and breadth of African thought in chapter 2 is a clear, high point of the book.Nevertheless, we should have some kind of idea of what we are looking for from the evidence we gather about society, and that is hard to square with the long list of new sociophilosophical linguistic terms Ochieng offers us here. For instance: if we developed a coherent theory of how to increase a community’s “constellational power” (the power that one gets from controlling natural resources) that would require a tradeoff with its “constitutive power” (something similar to the older neoliberal concept of human capital) how would we decide which to give up and which to pursue (32)? How would this new conceptual taxonomy help us do so?Chapters 3 and 4 largely expand upon the positive aspect of the project. Ochieng has argued in the first two chapters for conceiving of philosophy’s subject matter as deeply embedded in social structure and practice. This forces us to contend with the contingencies of history and the requirements of social life as embedded in relationships and networks of responsiveness and feedback. In chapter 3, he argues that figuring out healthy fundamental relationships and social networks will set necessary conditions for a right description of the organization of ethical social life. In chapter 4, he argues that the arguments of the book broadly help us sketch characterizations of a life well lived, like that of the saint, hero, or (good) citizen.As before, it’s not clear what the specific argumentative moves in these chapters owe to the conceptual space cleared out in earlier chapters. If the good life requires world articulation, which kind? Early chapters can shed light on what it would be, for Ochieng, to specify what a world looks like and how it works in ethical terms, but it isn’t clear how one would go about deciding which descriptions of the world are worth striving for—or, for that matter, which to settle for in a world where we as individuals have little power to change the actual worlds that provide context for our actions and their meaning-making.But to the extent to which Ochieng’s descriptive claims about the relationship between ethics done right, the good life, and the good society do recognizably interact with the proscriptions laid out in chapter 4, it would seem they count against the proscriptive claims offered in this part of the book, particularly in its final chapter. That is: it is precisely because a correct meta-ethical taxonomy of the descriptive world ought to have the many of the features Ochieng argues for earlier that neither the analysis of “ground projects” or of moral exemplars can give us any purchase on how to fulfill the promise of the book’s title and live the Good Life.The final chapter gives us a picture of what the Good Life consists of: the “articulation of ground projects.” Ground projects themselves consist of four types of articulations: world-articulation, self-articulation, knowledge- and aesthetic-articulation, and meaning-articulation—the person who lives well is not only able to develop a conception of the way the world is and ought to be, develop critical knowledge and aesthetic capacities, and creatively relate to signs in order to generate meaning, but is also able to generate resonances in their social environment that respond to these perhaps “internal” developments. However, I argue that this approach generates a dilemma.On the one hand: If the good life is fulfilled by the fact that it is a life articulated along these dimensions, his argument seems ultimately to rely on a formalism, of the kind the book criticizes when discussing the German transcendentalist position. More importantly, the consequences of this formalism seem themselves troubling: it seems like it is abusive people who are the most successful at articulating their lives along these dimensions. For example, the abuser in a relationship abuse pattern known as “gaslighting,” in which the gaslighter gradually abuses a victim into disbelieving her own perceptions of the world (generally in favor of his own) might well be characterized as a person who is effectively able to live in a way that communicates and generates reasons (Abramson 2014). Indeed, that is in some important way exactly why the gaslighter is living so viciously—it turns out that the ways that abusers’ lives articulate their conceptions of themselves and the world do not leave room for others to do the same.On the other hand: if the good life is not fulfilled merely by articulating itself along these dimensions but is also a substantive matter of what is articulated along these dimensions—then how do we come to an understanding of the content of the meanings, worlds, knowledges, and aesthetics in the good society and in the life well lived? One pessimistic response comes from a kind of modesty about the possibilities of ethical theory. On one candidate’s modest view, ethical theory is simply the task of saying ever more precisely what the ethical problems are, and what responsibilities or evaluative standards we are condemned to navigate, given our agential capacities. But the more optimistic theorist holds out hope for the possibility that ethical theory could have a how-to dimension: it could be a compass, helping us to figure out how to navigate the conundrums of ethical life, rather than settling for painting those problems vividly. The optimist might well wonder how the largely descriptive project the book sets for itself gives us purchase on the question of proscriptions. They might ask: does showing us what the good life would be like, help us live it?Ochieng’s chapter 4 arguments about moral saints and exemplars are vulnerable to a similar complaint. In this chapter he characterizes types of people we could model our behavior off on: the saint, the hero, and the citizen. Earlier, Ochieng persuasively argued that we need a good society to have good lives, and that it follows from one’s discussion of embeddedness that cleaving the ethics and political theories from each other is as nonsensical as cleaving the political from the economic, the ideological from the material.But we have a problem of choice in the context of different institutional contexts. Even supposing that I could be sure that Winnie Mandela or Frantz Fanon or some other specific figure ought to be my hero, it would seem that the relationship of their heroism to the particular circumstances they were embedded in would be deeply at issue in picking out what lessons, if any, I can apply to the particularities of the social relations that I am embedded in. This is no idle bourgeois philosopher’s “gotcha” response—for example, if changes in circumstances turned Robert Mugabe the heroic freedom fighter of the 1970s into Robert Mugabe the genocidal despot of the 1980s, we have every reason to pay close attention to the way circumstances may turn some of our virtues into vices, and vice versa.The Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life is to be credited for the boldness with which it characterizes both African intellectual and social history, and the sheer scope of the task it sets for meta-ethics for all philosophers. Though I have considered important criticisms to the more directly proscriptive aspects of the book, the book’s strengths outweigh them. It sets a new agenda and mandate for African materialist and meta-ethical thought: to develop theories robust enough to navigate the concrete struggles of daily life for African peoples, held hostage neither to mythologies about lost or marginalized tradition nor to the distortions of ill-suited abstractions

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