Joseph R. Morgan
SDS 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2:45-4:00
Western Metaphysics and the History of Knowledge about Bodies
I am presenting this paper as a student, teacher and scholar dedicated to the idea that
higher education must include in its pedagogical approach an understanding of how social justice
functions and what drives its necessity. Problematically, I have repetitively had to question this
goal in terms of putting it to use. If as a doctoral student I have only seriously engaged ideas of
social justice since beginning my master’s degree, how can this problem be approached at a more
accessible level in undergraduate studies. To attempt to respond to this issue, I have developed
this paper with an understanding that introductory classes to English studies, those required for
the large majority of college going students, will be vital for accomplishing this goal. Often,
however, these courses have been used as surveys of literary classics that tend to privilege
specific cultural ideologies: patriarchalism, certainly ableism, racism. These are works that teach
a mode of thought that follows the tradition of Western Metaphysics, a conceptual register that
initially served to privelege cultural ideals above physical needs in a religious sense, but has a
history of being used in promoting dichotomies such as white over black, male over female, able
over disabled, and even science over the humanities. The intent of this paper is to analyze the
fields of disability studies and English studies with the intention of advocating for a location of
pedagogical instruction where the exploration of Western metaphysics as a mode of ideological
representation, not as a method of establishing truth, is possible. Primarily I will assert that the
introductory college English classroom is a necessary location, yet rather than calling for more
common modes of social justice in literatute such as Feminism, I will maintain throughout this
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paper that the use of disability studies in these settings is necessary to understanding resistance to
Western Metaphysical modes of thought.
In the past two decades, the humanities have become subject to budget cuts and criticisms
on assumption of lack utility of theoretical and philosophical work as opposed to applied fields
suchs as the medical sciences. Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson in Higher Education Under
Fire take note of the many criticisms that assail the university, placing a particular emphasis on
the fact that “the university’s critics are now trying to convince the American public that their
children aren’t being taught at all, and that their tax dollars are being misspent on faculty whose
only concerns are research and professional self-advancement” (6). This problem plays out the
rhetoric of utility; majors and disciplines that generate jobs and revenue are seen as more useful
and because of scientific roots, based on truth, and those not essentially linked to these
ideological modes of progress, a group that apparently includes the humanities, are wasteful.
Problematically, these attitudes influence the distribution of university funds, and although there
are cuts everywhere, the humanities are a primary target. In many ways, the juxtaposition of the
applied fields and the liberal arts plays out in this practice, for funding from liberal arts
departments is under attack, justifiable in the rhetoric of the utility of fields of scientific research.
It must also be recognized, however, that the move to free higher education in the public sector is
far from fruition; the liberal arts must find ways of making their research and teaching more
recognizably useful, not resisting the rhetoric of utility, but altering the terms by which the
applied fields are perceived.
As fields in the humanities have taken up the task identifying the relationship between
utility and various forms of study in the humanities, the task of this essay is to analyze the
history of disability as defined in the sense of Western Metaphysics and to identify the directions
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that the humanities in the university may be taken in terms of developing locations of inquiry
where the study of disability can be developed in a widespread sense. To this purpose, I will
refer to Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd’s work on Minority Discourse. In their 1991
theoretical work, “Towards a Theory of Minority Discourse,” Abdul R. JanMohamed and David
S. Lloyd have made a suggestion to resists the vestiges of the aesthetics of Western humanism
that may be deeply helpful in directing disability studies in its coalition with English studies.
Writing from a primarily Postcolonial standpoint, JanMohamed and Lloyd write that “We must
see that a ‘humanism’ that systematically ignores all issues concerned with the relations of
domination . . . is in a sense profoundly bankrupt” (13). What they propose is another universal
humanism, but not deeply ingrained in Western Metaphysics. That is, rather than attempting to
find the transcendent universal as literary studies in Western culture have traditionally done, they
claim that “a viable humanism [that] must be centered on the itique of domination” (13).
Outside of the experience of perceived and statistically “proven” normativity, those with
disabilities share with other minorities as well as the colonized of other countries a commonality
in that they have been oppressed, and the search for common histories, JanMohamed and Lloyd
believe, can lead to the empowerment of disenfranchised groups.
Of course, a discussion of the history of Western Metaphysics must begin with Plato in in
his longstanding work, The Republic. Plato’s allegory of the cave in Book VII features the
primary discussion in which Western Metaphysics may be recognized. Plato depicts Socrates as
he imagines an “underground den” where people have been “since their childhood, and have
their legs and necks chained so they can not move, and can only see before them” (205). Behind
them is a flame casting light on the wall in front of them, and in front of the flame, false items,
such as puppets, are held to make images against the wall, which the captives certainly perceive
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as the truth, having no other perspective to evaluate them against. At this moment, Socrates
envisions these people being physically dragged out of the cave and cast into the light. A painful
and confusing process, eventually the light will enable these people to see the entire world in its
true state. Socrates summarizes the metaphor in commenting that we would be correct to
“interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world” (209).
Thus, Socrates creates a transcendental ideal in the sense of the intellect. The intellect can move
upwards with the soul, and only metaphorically is a body necessary in the ascent from the cave.
As a discussion on educational values, the texts goes on to state that“when a person starts on the
discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and
perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good” (224).
That is to say that the purpose of education was geared towards solving problems of truth, a
belief that, though in many ways helpful for the guidance of humanity towards what could be
considered higher purposes, utilizing a directed concept of critical thinking, creates historically
conceptual problems for the perception of the body.
The separation between the intellect and the body privileges the successful, active mind
over the physical self, a construction not inherently bad, but in various applications can be
devastatingly powerful. Take, for example, William Wordsworth’s 1805 edition of The Prelude.
His poem operates on a metaphysical register that demands the artistic exploration of poetry as
the transcendent truth of metaphysics. The truth is in the exploration of the aesthetic and
beautiful, he advocates, continuing to separate the body from the intellect by asking “Our animal
wants and necessities / Which they impose, are these the obstacles? / If not, then others vanish
into air” (“Book Twelfth” lines 94-96). These lines operate under the belief that the body is
separated from the intellect and spirit, that physical necessity means little next to the
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transcendent capacity of the aesthetics of poetry and its gift of truth. Rejecting this ideal, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak points argues that the attitudes of poetic transcendence are problematic,
stating, “I have not asked the critic to be hostile to poetry or to doubt the poet's good faith;
although I have asked her to examine the unquestioning reverence or--on the part of the poets
themselves--the credulous vanity that seems to be our disciplinary requirement.” In a sense,
Spivak argues for the recognition of the bodily necessity as something supporting the ability to
generate intellect, not in a conceptual hierarchy but in a profound realistic system tying the body
into intellect as part of disciplinary study.
The model of Western Metaphysics that focuses through literature as a transcendental
ideal made possible the nineteenth century idealists of the university. Early advocates of the
university predicated the institution on a conception of Western Metaphysics centered on
learning national culture, the progenitors of which generate the most interest is John Henry
Cardinal Newman, whose “Literature: A Lecture in the School of Philosophy and Letters” had a
strong impact on the concept of the university when published in 1858. Bill Readings interprets
Newman’s work on the university through the subject of the “liberal individual: the gentleman,”
a kind of person who would study “literature as the site of the development of both an idea of the
nation and the study of literature as the means of training national subjects” (76). Following
with the Western Metaphysical tradition, the higher purpose of Literature strengthens the culture
of the nation, and the national character boosted by those who study Literature in this sense
would likewise be elevated in the metaphysical tradition by comparison to other nations and
nation-identities, both Western and nonwestern.
Newman’s work, however, is not simply a commentary on culture, but a commentary on
beliefs of bodies and the assumed superiority of the white body in relation to the development of
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the intellect. He writes that “In the language of savages you can hardly express any idea or act of
the intellect at all: is the tongue of the Hottentot or Esquimaux to be made the measure of the
genius of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cervantes” (287). In the discourse of
1858, the choice of these two particular figures raises significant questions. By referencing
Hottentots, Newman may very well be responding to freak show exhibitions, a cultural
phenomenon that, in many ways, sought to provide a foil to define the normal American against
scientifically and culturally identified abnormal bodies. Robert Bogdan points out that “blacks
were of great interest to scientists and laypeople alike” and because of this, interest in native
Africans, depicted in “Stories of apelike creatures with strange savage customs and unusual
physiology” became a major exhibition practice of freak shows (187). Of course, this is not
simply an exhibition of intellectual capacity, but one of bodies as linked to intellectual ability.
This sentiment is echoed in one of America’s most revered poet’s work. Walt Whitman,
in the section of Leaves of Grass titled “Salut au Monde!” addresses this character, “You
Hottentot with clicking palate!” (line 227) and states, “I do not say one word against you, away
back there, where you stand.” (line 243). While the speaker claims in typical universal terms
that the Hottentot will “come forward in due time to my side” Harold Aspiz affirms that
Whitman’s poetry casts “physical deformities and wretched physiognomies of the grotesque and
animalistic hordes ‘away back there’ in the march of human evolution” in ways that “confirm
their racial inferiority” according to the beliefs of Whitman and his culture (191). In effect,
when Newman references the Hottentot, he draws on a cultural knowledge of the physiologically
different body as something considered evolutionarily inferior to white American culture, a
practice which links finer culture to a perception of greater physical capacity. Yet, by defining
his idea of Literature as the study of national identity, Newman establishes the idea of the
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university as one teaching cultural and bodily superiority linked by the scientific definitions of
his time. As this is a reflection for the idealist intent for the university, it is necessary, then, to
realize that the university itself has been founded upon not only a metaphysical privileging of the
intellect, but also the privileging of a certain image of the worth of the human body and the
conflation of white, normative bodies with intellectual ability and worth.
This brings me to a moment of discussion in which I must identify one of the major
issues which Disabiliy Studies has taken up as a subject of research. Recognizing the history of
the idealist vision of the university as one that privileged the intellect over the body and, in many
ways, relied on an ableist beliefs system about bodies, the American eugenics movement should
be a target of this historical analysis. Disability studies scholars have taken up the role of
analyzing the history of eugenics as a cultural movement and as an influence on governmental
policy as this facet of American life has been undermined in histories that show it to be an
aberration of modernity rather than a key moment. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder wrote
Cultural Locations of Disability with the partial intention of correcting the misperception of “a
historical revisionism that characterizes eugenics as a momentary aberration in the history of
disability science” (26). They likewise argue that eugenics is “the centerpiece of U.S. attitudes
towards bodies marked as deviant from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II.”
Attempts to revise the history of the United States have cast eugenics off as the business of Nazi
Germany, disregarding almost entirely the fact that eugenics had transatlantic influences.
Mitchell and Snyder write, “As a transatlantic scientific moment, eugenics bound much of
Europe and North America in a concerted movement to rid disabilities from a country’s national
spaces” (120). In effect, Nazi Germany could not have created the Holocaust as history has told
it without the influence of American eugenic policies of sterilization.
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Moreover, Mitchell and Snyder argue that the progenitors of eugenics, though they
claimed it to be a science, used categorization and empirical data of deviance “To salvage the
danger that deviance poses generally” and that “designations of disability seek to place some
populations as not only anomalous to, but nearly outside of, cultural adjudications of functional,
aesthetic, and biological value” (5). As such, the history of eugenics carried a great deal of
influence in terms of tying cultural value into the rhetoric of utility. Recognizing the cultural
implications of eugenics requires the understanding that the science relied on aesthetic value
judgments based on numerous cultural factors including bodily utility, the ability to function
within capitalism, and, moreover, the aesthetic beauty intended to signify a healthy nation.
Following this construction of metaphysical hierarchies, the applied fields are capable of
controlling the discourse of disablement because of their perceived utility. Because these fields
create more jobs and generate more revenue, have a scientific basis and fulfill many social
functions, they are seen as having a great utility. In reflection against what commands the
perception of utility in the applied fields, Michael Bérubé argues in his text Rhetorical Occasions
that, indeed, the humanities have important spaces of utility:
when it comes to grappling with the larger social process by which cultural
meanings are established and challenged, the tenuous understanding of what a
“meaning” is. . . this is where the humanities are uniquely useful (85-86).
Of course, disability studies deals directly with this issue, but one must face simple facts in
noting that, even though disability studies programs provide access for those interested in
entering the field, disability studies requires access to a larger audience than can currently be
accommodated by degree driven disability studies programs, which certainly are necessary for
the development of scholarship. In order to engage a larger audience and to reach media
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accessible to all college students, English studies not only offers such locations for the study of
meanings in introductory coursework, but also provides already intact social tools in literature
and other forms of texts.
It must be noted that I am not arguing that English studies solely take on the role of
disability studies, just as it has cannot to house in their entirety any specialized field of minority
study. While feminism, gender studies and other fields of minority studies have generated terms
of resistance to the conceptual register of Western Metaphysics within English studies, disability
studies offers to the study of literature a very clear model of resisting the conceptualized
dominance of the applied fields. The applied fields control a large amount of funding due to the
perception of utility in society and their ability to claim objective research, even though that is
more of a ploy than a fact. English studies and the liberal arts, placed on an opposing end of the
spectrum, with a critical duty towards the empowerment of many oppressed social groups, rely
on the history of resisting the essentializing doctrines of applied sciences that have used and still
use scientific data to justify the directing systems of cultural beliefs such as eugenics and the
drive towards profit that often trumps moral obligation. Disability studies has done much to
draw out the histories of the applied science of eugenics as one defined by cultural beliefs and
social oppression, and works as well to debunk the political power of the medical model.
Through the access to a widespread pedagogical platform that English studies offers disability
studies and other fields of minority research, English studies itself becomes a powerful tool for
drawing out the exploitative ideologies inherent in the privileging scientific and applied fields as
essential forms of knowledge.