Refuse this anti-black universality. Debate and rhetoric is not a neutral space for argument refinement, but a space defined by anti-blackness against those to which we owe an un-dischargeable debt---you ought to bracket out what you consider as universally valuable because that’s incoherent to Black debaters whose lived experience differs from yours.

We emerge to critical thought in interaction with the limitations of the worlds we inhabit, but we can also bear their destructive traces and enact their exclusions in spite of ourselves. Aiming for generality, we can arrive instead at a disavowed parochialism, a “universality” that is suspiciously intimate with and defensive of the contingent specificities of our ways of life. Thinking can thereby become a tool for concealing parochialism, immunizing destructive social habits from criticism, and preventing perception of and engagement with that which could build our capacity for generality.

It is particularly the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism in philosophy and intersectional analysis and its critique of feminism that have illuminated this critical problem and inspired this paper. Decolonial critique targets what Santiago Castro-Gomez calls “zero-point hubris”: “the imaginary according to which an observer of the social world can situate themselves on a neutral observation platform that, in turn, cannot be observed from any point” (2021, 8). Coloniality is thus, as Nelson Maldonado Torres argues, the “systematic negation of sociality and ordinary forms of interhuman contact” (2012, 262) in favour of the imposition from outside of principles construed as universal. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) shows how theory and antidiscrimination law are dominated by a “singleaxis framework” that, as Elena Ruíz (2018) notes, produces “social, institutional, and juridical systems that are structurally unresponsive to the needs, situations, and concerns of historically oppressed communities, and in fact may be the source of harm” (Ruíz 2018, 341). “Single-axis thinking” has encouraged feminists, for instance, to perpetuate the oppression of certain women in its complicity with anti-Black racism (Davis 1983), transphobic oppression (Bettcher 2021), capitalism (Fraser 2013), ableism (Hirschmann 2012), and “colonial feminism” (Ahmed 1992) or “gendered Orientalism” (Abu-Lughod 2013), as those dominant within the group-formations that stand to benefit from struggle against oppression hoard its successes (Táíwò 2022).4

The point of this paper is not to do the situated, practical analysis that Ruíz flags as the focus of intersectional work, but rather to show specifically how philosophy should self-consciously revise its practices and universality be reconceived so as to answer to the risks of zero-point hubris and single-axis thinking. In the first section, I explore phenomenologically the lived experience of being situated within a perspective, rehearsing the argument that situatedness produces in us a partiality and “single-axis thinking” that separates us from others who live in different terms. I distinguish, however, the phenomenologically revealed partiality of perspective associated with our basic existential situation from the historical, practical domination that renders certain forms of partiality general and powerful in defining the terms of social reality. In the second section, I show that we can inhabit the irreducibly partial specificity of our basic existential condition in ways that do not prevent but enable the effectiveness of struggle against and theoretical descriptions of domination. In other words, partiality is inevitable, and it often admits of political organization that conceals or expands it, but it is possible for us to live our partiality in a way that does not simply operate according to the necessarily one-sided terms by which we are inducted into being human. Through partiality, the meaning of the experience of others can become concrete to us. Here I will show that thinking itself must be reimagined: it is not a matter of a choice between specificity and universality, for it is within and through the crux of the specific that we catch a glimpse of the horizon of universality.

At the heart of human experience, the issue of the simultaneously enabling and inhibiting character of specificity is a richly developed point of study in the tradition, and thus, phenomenological reflection on how experience unfolds can contribute to analysis of this problem. This paper relies in particular on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1964a) “The Philosopher and Sociology” for its insight into, first, how we are initiated into meaningful experience by specific forms of life, and second, how communication and a particular kind of universality remain possibilities for us even in our inhabitation of determinate and mutually unfamiliar forms of experience. The paper’s ultimate commitment is captured by Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “superficially considered, our inherence destroys all truth; considered radically, it founds a new idea of truth” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 109).

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Because the paper’s theme is specificity and its relation to thinking, it is important to identify where my efforts toward philosophical thinking have found their origin and impetus. I am a white, middle-class settler woman without, as Walter D. Mignolo calls it, “the colonial experience and political interest propelled by the colonial wound” (2009, 170). My efforts themselves are a colonial artifact, a by-product of my implication in the dispossession and subordination of others. In answer to Socrates’ profound question to Cephalus, I have inherited wealth, not made it (Plato 1968, 330a). My aim is to make the inevitably flawed effort, against the grain of my cultivation, to think not from the terrain established by “centrisms” but to think of and with the exteriority projected by them, to attend to the scenes of profound injustice to which all are accountable: entrenched economic exploitation; the organization of the globe according to racist, colonial, and ableist priorities; the ongoing suppression of genders and sexualities that do not reflect the priorities of the generic heterosexual man. We are enveloped in systems that suppress and exploit human power, and our efforts to struggle against them require thinking with others, with the exteriorities these systems constitute. My desire is to investigate the living realities of human experience that make shared effort in this regard both difficult and possible. SPECIFICITY AND ITS AMBIVALENCE Who we are as human individuals is profoundly a function of others and the availability of specific worlds to us. This interdependence renders us specific and one-sided, reflecting the priorities of those who induct us into humanity and the characteristics of the specific environments we inhabit, which support and dissuade different activities and attitudes. The worlds to which we adapt do not have the same dimensions as what we might project as the “actual” world beyond any actual experience, or as the worlds of others, yet their specificity tends to be somewhat invisible to us. Merleau-Ponty captures the sense of this specificity when he observes that the “individual drama takes place among roles which are already inscribed in the total institutional structure, so that from the beginning of his life the child proceeds—simply by perceiving the attentions paid to him and the utensils surrounding him—to a deciphering of meanings which . . . generalizes his own drama into a drama of his culture” (1964a, 112; emphasis in original). “Attentions” and “utensils” are the vehicles of specification that circulate around us: forms of human behaviour and material expression of historical priorities that demand we assume them in order to be counted as a piece of the real world. There are many dimensions to this specificity. It is familial, reflecting our intimate community, its lineage, its style of inhabiting the world. Who we are unfolds as a response to the specificity of our familiar others. Specificity is cultural, stamped by the qualities of its contextualizing environment. We speak a certain language, use a certain generation’s slang, manifest trends in how we dress, make a living in specific ways, and so on. While there are significant differences within cultures, we nonetheless have a basic familiarity with cultural options that qualifies us as “insiders,” a status hard won by others. Specificity is also political; societies have made specific decisions about operation and self-organization that render them different from others, though their functioning depends on treating many of these decisions as not contingent but necessary. Our interpretations of reality settle into the grooves made by these more primordial interpretations, yet it is only by participating in specific worlds with specific others that we develop as participants in “reality.” The development of the capacity to make sense bears the traces of particular forms of sense-making and how these forms are demonstrated to us, and any perspective we take on this inheritance is mediated by it. We implicitly reflect what has always been demonstrated to us as “normal” even when we explicitly take ourselves to reject it. While this can seem and be oppressive to both insiders and outsiders, it is not simply an oppressive matter: only by being embedded in organized systems of meaning do we develop and become capable of relating to further others. Further, no such context could include everyone; location is necessary, and it depends on exclusion.5 Importantly, I am using “we” here in a way I construe to be universal. This is the case for all of us, and it renders us irreducibly different from each other. We share the condition of specificity, and so our experience diverges. And this unshareability is only exacerbated by the fact that our specificity is not transparent to us.

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Merleau-Ponty gives the term “perceptual faith” to the epistemic orientation to the world that develops in this condition. This is the faith that “we see the things themselves, the world is what we see”: it is a trusting “contact” that precedes and “exceeds [reflection’s] power of comprehension” (1968, 3; 1964a, 104). Thinking emerges on the basis of this primordial contact, in which the distinction between true and false is already meaningful to us and others, and the world is already real. Thinking cannot disavow the original condition of perceptual faith and can never grasp it in the way it actually happens. It can only point to it in the mode of what Merleau-Ponty calls “hyper-reflection,” which would put “to itself the problem of the genesis of its own meaning” (1968, 38, 12). “Objectivism” in thinking, as Merleau-Ponty’s critique goes, takes the true to be the objective and takes knowing to be that which exposes its true reality, and in so doing disregards the lived experience of integration between experiencer and object, the original, non-reflective contact out of which objects of reflection and reflective powers emerge and to which they owe an undischargeable debt. It disavows the murky ancestry of thinking.

While we can expose phenomenologically the non-perception of the lived present, the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism and the intersectional critique of feminism expose the politically constituted non-perception of the lived present.6 Alongside the philosophical critique of objectivism extends a political critique of domination: reflection operates on the basis of a disavowed history of domination. The scene behind the scenes that phenomenology illuminates, while a necessary condition of experience as such, is in turn shaped by a specific political history. While the condition of specificity is universal, forms of specificity are organized differently in relation to each other, and the way they are organized differently shapes how we live them.

This organization entails different epistemic capacities and orientations for different kinds of people. While those whose specificity links them with the dominant ways of life can be ignorant of the specificity of others, the converse is typically not the case. Given the power associated with dominant ways of life, familiarity with them can be the price people pay to make their way in the world. One thinks here of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (2015) notion of “double-consciousness”7 and of James Baldwin: “ask any Negro[black person] what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him” (1993, 103; emphasis in original). To use Lewis Gordon’s (2006) powerful metaphor, to live on the basis of the dominant code is to have the cat’s reach over the mouse: the cat has a sphere of influence that goes well beyond the immediate coordinates of tooth and claw. Its reach “extends to the area over which it can move faster than the mouse; thus, run though the mouse may try with all its might, the cat will seem to pop up everywhere” (2006, 42). The shared familiarity of the dominant code is an effect of dominance. Another’s orientation to the world must in some sense become familiar to me—as that by which I orient myself—if the reality it projects is the reality I am forced to reckon with.