(This post comprises a slightly modified version of a response to my “Philosophy of Disability: Its Purposes and Places” that Julie Maybee delivered at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division conference in New York City on January 16, 2024.

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Response to Shelley Tremain

by

Julie Maybee

In my remarks today, I would like to highlight the importance of the distinction that Shelley draws between what she calls the “philosophy of disability” as opposed to work in “philosophy and disability.”

In the Phenomenology of Spirit (I know, I know . . . I promise it won’t be too bad . . .), Hegel makes a big deal of “of” (§115).

He makes a distinction between thinking something and thinking “of” something, or having a concept “of” something.

The “of” creates a remoteness or distance between the concept/thought and the sensuousness that is (now) being thought of.

With the “of,” the something moves out, out there, into what Hegel calls the “medium of subsistence,” into the realm (or the way) in which things subsist on their own, that is, out there, in what now becomes public space.

To have a concept of something is to think, not just of thereness, of some there there, but to project that thereness out there, to move it out into the “medium of subsistence,” into the way in which things subsist on their own (i.e. out there in public space).

To think of something is thus to think of a complex sensuousness or thereness, but at a distance, that is, as projected (as a kind of sensuousness) out there into the medium or realm of subsistence (§115).

That is why, as Hegel also argues in the Phenomenology, all knowledge is necessarily social. Since we project our concepts out there into public space, we have to test them in relation to other people’s concepts. We (our concepts), our way of cutting up the world, can be right only if those concepts stand up to scrutiny in relation to other people out there. We have to see if those concepts, insofar as they purport to grasp something out there in public space, hold up to scrutiny from other people. As Hegel puts it, “self-consciousness reaches its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (§175). (I should acknowledge that Hegel himself had some views he should have checked more thoroughly . . .)

This is what a philosophy of disability does. As Shelley defines it, while “philosophy and disability” takes (supposed) “disability” to be a given thereness, “philosophy of disability” takes disability at a distance, projects it out there into public space, into the realm in which things subsist on their own. It then takes seriously the idea that what the concept of “disability” projects out there must be tested in relation to others and how they perceive and cut up the world.

And when we put “disability” and “impairment” out there into public space and see how other people have thought about the human situations that we call “disability” and “impairment,” it turns out that these concepts (and what they project out there) do not exist at all in many languages and cultures. In many cultures and languages, there are concepts or words for this or that human situation, but there are no general terms that include all of the situations that we include under the concepts of “disability” and “impairment” (cf. Ingstad and Whyte 1995, 7; Maybee 2024, 138). Moreover, in many cultures, these situations are not used to define a person. Rather, they are accidental, individual features of someone who is centrally defined through social relations and roles, and not bodily features (cf. Maybee 2024, 139-140, 145; 2019, 168-170).

The concepts of “disability” and “impairment” are thus not only highly abstract concepts—so abstract, in fact, that it should puzzle us as to why all of the situations that we put into the baskets we call “disability” or “impairment” came to be regarded as the same kind of thing at all—but also historically and culturally contingent. They are concepts that came into being at a particular time and place in a particular set of cultures.

Even in the West, where the concepts of “disability” and “impairment” were invented, they are relatively recent inventions. The historian Irina Metzler has argued that these concepts did not exist in the Middle Ages in Europe. To the degree that Medieval people did employ an abstract concept—a concept of paupers—the concept did not focus on bodily differences but on people who needed social support, and included widows, orphans, sick people, pilgrims, people who were economically poor as well as people with what we would call physical impairments (Metzler 2015, 4-5, 155-6). In other words, Medieval people cut up the world differently, based on different criteria, and so perceived different facts. 

Indeed, all concepts are historical and cultural. Today, I find it impossible to think of concepts any other way, as anything other than products of human invention, and so as necessarily historical and cultural.

And all philosophy is cultural.

The Ugandan poet and philosopher Okot p’Bitek once wrote: 

“Culture is philosophy as lived and celebrated in a society. Human beings do not behave like dry leaves, smoke or clouds which are blown here and there by winds. Men live in organizations called institutions: the family and clan, a chiefdom or kingdom or age-set system. He has a religion, an army, legal and other institutions. And all these institutions are formed by or built around the central issue of a people, what they believe, what life is all about, their social philosophy, their world view” (p’Bitek 1998, 73). 

Many years ago, Kwame Anthony Appiah once quipped that he sometimes thought that philosophers who took themselves to be doing philosophy of language were really doing philosophy of English (or similar languages). Kwasi Wiredu argued that we must distinguish philosophical questions that are questions only in some cultures and languages (e.g. the question of the relationship between fact and truth, since some cultures have no concept of “fact”) from questions that seem to be more universal (e.g. the question of what it is for something to be so) (Wiredu 2003, 240-242).

All concepts are historical/cultural, then, including “disability” and “impairment.”

They are defined in relation to webs of concepts and the social institutions and practices through which they are enacted (cf. Maybee 2019, 100-10; 2017).

With respect to “disability” and “impairment,” the important questions then become: why and how were “disability” and “impairment” invented as concepts in the West? What made these abstract concepts meaningful—these concepts that treat a bunch of very different situations that do not seem to be the same at all as if they are the same? And why and how are these concepts as well as the institutions and social arrangements through which they are enacted, maintained?

These are the important questions to which Shelley has dedicated her attention and writing, beginning with her seminal 2001 article that argued, against the social models of disability that were prevalent at the time, that both the concepts of “disability” and “impairment” are socially constructed. Not only is the concept of “disability” socially constructed, as scholars who were then defending the so-called social model of disability were suggesting, Shelley argued, but the concept of “impairment,” too, is socially constructed (Tremain 2001), or, as Shelley put it in her remarks today “impairment has been disability all along.” (By the way, I cannot overemphasize how influential Shelley’s article was on me when I read it . . .)

These are the central questions of a philosophy of disability. What social conditions made and continue to make the concepts and webs of beliefs and institutions surrounding so-called “disability” and “impairment” socially functional, in all of the various contexts in which they do function—including in the discipline of philosophy itself? And then: how can these social conditions be unmade to promote greater freedom and justice for disabled people? As Shelley said today, “philosophy of disability represents itself as politically motivated in character and socially engaged in content.”

As Rob Wilson pointed out in a recent paper, the discipline of philosophy has typically been silent about disability as well as eugenics. When it has not been silent, philosophers are likely to be supporters of eugenics. “Perhaps some silence here,” Wilson writes, “would be welcome.” He adds that in bioethics, in particular, and in philosophical discussions of the possibility of using technology to improve human life, “overtly pro-eugenic views are not only entertained, but keenly defended” (Wilson 2023, 1014). And, as Shelley has argued and Wilson notes, these silences (and non-silences) are reflected in views about who is a philosopher and who gets to do philosophy (Wilson 2023, 1015, 1017; cf. Tremain 2017, viii, xi, 3, 11, 29, 36, 41, 44, 177, 205).

As Wilson says (Wilson 2023, 1017) and Lewis Gordon once suggested in the context of a discussion of racism, if you come out of the gates having to argue for your basic humanity, having to rebut claims about your supposedly subhuman status, then you have already lost. “It is when one’s humanity is wiped out of the scheme of human affairs,” Gordon wrote, “to the point of functioning as a natural phenomenon among other natural phenomena—in other words, among the land, plants, and animals—that the racist schema evinces itself” (Gordon 1997, 55). The conundrum, Gordon explains, is that “the category of superiority demands the impossible of the inferiors. They are to prove the validity of their existence, which, in effect, means to demonstrate, beyond using themselves as justification, that their existence is justified” (Gordon 1997, 55).

All of this is to emphasize why Shelley’s distinction between philosophy of disability vs. philosophy and disability is such a crucial one. Again, as Shelley defines it, while work on philosophy and disability takes disability, as it is commonly understood in the West, to be a given, the philosophy of disability thinks through disability at a distance, questioning its supposed givenness and how it cuts up the world. The philosophy of disability also thinks through how we could cut up the world differently, and perceive different facts, to improve the lives of, and promote justice for, disabled people.

Let me end by saying that, in my own experience, Shelley has been the glue that holds us together, and I am grateful to her for all of the work she has done to build this community and for including me in it . . .

Bibliography

Bitek, Okot p’. 1998. “The Sociality of Self.” In African Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, 73–74. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

Gordon, Lewis R. 1997. Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. [The citations are to Hegel’s section numbers, so the reader can consult any English translation of the work.]

Ingstad, Benedicte, and Susan Reynolds Whyte. 1995. Disability and Culture. Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press.

Maybee, Julie E. 2023. “Disability and African Philosophy.” In The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, edited by Shelley Lynn Tremain, 132–54. London; New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Maybee, Julie E. 2019. Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Maybee, Julie E. 2017. “Em’body’ment and Disability: On Taking the (Biological) ‘Body’ out of Em’body’ment.” Journal of Social Philosophy 48 (3): 297–320.

Metzler, Irina. 2015. A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment. New York: Routledge.

Tremain, Shelley. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Tremain, Shelley. 2001. “On the Government of Disability.” Social Theory & Practice 27 (4): 617–36.

Wilson, Robert A. 2023. “Philosophical Silences: Race, Gender, Disability, and Philosophical Practice.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 57 (4–5): 1004–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad076.

Wiredu, Kwasi. 2003. “The Concept of Truth in the Akan Language.” In The African Philosophy Reader, edited by P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux, 2 edition, 239–43. New York: Routledge.