An Interview with Andreas Eshete

Abstract

An Interview with Andreas Eshete* Dagmawi Woubshet (bio) WOUBSHET: Andreas, thank you for this opportunity to dialogue with you; it's a pleasure and a privilege. Perhaps we could start discussing your writing as a philosopher; then, transition to talk about your work as a public intellectual, the ways in which you have connected philosophy to political practice; and end with your thoughts on Ethiopian culture. You have written that the general perception of philosophy as "an incubation inquiry" is misguided. What do you mean by that and also what kind of metaphor do you think aptly characterizes philosophical inquiry? ESHETE: I think the incubation idea comes from the history of philosophy. Philosophy used to be kind of an all-encompassing discipline and so for example most of the famous treatises in natural science were called treatises in natural philosophy. So many of the great English scientists—Newton, Bacon, and so on—were natural philosophers. So, usually the idea was that a subject would reach a certain level of maturity in philosophy and then it would become an independent science. Of course, there is still this phenomena going on, perhaps most significantly and most recently, in Cognitive Sciences. For a long time nobody studied the mind except people in psychology, who were very much behavioristi-cally inclined—famously, of course, Skinner and many others. But when people realized that we don't know very much about the mind, and we still don't, particularly the most interesting aspects of our mental life—for example, consciousness, or what it is like to experience yellow or experience pain, about which we still have no clear idea—that search took the form of an incubation inquiry or science. To come back to your question, with all the progress made in natural science, if we were to take a measure of our scientific knowledge, we still have to ask philosophical questions. The same is true with the mind. If we want to know, for example, developments in the cognitive sciences, we have to attend to philosophical questions. Even people who are practitioners—clinical practitioners who deal with mental life and illness—end up, at least the best ones, asking philosophical questions. So, my thought is philosophy's work is never done. And the fact that it has all these progeny in the sciences, not just in the natural sciences but also the social science, doesn't mean that philosophy is supplanted by other more rigorous sciences. [End Page 102] WOUBSHET: It's interesting that you position philosophy within the sciences. But, at the same time, you have written that "what makes philosophy as a field of inquiry very special is that no area of intellectual activity is alien to philosophy," which reminds me of Terence's observation—"I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." This characterization of philosophy speaks to the endeavor of literature. Can you say more about the ways in which philosophy, on the one hand, is situated in the sciences and, on the other, is within the domain of the humanities. It seems philosophy is unique in straddling these two realms. ESHETE: Its kinship to literature is probably the most important in my mind—why? Because first like literature philosophy addresses in one way highly deep and difficult questions, and in another way questions that everyone asks, like what is it to be moral, what is it to do the right thing, and so on. These are not just technical question, but questions that everybody asks. What is beautiful is a concern of everyone. So in a way literature and philosophy share that concern. And it's very important that inquiry be rooted in questions that exercise common sense. So, that is one area of kinship. Secondly, I believe literature is endlessly many things but, at least for me, one of the morally important things literature does is explore more imaginative possibilities, and I mean that in a very broad sense. Writers that I admire, for example my favorite short story writer is V. S. Pritchett and what I admire most about his writing, skills apart, is that he focuses on perfectly ordinary people...