Dwayne Tunstall as Africana Philosopher

Thomas Meagher

Originally published at the American Philosophical Association blog, Black Issues in

Philosophy: https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/10/17/black-issues-in-philosophy-dwayne-tunstall-
as-africana-philosopher/

One of the preoccupations of Africana philosophy could be characterized in terms of

axiology. Africana philosophy emerges out of a context of axiological colonization. This is a
context in which black people are regarded as lacking in value or, indeed, as being of negative
value – it is asserted that the world would be better off without them. White people, in contrast,
are regarded as indispensable: their value is viewed as overwhelming and self-evident. The
proper function of black people, such a world avows, is no more and no less than to serve whites.
And a variety of efforts are made not only to develop a consensus among whites about these
matters but, further, to make black people share these repugnant values – that is, to bring about
the axiological colonization of Africana peoples.

It is not only within Africana philosophy that one may find rejections of such a schema;
one can find critics of racism in every modern philosophical tradition. But what is perhaps
distinctive about Africana philosophy is its radical effort to explore the implications of such
axiological colonization. As Lewis Gordon argues in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, it
is a tradition characterized not only by the insistent focus on the question of liberation but also
by the question of philosophical anthropology and the matter that Gordon calls “the metacritique
of reason.”

It is the contention of much Africana thought, then, that Euromodern thought, colonized
by an axiological imperative to serve the ideological underpinnings of a racist world order,
fundamentally distorts its conceptions of humanity. Hence, Africana philosophy demands a more
radical and rigorous effort to answer questions posed in philosophical anthropology. Yet
Euromodern thought also asserts a false equivalence between European Man and reason. Reason,
then, becomes subject to axiological colonization: its purpose becomes to indicate the self-
evident value of whiteness and disvalue of blackness. Reason in black, then, confronts several
existential paradoxes. It must ask whether reason can really serve black liberation and, if so,
what forms of reason may ultimately beget valuable forms of human life.

An implication of this is that the value of Africana philosophy is not limited to black
people or even oppressed people more generally. This is because Africana philosophy
contributes to making philosophy more rigorous in general. By reflecting on reason and
humanity from a context of axiological colonization, Africana philosophy makes evident
dimensions that may be occluded in a variety of taken-for-granted attitudes. Hence, while the
concern with liberation is a leitmotif in Africana thought, it is typical of Africana philosophers to
be preoccupied with questions whose implications are far broader.
 In that sense, the work of Dwayne Tunstall is, in many ways, paradigmatic of Africana
philosophy. Tunstall’s work touches on questions of ethics, religion, metaphysics, and
metaphilosophy, primarily through an engagement with thinkers from the American pragmatist
and personalist traditions, African-American thinkers, and European phenomologists and
existentialists. That Tunstall is African-American and that African-American philosophers play
an important role in his work may suffice, for many, to characterize him as an Africana
philosopher. But in this essay, I would like to explore how Tunstall’s philosophical corpus is
thematically representative of the Africana tradition. Although Tunstall is a prolific author with a
myriad of publications to his name, for these purposes, I will limit myself to an examination of
his two monographs, which more than suffice to demonstrate the point.

Tunstall’s first monograph, Yes But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-
Religious Insight, began its life as Tunstall’s master’s thesis. In a very moving description, he
relates its origins in a reflection on a Michael Jackson lyric during a long, lonely ride. What does
a human life mean, he wondered, if there is no one to understand or remember it? The salience to
antiblack racism is clear, as the ideal of many racist societies is to produce black lives that are
regarded as not mattering and hence as not being worthy of attention or understanding. Indeed,
the dynamics of antiblack racist societies are often geared toward denying possible avenues of
love and care by asserting that black people’s thoughts are non-existent or unintelligible, that
what they have to say about their lives is insignificant.

Where such avenues are denied, Tunstall reasoned, what is left is God. God is that
perspective to whom one’s life always retains meaning, that perspective attentive to all that may
be obscured to one’s fellow mortals. In encountering the work of Josiah Royce, Tunstall found a
conception of God, as well as an ethical and religious schema, compatible with this insight.

Out of this realization, one direction forward would have been to write a simple study of
Royce’s views on ethics and/or religion, territory trod by many others but not without room for
further studies to reexamine and refine. But Tunstall’s work goes further. One commonplace in
Royce scholarship, he notes, is to examine Royce’s metaphysics through a study of his work in
logic and epistemology. For Tunstall, though, such a framework misses the key ideas that
portend the greater value of Royce’s work. It is Royce’s ethico-religious insight (a phrase
Tunstall draws from the works of Father Frank M. Oppenheim), he contends, that drives Royce’s
philosophical project. Hence, Tunstall takes up the project of articulating a Roycean metaphysics
that begins with the ethico-religious.

A consequence is that this approach runs counter to what Tunstall finds to be a prevailing
tendency in Royce scholarship: to read Royce in a secularized fashion. There are, of course,
philosophical insights in Royce that may be discovered through reading his work as if it were
secular. But this tendency, Tunstall demonstrates, passes over crucial dimensions of the idealist
and personalist metaphysics that becomes evident once one takes the religious dimensions of
Royce seriously.
 By taking the religious Royce seriously, Tunstall is able to elucidate a turn in Royce’s
thought away from an earlier absolutist idealism to a mature idealism grounded in personalist
commitments. The early work of Royce, Tunstall finds, was a form of idealism grounded in the
notion of the Absolute, though not quite the Hegelian Absolute, since the Absolute of early
Royce by contrast preserves a diversity of uniquenesses and particularities. This absolutist
idealism found a critic in the philosopher George Holmes Howison, whose earlier enthusiasm for
Hegel had waned and led him to develop what he termed “personal idealism.” Royce and
Howison engaged in a debate in 1895, with the latter issuing a critique of the former’s
conception of God. Tunstall demonstrates that Howison’s criticisms ultimately depended on a
misinterpretation of Royce’s position, yet Royce was moved nonetheless, “haunted” by
Howison’s critique.

This haunting, Tunstall argues, pushed Royce in the direction of personalism. The “will
to interpret” becomes, at this stage, essential to Royce’s conception of the human person and the
divine Self. God, then, figures as a form of omniscience, a perspective from which all is
significant, which, by extension, means God represents an ideal that human persons – whose
understanding of all that is meaningful is limited – strive toward, if ever incompletely. An ethical
implication of this is the pursuit of a “Community of Interpretation,” in which a will to interpret
the experiences of one’s fellows builds a body of shared significations that bind a community
and facilitate a social world in which empathy becomes a typical feature of mundane life.

Tunstall compares this Roycean conception to Martin Luther King’s articulation of agape
or the Beloved Community. He notes that there is a tension in King’s conception of agape
between the belief that it can only be manifest through human action and the belief that it is an
inevitability due to the power of God’s will – that is, there is a tension between agape as an
ethical ideal that we may fail to fulfill and agape as a religious belief in an eschatological
destination. Here Tunstall finds that Royce’s metaphysics can resolve this tension by
conceptualizing agape as that which God calls for but that which can only ever be partially
fulfilled through human striving toward the divine ideal.

That Tunstall relates Royce to the work of King here would, for many, constitute the
point at which Yes, But Not Quite moves from a work in American pragmatist philosophy to a
work with relevance to the Africana tradition. But given the thematic interpretation of Africana
thought above, this would be a mistake. For the deeper argument of the text can be construed in
this fashion: it stems from a concern with any metaphysics in which tendencies toward
depersonalization and dehumanization may predominate. In Royce’s metaphysics, Tunstall
discerns a possible antidote.

A critical implication of this can be found in Tunstall’s claim that Royce scholarship
tends toward a secularized reading that privileges logic as the locus of Roycean philosophy and
metaphysics. Whatever may be said to have initiated Royce’s own philosophical project, we may
note that Tunstall’s interest in it begins with his concerns about a depersonalizing world in which
a life can be lived in neglect and be forgotten. A rationalistic interpretation of Roycean
metaphysics, then, is insufficient because it occludes the crucial function of the divine in
retaining the meaningfulness of human experience.

A consequence is that Tunstall is not satisfied with Royce’s own metaphysics – it is, as
the title suggests, not quite sufficient to combat depersonalization. Tunstall advances this
argument through a comparison of the foundations of Roycean ethics to those established in the
work of Emmanuel Levinas. Royce, he finds, grounded his ethical insight in a rationalism
common to most of Euromodern moral philosophy. It is limited, then, in its ability to generate
care and concern for the infinite significance of flesh and blood human beings. It must thus be
radicalized to move beyond its rationalist foundations.

But nor is Tunstall sure that this revision suffices, for in the book’s conclusion, he raises
the question of whether Royce’s antiblack racism – overlooked or perhaps even praised by many
contemporary scholars because of its rejection of biological essentialism – is in conflict with a
Roycean metaphysics or is, rather, a demonstration of its remaining limitations. For Tunstall,
then, it remains an open question whether a philosophical revision of Royce’s metaphysics is
sufficient for a “yes” or would still amount to a “not quite” in the search for a metaphysics
adequate to combat modern forms of dehumanization.

These concerns, in turn, point to the questions at the heart of Tunstall’s second
monograph, Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack
Racism. This text, which began its life as Tunstall’s doctoral dissertation, works primarily
through the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. This alone suggests continuity with Yes, But Not
Quite insofar as Royce’s most noteworthy reader and critic in European philosophy was Marcel.
More to the point, though, it is the thematic underlying the former text’s reading of Royce that
remains as the stimulus to the latter text’s reading of Marcel.

A problem with much modern metaphysics, Tunstall maintains, is that it is grounded in

the examination of, in Kantian terms, the phenomenal as opposed to the noumenal. Philosophy
undertaken with these metaphysical commitments in place is thus tasked with examining reality
as, in effect, an array of natural objects, subject to exhaustive and universal formulations of
natural law. The problem, though, is that in such a framework there is much that cannot appear –
most crucially, human freedom and the divine. A consequence is that philosophy undertaken
within such a metaphysics may fail to reckon with modern forms of depersonalization and,
indeed, may even play a role in facilitating them. It is, in brief, a philosophy in which objects
may appear but persons as such may not.

For an alternative, Tunstall turns to the reflective method articulated by Marcel. A

bedrock of this method is Marcel’s conception of a person, which, unsurprisingly, shares many
features of a Roycean metaphysics. A person in this sense is characterized by a narrative self-
identity, with the implication that the person is a bearer of meanings – personhood is, to use a
term coined by Peter Cows, signiferous.
 What Marcel terms primary reflection is a method of inquiry that can apprehend objects.
Primary reflection reduces what it examines to an “agglomeration of functions” which can be
known empirically and understood in terms of their nature. Secondary reflection, by contrast,
examines those dimensions of meaning only evident beyond the natural world of objects. In
secondary reflection, reflection on the personhood of the inquirer becomes essential, and we are
led into examination of “who we are, and not what we are.”

Secondary reflection, then, is necessary for philosophical inquiry to transcend the

limitations of a depersonalizing metaphysics. Yet this would appear to pose a problem insofar as
secondary reflection may not be only philosophical. That is to say, fidelity to what secondary
reflection demands would imply an attentiveness to Being for which reason alone may be
insufficient and aesthetic experiences, such as those encountered in drama, music, and poetry,
would be requisite.

Here, Tunstall turns to the work of Lewis Gordon to suggest that Marcellian secondary
reflection invites what Gordon terms a teleological suspension of philosophy. In other words,
while there is much work for philosophy to undertake in order to combat modern forms of
depersonalization, some of this work requires philosophers to go beyond the scope of
philosophy. The tasks that a rigorous philosophical treatment of the problems at hand would
demand must ultimately include more than merely philosophical reflection.

This argument fleshes out Tunstall’s suggestion that Doing Philosophy Personally can be
read as advancing a position wherein axiology serves as first philosophy. This move suggests an
explicit fusion of the two thematic concerns of Africana philosophy outlined above in terms of
dehumanization and the metacritique of reason. A problem in Euromodern thought – and, indeed,
in modern thought in general due to the former’s efforts toward epistemic colonization – is that it
draws a false equivalence wherein European Man is regarded as the sole agent or inheritor of
reason. This false equivalence works arm in arm with a racist philosophical anthropology.

As Sylvia Wynter argues, building on the work of Gordon, a historical consequence of

this is that whereas the episteme of Christendom was grounded in theodicean presuppositions
(that is, presuppositions that assert the omnibenevolence of an omnipotent God against any
logical or empirical evidence to the contrary), these presuppositions become “biodicean” in
Euromodernity – they assert the intrinsic goodness of European Man, regardless of all evidence
to the contrary. European Man functions as an axiological absolute. But the false equivalence
between European Man and reason suggests that reason, within such a schema, may be regarded
as an axiological absolute as well, engendering presuppositions that I term logodicean.

This suggests, then, that much Euromodern thought may bear a problematic and
unexamined axiological commitment. If reason functions as an axiological absolute, then there
are certain philosophical possibilities that fall off the table, and the teleological suspension of
philosophy would ultimately be regarded as intrinsically lacking in value. In other words, the
value of philosophy is presupposed rather than examined. This problem may be compounded
where the notion of reason at hand is one that is also saturated with the presumptions of a racist
philosophical anthropology, such that not only is “reason” regarded as an axiological absolute,
but it is a notion of “reason” that has been distorted in advance by racist commitments.

Examining such a situation through a Marcellian lens, we may say that reason becomes
an object and that much philosophy proceeds on the basis of an apprehension of reason through
primary reflection. But this would be to prevent the appearance of those phenomenological
dimensions of reason that emerge through secondary reflection. Those dimensions would, in
turn, make evident axiological dimensions of reason not evident from primary reflection. This is
because primary reflection’s ontological reduction of the world to objects is also an axiological
reduction insofar as it permits the appearance of merely functional value. Objects have value
only through their function; intrinsic forms of value, in contrast, may only be evident once one
engages in secondary reflection for which persons may appear. Much Euromodern metaphysics
and metaphilosophy, then, engage in an implicit axiological deferral by committing in advance to
forms of reason which cannot transcend the limits of primary reflection.

For Tunstall, though, this Marcellian move remains insufficient. This is so for much the
same reason that Royce’s personalistic metaphysics remained a not quite, drawing upon a very
similar clue. Marcel claimed that he was driven by the need to combat racism: racism was,
ultimately, a reduction of the human existent to the status of objecthood. Yet, as Tunstall
demonstrates, Marcel never extended his philosophical project to any examination of antiblack
racism, a foundational mode of modern racism. Indeed, Marcel’s thoughts seemed to have been
shaped by antiblack racism, as is evident in his ideas on colonialism.

Hence, for Tunstall, the Marcellian project is incomplete without taking on the
philosophical task of understanding antiblack racism. Here Tunstall turns to the existential
phenomenology of Gordon to demonstrate the limitations of Marcel’s reflective method. Insofar
as this requires a move beyond mere philosophical reflection to an empirical examination of
modern forms of racism, it could be termed a teleological suspension of philosophy. But so, too,
does it suggest a shortcoming of secondary reflection as the philosophical method undertaken for
an analysis of racism. Primary reflection reduces persons to objects; secondary reflection
combats depersonalization by making personhood evident. But if, as Gordon contends, antiblack
racism is a form of bad faith, then the problem is not only one of personhood failing to appear.
Antiblack racism is one that “sees” the personhood of black people but disavows it. Hence, if
secondary reflection could demonstrate the humanity of black people, it would be insufficient to
undermine antiblack racism since this is a racism which has already learned how to evade
demonstrated humanity.

In short, a philosophical method in which the mechanisms through which antiblack

racism works requires more than secondary reflection. It would require, in effect, demonstrating
the functional elements of the lives of antiblack racists. This suggests the need for some form of
return to primary reflection, since racists are meaningful as objects of analysis. But nor would it
mean that racists could be treated as merely objects, as would perhaps be the conclusion of many
who take seriously concepts like Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism.” This is because to
understand racism does not mean to abandon the personhood that is evident through secondary
reflection. Hence, Gordon’s existential phenomenology is one in which one can examine persons
as objects of consciousness without reducing them to objects.

Tunstall concludes Doing Philosophy Personally, then, by returning to the axiological

question to explore those commitments that could ground this existential phenomenological
examination. For, given the concerns illustrated above, it would be insufficient to state that one is
merely drawn to the question of racism because it was one object of analysis out of many that
one could seek to conquer through reason. This question returns the text to the concern with the
divine central to Yes, But Not Quite as well as the third thematic of Africana Philosophy,
liberation. Marcel’s reflective method, Tunstall is concerned, may remain a “not quite” even
once Gordonian existential phenomenology is introduced because it continues to depend on a
Christian foundation. Marcel’s religious existentialism faces the challenge that it may be
grounded in Christian beliefs elaborated in order to fulfill the projects of Euromodern
domination and antiblack racism.

Tunstall here turns to the late William R. Jones, who explored the limitations of black
liberation theology through a variety of works, including his classic Is God a White Racist? The
problem with black liberation theology, Jones demonstrated, was that it could not escape
theodicean presuppositions. Fidelity to God functions as an axiological absolute despite evidence
to the contrary. But a turn to humanism as an alternative suggests the same problem: on what
grounds can the human being serve as an axiological absolute? The virtue of theism lies in the
fact that it suggests God as an ideal toward which we ever-incompletely strive; we do not need to
find the highest value in what humanity already is or even in some eschatological belief about
what a fully evolved humanity will eventually become. The folly of those types of humanism is
already evident in Euromodern thought, where, as we have seen, they become biodicean.

Tunstall thus closes by holding out hope for a humanistic theism that would transcend
theodicean and biodicean logics but whose philosophical development has yet to come. This
suggests that his axiological conclusion is one he is willing to apply to his own work: that it is a
striving toward higher ideals in spite of a recognition that the fulfilment of those ideas lies
beyond the possibilities of any given human act or human life. Doing philosophy personally, in
that sense, means not only to understand the person that becomes evident through Marcellian
secondary reflection, but to also do philosophy as a person, which means that one encounters
responsibility for pursuing ideals whose fulfillment must remain incomplete. Philosophy is a
human activity that seeks to attain greater heights but that cannot attain the status of the absolute.

To conclude, then, we may say that Tunstall’s work demonstrates characteristic features
of Africana philosophy. It is moved by problems of oppression and the apparently unlikely
prospects for liberation to develop a more rigorous understanding of what it means to be human
and of the peculiar responsibilities confronting reason. An implication of this, in turn, may be
that both Tunstall’s work in particular and Africana philosophy demonstrate a fundamental truth
about philosophy: that it is always done personally, with the implication that its “yesses” are
always “not quite.” But the value and beauty of a “not quite” is such that it does not lose its
significance for us: a not quite is a yes!