Lewis Gordon

• 1. Introduction

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  Lewis Ricardo Gordon was born on the 12th of May 1962, and he has spent his career asking a question that most philosophical traditions have avoided: what does it mean to exist as a black person in a world that systemically denies that existence? Gordon is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut whose work spans Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, and the philosophy of religion. His intellectual range is extraordinary. But at the center of it all sits one stubborn, urgent problem: the philosophical dimensions of anti-black racism and what they reveal about human freedom itself. He has written extensively on the works of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. He has founded research centers that exist nowhere else on earth. And he developed an entirely new branch of philosophy, postcolonial phenomenology, that forced the discipline to reckon with what it had long ignored. The questions his work raises are both ancient and immediate: what does freedom mean when entire populations are excluded from its promise? What does reason look like when its geography has been drawn to exclude most of humanity? And what happens when bad faith becomes not just a personal failing but an institutional one?

• 2. From Lehman to Yale

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  Gordon graduated from Lehman College of the City University of New York in 1984, having passed through the Lehman Scholars Program with a Bachelor of Arts degree, high honors, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. It took seven more years before he completed his Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees at Yale University in 1991. He received his Doctor of Philosophy with distinction from Yale in 1993. After finishing his doctorate, he taught at Brown University, Yale, Purdue University, and Temple University. At Temple, he held the Laura H. Carnell Professorship in Philosophy, with affiliations spanning religious and Judaic studies. His current post at the University of Connecticut at Storrs carries affiliations in Africana Studies, Judaic Studies, and Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies. He has also held a visiting professorship at Toulouse University in France and served as Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor in Political and International Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa from 2014 to 2016. Alongside his academic appointments, he founded the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School in the Bronx, New York.

• 3. Bad Faith and the Body

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  Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, published in 1995, was the book that first brought Gordon to wider attention in the study of black existentialism. Written in four parts, the book uses phenomenological vignettes alongside conventional argument to examine anti-black racism through the lens of bad faith. As Gordon reads it, bad faith is not simply self-deception. It is a denial of human reality, an evasion of freedom, a flight from responsibility. It takes the form of asserting that one is the only point of view on the world, or of fleeing from displeasing truths to pleasing falsehoods. Gordon identifies bad faith as a coextensive phenomenon, something reflective of the metastability of the human condition itself. Two innovations belong specifically to him in this framework: the idea that bad faith involves an effort to disarm evidence, and the idea that it can be a flight from and war against social reality. Gordon rejects the notion of disembodied consciousness, arguing that such notions are themselves forms of bad faith. He articulates instead a theory of the body-in-bad-faith. He also rejects authenticity discourses, arguing that they are trapped in expectations of sincerity, which is itself a form of bad faith. His proposed alternative is what he calls critical good faith: a commitment to respect for evidence and accountability within the intersubjective social world.

• 4. Racism as Hyper-Rationality

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  Gordon argues that racism requires a person to reject another human being's humanity. Because that other person is in fact a human being, such a rejection is a contradiction of reality. A racist must therefore deny reality. And because communication between a racist and the targets of racial hatred is possible, social reality is precisely what racist assertions deny. Racism, Gordon contends, is an attack on embodied realities. It attempts either to create bodies without points of view, or points of view without bodies. He places racism within what he calls the spirit of seriousness: the treatment of values as though they were material features of the world rather than expressions of human freedom. Racist rationality then ascribes intrinsic values to people based on their flesh alone. Gordon's most striking move here is his agreement with Frantz Fanon that racists are not irrational people. They are, instead, hyper-rational expressions of a racist rationality. Theories that locate racism in bad emotions or passions have it backwards, Gordon argues. Those emotions are a consequence of racist thinking, not its cause. In his theological analysis, Gordon presses further, arguing that a particular assumption underlying Western ethics must be rejected: the notion that similarity is a condition of ethical obligation. The fact that black women can worship a god to whom they are neither similar nor could ever be identical demonstrates that love does not require similarity. Fighting racism, he argues, does not mean erasing racial difference. It means respecting the humanity of people who exemplify that difference.

• 5. Postcolonial Phenomenology

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  Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, published in 1995, introduced most of the theoretical innovations that would define Gordon's contribution to phenomenology. He announced in that book that he was not interested in writing about Fanon but in working with Fanon to advance his own intellectual project, a distinction that opened an entirely new stage in Fanon Studies. Gordon is credited as the founder of postcolonial phenomenology, sometimes called Africana phenomenology or de-colonial phenomenology, built on a series of departures from the traditions of Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre. Husserl had called for a suspension of the natural attitude, but his goal was primarily epistemological. Gordon's transformation, which he calls ontological suspension, shifts the concern to errors arising from inappropriate ontological assertions. He also advances phenomenology as a form of radically self-reflective thought that must question even its own methodological assumptions. This means phenomenology must resist what he terms epistemological colonization, and in resisting it, phenomenology itself becomes postcolonial. From this move, Gordon refused for a period of his career to call his work philosophy at all, preferring the term radical thought, by which he meant a willingness to go to the roots of reality in a critical way. Among the theoretical tools his lexicon has contributed are his unique formulation of crisis, his theory of epistemic closure, his theory of disciplinary decadence, and his concept of the teleological suspension of disciplinarity. Existentia Africana, published in 2000, consolidated this framework by examining what existence means, drawing on its Latin etymology of standing out or appearing, in relation to realities faced by African diasporic peoples.

• 6. Race, Mixture, and the Everyday

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  Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age, published in 1997 and winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America, pushed Gordon's analysis into the territory of critical race theory and introduced one of his most discussed thought experiments. In the chapter titled Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire, Gordon constructs what he calls a racial-gender-sex-sexuality matrix to challenge conventional assumptions about mixture. Within this matrix, a white woman is mixed because whiteness renders her masculine while womanhood renders her black. Same-sex interracial relationships within the matrix are not necessarily homosexual or lesbian. Readers of earlier books had noticed the role of music in Gordon's prose and analysis, and this book extends that quality. He argues that most theories of social transformation fail by ignoring the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. Moral and political thought can construct conditions for biological and social survival, but they do not address what it means to live in a genuinely livable world. Gordon argues that an emancipatory society must create spaces for the ordinary celebration of everyday pleasure. He draws upon Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, and Frantz Fanon to argue that racism and colonialism are lived as normal aspects of modern life. Institutional bad faith renders the extraordinary conditions imposed on some groups invisible and advances the false notion of a shared ordinary set of conditions, which Gordon identifies as the philosophical content of what people colloquially call double standards.

• 7. The Geography of Reason

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  Gordon argues that Western thought has tied reason to instrumental rationality and in doing so produced an antiblack geography of reason, a conceptual landscape in which reason's domain excludes most of humanity. Shifting that geography, he contends, would require opposing the forms of decadence that treat any human community as incapable of manifesting reason. He goes further by arguing that reason is broader than rationality because reason must be used to assess rationality itself. Rationality can only try to impose consistency on reason. But reason can reveal that maximum consistency, though rational, may be unreasonable. The co-edited volumes he produced with his wife Jane Anna Gordon, Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice in 2005 and A Companion to African-American Studies in 2006, develop these ideas in a collaborative framework. In Not Only the Master's Tools, the two Gordons respond to Audre Lorde's admonition against using the master's tools by arguing three points: tools need not only tear down houses but can build them up; the master's tools are not the only tools available; and constructing alternative theoretical models can decenter the master's house, stripping it of its mastery. The Companion's introduction advances a theory of African-American Studies as a form of double consciousness and introduces the concept of the pedagogical imperative, a teacher's duty to continue learning the broadest and most accurate picture of reality available. Gordon considers all of his work part of a humanist tradition in which the role of intellectuals is to challenge the limits of human knowledge in what he calls the Geist war. His book Fear of Black Consciousness, published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux and Penguin Random House, is among the most recent entries in that project.

• 8. The Afro-Jewish Center

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  Gordon is the founder of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, which he describes as the only such research center in existence. Its focus is developing and providing reliable sources of information on African and African Diasporic Jewish or Hebrew-descended populations. His own stated position on this subject is direct: in his words, "In actuality, there is no such thing as pure Jewish blood. Jews are a creolized mixed-race people. It's been that way since at least the time we left Egypt as a culturally mixed Egyptian and African i.e., from other parts of Africa people." At Temple University, Gordon directed the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, whose projects included developing a consortium on Afro-Latin American Studies, a Philadelphia Blues People Project, semiological studies of indigeneity, a Black Civil Society project, and symposia on race, sexuality, and sexual health. He served as Executive Editor of volumes I-V of Radical Philosophy Review: Journal of the Radical Philosophy Association. He also co-edited the Routledge book series on Africana philosophy and holds the presidency of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Across approximately 400 articles, book chapters, and reviews, Gordon has built a body of work whose institutional dimensions, from research centers to editorial leadership, reflect his conviction that intellectual life is inseparable from its social conditions. His 2015 book What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought, published by Fordham University Press, was selected as Book of the Week by the Financial Mail in South Africa in December of that year.