Opening Remarks at a Commemorative Symposium on Prof. H. Odera Oruka

["The written word does not forget" ~ MY]

This symposium, dedicated as it is to the Father of Philosophic Sagacity, makes pertinent the question: What is the overriding problem of method in Philosophy today? In his research on Sage Philosophy, Odera Oruka appears to abandon his discipline's patent method (or is it patent tool?): the armchair -- or, if you prefer, introspection/contemplation. He immerses himself, with little time for apologies, in a method which in an earlier time might have been called ethnographic, but which is more trendily labeled, nowadays, qualitative research.

But is this an abandonment or in reality an enriching departure from the very norm which creates false boundaries of intellectual space? And if an enrichment, are field interviews, such as Odera Oruka conducted, to be seen as a form of dialogue -- or as observation? Or are they, from another view, a necessary component of what now passes for scholastic interrogation? And if interrogation, is that, as practice, a throwback to subconsciously remembered/emulated encounters with agents of the police state? [As an aside: the other day I encountered one thinker's sardonic (or was that sadistic) commentary on numbers, which went something like this: "if you torture numbers long enough, they will tell you anything you want".]

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL TEXT OF THE OPENING REMARKS





FURTHER READING
Azenabor, Godwin (2009) "Odera Oruka's Philosophic Sagacity: Problems and Challenges of Conversation Method in African Philosophy" Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophic Association of Kenya. Premier Issue, New Series, Vol. 1 No. 1, June 2009, pp. 69-86

Hapanyengwi-Chemhuru, Oswell (2003) "Odera Oruka's Four Trends in African Philosophy and their Implications for Education in Africa" Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya. New Series, Vol. 5 No. 2, December 2013, pp. 39-55.






NOTE: I made these opening remarks on December 10, 1999 during my tenure as Dean, Faculty of Arts, UoN

Telling

Telling is a re-enactment or codification of that which we or others have observed, done and/or experienced. It is thus the summation, of sorts, of all of ontology’s four manifestations, including itself, and all that ontology means and makes possible. Often, we interrogate in order to narrate, and do tell (and thus affirm) by way of an interrogation. A good telling is a “closing of the loop”, and a hard thing to do. Fast-forward and you realize that, in a sense, ethnomethodology is a wonderful kind of telling. So is thick description. So is mythology and poetry and drama and the novel. History is a telling, in its dialectical as well as chronological renditions and traditions. The epic and all the sagas of the world are a telling. Music and painting are a telling, and so is sculpture. Monuments are a telling, too. And thus all stories are by definition already told.  

Thick Description ~ CSO 302

"... : if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.

In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners (sic) do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.

What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description." ~ Clifford Geertz (1973: 5-6) [Quote from his book, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books]

Gilbert Ryle's concept of thick description, as popularized in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology by Clifford Geertz (see, also, this article), refers to the successive addition of layer upon layer of detail to a phenomenon or process or event being described -- building up from 'literal' (or simple or lay) to 'thin' (or journalistic) to thick (or 'deep' or scholarly) description -- such that, true to the second law of dialectics, the quantum (quantity) of descriptions progressively transforms into a qualitative synthesis of the 'totality' of aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is like adding pixels and mega-pixels, one measured 'spread' after another, to a picture until one achieves the highest possible level of clarity, or picture quality.

Thick description is widely accepted as a major qualitative data analysis method or technique. However, I have preferred to use the concept synthesis in the above definition, as it more satisfactorily captures what for me is the core purpose of thick description. There is debate, however, concerning the relative merits of analysis and synthesis in pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

Analysis, an anchor concept in both quantitative and qualitative research, which is used routinely and unquestioningly by nearly all scientists (natural and social), does not seem to be quite apt here. B.N Ghosh (1985: 23), for example, has suggested that “analysis plays a more important role than synthesis” during “the initial stages of a science”; but “as the science becomes more and more progressive, synthesis plays a more and more important role. But in every science both the methods are used simultaneously.” He (1985: 24) adds that:

“A science aims at not only arriving at the truth but also at expounding the truth. A synthetic method is necessarily expository because it puts together the elements of a phenomenon in a systematic manner. In synthesis, exposition is possible because the entire elements are completely known and, as such, they can easily be arranged in an orderly way. The discovery of truth, however, is made possible by the method of analysis.”

I think that the aim and effect of thick description is to expound in 'full' the details, the 'totality', of the object of description. However, the end-product of thick description cannot be touted as a "complete" exposition of that which is (to be or has been) described; and I suspect that thick description was never intended for such a purpose.

NOTE: For more on thick description read:
1.This article by Joseph Ponterotto
2. Fei-Wen Liu's article

PS: Quote at the top added on September 11, 2015

THE THREE DIALECTICS: Dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian Question

The dialectical approach is an ever-present route to a deeper understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian question. It seems to me that this approach becomes increasingly attractive and fruitful with the passage of time – that is, with each passing decade. We may even add that its revelations (I use that term consciously) are generationally packaged in a broad sense; which means that we have three sequential packages so far (that is, since 1948) to worry over.

There are indeed three dialectics, which intertwine, in the Israeli-Palestinian Question; and their intertwining is itself of a dialectical nature.

The first of these is what I will call the Occupation Dialectic -- the Territorial Dialectic, if you wish. Here, the struggle/confrontation/ hostilities/contradiction or thesis-antithesis conflict, now on and now off, revolves around historical rights to territory and unfettered settlement, self-determination, settlement

The second is the Conversation (or Voice) Dialectic. Issues here are couched in highly emotive historical, cultural and religious terms. Each side invokes history, and even chronology, in support of its arguments. The Palestinians want their own independent state, with Jerusalem included. The Israelis want secure borders, in which its citizens are safe from remotely or otherwise instigated and organized attacks -- by PLO originally and Hizbollah and the like now. The Palestinians view the Israelis as an illegitimate occupying force. Israelis insist there is nowhere they are going,  

The third is the Action (or Power) Dialectic. Technology, particularly the technology of war and of surveillance, plays a key role here – and may yet be the decider, the Endgame factor.  And the game may not quite end in the way the protagonists typically frame the end.

[First written on January 5, 2009. To be expanded upon]