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Chapter one addresses the ubiquity and scope of analogical reasoning, calling into question the ways in which we conventionally distinguish between modern and premodern thought and, by extension, distinguish between philosophy and common sense.

Chapter three explores the recurring problem in both philosophy and anthropology of doing justice to what William James called the “unsharable feeling which each of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel.” Is it possible to bracket out such a priori, abstract and transpersonal terms as ‘the social’ ‘the cultural’, or ‘the customary’, and avoid what A. N. Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – treating such analytical constructs as though they were lived realities, and, as a corollary, treating lived realities as though they were a veil camouflaging unconscious forces that required scientific expertise or intellectual genius to uncover and arcane coinages to describe?

Chapter two considers the seemingly incompatible perspectives of philosophy and ethnography. While philosophy has traditionally presumed to make universal claims about the human condition, modern socio-cultural anthropology has, for the most part, avoided such claims, preferring a vision of human diversity, ethnic distinctiveness, and moral relativism. The challenge for reinventing philosophical anthropology is working out how we can accommodate both these orientations, recognizing difference and sameness, dissonance and consonance. I evoke Schönberg’s atonal music, Adorno’s negative dialectics, and Keats’ negative capability in taking up the question of how it is possible to do justice to both our empirical knowledge of the linguistic, cultural, and individual diversity of humankind and our quest to identify modes of thought, action and being that are common to all humanity and, in many cases, are shared with other life forms.

This theme is taken further in chapter six, which explores the conditions under which certain beliefs and behaviors seem so incommensurable and inexplicable that we are led to conclude that those who hold these beliefs or exhibit these behaviors are alien to us, even scarcely human. While philosophers have occasionally wrestled with the question as to whether beliefs and practices are intrinsically rational or magical, moral or immoral, ethnographers have sought to explicate the social and practical functions of worldviews. But is it possible to go beyond relativism and claim that there are epistemological, logical, psychological or ethical criteria that hold true in all human societies and at every period of human history?

My focus in chapter five is on human-animal relationships, specifically the ways in which the life of one passes into the other and the ways in which one makes the other thinkable. After elucidating how this interchange of being is understood in various societies, I propose an existential theory of ritual that explores the proposition that many myths and rites are informed by an urge to redistribute life itself, which always tends to be perceived as unequally distributed. Life forms are, therefore, constantly moving, both physically and imaginatively, from where life is scarce to where it is more bountiful, and these life forms are also in constant competition with one another for the scarcest of all goods, life itself. These actual or virtual redistributions of life are typically justified by moral dogmas that determine which life forms are more deserving of life (including eternal life) and which have less urgent claims on the right to live. For if life is to be taken from one person, creature or place and incorporated into another, then some kind of moral discrimination will be needed to justify why one being’s right to life is greater than another’s.

The leitmotif of chapter ten is alienation. Though Marx broached this subject in his critique of the capitalist mode of production – which alienates the worker from the fruits of his labor and undermines his capacity to determine his own destiny – and French existentialism made fashionable cognate ideas of aloneness and estrangement in mass society, my focus is the imperfect fit between our lived experience and the ways in which we conceptualize, narrate and represent it. Building on Adorno’s negative dialectics, Derrida’s method of deconstruction, and James’ radical empiricism, I explore this aporia between words and worlds, nomos and nature, through the vernacular medium of Kuranko storytelling. Storytelling, I argue, may be conceptualized as an alternative sovereignty, a negotiated form of ethical and social life that lies at the margins of the state - a space outside of domestication.

My concluding chapter returns to the theme with which this book began – the oscillation between intimacy and estrangement, participation and observation, immanence and transcendence, and the contrary roles that anthropology and philosophy have traditionally played in academic discourse. Life involves a perpetual oscillation between engaging with the world and seeking distance, respite, or release from it. What we call philosophy is only one of many adaptive strategies that human beings have devised for working out a modus vivendi with other human beings and with the extrahuman world that envelops them. As such, ideas emerge, spread, metamorphose, mutate, and die out in the same way that other traits do, and all are as potentially vital to our continuing existence as the tools we use, the genes we carry, the families we create, the homes we build, the clothes we wear, the land we farm, and the minerals we mine.

Chapter four further explores the indeterminate relationship between being and thought. Can thought ever transcend the limits of a thinker’s particular situation, let alone comprehend the lifeworlds of animals or the nature of the material universe? Is an abstract language possible, or is all language grounded in bodily, material, and social imagery and experience? Theodor Adorno, speaks of the illusion “that the concept can transcend the concept” and “thus reach the nonconceptual.” This remains, he adds, “one of philosophy’s inalienable features and part of the naïveté that ails it.” Arguably, however, this naïveté is also a necessity, for what human being could live without the illusion that thought or language, number or knowledge, can enable him or her to encompass, demystify, and even master, the world itself.

Chapter eight explores the theme of fatality and freedom not as a philosophical problem but as a fact of experience – as something to be lived through rather than simply thought through. My existential bias implies that the compatibilist resolution of the so-called free-will problem in philosophy perpetuates the view that this problem is a logical one that can be resolved by some kind of intellectual legerdemain, when in fact it must be treated as a recurring and often unresolveable existential issue.

Chapter nine is a critique of the notion of agency. Rather than make a philosophical case for either agency or patiency, I consider two modes of thinking – the first that emphasizes an active, disciplined, focused application of thought to being, the second that emphasizes a more passive, attentive, open-minded approach in which the thinker simply registers or channels thoughts that appear to come from elsewhere. In critiquing any kind of ontologizing of cultural representations of self and other, and sweeping generalizations concerning intrinsic cognitive or epistemological differences between primitive irrationality and modern rationality “them” and “us”, I focus not on fixed mindsets or mentalities but on the existential conditions under which thinking is experienced either as a process that is undertaken consciously and intentionally or as a process that simply happens to people without their choosing.

Chapter seven considers the relationship of persons and types in both philosophical and anthropological discourse. My starting point is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation in his story, The Rich Boy, that “There are no types, no plurals,” only individuals, and his warning against the literary tendency to begin with individuals only to create types, for types offer us “nothing”. Although Fitzgerald has in mind the stereotypes with which the poor depict the rich and the illusions the rich have about themselves, his comments apply equally to the glib contrasts we draw between men and women, good and evil, old and young, and modern and premodern. Not only do we tend to believe that these category distinctions reflect empirical reality; we become convinced that one category is superior to the other, and that we who deploy these antinomies with greatest aplomb are more rational and clear-sighted than those who occupy the inferior positions in our equations.

Johanna Charlotte Unzer (1725–1782), born Ziegler, is the author of the first metaphysical treatise intended specifically for women. In the preface of this treatise, published in 1751, she justifies her ‘unhabitual’ enterprise, emphasizing that her intention is not to instruct but only to please her female readership. A closer glance, however, reveals a genuine philosophical intention and an active participation in the debate on popular philosophy and aesthetics in Halle. Challenging an all-too narrow and all-too mathematical conception of practical philosophy, Unzer advocates a dynamic model of philosophy as a love of wisdom, and a philosophy of beauty, poetry, and aesthetics. Fundamentally, these are ancient and mostly Platonic ideas, and among her intellectual circle Unzer stands out as a modern Diotima. But on account of their distinctively modern premises, these ideas likewise take a particularly modern shape, and they illustrate a certain Platonic reversal incipient in Wolffianism itself.

The introduction of Life, Emergent lays down the main theoretical anchors of how the privileging of the social over the biological in contemporary bio--political theory is apprehended in this book. Two philosophical tropes, bios and pathos, are anchored and the query of life positioned for exploration in ethnographic and empirical contexts.

The fifth and final chapter of Life, Emergent brings together the various strands of life and the social that have woven a swath of arguments that directs an excavation of life within an emphatic imagination of the social. This essay also approaches a reflection on the possible nature of a politics of and in life that the discussions so far lead to.