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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David.
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Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
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Frantz Fanon was a physician, a psychiatrist, but also very much a political philosopher. Born in the French colony Martinique, he was perhaps most famous for his book Black Skin, White Masks, a powerful critique of colonialism and white racism. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Lewis Gordon, author of what Fanon Said, introduces and contextualises some of the key ideas of this radical existentialist thinker.
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Lewis Gordon, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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I am delighted to be here.
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We're talking today about Frantz Fanon. I know he had a very short and eventful life. Tell us a little bit about him.
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Sure. Frantz Fanon died at the age of 36. So a very short life. He was born 1925 on the island of Martinique, same year as Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba. In other words, a year of revolutionaries. But since this is Short Bites, the very quick answer is Frantz Fanon is a rock star, superstar, canonical figure, not only in the global south, but in philosophy and in psychiatry and in revolutionary thought. He is there with individuals like Che guevara, Karl Marx, etc.
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So you mentioned he was born in Martinique. Is there a link between the culture in which he's raised in his philosophy?
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Many people would say no. I would absolutely say yes. And part of this is because Frantz Fanon grew up speaking Creole. He was from a colony. He's very famous for his writings on colonization and decolonization. So being born in a colony makes sense to be known for work about colonies. So that's one thing. The other thing is the Creole language. It's not one language, it's many languages combined. He spoke an Afro, Francophone, Creole. That's a language in which there is, for example, no separation between the person and the body. Fanon's humanism, I have argued in my writings, is connected to his refusal to separate dignity even from a corpse.
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Right. And obviously he's appearing here in Philosophy Bites, but he seems kind of difficult to classify because he's a philosopher. But he was also a psychologist, a sociologist, an activist. He's many things.
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He is many things. But we should bear in mind that his combination is not that unusual in philosophy, if we think about it. John Locke was a physician. Aristotle was a physician. William James was a physician. Karl Jaspers was a physician. In other words, it's not that unusual. You'll find this also in the Asian world as well. You will find it all across the Indigenous world. In fact, the earliest known philosophers were physicians. If you think of Imhotep from 5,000 years ago, he was a physician. This makes sense in a way, because ultimately, philosophy is also a practice at the intellectual level of healing. Even though we talk about it as a love of wisdom, a kind of wisdom that doesn't heal you is weird, isn't it?
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Now, the book I'd heard of is Black Skin, White Masks. Can you summarize what the thesis is in that book?
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Yes. Black Skin, White Masks is the argument that there is such a phenomenon as a sick society. Sometimes the people who suffer the most in a society suffer from actually being healthy. Fanon argues that colonialism produces what he calls sociogenetic. And this means socially produced forms of disorders that take the form not only of mental disorders, but but forms of suffering that are political. As a consequence, if there are politically induced forms of suffering, then one has to develop political solutions for them. And in Black Skin, White Masks, the political solution, he argues, is to become what he calls actionable. That means you become healthier. The extent to which you participate in making your society better.
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And when you say it produces some kind of mental illness, that's both amongst the discriminated population, but also the white population who are imposing discrimination.
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Correct. In fact, this is another way of talking about the book. The thesis of the book is in its title. It's called Black Skin, White Mask. Many people erroneously think the book is about black people wearing white masks. That is false. The book is about two kinds of lies produced by colonialism and racism. The first lie is the notion of the intrinsic inferiority of black people. That lie seals black people into our skin, and it takes the position that black people are less than human. The second lie is the white mask. This is the mask that white people are pressured to wear, and it's the lie of white superiority. Fanon poetically puts it this way. If some people are put above human and some people are below human, what happens to the human being? Fanon describes what happens as the attempted murder of humanity.
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So there's a complicated idea in Black Skin, White Masks, which is that those whites who don't recognize injustice are the.
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Ones who are ill. What led him to write the book was Fanon was receiving clients who talked about their suffering. But as he interrogated the suffering, he realized they were suffering because they were healthy. What would be unhealthy is to be at home in an environment of degradation, suffering, dehumanization of people. So for Fanon, this raised a very interesting question. For the human sciences. What your job is as a psychiatrist is to help your patient become at home with her, his or their environment. But if you're going to make your patient at home with sexism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, the long list of isms, then what you are ultimately doing is making your patient ill. What Fanon would say to that patient, which is not suffering from a mental illness, is suffering from the problems of an unjust society, is to make the society better. This doesn't mean Fanon rejected mental illness. He did do studies of mental illness, but he's very explicit in the text that most mental illness, which he separates from neurological illness because, for instance, bipolar disorder is a neurological illness. The kind of illness he's talking about is something very different. He's talking about a social produced phenomenon. But here's the thing. There are people with mental illness in the world. And what Fanon observed, not only in his dissertation, which was Humphriedreich ataxia, which is a form of neurological disorder, where he was able to point out that there are people with a neurological disorder who were not mentally ill, but then there are those who were, is the same result he has in black skin, white mass. He argues that most mental illness at their core are generated by forms of narcissistic disorder. And narcissism is when there is a form of investment in the self that produces a form of asociality as a consequence. He's examining the white mask as a form of narcissistic disorder. And here's the crucial thing. All narcissistic disorders are lies. And when one is living a lie, one is not in touch with reality. You see, again, he's not saying that white people are all racists. He doesn't say that. He's not saying all black people have an inferiority complex. A lot of people erroneously read him to say that. He's examining the white people who do have the disorder and the black people who do have another disorder. Because you see, there is a narcissism that takes the form of a superiority complex, but there is a narcissism that takes the form of an obsession with one's inferiority. One is the victim of everything. It's always what's being done to me, to me, to me, to me, to me, to me. And when that happens, one is so centered as the victim that so much energy is put into trying to convince you you're not a victim, that you're the center of all attention. In other words, there are two forms.
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Of narcissism now, one thing I think most people know about Fanon is that he was active in the decolonisation movement, that he fought in the Algerian civil war on the Algerian side against the French. He wanted to get the European colonies out. Did he have a vision for what should go in their place?
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He did. Every Fanon argument, every text comes to the same conclusion. He is addressing issues of dehumanization. The response to dehumanization is to create a more humane and human world. It's not a perfect world, but it should be a better world. That's basically Fanon in a nutshell. Fanon then argues that when you look at dehumanization, it brings us out of relationships with our fellow human beings. So that means better societies increase the conditions for us to be in healthy relationships with our fellow human beings. Now, in terms of if we put into political terms, he was arguing that not only countries should have self determination, but he was also critical of the nation state. Okay. For Fanon, although in a temporary measure, it's very important to fight for national liberation. The idea of having just collections of nation states continue this problem because you'll have people who belong and people who don't, you see? And it's going to create problems of inequalities, etc. There is just no nation state that produces equality. There is none. So Fanon argued when he was approaching his death, he was. He and Patrice Lumumba were fighting for a United States of Africa, for example. In other words, he wasn't against the existence of nations, but the meeting of the nation and the state together created an imbalance of power of human beings versus other human beings. So ultimately, I argue Fanon died young, so he didn't get to flesh this out. But I argue he was ultimately looking for a world of a form of global non nation states, but a global federation of nations together.
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Right? Because I thought that he was interested in Pan Africanism. And in a way that just extends the problem you've been talking about to another level. It creates another barrier, just at the continental level rather than at the nation state.
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Correct. Pan Africanism for Fanon was more in terms of the liberation of Africa. But you cannot stop that there. For Fanon, he's always resolute. The issue was the liberation of humankind. He was a radical humanist.
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Can you say something about the means to get to decolonization? Because obviously Mahatma Gandhi is operating a few years before the Algerian civil war and was a proponent of non violence. Where did Fanon stand? What did he believe was the necessary means to achieve decolonization.
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Well, there's several things. You know, earlier when I brought up Bergson, I could have brought up people like Simone de Beauvoir Sartre and others. And Fanon belongs in their company. He was an existentialist. This is crucial because his existentialism is one of the reasons why throughout all of his writings, he's careful not to stereotype people into a Manichean black and whiteness. It's a similar thing when Fanon, as a psychiatrist and as a political agent, looks at people. He was concerned about whether we waste our time in certain issues. The issue of violence a lot of people talk about when it comes to Fanon because Fanon was not apologetic about violence. So the idea of an unapologetic black man talking about violence scared a lot of people. But they miss his argument. Fanon, and this may shock you to hear, was actually anti violence. He detested violence. Remember when I said earlier in the Creole language, he did not separate the corpse from the person? So he was radically against dehumanization. Violence is a form of dehumanization. But here's the problem. Some people say if you're anti violence, you should be a pacifist. Now, what that means is if there's violence occurring, the question, Fanon says, is if you stand on the side and permit it to happen, you're complicit with violence. For Fanon, you need to be an agent. You need to act against violence. But if you actively act against violence, you get entangled in violence and you will be called violent. It gets even worse. If the people are committing the violence believe they're intrinsically just, that means from their point of view, they're doing the right thing. So that means that any moment you intervene in people who believe they are intrinsically just, you are the one who's going to be called violent. And Fanon argued, it's a waste of your time to prove to them that you're not violent, because there's only one thing you could do that they would accept as non violence. And you know what that is for you to do nothing. So what Fanon argued is you must do something and to accept that doing something is going to be called violence. However, there's another part of the argument. Fanon made a distinction between counter violence, which is reacting to violence, and violence, which is for the sake of anti violence. Violence for the sake of anti violence requires trying to stop violence, and it requires constructing a world that sets the conditions that make violence obsolete. His argument is that A struggle that's ultimately anti violence may engage in violence to stop violence, which is very different. There is no such thing as human relationships that are absolutely free of conflict. But there are two kinds of conflict one could imagine. Conflicts that are designed to strengthen relationships are healthy, right, because they're a fight for coexistence. Conflicts that are designed to eliminate the other are unhealthy. Those are war. Fanon was against the latter, but he was for the former. In other words, Fanon argued that if you're in a war, your goal should be to end a war, to start a struggle for coexistence. Whereas there are people who are in a war who only is focused on one thing, the elimination of the enemy. So for them, even if they win, they keep fighting because their ultimate goal is non coexistence, the absolute elimination of the other. And that's what Fanon was against.
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I asked you that question. In the context of decolonization, how does that extrapolate to, for example, the civil rights movement in the United States?
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It connects to it beautifully. The civil rights movement in the United States was not a fight to eliminate a group of people. It was a fight for the inclusion of of people in a society. It required also setting the conditions for people unthought of. A lot of the actual premises of the civil rights movement connect to the gay movement. It was connected to the women's movement, it was connected to the Native American movement, it's connected to immigration movement. Those are movements that are about the dignity and rights of fellow human beings. I think a more difficult one is when we talk about certain decolonization struggles that are not premised upon the end of colonization, but actually for the question of who should be the proper colonizer. Now some people may take the position that the issue is not that I'm colonized, it's just that I'm the wrong one to be colonized. You should be colonizing someone else. So I'm going to stop you. And now I'm going to put colonization its proper place with me as the colonizer. And unfortunately, I'll just say it straight, that's pretty much the Middle East. All Middle Eastern countries are right wing countries. Right now I don't see any country in the Middle east that's really fighting for decolonization. It's fighting for a particular vision and who should be the proper colonizer. And right now we're dealing with a global problem that as authoritarian forces ascend, they're actually affirming the idea this is the white supremacy but it doesn't have to be white. It's supremacist notion. Even though Fanon says in black skin, white mask, the white mask doesn't have to be literally a white flesh person. It's a position. So whether you're going to call whoever is going to operate the lying mask of superiority white, they're in African countries. There are people who take the position that they should have the mask of the superior Africans. That's Fanon's point, that that produces the violence.
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You touched upon this earlier, but it sounds to me like he's a pragmatist rather than an idealist. He wants to make the world better without making it perfect.
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Well, here's the thing. There are varieties of idealism. There are idealisms that are based on the notion of absolute perfection, but there are other idealisms that are based on the notion of reasonability and maturity. For instance, if you think about being a parent, what is an ideal parent? An ideal parent is a parent who is reasonable enough to enable their children to grow up and have room to live their lives. However, an ideal perfect parent in some models is like a God, a parent so perfect that there's no room for the subsequent generations to grow, to emerge. Because daddy or mommy were absolutely perfect. Well, in a way, if you read Le Dagnaie de la Terre, the damned of the earth, or some people know as the wretched of the Earth, Fanon's last book published in his lifetime. Fanon really spends a lot of his time in the book being critical of the post colonial states of the people who ushered in the independence of the country. But they construct themselves as so perfect, there's no room for the next generation to create the country in a way that is livable for them. So it is pragmatic, but in the philosophical sense of reasonability. Fanon, I would argue as a psychiatrist and as a philosopher, was also arguing for human maturity. In other words, a lot of his arguments oh, humanity, please grow up now. Growing up doesn't mean becoming a bore. Growing up doesn't mean walking around like you're perfect. Growing up means that you're able to have joy, life, integrity. You're able to understand that you should share with others. In other words, be a decent human being.
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Sum up his influence for me.
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His influence is extraordinary. Fanon is influential not only in what's called decolonial thought, African diasporic thought, work in psychiatry, but he's also extraordinarily influential in a form of existential thought that connects it to what we call the human sciences or the human condition. Fanon is part of the movement that is critical of orthodoxies. He's part of an influence that says we are responsible for the future. And he is part of that. From Marx through to Jean Paul Sartre all the way through to people who are critical about humanity taking his future in its own hands. Fanon is part of that line of philosophers. So even if we don't talk about his work in liberation and colonialism, he would still be worth reading because he understood that the human condition is not the negative, hostile thing that Hobbes and those talked about, but human beings are also a possibility. In his words, humanity is also a yes.
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Is it fair to say, a little bit like Wittgenstein here, that part of his impact was. Was he had, reading about him, an extraordinary charisma, an extraordinary impact on the people he met. He was a great orator. He was extremely handsome. That's worth pointing out, right?
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Rock star, handsome, rockstar, handsome.
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Is that part of his legacy, part of why he's remembered?
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For some people. But you see, it's a complicated issue because Fanon was black. And as a black person, Fanon challenged many people, not only black people, but many white people, to deal with their discomfort. In other words, there are people who have to come to grips with issues about what they exclude, but how in exclusions, we may be hurting ourselves as well. So I do think his charisma was one thing. His life was extraordinary. Come on. I mean, fought in World War II, fought in the Algerian liberation struggle, fought in the Pan African decolonial struggles. Everything Fanon was involved in, he contributed something extraordinary to it, whether it's psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, politics. So he is one of those burning flames, as one of his professors said. And his brother Joby talked about this. His brother Joby has a story where one of his professors says, is. Is France your brother? He says, yeah. He says, man, he's fireworks on the outside, fireworks on the inside. Well, we're inheritors of that flame, those fireworks. But his ideas, we should remember, were extraordinary. There is a tendency with black thinkers to talk so much about their lives, we forget their thought. And that is a form of dehumanization of them. So I tend to focus on his thoughts. And his thought was extraordinary. He's worth reading, even if you were butt ugly. But he was very fortunate to be rock star handsome.
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Lewis Gordon. Thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you.
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You've been listening to Philosophy Bites. This episode was made in association with the Institute of To Philosophy and supported by the Ideas Workshop, part of Open Society Foundations. For more philosophy bites, go to philosophy bytes.com.