Annual philosophy lecture breaks down systems of power, materialism
In Sheldon Hall’s historic classroom a keynote speaker was invited to give the 38th annual Steinkraus Lecture on Human Ideals to Oswego students. It included content relating to Marxism, neoliberalism and the state of contemporary society. The Steinkraus Lecture is an annual philosophy lecture series created to honor the late SUNY Oswego philosophy professor Warren Steinkraus. Dr. Vanessa Christina Wills, a professor hailing from George Washington University in Washington D.C., gave a detailed presentation titled “Minding the World: Materialism as a Philosophical Method.”
In an exclusive interview with the Oswegonian, Dr. Wills revealed that she came to campus through an invitation from the SUNY Oswego’s Philosophy department, namely by associate professor Mike Gadomski. She has a personal connection to this area, sharing that she “used to live in Rochester and was happy to come up,” and finds this part of the country to be beautiful as well as sentimental of her past time living nearby.
In addition to sharing some details about her history with the area she wanted students who could not make it to the event to know what her talk was about: “The talk is really about how can we really understand our place in the world, how do we understand ourselves, how do we achieve some self-consciousness and how do we come to a correct understanding about our world?”
Dr. Wills describes these questions as being “age-old” and well connected with elements of “liberal philosophy which is really focused on this question of shared deliberation and democratic decision making and who can be part of that deliberation.” She shows deference but offers a critical eye to our current standing institutions nearby the college that she instructs at by saying “I think that liberalism and liberal democracy and institutions can articulate the importance of democracy but are highly limited in their ability to actually democratize institutions and the discourse within them.”
The main group Dr. Wills sees as being excluded from important conversations in the rooms that hold powerful people are “the working class.” She explains that since “the war of capital is so overwhelming that there is no democratic space for regular citizens to participate in decision making,” describing how some people’s view of the working person having a voice in these types of institutions and being able to actually achieve change is idealistic at best. Noting that the overt manipulation of the masses is historically documented and ongoing, making this concept of different classes of people having an equal footed conversation with the current billionaires (and now one trillionaire) in power “only an ethical aspiration.”
Dr. Wills closed the interview by asserting that the oppressive hierarchies of power that are currently in place will only fail if the working class stops “accepting the abuses of power.” Explaining that “unequal systems survive when people are taught to accept these systems and they become normal and ‘just the way things are.’ When the new generation is taught that this is not the normal way of thinking then this train of thought changes, threatening the oppressive power structure. Power survives when inequality feels natural. Power shifts when that ‘natural order’ is questioned.”
The following is information gleaned from the presentation itself. Dr. Willis opened her slideshow with a question posed to the audience: “what could explain our capacity to form objective thoughts of an external world that might even exist independently of us?” Flipping through to the next slide, she evoked John McDowell’s book “Mind and Body” and Marx’s conceptual framework of Neo-Marxism to build the basis of her argument about the current state of the world and what should be done about it.
Before diving into an explanation of how philosophy has often been applied to historical wrongs impractically using the method of idealism, which describes all of our problems as coming from within our consciousness, she shared some real world examples of historical wrongs such as the Vietnam war, the Bosnian war and the Rwandan genocide. Her lecture expanded the scope of this philosophical method by using historical materialism, a foundational theory in Marxism which focuses on how the material conditions of the outside world and economics drive our social power structures, to explain how there are outside forces at work in our social reality.
She described the idealist method by bringing up John McDowell’s concept of “philosophical anxiety,” which was described as the philosopher’s fear of “being in touch with the world.” Dr. Wills diagnoses this anxiety, which has been observed to exist in the more modern philosophers, as being a symptom that could be “cured” by examining historical materialism and parallels it with the global anxiety surrounding the degrading state of the world.
McDowell’s book was subsequently described as “an update of Hegel’s dialectical idealism.” Although McDowell vehemently denies any of his ideas written about in “Mind and Body” ascribe to idealism, the conclusion that it is one that Dr. Wills reached, as well as many other well-respected academics who read this work. Regardless of personal opinion on the matter of interpreting his work, the rest of her lecture contained riveting implications about the future of our society using McDowell’s piece as a starting point.
