The Links Between Individual Moral Action and Collective Political Life

What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world? The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other by Daniel Louis Wyche, a senior scholar at the Law School’s Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, explores the ways several 20th-century thinkers have tried to answer this question. By tracing their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, Wyche shows how collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.

Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of spiritual exercises; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the interior effort; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the care of the self; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of self-purification integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of political warfare. Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical.

Wyche shares his thoughts on the book with Columbia News, as well as what he’s read lately and plans to read next, his current research, and who he would like to invite to his next soiree.

Why did you write this book?

In many ways, I began asking the questions that ultimately became this book over 20 years ago during my undergraduate days at Rutgers University, especially in the literature courses of John McClure. He introduced me to some of the key thinkers who appear in the book. Over time, I refined all of these different questions and themes into a single fundamental question: Without reducing the political world of groups, communities, systems, and material conditions to the mere sum of the moral lives of individuals, what is the relationship of one’s ethical transformation to the political transformation of the world?

Another way of putting it is: How, and under what conditions, is the care of the self coterminous with the care of the other, of others, and of the city? These questions have puzzled me for years, especially because I think that our popular discourses around ethics and politics seem to assume easy and ready answers. I wanted to show why these are serious questions worth thinking through clearly and methodically, and try to see if I could offer anything in the way of answers. I don't know that I actually answer anything, but I hope I've succeeded in providing some tools and resources for dialogue around these important issues. 

Can you give some examples from the book of links between individual moral action and collective political life?

Definitely. The number one example that I give in The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other is political organizing, which includes labor organizing. I argue that organizing is the paradigmatic case of a political-spiritual exercise. The primary case I offer comes from the Civil Rights era, focusing on the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I emphasize that, despite the importance of major figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, E.D. Dixon, and many others, each of them was adamant that this was a grass-roots movement led by the rank and file, by the mass of people whose lives were impacted and shaped every day by legal segregation. According to these activists, the act of becoming an activist—in this case, through training in and practicing nonviolent mass direct action—was an act of collective self-transformation. That collective transformation—becoming "new" in some way—was the necessary condition for their political victory. Once again, this is what so many members of the rank and file say themselves. I try to show that becoming a new person—in this case, an organizer, an activist, someone who has novel and even more powerful relationships of solidarity with their neighbors (and to be sure, those relationships existed already)—allows a community to transform the material and political conditions in which they live.

That, in turn, provides a fresh atmosphere or milieu, which itself allows for new possibilities in terms of who one may be, how you can imagine yourself, and so on. Essentially, marching, protesting, training, etc., for over a year will absolutely change who you are, as so many of these people acknowledged. I think if you speak to any organizer, activist, or person who has engaged deeply in a movement or movements—someone who has put their body on the line in the company of others—you will find an incredible story that reflects these deep and rich connections in ways that show how impossible they are to disentangle. 

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

One of the things that The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other begins to invoke, but does not fully address, is the question of political imagination, and how we can create new horizons for ourselves. Because who we are as subjects (individually and collectively) is in many ways determined by the political, economic, and material conditions in which we find ourselves (including the institutions that frame our lives, from education to work to medical facilities), for some of the figures that I mention in the book, by trying to change those conditions, they changed themselves. The inverse is also true: By shaping ourselves in new ways, we open up to innovative possibilities for shaping the world around us, including political and ethical horizons, spaces of possibility that we may not have even been able to imagine before. As such, I am extremely interested in speculative fiction, free improvisation, and other similar practices in the arts, and the unique roles that they can play in that process—as practices of freedom, in other words.

Music is an enormous area for me in this process, but I also see some forms of speculative fiction as playing a vital role. The most important authors for me in this regard are Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, and I am working on a paper about them now. Last year, I read Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M. E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, which just blew me away. It is a vital book in this tradition, and a joy to read.

Completely unrelated, the other best book I recently read is UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There by journalist Garrett Graff. It is a riveting history that is politically quite important, as it not only tells an incredible story about the Cold War, but it also unpacks a great deal about contemporary conspiracy thinking. It’s amazing to learn how seriously many governments took the idea of UFOs, and how the nature of that phenomenon changed with the times over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

What's next on your reading list?

It is a little off topic, but my friend and colleague, Sonam Kachru, who is a professor of Indian Buddhist philosophy at Yale University, recently gave a talk where he cited the book Gods and Robots by Adrienne Mayor. It's about the ways that ancient peoples imagined forms of artificial life. I am very interested in how people imagine other forms of life, as a way of thinking about radical difference. The book also just sounds very cool. I've been meaning to get to Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson, about the great British free-improvisor and guitarist, one of my favorite artists. There is a deep connection between improvisation and the themes of my own book, though that is something to be explored in the future. Another friend and colleague, Daniele Lorenzini, has just published an important book on Foucault and the concept of truth, The Force of Truth, which is also on my to-read list.

What else are you working on now?

I currently have a few articles about Michel Foucault that will appear in some different collections. One of the articles connects the idea of revolutionary subjectivity that Foucault just raises and drops, and that I talk about in my book, to the Diggers and Levellers movement of the 1640s. The latter were a group of radically egalitarian Christian utopians who attempted to live collectively by farming the wastes in part of England, but were brutally repressed and murdered by the propertied classes.

I am also working on my second book, From the Scale of Despotism to the Scale of Freedom: Violence and Justice in the Nonviolent Tradition. This book grows out of The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other. I show that within the long and diverse history of nonviolent political action, major thinkers and activists have subtle and complex ideas about political violence. Despite what popular media discourses and histories would have you believe, the view of violence—from the perspective of a firm commitment to principled nonviolence—is never merely a yes or no proposition, nor is it even a kind of consequentialism that allows violence as long as it brings about desired outcomes. The answers from people like Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, William Lloyd Garrison, major suffragists like the Pankhursts, and so on are all far more complex and varied. Their views challenge many standard ethical accounts. The book is a work in progress, so any major conclusions will have to wait, of course.

Which three scholars/academics, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

This is a tough question: Although there are so many figures whose work I love, I wonder if they would actually be good company. What that says about my influences, who knows. Among my biggest influences are William James, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, and quite a few others.

But in terms of Columbia, I would have to put the legendary Sidney Morgenbesseron this list, if for no other reason than that he was well known as perhaps the greatest philosophical comedian of all time, and would keep any conversation going. From a completely different historical perspective, though one that I think works strangely well, it would be pretty incredible to have the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi in the room, if that is an option. We could then include Diogenes the Cynic, and it would definitely be a party, so let's go with those last three.