Philosophical Conversation with Kenneth Liberman

Abbreviations (Liberman)

TC- Tasting Coffee

HCR- Husserl’s Criticism of Reason

FE- Filosofia ed Etnometodologia

URLOM- “Universal Reason” as a Local Organizational Method

Other Abbreviations

LM- Life of Mind (Hannah Arendt)

Institutional Greetings

Buongiorno, good morning. Here we are. Let me first thank, before we go into medias res, prof. Kenneth Liberman for his generosity and kindness in taking part at this international philosophical conversation which is centred around his philosophical and sociological path with particular reference to one of his masterpieces, Tasting Coffee. Inquiries into Objectivity. Let me also thank with gratitude and gratefulness all the academic institutions which are engaged in this conference. I would like to mention each of them. First of all, the Saint Bonaventure University, here represented by its Rector, Father Alfigio Tunha, who hosts physically the conference. The International African Centre of Applied Phenomenology in Saint Bonaventure University, Lusaka, Zambia. The South African Centre of Phenomenology, represented by prof. Abraham Olivier. The Department of Philosophy and Applied Ethics of the University of Zambia, represented by Dr. Julius Kapembwa. The Centre of Hermeneutics and Applied Phenomenology represented by Prof. Daniela De Leo. The Department of Philosophy of Tangaza University (Kenya), represented by Dr. John Mundua and the International Doctorate in Philosophy: Forms and History of Philosophical Knowledge, University of Salento, Italy represented by Prof. Igor Agostini. As you can see, many academic institutions from Africa and Europe are involved and this fact adds an extra value to the topic which will be touched during this philosophical conversation. Prof. Kenneth Liberman, thank again for giving us the opportunity to organize such an international event. For the very few who don’t know Prof. Kenneth Liberman, let me be of help, reading just very few lines of his amazing academic career.  Professor Liberman received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1981. He joined the University of Oregon in 1983. His specialties are ethnomethodology, intercultural communication, race relations, and social phenomenology. Liberman has completed ethnomethodological studies of mundane interaction among traditional Australian Aboriginal people (Understanding Interaction in Central Australia, Routledge), the practices of reasoning of Tibetan scholar-monks (Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture, Rowman & Littlefield), and the uses of objectivity in coffee tasting by professional coffee tasters in 14 countries (Tasting Coffee, SUNY Press). He provided a detailed ethnomethodological account and assessment of sophistry based on a video-recorded Tibetan debate in his Husserl’s Criticism of Reason (Lexington Books). His More Studies in Ethnomethodo-logy (SUNY Press) won the Best Book Award from the EMCA Section of the American Sociological Association. He is presently undertaking a long-term comparative study of negative dialectics in Tibetan Buddhist and postmodern epistemological practice. Liberman was a disciple of the influential American sociologist Harold Garfinkel and the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitch.

So let’s start. I would like to break up the online meeting into two parts: the first one will involve me, Prof. Giorgio Rizzo, University of Salento, and Prof. Kenneth Liberman and it will concern many topics which constitute the central core of Liberman’s philosophical journey. The second part is open to contributions from students and scholars of the academic institutions taking part at the discussion. Why then Philosophical Conversation over a cup of coffee? The title chosen for this meeting? Quoting Edmund Husserl, I would like to say that “Give me my coffee so that I can make phenomenology out of it”. And, as a matter of fact, while discussing with Kenneth, I have a cup of coffee, of very bad quality, I would like to add Ken. Sorry if I don’t live up to your expertise, Ken, as regards tasting coffee. The quotation from Husserl, however, is very instructive, since it shows us a path, a method, to do good philosophy. Tasting coffee brings into play an astonishing cluster of philosophical notions like objectivity, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, impartiality, taste, knowledge and so on. Another reason for taking this particular and unique path in discussing philosophical topics is that, quoting Wittgenstein (with a degree of caution), is that, maybe, “There is no such thing as phenomenology, but there are indeed phenomenological problems”.

Tasting Coffee

1. You invite everybody of us not to “overthinking the experience” in order to make us open to what is unexpected (TC, 94). In other places of your works you appreciate the way Heidegger gives us back a new and revolutionary semantic of the notion of thinking. To avoid any contradiction, can we assume that there is a kind of thinking that doesn’t interfere negatively with our encounter with the world?
2. The more we come up against something we are not able to control, the more we make “direct contact” with an heteronomous objectivity (Adorno). Is it again Heidegger the stone guest in your idea of accessing reality? That is, is it your assumption that we can have a genuine and primordial encounter of the world, only if we are able to put under epoché, the Western domination of nature and its transformation into a Gestell, a Bestand, a stable resource always at our exploitive disposal?
3. You write [TC, 94] there is little about taste that is unproblematic, taste (and coffee, of course) is outside of concepts and resist pinned down. If I agree we not cede our experience to schemes of knowing, however, I ask if your position represents a limit to the understanding of taste (as in Kant, the third Critique) in terms of intersubjective faculty.
4. You write [TC, 129], coffee is a living being and as life it cannot be in ontological isolation from other lives, or better to say, forces which surround it. African metaphysics, I think, can be of support to your thesis, since it doesn’t reduce being to a static entity, but, much more, to a dynamic force. L’etre est force [Tempel, Bantu Philosophy]. You add also, enforcing your position, coffee has manifold material encounters with other phenomena (sunshine, mould and so on) as well as spiritual encounters (with human drinkers). Let me be a Marxist for a while (in honour also of the first Socialist mayor in USA). It is true, I admit, that your work on coffee shoes many hints at, what I would like to label, an unmasking of what to everybody of us presents itself with the features of hard objectivity (starting from coffee seen from the perspective of a steady and stable commodity on supermarket shelves), inviting us to go beneath the surface. And even at this place I feel an echo of the Heidegerrian notion of Bestand, but what about the material encounter coffee has with labourers which are underpaid and exploited in thrall to Western corporations?
5. Tasting coffee for you is a case study of sociology of science and related issues: a) how is reliable knowledge organized; b) how can humans organize knowledge better; c) how can the ways they organize knowledge help them to deepen their understanding of matters? Since, according to you, coffee industry requires objectivity. And so you write about unique flavour and taste and the need to know flavours in an objective way. The problem maybe is that you presuppose something, objectivity, which should be first investigated. Is it attainable in taste? [TC, 2]. It is also a problem of identification. In fact, how identification is possible when we have to do with something so subjective like tasting or smelling? You seem to prevent such an objection when you write “even though everyone knows that gustatory experience is something that is abidingly subjective” [TC, 3]. For one thing is to ground objectivity in empirical terms, another thing is to ground it in transcendental terms. Unless you have to admit that you brought transcendentality from heaven to earth. And this is also a legitimate move.
6. The question that many students pose to you is “How do I know when I have completed enough field study and can begin to write”? [TC, 4] and you reply “when the data becomes repetitive and predictable” and much more you “grow bored with the repetition” [TC, 4]. But even here we are talking about the repetition and predictability we are talking about your personal preferences. There is not something arbitrary in it? And the arbitrariness of your scientific investigation is much more evident when the completeness of your research, if it possible to achieve completeness, would depend on your getting bored with such investigation [TC, 4].
7. If you write then that coffee industry is suited very well for the problem of what it is to know objectively, then it seems to me that at this point lies a fundamental problem. Coffee industry doesn’t pursue objectivity without interest so that research here is not disinterested. And if evaluate their research of objectivity in Kantian terms for the very reason that in this case we have to do with taste, so I would be led to the conclusion that judgment of taste which is not disinterested is, as in Kant, an absurdity.
8. You write also about the “ideal taste” of professional coffee drinkers and you compare this ideal to the mundane life of lay coffee drinkers which are less focused on taste than on the situation and context in which they follow this social praxis. Coffee drinking is much more a social practise. In some sense it seems to me that you are smuggling into your argument that Husserlian distinction between eidetic sciences and empirical sciences, eidos and concrete object, theoretical constructs and lebensweltlich praxis.
9. You distinguish between a “naked taste”- experienced directly by a drinker with an open mind- a piacere nudo (immanent, naked pleasure, and a “dressed taste”- full of preconceptions about cru, origin, notoriety and rating. Do you think that a “naked taste” is possible” That is a kind of perception deprived of any conceptual content? It seems to me that, according to you, a pure taste is impossible, that is nonconceptual perception is not possible. Is it true? [TC, 6]. Will we never be able, thus, to capture what Merleau-Ponty labels le brut et savage Etre?
10.  When you write that in order to appreciate tasting coffee we need “not only knowing more but sometimes knowing less” (TC, 7) are you not maybe suggesting that we should abandon Western conception of knowledge (knowledge is power, taking other epistemological paths?
11.  Would you agree with one of the most worldwide influential Italian contemporary writer, Italo Calvino, who in his Lezioni americane, translated into English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium writes as follows:- It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty- that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances? [Six Memos, 56]. And do think that Calvino’s solution to this epidemic -that is literature- can create the antibodies to fight this plague in the language? A plague that increases our feeling of alienation and discomfort? At some point you write in your essay Semantic Drift in Conversations [SDC, 264] that it is natural for the meaning of a word to shift, glide, or slip across the possible significances that are available to parties in any conversational interaction referring to Garfinkel who stresses the “essentially vague” character of utterances. And you agree with him about the “indexical sense” of a word meaning that the word does not itself possess a kernel of meaning before it is uttered but picks up its meaning along the way “much as one might inherit a fortune from a nearly forgotten uncle”. I agree completely with your idea, but maybe you (and) me forget the power of social media, and let me say, of English imperialism to level out the richness and indexicality of words.
12.  “Una taza de café està llena de ideas” (A cup of coffee is full of ideas). What do you mean by this?
13.  You say that tasting coffee is a collaborative enterprise? Can you explain it?
14.  Another paradoxical situation in tasting coffee, you write (TC, 10) is “how taste descriptors are used to locate the taste in a cup even as these same descriptors keep getting in the way of tasting” (TC, 10). So the question which arises is this: in tasting coffee, my tasting experience is led by those taste descriptors or is genuine, that is, oriented exclusively towards the cup of coffee? And in order to tame the semiotics of tasting descriptors, you invite the tasters to keep their mind clear, avoiding getting cluttered up by the taxonomy of those descriptors. Is then objectivity in tasting coffee a “necessary impossibility”? (TC, 8).
15.  You write in More Studies in Ethnomethodology (MSE, 218) that it is as the taste descriptor is riding on your tongue, diving into the cup, and orienting your taste to be particularly sensitive to a certain area of the taste spectrum:-Those tastes are objectively there, but the subjective orientation- and even the language and conceptualization (“chocolate”)- affects the experience-. You are just telling us that the myth of the given, of a pure, original and genuine experience, is just impossible since every content, even the most primordial and immediate is full of conceptual content?

Criticism of (Western?) reason

1. So we return again to what foretold previously- What is thinking for you, apart from the attempt to destroy the walls of reification which every said, every thought, brings with it [HCR, 74]?
2. It seems to me that you try to detranscendalize and to anthropologize phenomenology. Are you sure you are doing still phenomenology? Or about which kind of phenomenology you think?
3. You like to quote Husserl’s key statement, that “Evidence is an effective performance” and this highlighting of Husserl’s statement leads us back to your conception of a “thinking reason”- that is a reason who deals with the contingencies of life. Can you be more explicit about your belief? I can assume that maybe in your strong evaluation of Husserl’s statement is hidden the idea that we should avoid that process according to which thinking becomes a routine, a standardized protocol, instead of being original and experiential.
4. And here I would like to stress the importance attributed by an astonishing German-American thinker like Hannah Arendt to the thinking reason. According to Hannah Arendt, in her masterpiece The Life of Mind, at least two topical questions ought to be answered before we get engaged in thinking: a) What makes Us Think; and b) Where Are We When We Think? Now, she adds also that seen from the perspective of the world of appearances, the main characteristic of mental activities, that is of thinking and judging e.g., is their “invisibility” [LF, 71], the Epicurean lathe biosas, their reflexivity [LF, 75], in that every cogitare, no matter what is its object, is also a cogito me cogitare, a “retour secret sur moi-même (Montesquieu) and their “withdrawal” [LM, 75-76] from appearances, from the world altogether since “every mental act rests on the mind’s faculty of having present to itself what is absent from the sense” [LF, 76]. Wouldn’t you agree with such statements? And if you agree with, how could you argue for the publicity of the thinking activity, that is for the idea that thinking, or judging, is a public practise?
5. Neither logic or experience are the ultimate foundation of thinking, according to you, but the continuous movement between the two, thinking and communicating, constitutes truth, what you define a “zig zag” thinking that has strengthen relations to experiencing in situ.

Philosophy and Ethnomethodology

1. There is a particular sense you attribute to the word “methodology” in the compound word “ethno-methodology”. If I am correct, “methodology” means for you the daily methods common people deploy in the practices of their life. And much more: by deploying such methods common people perform a “comprensione-in-comune” [comprehension-in-common; FE, 8]. At first sight, it seems that your idea of ethnomethodology speaks the same language of a phenomenological research of the Lebenswelt.
   I, however, would like to make the same criticism as regard your idea of “ethnomethodology” that I would do as regard the notion of Lebenswelt. You put in the foreground the relevance and necessity of cohesion, common comprehension, order and “correctness” [FE, 8] of the daily practices, but what about the historical phases of discontinuity, which Kuhn would call “change of paradigm”, which are of equal importance for the development of a society? I can agree with you that ordinary activities and practises are most common and worth to be analyzed, but don’t you think that to understand the Zeitgeist and more important features of a community, revolutions are most helpful [FE, 10]?
2. You also add that the social order investigated by ethnomethodology is always “local” since concerned about the “minute details [FE, 9] of the daily interactions among common people. Does it mean that Husserlian dream of a universal reason aimed at establishing, according to a philosophical telos, a universal socio-cultural order grounded on rational ethical rules should be completely abandoned in favour of communites led by local standards? Doesn’t it imply a form of radical relativism and the danger of incommunicability? According to the saying “small is beautiful”? 
3. You write phenomenology is individualist, while ethnomethodology is anti-individualist since concerned about social interaction (FE, 10]. I don’t agree with it. If then, as you add, the sense-making of any practise is deferred to what you label a “local production cohort”, don’t you believe that not only individual creativity gets lost, but also that every productive activity is permeated by a certain index of anonymity? Contra Alfred Schutz? If individualization is a by-product of sociality [FE, 92], maybe you think on the same wavelength of a radical Ubuntu conception of the ontology of human being. 

Phenomenology and Marxism

1. You want to assist coffee purveyors (TC, 372). But on which grounds? Ethical, economical? How is the condition of the labourers in coffee plantations?

On Thinking

1. You propose a kind of “dialectical thinking” (URLOM) which takes up Socratic thinking in that you distinguish, I think rightly, between thinking and thought and interpreting the first as “liberating” and the “source of originality” (as much as the sense of thinking in Arendt’s Life of Mind). At the same time, however, stressing the interactive work of using logical structures to provide a social order and portraying thought as a “public doing” and a “concerted activity” (URLOM, 294). Don’t you find a kind of contradiction between the first sense of thinking, very radical and critical, and the second one, public and social order oriented? 

Notes

• Sellar’s account of the scientific and manifest image of the world.
• Hannah Arendt on thinking- stop and think as not reified activity (see Heidegger, too). Living in the tempest (see the Life of Mind).
• Kant distinguishes between the “pure judgment of taste”, grounded on impartiality, and “barbaric taste” which involves the subject’s vital interests. Pure taste ought to do only with form- as for Beauty.
• Merleau-Ponty highlights “l’entourage du perçu” since “le monde perçu comporte des relations”.
  He says also that “la chose perçue n’est pas une unité idéale possédée par l’intelligence, comme une notion géométrique, c’est une totalité ouverte à l’horizon d’un nombre indéfini de vues perspectives qui se recoupent selon un certain style, style qui définit l’objet dont il s’agit” [Le Primat de la perception, 49]. What is the style of perception? And does the style depend on culture?