Quote quoted From “Race Matters”. By Cornel West. Used without permission.
Of course race is a very central issue in the Western Hemisphere; I believe it is a central issue in many places across the globe as well. So, I support Professor West’s critical assessment.
However, I bring in this excerpt as an example of just what I refer to by my terms conventional method and reality as opposed to truth.
These not only involve race, but the issues of race exemplify what an anthropology of philosophy might entail: It is an uncovering and descriptive state aside from an ontological and meaningful state (side by side in a unilaterally dual manner, ala Nonphilosophy).
We can begin to see and comprehend how reality manifests less as a tension between discourses and what is encoded into them, but rather more as orientations upon such circumstance.
Reality is that condition whereby we live by, what could be called, ‘false narrative dichotomies’. It is not that we can choose to not live by them or ‘rationally’ disregard them Becuase they are unethical or faulty in some way; no.
It is that they constitute the very condition by which reality is manifested as such I am able to know myself as an active identity.
The issue of race exemplifies this condition well. For race and racism is indeed that (a) real condition whereby I am able to find myself. The courageous conversation thus to be had, especially about race but also about any social condition, is that discussion which arises when I am not discounting or invalidating the situation because it sits unethically with my sense of righteousness. A courageous conversation about truth is when I include myself as complicit in the uncomfortable situation that I am attempting to address honestly, to thus possibly change.
Reality is that exclusive place where I find myself against otherness through a ‘truncated’ meaning (Zizek/Lacan: Symbolic-Imaginary or Image/Symbol) and the truth is that place which includes all aspects of the situation whereby I find myself (Zizek/Lacan: Real).