How can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment?

In Defense of Prejudice, Sort of

by Ari N. Schulman


Adam Adatto Sandel has not written a book about the Jim Crow South. Actually, he takes great pains to avoid The Place of Prejudice having anything to do with “prejudice” in the everyday sense of bigotry. Sandel, a lecturer at Harvard with a D.Phil. in political theory from Oxford, is in his first book out to defend a very different meaning of the word — a broader kind of prejudice that was a central preoccupation of the intellectual founders of modernity, that they saw as an ancient crust built up upon the mind of the world, and dreamed of shaking loose.

The book opens with a list of philosophers’ grievances against prejudice. Francis Bacon labeled as prejudice the patterns of thought ingrained by tradition, habit, and language. He sought to rid our minds of these influences, for to judge truthfully, one must be “unbiased, a blank slate.” Immanuel Kant named many of the same bogeymen, and for good measure threw in natural desire. He went so far as to write that “enlightenment” itself means “emancipation from prejudices generally.” René Descartes was so radically suspicious of “preconceptions” and received ideas that he aimed to rebuild philosophy from a stance of absolute ignorance.

For the founders of the Enlightenment, then — once a project, but now, need we remind ourselves, the starting point of most thought in the Western world, from academic philosophy tomes all the way down to the comment wars on political articles posted to your Facebook news feed — prejudice was not just a vice, but the very thing against which enlightenment could find its definition. So don’t get the wrong idea from the title of Sandel’s book: it’s even more reactionary than it looks.

On his account, Enlightenment thinkers aimed to supplant prejudice with a “detached conception” of reason, rid of “any authority or influence whose validity we have not explicitly confirmed for ourselves.” Ultimately, detached reason aims to become entirely free of perspective. It seeks to reach conclusions modeled on the exactness and universality of mathematics, truths of science and ethics and politics that float far above the jagged shores of circumstance upon which we find ourselves washed up. Thomas Nagel got to the heart of the matter by calling this the “view from nowhere.”

Sandel aims to replace this detached view with something better. His book is centrally concerned with Martin Heidegger’s depiction of how our felt lives are the source of our judgments about the world, and it aims to demonstrate that Heidegger, despite his gripes about Aristotle, was largely continuing a project he began. Sandel also explores the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s defense of rhetoric, and of perspective in the study of history.

Putting these thinkers in conversation, Sandel offers what he calls a situated conception of reason, or “reasoning within the world,” as the book’s subtitle has it. Our individual experiences are not the antithesis of reason but its basis, the ground on which we stand while we peer out on the world and expand our horizon. The result is a remarkable, deeply humanizing book.

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