From the issue dated April 9, 2004
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The Unexamined Life May Be Your Own
When philosophy professors contemplate the "philosophical life," it tends not to be their own. Socrates, who brilliantly initiated dialectical back and forth, then nobly died for his beliefs, works as role model for lots of alpha men in the field. Hypatia, torn apart for her beliefs and independence, and French doyennes from Beauvoir to Hélène Cixous doing it their way, form a helpful late-night vision for many women. By comparison, looking in the mirror, or in the next room, or out the window, offers scant appeal. The mirror shows not toga or beret, but brand garb indistinguishable from the dentist's or real-estate agent's. The next room serves not as academy or lyceum, but storage space for those fabulous kids who, personal merits aside, screwed up the whole tenure-clock thing at one's Great Research University on a Hill. Outside the window loom not olive trees and gently sloping fields, but a 7-Eleven and strip mall. Hardly material to make one feel whisked into the pantheon alongside Descartes and Wittgenstein. Much easier, when one seeks to glorify the "philosophical life" and preserve self-identity, to change the scenery to Athens, Paris, Cambridge, or Oxford. One shouldn't be too hard on non-immortal philosophers wishing to trade up when they ponder the link between autobiography and philosophy. Every actor, after all, thinks of Brando or Bette Davis as a peer across time. Blame the vicarious autobiographical reflex in academic philosophers (we're not talking Rousseau here) on the gap between philosophy's illustrious past and the modest quotidian reality of most current practitioners. Blame it on the gap between the heroic dignity of bygone philosophers at their best and the perhaps necessary careerism of today's ilk in convention-hotel corridors. But if, as Nietzsche asserted, "every great philosophy" is "the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir," shouldn't philosophers privilege their own lives when they get preachy about the "philosophical life"? While a few American academic philosophers of recent times, such as W.V. Quine, boast book-length autobiographies, even books like theirs confirm the distance between the starry work above and the grimy life down here. The situation is not better in shorter pieces. Scan scores to hundreds of journal articles by philosophers, whether on tired epistemological programs made over for the umpteenth time, or on urgent issues of the day -- just war, cloning, democracy in cyberspace -- and hardly a trace of autobiographical detail surfaces. We know what many philosophers believe, and why they claim to believe it, but not who it is that believes. Two recent volumes thus fall not stillborn from the press, but with a thunderclap. The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), edited by George Yancy, gathers essays by 16 male and female philosophers. A companion volume, Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), edited by Linda Martin Alcoff (who contributes to Yancy's volume), brings together memoirs from 12 women. Somehow the editors convinced contributors not that their lives matter -- one suspects they came to the table holding that view -- but that they matter enough to be recalled, reflected upon, talked about. And because their lives matter, their names matter. Ponder for a moment, if you read in philosophy and related disciplines like women's studies and communications, these lineups, and whose work you may have encountered. Yancy offers Alcoff, Bat-Ami Bar On, Lorraine Code, Sandra Harding, Douglas Kellner, John Lachs, Joseph Margolis, Charles W. Mills, Nancey Murphy, Nicholas Rescher, Richard Shusterman, John J. Stuhr, Paul C. Taylor, Nancy Tuana, and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Alcoff gathers Sandra Lee Bartky, the late Teresa Brennan, Claudia Card, Virginia Held, Alison M. Jaggar, Stephanie Lewis, Uma Narayan, Martha C. Nussbaum, Andrea Nye, Ofelia Schutte, Kristen Schrader-Frechette, and Karen J. Warren. Oh dear, long lists of names. Isn't that why they invented "for example," or (better loved in these pages) "e.g."? But who would willingly permit someone else to be used as an example for oneself? When you say "philosophical life," you're talking about Sandra Lee Bartky's "four horsemen of the apocalypse: depression, fear, dread, and panic." And Brennan's rape, stalking, and need to declare that, no, she did not sleep with Anthony Giddens, one of her English mentors. And Margolis's World War II service. And Rescher's mania for publishing books (now more than 80). Put that in your philosopher, these books imply, and stoke it. Yes, there's the inevitable egotism, self-puffery, credentialism, and -- dare one say it? -- ignorance of self in these reflections. Far more important, there's news -- and drama, and tears, and love, and more wisdom than appears in putatively more important work to which a few of these worthies owe tenure and career. Inevitably, Singing in the Fire proves the more mesmerizing volume because it showcases the tension in a field that has gone, as Alcoff notes, from an almost "complete absence" of women a century ago to "a representation that is now nearing 20 percent." The change continues, writes Alcoff, in an environment that is "less a culture of complaint and more a culture of cruelty toward anyone who challenges male privilege." Male philosophers will -- should -- cringe as they read this book. Listen to Martha Nussbaum, probably the most prominent senior figure in the field and normally an even-toned essayist, turn superbly caustic in "'Don't Smile So Much': Philosophy and Women in the 1970s." "Men's ways of being infantile vary," she begins a passage on male peers. "Some are flirtatious and silly in a relatively harmless way. Some fear old age dreadfully, and believe that continual exercises in seduction will produce something like erotic immortality. Some long to tell you in no uncertain terms that you are a whore, because it makes them feel power. Some hate themselves and have contempt for any woman who is nice to them. Some -- and these are the worst, I think -- are satanic, by which I mean that they have an emptiness at their core that they fill with exercises in domination, which they market with a frequently dazzling charm." That comes before she crisply details her harassment by her late mentor in classics, G.E.L. Owen. (Yes, people here also name names.) "The main problem of feminism in philosophy," Nussbaum remarks, "is the infantile level of human development of many of the men who are in it." Other women tell kindred tales. "What has come to be called sexual harassment has been almost a constant across my various jobs and schools," writes Alcoff, "and I am not referring to simple compliments (which some think feminists overblow into harassment) or invitations but clear attempts to put me in my place or to enjoy sexual contact without my consent. A favorite philosophy professor tried to undress me in a hallway when I was an undergraduate. ... When I was a new assistant professor, I was loudly called a 'bush' in front of graduate students by a senior colleague." Sexual harassment ranks as just the most sensational of the real-life factors influencing published work that these essays counterpose to "depersonalized" philosophy. That Russellian kind, Alison M. Jaggar recalls, captivated her as a teenager, positing an "abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter." She doesn't buy that anymore. While women here also compliment generous male mentors, enough garbage turns up to consolidate a thought: We should know what kind of people lurk behind the "emotionally neutral" texts and titles pressed upon us by academic philosophy. In the so-called real world, for instance -- law, politics, medicine, journalism -- overt egotism reduces trust in the judgment of the egotist. What should we make, then, of the rambling self-adoration in some of the men's essays -- I was the best at this, after which I was the smartest at that? Confides Rescher: "The facility of my pen (I write everything by hand!) has enabled me to produce a system of philosophical thought that is more many-sided, complex, and far-reaching than has been the case with any other living American philosopher." There's little of that preening in the generally sharper essays of the women: modest, stylish, focused, and wittier. Some of the latter "daydream," says Alcoff, "about a possible world in which the default image of philosophers would no longer be male." Can't blame her. In various less spectacular ways than documented by tales of the arrogance and oafishness woman philosophers face, these essays drive home the impact of the autobiographical on the philosophical. Time spent in Israeli intelligence changed Shusterman. Lorraine Code found herself shaped by her father's attitude that university would be "too much" for her mother. Coming out of the Richard Allen housing projects of North Philadelphia instilled a missionary zeal in Yancy. Typing and retyping her husband's master's thesis on Camus, and then his doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein, meant for Sandra Harding never "getting close to either philosopher since." When philosophers share the details of their lives, the impact extends to the reader. In my first column for The Chronicle, I mocked Florida Atlantic University's Ph.D. program for public intellectuals, directed by Teresa Brennan. The university's publicity material invited as much, I thought. Now I read Brennan's posthumous essay, about her terrible luck in life, and subsequent physical struggles, and feel ashamed. More important, I understand why she involved herself with such a project, and why her involvement cast a different light on it. Autobiography matters. What would philosophy be like if we read the autobiography of a philosopher before we read the work? It would be better. We would be better. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches literature at Herzen University and philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, both in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 31, Page B13 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education