As “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000381.html notes, Carlin Romano wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “two recent collections of autobiographical memoirs by philosophers”:http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i31/31b01301.htm. There’s some interesting, and important points, to be made, so naturally I’d like to start with a cheap joke. Here’s a sample of what we’re likely to see if more philosophers turn their hand to autobiography.
bq. 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. (Nicholas Rescher)
I’d be jealous of Rescher’s philosophical achievement if I wasn’t wittier, more charming, better looking and generally just a more excellent human being than any other living philosopher. “No, really.”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000063.html
One theme of Romano’s piece is that it might be better if more philosophers worked more autobiography into their philosophy. My first thought was that this was a ridiculous idea. My second thought was that blogging, at least the way some of us do it, seems to deliver just what Romano wants. See, for instance, “this post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002671.html where I work a drinking story into an argument about imaginative resistance. My third thought was that there’s no contradiction between the first two thoughts.
Interestingly, I’ve never been tempted to write a post with such a personal angle on Crooked Timber. This hasn’t been because I’ve had instructions from on high that CT is not to be used for personal posts. It’s just that it has never seemed appropriate to use up the real estate there to tell long stories about the time that I was stuck in an elevator with a circus elephant, or whatever other boring thing might have happened to me that day. It would feel self-indulgent. Since anything I do on a personal blog is self-indulgent, I don’t feel as constrained here.
The more important point raised by Romano’s piece is the very different experience of men and women in academic philosophy. As the commentators at “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000381.html note, Romano is possibly not the best choice to have writing about this, but the point still comes through fairly clearly. Here’s a long quote from Martha Nussbaum’s entry in _Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy_ (edited by Linda Martin Alcoff).
bq. Men’s ways of being infantile vary. 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.
bq. …
bq. The main problem of feminism in philosophy is the infantile level of human development of many of the men who are in it.
Naturally, I’d like to think that my generation is better than this, though I guess I suspect that if they (we) weren’t (aren’t) I wouldn’t be able to tell.
I do think ‘satantic’ is a wee bit over the top though. I thought demonic possession went out of fashion with witch-burnings.
To my eye the common thread behind Nussbaum’s tropes isn’t misogyny as much as pretty severe depression. That might be disheartening, or it may suggest that there’s a way around the worst of the problems. At least to the extent that we regard depression as effectively treatable. Of course if depression is that big a thread running through philosophy, that’s a story, and one we should be doing something about.
Thanks to Tamar Szab{o’} Gendler for first pointing out the Romano piece to me.
