by Subrena E. Smith

The title of this essay, borrowed from Marie Cardinal, addresses the act of writing. I write to give a view into my construction of the world. I write to make actual my perception of how things are. I write to demonstrate to my profession that I am worthy of being one of its members. I write so that I can gain tenure to remain in the profession that I’ve chosen and to contribute to my family.

Writing is a central component of my life. But there is a kind of writing that is unpleasant: grounded in fear and anxiety. Why? A simple answer is that it’s hard. It might seem that things that are hard cause me to be fearful and anxious. But this is not so when I write fiction, or when I train to run. All of these things require effort, but for me, physical training and writing fiction are pleasant, and philosophical writing is unpleasant. Writing philosophy makes me theoretically and conceptually naked. It’s judged, often harshly. It’s pulled apart. It’s ranked. It calls into question my legitimacy and my ability as a philosopher.

My experiences of writing philosophy are mine, but I think that they are similar to what some other philosophers have felt. I’ve heard stories. Many of you have heard stories. Yes, they are anecdotal, but if there are things that you reviewers and editors could do that might lessen the stress for some of us, is it not worthwhile to consider doing them?

Philosophical writing is not monolithic. People use different methods. They write on different topics and they vary in their styles. To my mind, this is a good thing. What is strange is that against this variegated tapestry, talk of what are and are not good philosophical methods, styles, and even topics, is abundant. While some in the profession seem to endorse variation, some others within it find it unsettling. Being on the outside side of tenure means that I take their whispers seriously. These are not just musings, they represent a real fret about ensuring that I am positioning my work just right to be sanctioned through.

Being hyper-alert to whether one is being philosophical enough can prevent one from yielding to the creative process that is required for doing philosophy. The philosophical topics that I address have to be mine: they have to impose themselves on me. I have to decide how to treat them. It doesn’t work to begin with a question and then start worrying about whether the keepers of the profession will treat one’s question as worthy. Being guided by one’s creative process does not immunize one from assenting to general mechanical norms of philosophical writing, but the work has to be generated and guided by the instincts one has developed about how to address a topic.

It was these feelings and worryings that called forth my misplaced joy last spring at the Pacific APA meeting in San Diego. There, there was a session on publication within the profession. Oh, was I thankful when I saw that session on the program! I anticipated that it would provide a view of what the publishing elixir consists in according to journal editors and successful authors. Alas, I left that session no more enlightened than before I entered. What was particularly disorienting to me was the degree to which those in the know did not agree on basic points. Ostensibly, the session was called to address some of the problems of publication within the profession, suggesting that those in the know agree that there is a problem. But as the session progressed, and each journal editor spoke, and each of the other panelists spoke, I began to see that the parties do not agree on what the problems are, or even whether there are problems. If those who should know how things are visa-a-vis getting published don’t agree, then Houston, we really do have a problem.

Whatever the reasons, it was clear that it is hard to publish in philosophy journals. I wanted to know why, so I buoyed myself up and asked a multi-dimensional question that began with enquiring why it is that some in the profession seem to be proud that it is difficult to get published in philosophy (from my own experience, I know of many individuals who think that it is good that it is hard to get published in philosophy). I continued by pointing out that we should all be worried that many of our peers find publishing hard (on several different dimensions). Since to my mind philosophers are in part the result of the training that they have received, if enough people don’t manage to get their work published, or to get much of their work published, then perhaps our training institutions are not preparing us to participate in our own profession.

No one responded to this portion of my question, but I think that it is an important question to ask. It is not a badge of honor that lots of smart, competent philosophers struggle to get their work published. It should be worrying for all of us.

Some of you reading this may take some of my points in a way that I don’t intend. I want to make sure that you hear what I am saying. Of course, I believe that our profession should have standards for what counts as publishable work. I certainly don’t believe that all papers sent out for consideration are publishable. But one can endorse these two principles and still think that there is a problem in need of addressing.

I’ve lately been thinking about the sources of my fear about writing philosophy. It began in graduate school. On too many occasions there were discussions that left me thinking that I didn’t know the words to the chorus of the songs. If many of the discussants had the same intuition, and I didn’t, then there must be some defect with my intuition-generator. There was this almost constant fear that my way of thinking was the wrong way of thinking. Nobody told me so. In fact, I was supported and encouraged by my peers and professors. But the sense of not knowing the words to the choruses frazzled my ability to trust my own philosophical instincts.

I’m more self-aware now, but still fearful.

Philosophers often talk about “good” papers. But everyone and their grandmother knows that ways of determining which papers are “good” papers are largely voodoo. Take yourselves as examples. How many papers have you read that you decided were good, but someone whom you respect takes a different attitude and judges that they are bad? I can name some names of established philosophers who for one reason or another, are not, for some people, correctly philosophical. I’ve heard that Pat Churchland’s work is not philosophy. She’s doing science, it’s said, not philosophy. There are some who say Dan Dennett’s work is just shallow, and I’ve heard that Sharon Street’s work on evolutionary ethics is creative but that it’s not good because she is wrong. I’ve had conversations with people who could not disagree with Ruth Millikan’s work more. She is WRONG about intentionality and WRONG again about biological function. I could go on. When I am in the company of people who so strongly express their disapproval, I shrivel up inside.

Look, we do not have some singular method or set of methods for determining which work is good. What we have, apart from some very basic standards, are our individual preferences and the trends in the profession: trends that are established by works that get published and from those prominently placed and highly visible in the profession. To be sure, such people have expertise, but even they have personal philosophical preferences as well: preferences that can get in the way.

Writing philosophy is unpleasant for me because in writing I attempt to contort my creative self, to adopt some ephemeral standard that is supposed to exemplify the ideal form of philosophical writing. There is a way of thinking about and treating my topics that is natural to me. It takes effort, but flows from me. This means that my work may have some idiosyncrasies; a strange framing here, a neologism there. There have been occasions where audiences and reviewers have made it clear by their remarks or questions that they wished me to treat ideas differently, or wished me to treat different ideas. While I don’t mind being isolated, it matters if my way of being philosophical isolates me. I am not so innocent as to believe that my key-strokes are beyond question. That would be unreasonable. What I am talking about is the kind of response that fails to address the work as it is with its author’s particular philosophical commitments. For example, if I take the position that living things are not separate and apart from their ecological surround, but you wish me to have a different commitment, you may try and persuade me to adopt that different position (I won’t). But my failing to take your position is no reason to reject the work.

I am not alone in getting feedback from reviewers that makes me spin and ask myself “What is this person talking about?!” As a junior person in need of notching up publication numbers, this is maddening. Given the plethora of ways of doing philosophy, it is baffling to encounter remarks that suggest that one needs to adopt some other, superior way of going about one’s philosophical business. But I want to do philosophy my own way. I want my work to be the manifestation of my way of theorizing the world. As long as the ideas that I communicate are clear and coherent enough, then I ought not to be told to write differently or to think differently.

It’s said by some philosophers that empirical work is science not philosophy, and that philosophy is all about some non-empirical realm. My position is that there is no non-empirical work in philosophy. My interests come from the things in the world that impose themselves on me.

I have on occasion been asked, skeptically, how some topic that I’m exploring, or some way that I’m exploring it, is philosophical. While I think that this is not a good question to be asking, I’ve tended to respond by defensively trying to argue my philosophical case. I don’t believe that the ground of philosophy should be yielded to a particular methodological orthodoxy, and my real attitude is that the questioner should be put in the hot seat and asked justify their question. But I’ve not done that. For fear. Fear that if I don’t say and write the right kinds of things, the right people won’t endorse me.

To my mind, this is a sorry state of being. I do philosophy. I want to do it my way. I want to ask the questions that I’m interested in asking and give answers as I have determined I should. I want reviewers to remember that they are reviewing the work produced from the mind of another. I want them to advise me on the work in front of them, not on work by some counterpart of me at a possible world.

What will remain if those charged with securing philosophy’s future background their preferences – stylistic, methodological, and topical – in favor of more varied pathways to determining publishable work?  Much.

Subrena E. Smith is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where her research focused on philosophical and psychological misappropriations of evolutionary theory. Her current research interests fall under the umbrella of philosophy of biology, broadly construed.