This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about the book On Being Me, written by J. David Velleman and illustrated by Emily Bernstein. J. David Velleman is a professor of philosophy and bioethics at NYU (retiring 2020) and a research professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His other books include How We Get Along, Foundations for Moral Relativism, Beyond Price: essays on birth and death, and The Possibility of Practical Reason. A new edition of his essay collection Self to Self is forthcoming. (All but the first of these books is an open-access publication.)
Emily Bernstein is a cartoonist, illustrator, and animator living in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to On Being Me, her work has been published in the New Yorker and on VICE.com. You can learn more about her work at www.emilycbernstein.com.
What is your work about?
David: On Being Me is a personal meditation on what it’s like to be a person, written for a general audience and illustrated by the New Yorker artist Emily C. Bernstein. Each brief chapter explores an ordinary human concern, doing philosophy with the reader rather than teaching philosophy to the reader.
In “Wanting to Go On”, I argue that the survival of “me” is not the same as the survival of the person who I am, since I can imagine being someone else while still being me. It’s possible to dream of being someone else, and some people believe they really were someone else in a “past life” — which is false, of course, but perfectly conceivable. What matters in survival, I claim, is to go on being me, not necessarily going on as David Velleman. Going on as me consists in having access to someone in the future via genuine first-person reference, as occurs in anticipatory thoughts, plans, and emotions about “my” future, all of which survive to end up referring indexically to a future person.
In “Fearing the End”, I use my conception of survival to explain why the passage of time is an illusion, and hence why I am not really running out of time, recalcitrant appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
In “Regretting What Might Have Been”, I argue that it would be irrational to regret not having what I might have had if I had made better choices in the past. The counterfactual David Velleman who got rich selling the Apple Computer shares that I didn’t buy back in the 1980s is not related to me in the way that justifies first-personal attitudes such as regret.
In “Aspiring to Authorship”, I explain why determinism does not threaten my sense of having an open future in which I can make up, rather than merely discover, how my life will unfold. In “Making Things Happen”, I expand on this conception of free will to explain agent causation.
Finally, I speculate briefly about the connection between being “me”, being good, and being loved, in “Wanting to Be Loved”.
Why did you choose to write a collection of meditations grouped around a theme rather than, say, a monograph exploring the topic? How do you write your meditations so that they are done with the reader and not to the reader? Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
David: My philosophical work has always been autobiographical, sometimes overtly, more often covertly — even unconsciously, as I sometimes realize in retrospect. That said, On Being Me is not about being David Velleman; it’s about being a self-aware creature, a creature capable of thinking of itself in the first person. I’m interested in figuring out what it means to be a “me”, as Horton learned what it means to be a “Who”. Readers will notice that the character in Emily Bernstein’s illustrations is her, not me, because she is thinking through the text in application to herself. We hope that each reader will feel encouraged to do likewise.
Although the book is not about being David Velleman, it uses examples drawn from my life: my childhood aspiration to be a dancer, my memory of trip to the Empire State Building with my grandfather, my daughter’s experience mastering the first person as a toddler — and, yes, my failure to heed my brother’s advice to buy Apple Computer back in the 1980s.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
David: The book presents in accessible form many of the ideas I have published over the past 35 years in the philosophy of action, moral psychology, and the metaphysics of time. The discipline of explaining those ideas to a general audience, and the stimulation of collaborating with an illustrator, helped me — or, I should say, forced me — to clarify much that was vexed in my academic publications. So I think of the book as the culmination of a large slice of my philosophical work.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
David: My experience has been that academic publications are received by their audience as grist for the professional mill rather than food for thought. Much as I enjoy the give-and-take of discussion with other philosophers, I wanted to reach readers who might be interested in my ideas for their own sake, simply as one person’s take on being a self-aware creature.
I would never compare myself with the great philosophical essayists of my student years, such as Harry Frankfurt, Tom Nagel, Dick Rorty, and Bernard Williams, among others, but one motivation for writing this book was a sense of loss at the gradual disappearance of philosophical prose of the kind that drew me into the discipline through their work. In writing the book, I tried to prune away scholarly references and technical vocabulary without watering down the philosophy. My hope is that writing in the first person enabled me to capture ordinary experience in ordinary language while narrating a sophisticated process of philosophical thought.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
David: The introspective approach of the book made it impossible for me to include my ideas about inter-personal relations. In that respect, the book falls short of its stated goal of exploring what it’s like to be a person. I don’t know whether I would be able to write an equally accessible book about ethics, moral relativism, or some of the other topics I have worked on. I may try.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
David: I generally avoid teaching material from my own research. The direction of influence goes the other way, in that I have often written on topics that I first encountered in teaching. Explaining philosophy to students, especially to undergraduates, has proven to be the most fruitful source of ideas for my research. For example, it’s unlikely that I would ever have written on bioethics if I had not been assigned a bioethics course in my first semester of teaching at the University of Michigan, and all of my papers on Kantian ethics have arisen from my struggles to teach the Groundwork to undergraduates. My main worry about retiring from teaching is that I will no longer have any new ideas to work on.
Let’s turn to Emily Bernstein. Emily, how did you decide what to draw for different parts of the book? Are there particular styles or motifs you felt would best accompany David’s essays?
Emily: When David first approached me about this project, we talked about creating a character to represent the “me” in the text. I suggested making that character, well, me. Being so literally involved in this book has made it a truly collaborative and unique experience. There were some sections for which David had very specific ideas about the illustrations and other sections where he gave me license to more or less do as I pleased. But for every drawing there was a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of communication about what would make the illustration cogent, relevant, and interesting to look at. It was a real delight to work on.
What value do you feel illustrations such as yours adds to philosophical works like David’s? Are there other authors or philosophical works that you feel would benefit from such art?
Emily: David wanted this book to be something approachable, readable, and (dare we say) enjoyable for the reader. I think the illustrations signal to a casual reader with no philosophy background that this book isn’t going to bite you. It’s illustrated! You can read this! For someone who knows a bit more about philosophy, the illustrations signal that this book is not a textbook, but a human, personal reflection on ideas that may be familiar to them. Also, some of them are funny. Maybe philosophy in general could use more jokes.
Is there anything about the relationship between the art world and the philosophy world that you would like the latter to know?
Emily: Philosophy and art are both attempts to describe and make sense of the world around us. I make comics, so I think a lot about the relationship between words and pictures. When you add an illustration to a text, it can be a literal depiction of what the words describe. But it can also be something else, something that adds meaning to the text instead of just repeating it. I hope that we achieved that in this book, and I hope that more philosophers consider illustrating their ideas. It doesn’t just open up your work to a broader audience, it can add a new dimension to something you thought you’d figured out.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
