Most of us have had the experience of teaching Introduction to Philosophy and, in that capacity, of teaching the ball of wax example from Descartes’s Meditations. (I do so in my own intro class with an enthusiasm that my students, at least initially, find strange. As much as I struggle against the philosophical legacy of Cartesian dualism, it is one of my favorite exercises.) Examples such as this, which give such a concrete, tactile aspect to an otherwise abstract, philosophical problem can be rewarding when they lead students to understand the value of something like Descartes’s project of radical doubt. With Descartes’s example of the ball of wax, what is at stake is the unity and identity of an extended substance. As the wax shifts from one color to the next, from one temperature to another, as it goes from being rigid to pliable to nearly liquid, what is it that allows us to say that this substance remains a single, self-same thing? While many of us might not be happy with the way that Descartes ultimately answers this question, the immediacy of this experience of change as well as the extreme form of doubt that it inspires in the otherwise taken-as-given world, remains a potent pedagogical tool for a young thinker.
While it is certainly the case that there are ways that an Intro to Philosophy class, and a seemingly distant Early Modern text like the Meditations, can lead to fruitful discussions of a public and political nature, my last few semesters of teaching Philosophy of Disability has led me to think about a pedagogical distinction between the type of mentality in the one class versus the other. I strive, in any class I teach, to get students to think about applying the concepts and problems that we study to contemporary social reality (and I choose pieces that reflect on the construction of that reality, from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals to Ahmed’s “Phenomenology of Whiteness”), but in the case of Philosophy of Disability, my students ended up pushing me a step further. The class moved beyond illustrating philosophy with social-political questions, and they began truly thinking philosophically about the space of public experience that they belong to. I’ve found that an emphasized public element can’t but come to the fore and the doubt in the otherwise taken-as-given world that I use Descartes to inspire became a primary philosophical method. This public space became the ball of wax: something that becomes multiform to such an extent that its unity and identity can’t but be questioned.
With texts ranging from James Charlton and Tom Shakespeare to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Havi Carel, the aim of the class is, broadly speaking, to get students to reflect on issues of accessibility, neurodiversity, and the value of in/ter/dependence and how such things constitute our shared space differently, all the while problematizing any notion of normalcy or an objective standard from which everyone begins. In every case, the attempt to problematize the taken-as-given world or the values we’ve unwittingly internalized (such as health or independence) ends up having the imaginative efficacy of the ball of wax. Students can’t help but begin to confront the everyday world with the eyes of a philosophical doubter in a way that I think accords extremely well with what I think of as being public philosophy.
Take, for example, S. Kay Toombs’s “The Lived Experience of Illness.” In this piece, Toombs provides a phenomenological account of the experience of disability. She argues that “the phenomenological notion of [the] lived body provides important insights into the profound disruptions of space and time that are an integral element of changed physical capacities such as loss of mobility.” More specifically, she analyzes how the loss of her upright posture changes not only her relation to the physical space around her, but the way one is treated by others. My students loved this piece. They seemed to have intuited, but not been able to articulate the correlation between literal and social space. Toombs describes this by explaining her relationship to her hallway bookshelf, which went from “repository for books” to “that which is to be grasped for support on the way to the bathroom” to “an obstacle to get around with my wheelchair” as her mobility shifted (16). They were able to recognize that it is not simply a ‘normal’ that dictates the social space, and certainly not an external objective reality, and saw instead how space is constructed in a multiplicity of ways. In this instance, they already had a nascent sense that the world is not simply objectively given, that objects and spaces have particular meanings that derive their sense from bodily intentionality. They saw in Toombs’s philosophical account of her personal experience, not a subjective relationship to objects in her own house, but the way that the meaning and the construction of space is built, which, in turn, means it can be rebuilt and recreated with new meaning.
We also read Quill Kukla’s essay “Medicalization, ‘Normal Function,’ and the Definition of Health.” I had worried that the students would be put off (or distracted) by the in-depth analysis of the multiple ways of defining health and the limitations of each way. Rather, they immediately grasped Kukla’s opening thesis: how we define health has practical and social effects, that health has everything to do with justice. I have tried before to get students to recognize that health is, as Kukla puts it, “an intuitive notion and not a technical term”—I have used it as an illustration of Nietzsche’s insistence of a constructed truth, of a lie repeated so often that the history of its creation is forgotten. But by taking seriously the point that our values and indicators of a “good life” (such as health) all point to a life without disability—and knowing that they wanted to reject this as a conclusion—they were able to contend with some of the more difficult and personal-world-view challenging points from my Intro classes.
We read works that discussed the formation of identity (Valeras), that discussed how we ought to categorize and evaluate disability in a clinical or research setting (Verbugge and Jette), as well as foundational texts in disability literature (such as Elizabeth Barnes’s The Minority Body and Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body). And as our final reading for the semester, contending directly with the way in which the world is built by and for non-disabled folks, we read Sara Hendren’s recently published What Can a Body Do? Hendren’s opening chapter is about a task that she sets for her engineering students: to create a lectern for art historian and curator Amanda, whose height, at just over four feet, is outside of the range considered average for humans, that is portable, proportionate, and capable of doing more than stand at the correct height. With this piece, we considered what the aim of accommodations really is. Is it participation? Entry into the room or a seat at the table? Can we do more?
One might go into teaching this literature expecting that some students may feel like they don’t have anything to contribute or an immediate relationship to such “medical” problems (a view that we spend the first few weeks analyzing and critiquing, alongside the social model of disability); but in my experience, quite the contrary has been the case. Though nearly all (but not all) of the students in my Fall 2021 course had previously had no exposure to disability (either theoretically or experientially), I did not have to convince them that learning about it had an impact on their own lives. I aimed to. I was ready to. But I did not have to. They knew, as Eva Feder Kittay argues, that to rethink the value we place on dependence has everything to do with what sort of lives and livelihoods we value. They knew—no doubt because this point was made so personal for many of us during our current pandemic—that we are dependent on others not just for material goods, but for our mental health. Within each text, they found powerful sources of self-reflection, from many different aspects ranging from questions of medicalized knowledge to questions of architecture and urban planning to ethical composure and their own bearing in the world.
One understanding of public philosophy is that it is when professional philosophers discuss issues that concern the public at large. Another, as the editor of the public philosophy beat on this blog, Ashley Bohrer, suggests, is that it means recognizing the ways that non-academics are already doing philosophy. It is this latter sense that has been given renewed meaning for me in teaching Philosophy of Disability. Reflecting on the way in which my students continuously pointed their inquiry into the construction of our shared spaces and the constructed meaning of our social world, my own thinking about what we can do when teaching philosophy at the undergraduate level to non-majors has radically expanded. In Shannon Proctor’s piece “Growing Into a Public Philosophy Program” for the APA Blog, she writes about public philosophy, that we often assume it is distinct from the work we do in our classrooms. In teaching a class with such apparently public implications, and working with students who were willing to really imagine how the world could be, this distinction was delightfully erased.
Kelsey Borrowman
Kelsey is a PhD candidate at Villanova University. She works both in critical phenomenology and public philosophy, but largely focuses on the intersection of the history of philosophy and disability studies. She’s currently writing her dissertation analyzing the role of health in the philosophies of Rousseau and Nietzsche. Outside of academia, she has strong opinions about contemporary film, dabbles in pottery, and, in the kitchen, is a jack of all cuisines.
Image description: Kelsey is standing in front of a black bookshelf. She is white with brown hair, pulled into a messy bun, affectionately referred to as a ‘rock-a-doodle.’ She’s wearing a cream shirt, several pieces of gold jewelry, and has dark-rimmed glasses.
