The first year of my Ph.D. was conducted entirely online and was something of a blur. This was punctuated by my first experience with West Coast wildfire smoke, lots of solo walks around the University of Washington’s beautiful Seattle campus (that never involved actually venturing into any buildings) and eventually, the vaccines that at one time seemed like they might usher in a new normal. I waver between wanting to forget much of that year—as it turns out, moving a few thousand miles away from nearly everyone you know at a time in which gathering with new acquaintances outside of Zoom is disallowed can be a bit alienating—and ruminating on it, particularly on those aspects of it that helped me see forward and outward. I owe part of this to the dedication and persistent curiosity of my undergraduate students, but my own coursework also kept me centered in a time when it was easy to be anything but.
Two courses in particular stand out to me in this respect: a seminar on feminist ethics, and one on Iris Marion Young’s political philosophy, taught (respectively) by Sara Goering and Carina Fourie. There’s plenty I could say about the content of these courses, as both inspired novel turns in my own research program, and about their wonderful instructors (both of whom, I might add, are exceptional advisors as well). What I want to focus on is less about a particular text or person than it is about the epistemic or intellectual habits that these courses encouraged. Through these courses I found a new appreciation for unanswered questions, or questions whose “answers” consist only of further questions.
I’m not a Hegel scholar, nor am I a committed Socratic, but I’ve grown to appreciate a willingness to respond to questions with “both-and but also neither-nor.” Or, though being terse and sometimes feels risky: “I don’t know.” I often worry that my unwillingness to commit to a single answer to some questions is a character flaw, but I think there’s something actually quite valuable in that admission of—even commitment to—not knowing.
Some questions undoubtedly call for unambiguous answers; as to whether violence and injustice are bad, I’d have a hard time justifying any answer other than a resounding “yes.” The two classes mentioned above helped me grow more comfortable with holding strong convictions about, say, the wrongfulness of injustice, while still recognizing that some questions will remain difficult to answer, or even unanswered altogether. Each class, to some extent, included discussion about the nature of individual responsibility for structural injustice (and, consequently, individual responsibility for ameliorating it). There are, in my view, some clear-cut claims to be made in conversations like these; it doesn’t seem controversial to say, for instance, that individuals have an obligation to work toward dismantling structural barriers, even ones that have historically benefitted them, that make others’ lives more difficult. But what this action, this work, looks like is much more difficult to parse, and both seminars allowed us to sit with and in this difficulty. Rather than using it as a reason to avoid or shut down conversations, I think there’s a strong case to be made for sometimes embracing ambivalence, for being willing to take risks—philosophical and otherwise—armed with the knowledge that the pursuit may be, according to standard measures, fruitless. We might end up back at square one, we might erase paragraphs’ worth of writing upon realizing that it might never arrange itself into a coherent essay, and we might, consequently, find ourselves staring down an unimaginable number of possibilities for how we might use our work to make the world make more sense, if only to ourselves. To quote that meme of a cartoon dog wearing a hat sitting in a burning room: this is fine.
Not knowing has been one of the most constant features of this pandemic Ph.D. That first year, decisions about remote instruction were made on a quarterly basis, so it felt like there was quite a bit of breath-holding, of wondering when we’d be able to talk about our respective lack of knowledge face-to-face. This not knowing applied on a broader level, as we had to contend with not knowing much—or, at least, often not enough—about the virus. Even still, both epidemiologically and from a disability and chronic illness studies perspective, there are so many questions that remain unanswered about the long-term effects of the ongoing pandemic by virtue of the fact that reality—that which is to be known—is happening in, well, real-time.
Not knowing is scary, particularly in these matters of life-and-death. I’ve grown more comfortable in my non-knowledge by considering it in light of Cynthia Townley’s “Toward a Revaluation of Ignorance.” Not knowing is, in a quite literal sense, the foundation of knowing. Neither can really exist without the other. Maybe this betrays some epistemophilic impulse that I don’t actually wish to endorse, but I’ve learned to cope with my ignorance (in many different respects) by viewing it not as an immutable lack, but as a foundation upon which something else—be it knowledge, curiosity, justice, hope, or something else entirely—can be built.
Because I’m a philosopher, I feel obligated to address the most obvious potential flaw in this logic: doesn’t not knowing hurt sometimes? Can’t it be violent, like the “militant, aggressive” white ignorance that Mills critiques? Might not knowing be quite active and pernicious, rather than reflecting a passive state of latent or potential knowledge? I think that the answer to these questions is unquestionably “yes,” but I think that their concerns can be eased in part by viewing genuine curiosity, and action toward satisfying it, as our foremost epistemic obligations. There can be reconciliation, that is, between wanting to know or seeking knowledge, and recognizing that one’s knowledge will never be complete, or completed. I’m not claiming that curiosity alone will rectify injustice, but merely that it is one of many epistemic virtues those of us who are concerned about injustice and our own relationship to it ought to cultivate.
Erica Bigelow
Erica Bigelow is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. The broadest categorization of Erica's research is social and political philosophy, as she works on philosophy of disability and disabled philosophy, applied (bio)ethics, feminist theory, and epistemic/affective injustice.
