Back to the Warm Home, Good Relationships, and Philosophy

After five prep months, then twenty nine print months and forty two posts, here we start to conclude Into Philosophy, the umbrella series for five mini-series related by affinity. We have three more months and three more posts to go, this month and this post included. Revisiting what we did at mid-point, we decided to correspond back and forth for March and April, half of which you find here. Then Katherine is going to share her last post at the end of May.

~

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

Wir sind aufs Glatteis geraten, wo die Reibung fehlt, also die Bedingungen in gewissem Sinne ideal sind, aber wir eben deshalb auch nicht gehen können. Wir wollen gehen; dann brauchen wir die Riebung. Zurück auf den rauhen Boden!

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, par. 107, 1945

March 5th, 2023
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Dear Katherine and Jeremy,

When you and I, Jeremy, first started the series, we were in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. We had a couple of conversations before we came to the idea of our first mini-series, Genealogies of Philosophy and Philosophy as a Way of Life. The former opened up some of the background conditioning philosophical endeavors while seeing how people’s stories belonged to or changed that philosophical ground. The latter stretched philosophy as a way of life so that it included decolonization, comparative philosophy, community art practice, institutional design, and outdoor education.

There was a great deal of uncertainty in our world when we started working on the series while also navigating life under the pandemic. After years of precarious work, I didn’t have a permanent academic job, and like many young, professional philosophers found myself growing disillusioned with the entire academic enterprise. Increasingly, I began to wonder whether philosophy—and perhaps even more fundamentally, intellectual pursuits—are worth it in the end. I’d thought my whole life: Erudition for its own sake! Then later: Who cares if degrees in the Humanities don’t pay well! But in the lead-up to our series, I felt like many other post-PhDs I know: as though the electric fuse in my mind had blown out.

This trajectory began years earlier during my doctoral studies. I sat for hours at my desk facing gray cloisters and overcast skies—an atmosphere so quintessentially English. I typed on a Microsoft word document while the grotesque political storm around Brexit raged and discourse about the “migrant crisis” in Europe took an especially dark turn. In the midst of these politically significant times, had I no other choice but to preoccupy myself with the analytic reception and the phenomenological critique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?

WORKING THROUGH OUR SERIES ALLOWED ME TO RETURN TO PHILOSOPHY (AND TO WRITING). IT MADE VIVID TO ME THAT PHILOSOPHY DOES HAVE AN INTERNAL MEANING, THAT IT IS RELATIONSHIP DOWN TO ITS CORE.

I once thought that philosophy is a kind of distillery leaving the dirt of politics behind. There is something beautiful (and old) about this idea. Many philosophers, including Wittgenstein, believed that we could give an account of the world that was crystalline and pure. But then they realized that in trying to do this, we actually leave the world behind. “Back to the rough ground!”

Coming back to the rough ground for me was realizing that there was a utilitarian and almost exclusively outcome-focused orientation to the work I was doing. My concern was increasingly financial. Can I finish my doctorate before funding runs dry? Will I find a job subsequently? Soon, I didn’t see much of an internal meaning to any of it. The sobriety that comes with aging showed me that life has its own demands.

I don’t know if either of you has had this feeling that doing philosophy can induce embodied stagnation while the mind goes on running. Sitting in front of my screen in those days with an ever-roiling mind, I came across a poem by Osip Mandelstam, a politically subversive Soviet poet who took on Stalin himself and paid a heavy price for it. Here’s the poem:

There is no need for words:
nothing must be heard.
How sad, and fine,
an animal’s dark mind.
Nothing it must make heard:
it has no use for words,
a young dolphin, plunging, steep,
along the world’s gray deep.

While I don’t agree with Mandelstam that the dolphin’s mind is sad or dark, something of the animal with a quiet mind and a body moving through its element lingered. When I returned to teaching after my doctorate, that English mood stayed with me, the poem too. I stopped reading most philosophy. I almost ceased writing …

Working through our series allowed me to return to philosophy. Our series made vivid to me that philosophy does have an internal meaning, that it is a relationship down to its core. Even when relationships in professional philosophy are fraught, alienated, denied, or less than congenial, they are needed for reasoning with each other about the world as a community. Through my work with you both and the various people we’ve met along the way, I’ve come to see that there is a living pulse underlying philosophical work after all. Part of our series consisted of finding and listening to this pulse.

You joined us, Katherine, with your mini-series, Starting Out in Philosophy, while I and Jeremy moved on to Precarity and Philosophy and On Congeniality. Despite differences, our series are intertwined especially by the critical spirit that runs through them sometimes light-hearted and other times melancholy. It seems to stem from a longing for a future philosophy. This longing isn’t utopian. It isn’t about perfection or purity (what one might typically associate with utopias). I am thinking of something less determinate, messier: the rough route made when one moves through tall grass.

This path came to the fore especially in your beautifully searching posts, Katherine, in which we accompany you and those you interviewed discussing the possibilities of your education, including chores, the meaning of studying, and how the university might relate to those it has excluded or ignored.

Over the last two years, I’ve gradually returned to writing. What about you? In the spirit of one of our mini-series, Genealogies of Philosophy, I want to ask you both where you were when we started the series. Where do you find yourselves now?

Yours sincerely,

Sidra

~

March 6th, 2023
Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA
Subject to the Treaty of Greenville, 1795

Oh my, Sidra,

Your note made me happy. And hello, Katherine, how is your day out in Portland reaching meaning through the texture of social service alongside community-based, non-academic, group study of texts?

I’ve been reading Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica for my class called Good Relationships. My students are writing these long and thoughtful emails, and we have had some involved conversations in class, which we describe as a “reading group” for credit. The protagonist of the novel, Allison, suffers through chronic Hepatitis C and is feverish in the stream of consciousness of the novel. 

I am like that tonight, edged on by the book but only because I am more broadly so, tired from being a parent, a little stressed (but resisting it) from work stuff at an organization where I’m volunteering, and sitting here with Misty drawing her current portrait’s lines—it will be a watercolor to match her lithograph of her grandmother Emma (my son Emet’s namesake)—right there across from me, one tough mother. I am thinking of mothers. We exist in a social world that is unjust. But how do we make the most of what is good in it while finding ways to improve our society over generations so that it comes slowly to make good enough sense?

I WANTED TO DO LONG INTERVIEWS AS PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS. THESE WERE REVEALING, THE PROCESS EXCEPTIONALLY MEANINGFUL.

When we began our series, Sidra, and when, Katherine, you joined us, I put my trust in you. It was easy to. We knew each other. You were trustworthy, and I am grateful that you trusted me.

Our relationships across three generations (“Gen Z to Y to X”) were a source of potential good, one that held true. I heard what we did as the strength of a small, persistent note that rides on the undersurface of a noisy room, contributing in a small way to changing the tenor of what is philosophically possible in our time. Aim for subtle philosophy fit for the motion of life? But to change a philosophy is to change our pursuits, justifications, and sensibilities.

The proposition that I explored through my two series was one of form, not content. We typically get arguments in philosophy, but not the stream of consciousness about Misty and mothers. That is a problem, in my opinion. It diminishes philosophy. I approached some such problem as this through the form of life in Philosophy as a Way of Life and via relational reasoning in On Congeniality. With the former series, the practical form opened up a space to let life in, and with the latter series, the relational form diffused theory into interpersonal depth and subtlety.

I wanted to follow a form to its completion, here the project of the five mini-series woven together by the pretext of Into Philosophy: “stories exceed ideas.” I wanted to write with others in a way the writing would contribute to good relationships and personal growth, not simply be a means of people advertising themselves or of promoting their work. Both of these things seem to ride the undersurface of interviews and posts these days, and it sickens me. It’s so unphilosophical! And the way in which creative people try to sell themselves is so corrosive! Also cowardly. It’s far better to protest than to sell out.

I wanted to do long interviews as personal relationships. These were revealing, the process exceptionally meaningful. In one case, we met someone and found out that they were irascible. Well, it has been the COVID age. In all other cases, our project brought us closer together with our collaborators or interviewees. People got nervous; we adapted. And in at least three cases, interviews we had planned did not ever see the light of day. One was entirely written! But letting things go was for the better. We respected the relationships in the process.

Reading Veronica, I can be struck by both the profession and the discipline of philosophy’s lack of continuity with the flow of life. Perhaps it is too much to ask for conceptual rigor and literary authenticity? Should writing philosophy be as scary as diving de novo from height? Theories covered in dust and crumbs from an apartment before Spring cleaning suggest the smells of a winter’s worth of meals—soups, crock pots, skillets, and bake trays. Sounds of footsteps creaking floorboards, echoed cell phones rung from other rooms, the outside enters. Klaxons of cars or deceptive sifting where the outer brush is silent, country dark.

Jeremy

~

March 13th, 2023
Portland, Oregon

Dear Sidra and Jeremy,

I loved reading your notes and getting a glimpse of your lives. What else is there even to say?

I was so lost when we began this series. I feel lost now as well, probably even more so.

When you two invited me to join this series, I was preparing to head to college and full of anticipation for it. I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer for what was important or meaningful. But I did have confidence that it was through erudition that all those details could be figured out.

The classroom was exhilarating, but it never presented me with the way of life that I sought. This was jarring. I never intended school to be just four-years-long. I didn’t want to merely prepare for what was next. I wasn’t even after learning for its own sake. I was looking for a sufficient way of life. Could academic study be enough for making my life?

I had romantic ideas about spending entire days in the library. Accompanied by dusty books, I would sort things out. That was to be my life. Yet there wasn’t a culture of this on my campus. It felt against the grain at a place oriented so much by prestige and ambition to instead seek out what is truly valuable or to work on what mattered to us. That I found more reliably on walks and at parties when friends and I tried to wade through the messiness of our lives or at protests working together to make institutions better.

I tried and at times failed to find the attention I romanticized. That made me less confident my vision was even achievable outside of fleeting moments in conversation where learning felt pure. My ideal felt selfish in the middle of social strife and poor working conditions which not only existed next to my pure learning but which were the conditions enabling it to happen.

Was it possible to even talk about what mattered through erudition? Bizarre as this might sound, I doubted it, thwarted in my attempts to do so in the classroom and trying to reckon with the state of the world that allowed my privileged learning to occur but to which my learning seemed to have little to say in response. Not a good situation!

Yet I am resourceful. My series became about anything that I thought could make for a life: study-community, study-politics. How can we use our studies to solve the problems of our lives? How can intellectual life make us more human? What is the best way to acquire a meaningful civic education? I found erudition outside of class that does help us wade through our lives, affirmed an intimate intellectual life bringing us in touch with our humanity, and reflected on how some educations are organized to shape us as political beings. Then, in my time away from college, I’ve used the tools of philosophy to consider closely my life outside of academia.

The point is, since I entered college, I’ve begun to move away from academics as entirely the center of life. They’re not enough to make my life.

Despite feeling pressure to succeed and my own guilt-ridden love of learning, I’ve been proud of myself when I could let a deadline roll by. Something more important beckoned: time with a friend or a protest. I told myself not to take classes too seriously or ask too much of them. Please understand this. I seek what matters. I felt conflicted about how to uphold all my relations when there were important obligations that the university was failing.

I have been mourning that academic philosophy, while enjoyable, seems not to hold many answers. Instead of studying academic philosophy, I now find that life is rich and confusing. Academic philosophy isn’t at its center, although when philosophy pops up in the midst of living, it can be helpful.

You know, not all of life needs to be philosophical. Not everything we do needs a worked-out philosophical motivation. In fact, some things shouldn’t have one, otherwise we could not grow and just live. But philosophy can bring us outside of ourselves to take an honest look at who we are and what we say. Philosophy can help us stretch ourselves to take seriously how another represents her ideas about the world. This call and response is how we build up a common world. I want philosophy that can help me to articulate myself when asked, after taking a moment to find expression for something I haven’t figured out yet. We ought to be able to explain ourselves to others. In this, I often realize that I am mistaken (and I have a habit of stopping mid-sentence when that happens!), but it is through dialogue that we can build out a shared world.

I WANT PHILOSOPHY THAT CAN HELP ME TO ARTICULATE MYSELF WHEN ASKED, AFTER TAKING A MOMENT TO FIND EXPRESSION FOR SOMETHING THAT I HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT YET.

I was lacking, and my experience of academic philosophy lacked, this call and response. But I find it in conversation and also in experiments in living where thinking is a fluid part of life and our projects are entangled with those of others. Then this world feels so goodly strange to me working with others to live in ways that make sense to us. Our lives intermix, and we find the completion of a thought in just trying things out, living accordingly. Here’s a kind of family where thoughts become familiar through wear and tarrying.

Happily in our mini-series, we tried to do philosophy while stretching the limits of its ideas and topics usually discussed in academia. Sidra, your post on intergenerational bonds was an occasion to think about my relationship with the dead. Jeremy, your post on sarcasm helped me to work through some cynicism I was developing after a year of schooling that seemed fake. I love playing with words and ideas, but helpful philosophy is that kind of philosophy. It’s what I’d be most comfortable giving the name wisdom to.

I don’t know what I am interested in anymore, honestly, and I don’t know where I could fit in the world. I don’t know what philosophy could mean in my life or if I am even still interested in it now. Today I feel melancholic. It is early morning in Portland, raining hard. What a distance between how things are and how they must be! What are we to do with all this?

With warmth,

Katherine

~

March 16th, 2023
Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA
Subject to the Treaty of Greenville, 1795

Hey Katherine,

That picture up there—it’s from 2007, a reunion of me with my college buddies, still my close friends to this day. The photo is actually of my dad’s internal family memoir, Reasonably Contented: Growing Up at My Own Speed. My dad and I go out to Market Hall in Van Aiken once a week after swimming at the Warrensville Heights YMCA (I swim, he does water aerobics at almost 87 years of age). We get a macchiato for him, and an oat milk latté for me (the only time in the week when I add anything to my coffee). Then we discuss some part of the memoirs which took him 10 years to write (2005-2015). That’s our way to remember our family, my late mom (his wife of 54 years), and also to prepare for the day when my dad is gone and I go on.

That’s my mom, Esther Ann Bendik, singing on the Commons in Ithaca in about 1975. That’s me with my back to the camera in the left foreground! 

Here are some more college photos from the memoir while I’m at it:

See, those photos from 1992-93 suggest that we buddies were still together fifteen years later in 2007. And now thirty years hence (scroll down to see Steve in that post)!

These photos are there for a reason: to focus on good relationships especially when one is in a structurally unjust context. I’m trying to catch up to your mood right now. I don’t like you feeling sad and lost. As you know, lostness can be good, the life of wonder. But it can also be not so good. Which is it for you?

Studying within structurally unjust academia

You write compellingly. Yet sometimes, I didn’t find your reasoning convincing. Here’s one example. One reason to hand in an assignment on time is because you made an agreement. A class is a moral compact where all others depend on it for the class to go smoothly. Certainly, the moral structure of institutions in structurally unjust contexts is troubled, and there are more important things than getting schoolwork in on time. You are right. But is a false opposition being created when something as quotidian as making good on our promises to do our work in one context is supposed to challenge unjust labor in a different context? Is the individualism of that protest appropriate?

It’s one thing to chafe at classroom norms, another to collectively organize to change them. Is there a way to go to class and to the library to learn as a tactic? The word “tactic” comes from ancient Greek, meaning a rigorous, systematic form of organization. A “tactic” is not simply or always a military figure but is a word that can be used more broadly for truly organic systems, where “organic” indicates functional relations, even instruments or tools. I am asking about how class can become a tactic for social justice and deepening humanity.

This bears on the question of romanticism that you mentioned. Romanticism was in many ways a protest movement about social alienation, urban exploitation, and industrialism. Also, the denial of equality between people’s hearts. Your letter uses the term pejoratively, but to my mind, you may very well be a current-day romantic! You eschew convention to rediscover authenticity. You seek intimate communities where spirituality, thought, service, and cooperation form a whole. You are defiant against all forms of obstruction between people as equals and within communication that could otherwise be sincere. That at least fits historical romanticism.

This loss of history about what was noble in the romantic is possible in part because you do not seem to be locating the concept in studying history/tradition enough, which is itself possible when one does not give a lot of time to the study of tradition. That time need not be spent in a classroom, a college, or even today in a library. But these things can be used—tactically!—for such deep work in the traditions. Also, without libraries and structured, rigorous institutions of learning in some form, the internet would just make a total mess of things, don’t you think? How do we transmit intergenerational knowledge well? Romanticism might even give you a way to approach the library as a protest, a kind of revolt. This is how Foucault saw the archive, and how many liberation intellectuals see it now, such as Saidiya Hartman.

The general point hovering in the background is this. How can academic philosophy hold answers if one doesn’t give time to it, including working one’s way up into advanced classes and down into traditions of practice, discourse, and thought? This is one of those moments where the thing is set up to fail because the approach to it is not sufficient to let it do its work. This matter strikes me as morally important. Our job in college is to go to class, the library, the lab, etc., and to learn. Otherwise, it’s not the right institution for us. At the same time, one can’t blame the academic structure if one doesn’t give it a sincere chance. Maybe today that takes tactics?

In the night air
when stillness tells the world
there's still life inside the heart,
we hear the city coming together.
Like the bar I went to last weekend, singing,
or the stadium shouting out the match,
and the families, even, more beautiful than loneliness.

~ an excerpt from memory of something I wrote for the Yale Literary Magazine in 1991

Honoring tradition as an organic tactic

How should we position academic work in our lives? When I read your letter and thought back to your older posts, another thing that I wondered is whether there is an unfunctional pressure being put on schoolwork to offer solutions to living. This would be like asking a chalk line to do the work of a hammer to take out studs. So much of flourishing is figuring out what things are good for what other things, letting life acquire breadth because there are so many different tools, tasks, and experiences. Think of a workshop with a great array of tools and parts spread out around it, and which one is academic study in that array? Again, a question of tactics.

When I study an esoteric subject in the history of philosophy, something that academic rigor and resources are especially well poised if not needed to do, the study affords me the opportunity to take in a whole range of things that I might not normally consider about how life gets conventionally organized and understood in my world. This allows me to sit back and contemplate. Notice how different this is from the pressure to find solutions. It’s about taking things in and understanding their relationships. Does it make sense to let academic work sit on the side of living so that it affords us a space to contemplate?

In my reply to Sidra, I criticized the loss of continuity between everyday life and the discipline of philosophy. Now here I am suggesting that academic work should sit on the side of living. That sounds discontinuous: a university drawn back from commercial and political life, its own enclosed community. 

Yet philosophy can be personal and contemplative at once, something that opens up the strangeness of being human. Think of someone who used to teach at your college: Stanley Cavell, especially his memoir, Little Did I Know. Cavell was a classical pianist before becoming a philosophy professor. He wrote like the French impressionists of piano, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel—or their precursor, Chopin—an intimate stream of consciousness. Especially in that last book of his, Cavell showed that the stream of consciousness can draw on the depths of history and its alien strangeness while surfacing into one’s own life’s depths and strangeness.

Just writing about Cavell (whose writing prior to the memoir usually annoyed me!) makes me excited to engage with what we do in universities as humanists. His engagement with interpretation was that powerful. I still have it on my to-do list that I get to lead or participate in a reading group around his once-dissertation, The Claim of Reason.

In some such spirit of the personal and the erudite, your letter brought to mind honoring tradition. Now by this, I do not mean honoring something unjust. I mean honoring what learning and error have come before us in rigorously making sense of things. Krushil Watene and Christine J. Winter have been directly and indirectly teaching me about the Māori understanding of whakapapa—genealogies or “layerings.” Last week, Krushil was talking with Simona Capisani and me about how Krushil does not so much criticize the Capability Approach (the three of us were discussing our work with it) but honors it. I took this to mean by improving or adapting it. Krushil later corrected me that the honoring is not whakapapa per se; that is an ontology, axiology, and epistemology, as she explained. But being in tradition where critique is honoring struck me as a particularly powerful way to be genealogical.

When Krushil spoke of honoring the tradition she endeavors to improve, I had one of those moments where the coloniality of knowledge is real. Criticism is such an antagonistic way to understand tradition. Yet honoring by improving seems just as “critical,” perhaps more so, because it begins with trying to be constructive and to appreciate the truth or good in something, a tenant that Aristotle also held. The point is, another reason for academic study is to become part of a tradition, something that exceeds the personal anxieties tending to preoccupy many in neoliberal individualism. Maybe we could benefit from learning from the vastness of traditions? Sidra and you both seem to accept this.

One of the things that seems good about college is that it is a time to get lost in tradition, to step out of the commercial and fraught flow of the present and to become more of a part of humankind in our thoughts. In what we carry with us. Then college is a time to pause and go back into the roots of things, their layerings. Here, I imagine the stream of consciousness continuity with everyday life rushing over a waterfall into a deep, calm pool where sunlight cannot reach the rocky bottom, the rough ground. The things we say to ourselves then become mixed with the words and insights, the sediment, of ancestors. Thoughts rising up from time.

Academic study is a way of doing things with integrity in history, participating in a multigenerational effort for the common good. In its systematic forms, disciplines, and rigors, it is tactical. The question is how to make academic study organic—tactical—in one’s life situated within structural injustice. But if one can do this, then our studies should involve suspending practical anxieties enough to swim with esoteric and very difficult things. In letting ourselves do this, we might emerge from the pool refreshed and sometimes even with a mind to change. I am wary of anything in myself that ends up being reductive of being human, one-dimensional, not multidimensional as we are.

WHEN THEY LEFT, HE SHOOK MY HAND AND LOOKED HARD AT ME:  “DON’T BE BITTER,” HE SAID.  HE WASN’T DENYING SOCIAL JUSTICE.

A story about bitterness and study

There was status consciousness, elitism, and vanity in the private college I attended, too. Like you, I found college seriously objectionable, even a quarter century out from it. But there was a part of it—in hard work, being with good friends, creating, working in the Dixwell Projects and at the Q House for kids, being a literacy volunteer, editing poetry for the lit magazine, and what I now am being challenged to think of as honoring tradition—that was good. Highly not ideal. Still, good, that part of college. A basis for the future.

I worked in the dining hall in college as part of my work-study and was a union member of Local 35. Well, the waste and entitlement I experienced working on the other side of the serving line or in the dishroom got to me over time. Students could be so spoiled, mean, and entitled! By my junior year, still absorbing my first big breakup ever, I also became jaded about college.

It was winter break. My parents had over friends. One of them was a philosophy professor. We talked. I complained. When they left, he shook my hand and looked hard at me: “Don’t be bitter,” he said. He wasn’t denying social justice.

The way I pushed past bitterness was that I cherished my friendships and devoted myself to the chance to go deep into time, both my own and the world’s. I don’t know if that would work for you. But society takes generations to improve. We have to pace ourselves and find our tactics.

Faithfully,

Jeremy

~

Station Sloterdijk, Amsterdam
March 21st, 2023
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Dear Katherine and Jeremy,

I read your letter, Katherine, while commuting to class on a rainy day. Sitting on the train, the gray skies above me and the gray concrete of industrial buildings rushing past, I reflected on the sources of discontent about university education that I have encountered in my own lifetime. I remembered an image of a palm tree somewhere in the United Arab Emirates from 2018. Then, I recalled a song. Back in 2003, I listened to Blur’s “Out of Time” repeatedly shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq and right before I left for college.

Let me be honest first by telling you that when I was a student, I had little patience for grievances that classmates expressed about our education. From where I stood with my monetary and passport difficulties, my European classmates seemed quite privileged. Many came from wealthy families, had access to government subsidies, and didn’t have to worry too much about grades and scholarships. When they would complain about classes, I’d find myself quickly growing exasperated.

Many around the world would give anything to have access to an education such as theirs. I was grateful for being in the classroom. Working in the serenity of a library surrounded by old books, I could hardly believe it at times. Here I am studying philosophy so far from home, while my grandmothers were illiterate and my mother was never allowed to finish primary school.

Over time, however, I began to see things differently. Not all criticisms of university education are the same. There are those students, of course, who think they have purchased an education the way one purchases anything. Some are disappointed that their monotonous lecturer cannot deliver a power talk along the lines of TEDx. Others are annoyed at having to read for classes while a few suffer from the familiar hubris of the undergrad who believes they already know everything. “Why,” a student asked me once, “do I have to read another Foucault text? I’ve already read Foucault in another class!” It is not just students, of course. University administrators are captivated by “the new.” The overused, empty word “innovation” is supposed to encapsulate it.

Your perspective on the university, Katherine, is a world apart from these criticisms. I find it wonderful that you are looking so earnestly for what is authentic and meaningful, that you are trying to develop an internal relationship with your education rather than taking external parameters of success for granted. That task seems to be especially difficult at your college. There is urgency driving your critique, making your alienation from university education human.

It can seem at times that an apocalypse is closing in on us. With the destruction wrought by climate change, increasing divisions and inequalities in our societies, and the rise of hardhearted right-wing politics across the world, it seems the world is running out of time. All the while, there are people in need.

We can think, for example, of the migrants that drown regularly at the shores of Europe or who are dehumanized in its camps. Then there are the recent earthquakes in Syria and Turkey with the death and destruction made so much worse by government ruthlessness. Natural catastrophes such as earthquakes or pandemics may not be caused by human beings, but human beings do determine the magnitude of their destructive power.

We can also think of other life forms. It recently occurred to me that to grow up in our world is to live the reversal of the fairy tales we read as children. In these fairy tales, what is tender and meek, our animal relatives for example, defeat what is heartless and cruel. When we see images of singed trees, scorched landscapes, and of maimed animals, we know that too often it is cruelty that wins.

YOU ARE RIGHT TO WONDER AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THIS WORLD, “WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SIT IN A CLASSROOM, TO CLOSE-READ TEXTS FOR ONE’S OWN ERUDITION AND EVENTUALLY SOME SORT OF A DEGREE? WOULD IT NOT BE SO MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL TO WORK PRACTICALLY TOWARDS CLOSING THE RIFT?”

I don’t think that I felt this urgency so acutely when I was doing my undergraduate studies immersed as I was in a particular vision of philosophy. In my youth, philosophy was a source of consolation. For a long time, it also allowed me to retreat from our messy and complicated world.

I was in my teens when the U.S. declared war against Afghanistan and then Iraq. The former neighbored Pakistan where I’m from. The latter neighbored Kuwait where I lived. While these wars gave rise to the first glimmerings of political consciousness in me, soon enough the idea that one could substantially change anything seemed hopeless. As an undergrad, I started studying politics, but I soon turned to philosophy. You see, I sincerely thought that philosophy gave me access to the most fundamental truths, and these truths were sempiternal and unalloyed. Philosophy wasn’t quite a form of escapism. It was more a contact with the fundamental truth of things in the style of the old metaphysicians or theologians.

I do think there should be room for philosophy of every kind, but at times philosophy rightly comes under pressure from the world around us. We need not go far to face this pressure. As faculty, should we sit content at our desks knowing of our universities’ investments in perpetuating precarious labor, in disposing of staff members who investigate bullying and intimidation at the university, or in building alliances with the fossil fuel industry? What is the philosopher’s task here?

You are right then to wonder against the backdrop of our world what it means to sit in a classroom at an elite and exclusive university, to close-read texts for one’s own erudition and eventually some sort of grade and a degree. Would it not be so much more meaningful to work practically towards closing the rift between how things are and how they ought to be? You put that so well in your letter. No matter how dire things may seem sometimes, reality – as Paulo Freire tells us – is unfinished and open to our freedom. It is difficult to turn one’s face away from this fact.

But college need not be a form of turning away. Jeremy, you describe the time at college as one that allows our consciousness to enter a “deep, calm pool” where our thoughts mix with those of our ancestors. This is indeed a picture of learning at college that is removed from consequences. Yet while removed from consequences, this way of looking at learning is not removed from political agency. We need that deep, calm pool to become less reactive and more responsive in our urgent times. The idea isn’t of course to be extractive, to mine learning for items of political or practical consequence, but to allow learning to deepen our sense of things.

Yours,

Sidra

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

Part II of this epistolary correspondence will appear at the end of next month.

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer would like to thank Timothy Wutrich and Paul Iverson for guidance with ancient Greek and Misty Morrison for an artist’s look at this post.