Intergenerational Practical Knowledge: Conversations with Senior Philosophers – Elaine Miller

The Women in Philosophy series is launching a mini-series titled “Intergenerational Practical Knowledge: Conversations with Senior Philosophers.” A goal of this mini-series is to create a space of intergenerational knowledge sharing about navigating the profession of philosophy as gender-minoritized folks. This is the first iteration of the mini-series, and Elisabeth Paquette is very happy to be speaking with Dr. Elaine Miller!

To begin, can you provide us with a brief narrative about yourself in philosophy? 

I was an English major in college. So I did not go into philosophy immediately, but I did have a philosophy class in high school. I grew up overseas; I was born in Turkey, in Ankara, and then my family moved to Saudi Arabia, where I grew up. When I was 13,  my sisters and I were sent to a boarding school in India, which was wonderful. There I had a course called “Search for a Meaningful Existence,” which I still remember. It was called a religious studies course, but it was really philosophy, and it was the perfect course for an adolescent away from home in a new environment. I really liked that class, but at the time I didn’t know that was something you could study in university. And because I had done APs in English and had always been a literature person, I thought that was what I would study. I did have one very memorable undergraduate Philosophy course on Marx during a year studying abroad in France.

After graduating from university, I got a job in Japan teaching English for the Ministry of Education in the JET Program. I then moved to Istanbul and taught for two years in an English Department, and it was at that university that I started taking philosophy courses again, and eventually completed an MA in Philosophy before returning to the US for my Ph.D. So my interest in philosophy was always there, but it took a while to develop. 

How has growing up and working in places outside the United States impacted your interest in philosophy or your approach to philosophy?

When philosophers such as Mariana Ortega or María Lugones talk about having a multiplicitous self, or about world traveling—I know that they’re not thinking of my demographic, as someone who’s white, American, and in a very privileged subject position, but at the same time—growing up and moving from one different cultural context to another really made me feel like I had multiple selves and that I needed some way of creating meaning by gathering them together. 

Thinking back to your start in English, something that I talk with students and friends about is the importance of reading novels and things that are outside philosophy in order to spur on philosophy. Is that similar for you?

Reading novels is very important to me, because, although I appreciate the way in which philosophy pushes us to a clarity of thinking and to making arguments, at the same time, I think the form of philosophy is sometimes too restrictive to really expand thinking. Literature opens up worlds in a way that I think philosophy also should. When I write, I always start out with an idea, but also with the understanding that things may completely change as I write. At the end of the initial draft, I go back and I clarify my argument retrospectively. I’m very interested in the creative process, and I want to investigate creativity philosophically, asking how we come up with new ideas and new ways of expressing ideas.

Did you always know that this process of writing for you was the one that worked or did it take time to figure that out?

I didn’t know it explicitly. I remember I went through this process when I was trying to come up with an idea for my dissertation, which would eventually become my first book, The Vegetative Soul. It’s all about the figure of the plant as an alternative way of thinking about subjectivity in nineteenth-century German philosophy.

That’s what I ended up writing about, but I didn’t study that explicitly in grad school.

I studied FWJ Schelling, GWF Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, etc., and I noticed how these figures of plants just kept popping up in texts by these authors, often implicitly linked to feminine subjectivity. I started thinking about how the existence of plants is different from that of animals: How they live together differently, develop differently through metamorphosis, communicate differently, are individuated differently. There’s a lot of that in nineteenth-century philosophy, but it’s in the margins or in seemingly offhand comments.

And when did you graduate?

1998.

Do you see the discipline of philosophy as having changed?

I would say yes and no.

When I first entered the philosophy department at Miami University, I was one of two women faculty members, with one other woman in a visiting position. All the rest of the faculty were men and there was quite a big age difference between us as well. That small community of fellow women philosophers made a huge difference.

As a young woman, I viscerally sensed that to enter professional philosophy was to enter into a very established masculine space.

Now, the most senior people in my department, including me, are women. 

My particular department is good, and when I come to a conference like philoSOPHIA, it’s amazing, but then I am reminded by others’ stories that so much of the old stuff is still going on. 

What allowed those changes to happen?

In my case, when I and the other junior women in the department started to rise to the top of the department and other people retired, when we became the de facto driving force of the department, the department changed.

And I think that is how it happens: when women and other gender-minoritized folks are hired and are able to not just carry out what’s always been done but also make changes, and also when a space opens for new areas of philosophy to be legitimized.

Were there other organizations or particular people that were supportive when you were a graduate student and/or junior scholar?

There were organizations like philoSOPHIA, the Irigaray Circle, and SPEP, and people like Kelly Oliver, Debra Bergoffen, Mary Rawlinson, and Ewa Ziarek, who supported me and many other women in the discipline. 

Within my own department, I have to credit my colleague, Emily Zakin, who really showed me how to be a strong woman in philosophy. She was a good mentor for me, and I think having a mentor is one of the most important things for gender-minoritized faculty in philosophy.

But also, being part of a network is powerful. And it’s a different model of power, right? It’s more of an energetic or horizontal model of power that comes through collectivity, rather than some folks being hierarchically above the rest. That’s the kind of power I seek to create.

So then having a mentor and having community were able to sustain you in philosophy?

Yes, and also there were some international connections that helped, reminding me how philosophy is done and respected in other countries where I studied, like in Turkey and in France.

In addition to reading novels, as we discussed above, are there places that you find space for creativity that either renew your interest in philosophy or inspire your life outside of philosophy?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the body and movement. In philosophy, we’re always in our heads, we’re always writing, thinking, and talking, but we’re not moving very much.

I started doing yoga about 10 years ago, and I became a yoga teacher more recently. I find that if I’m feeling stuck in something that I’m writing or thinking, and I do yoga, or go walking, or running, or anything physically active, it can transform my state of mind. I’m also trying to incorporate more movement into my classes by allowing students to get up, walk around, change places, etc., especially in the context of group work. 

Art of all forms, both creating and experiencing it, is also important to me. I like to write fiction and to draw, and I’m especially interested in contemporary visual art, which I’ve written about in some of my philosophical work.

I’m also a gardener. I love to plant things. My garden is important to me, as a place where I grow vegetables, but also as an aesthetic space where I spend time each morning. I’m not a great gardener, but I always try to spend time with plants and think about the ways in which their existence is so important to our lives. We often overlook them or take them for granted, or assume that they are easy to understand, but plant life is complex and mysterious. Plants have been a big presence in my philosophical writing.  

So how do you balance work and life? Especially given that you travel, you’re a parent, and the chair of a department.

I try to make room for travel because my international connections have always been an important part of who I am. But it is sometimes a struggle because I feel pulled toward my children, who are now grown, toward work, toward my yoga community, all these things that are more rooted in one place. 

This summer I’m going to India on a trip with my university, and that’s an example of a trip that is connected to my work, to philosophy, to yoga, to India, where I lived in the past. 

I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I have two remaining questions. The first question is about your next project. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

I’m interested in the concept of reflective judgment, which for Kant is about judging aesthetics, specifically judging beauty and sublimity and purposiveness in nature. But I want to look at reflective judgment as the basis for a theory of creativity. Kant’s concept of genius is not very interesting to me. To explain creativity as the product of genius is just to say that one is given ideas by nature without understanding them.

And I think there is room for a conception of reflective judgment to explain not just how we judge art but also creativity itself. Reflective judgment was taken up by other people after Kant, such as Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt, in different ways. I’m particularly interested in the indeterminacy of the concept at the heart of reflective judgment. Kant discusses reflective judgment as a product of the play of the understanding and the imagination that results in an indeterminate concept. What is an indeterminate concept? Isn’t a concept by definition determinate?   

I’m thinking about indeterminacy as the potential to create a new concept or a new idea, whether that be an aesthetic idea or a new intellectual concept.  

And finally, do you have any advice for graduate students or junior scholars in philosophy?

Find someone, even someone in another department or school, whom you can absolutely trust and ask for advice, and who will support you and be a model for you on how to flourish in an academic setting. 

When you go to conferences, talk to people of all ages and stages of their careers, because these are also people who can be your mentors, and can give you valuable advice. 

Join organizations like philoSOPHIA, which are supportive and open to a bunch of different ways of doing philosophy. Sometimes you can feel isolated even in your own department, depending on whether or not you have colleagues who do things that are similar to you.

Allow yourself to keep learning and pursue ideas that interest you, without rigidly remaining within a narrow sphere of expertise for the sake of your career. Find interests outside of philosophy that complement your intellectual work. It has been really important for my mental health to continue to be exploratory and creative. I also think it’s ok to completely reinvent yourself intellectually from time to time. 

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.

Elaine Miller

Elaine Miller is Professor of Philosophy at Miami University.  She researches and teaches nineteenth-century German philosophy and contemporary European feminist theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of nature. Her books include Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times (Columbia University Press, 2014), The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (SUNY Press, 2002), and an edited collection, Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity (SUNY, 2006). She has also published articles in the Hegel Bulletin, Idealistic Studies, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and Oxford Literary Review, among others.

Elisabeth Paquette

Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Buffalo (SUNY). She works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. Her publications can be found in the following journals: Badiou Studies; Philosophy Today; Radical Philosophy Review; Hypatia; philoSOPHIA; and Philosophy Compass. She is the founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop. She enjoys rock climbing, camping, knitting, and walking the dogs!