As many of us head back into our classrooms to greet new cohorts of students, I am thinking about what it means (to me) to teach in philosophy. Since I started studying philosophy some twenty-five years ago, I’ve had the luck of learning from master-teachers of the discipline, who transformed my thinking and living.
More generally, I have been considering the ways philosophers approach feeling, influenced in part by recent work with a cohort of folks from Philosophia, Ada Jarsmaa, Lauren Guilmette, Taylor Rogers, and Bailey Szustak. For the 2024 meeting, these feminist philosophers brought together scholars across disciplines to consider the themes of making, doing, and sensing in philosophy. These thinkers, among them Tay, whose philosophical film, N.O.A., is a meditation on grief and world-traveling, join me in considering how we might use all of our tools to engage in our philosophical explorations.
This summer, I traveled to Berlin, Germany, to celebrate the publication of Beauvoir and Politics: A Toolkit, edited by Liesbeth Schoonheim and Karen Vintges, and participate on a panel at Humboldt University with some of the other contributors. In addition to sipping spritzes on the Spree, I was also able to connect with Caleb Ward, who researches and teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin. A fellow scholar of Audre Lorde and co-organizer of the upcoming 2024 Roundtable for Black Feminist and Womanist Theory / 2024 FEAST Conference on Audre Lorde, which will feature a keynote by Alexis Pauline-Gumbs, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Caleb also invited me to join him for the dedication of Audre-Lorde-Straße, a street named after Lorde that commemorates the impact that Lorde had on the Afro-German (queer, feminist) community during her frequent visits there from 1984 to 1992. I also used my visit to Berlin to delve into an environmental reading of Lorde’s Berlin lectures, collected and translated in 2020’s Audre Lorde: Dreams of Europe, Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984-1992.
The publications of Survival and texts like Kathryn Sophia Belle’s Belle and Beauvoir: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex and Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle affirm the uptake of examination and analysis of Lorde’s work in disciplines like philosophy and beyond. In the second set of lectures from Dreams, Lorde identifies what she terms the “institutionalized outsider,” the artist who is taken up by institutions and “can stand in opposition as long as not threatening” (79). As Lorde herself becomes institutionalized, I fear how her incorporation into a discipline like philosophy might serve to limit the breadth of her impact.
Lorde was a student of philosophy, though throughout the lectures and her prose at large, she frequently draws a distinction between the work of philosophers and the work of poets. She is clear that the poet’s job is to make people feel, but she frequently makes philosophy, or the male European paternal, the foil to the feeling, poet mother. Upon first encounter, Lorde’s work immediately disturbs many understandings of our discipline.
While reading the Berlin lectures, I was most struck by Lorde’s attempt to reach and teach her Berlin students and inspired by what she wished and required from them. Lorde’s approach to pedagogy seemed to mirror in many ways her approach to poetry and theory. In all, she stresses feeling, self-conscious living, and examination of specific experience.
I am led to a number of questions:
What is the task of the philosopher? Where is the place for feeling in the philosophy classroom? What does it mean for Black feminist and other “outsider” figures to enter into our philosophical sphere? How can we be transformed by them beyond the theoretical so that we can live into the full measure of their impact? How do we question the universal? How do we lead our students into understanding concepts that come out of the experiences of those outside of the mythical norm?
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Audre Lorde first visited Berlin around the age of 50 upon the invitation of Dagmar Schultz to conduct a series of lectures about African American literature at the Free University of Berlin. Dreams includes two of these series: a Black Women’s Poetry Seminar and a series on the Poet as Outsider. In the early lectures, Lorde is new to the context of Berlin and new to this group of students, who are by and large young white German women. Although at this point in her career Lorde is a fairly well-known poet and Black feminist activist, she doesn’t know these students and seems unsure, almost defensive, about what to expect from them. She begins her first lecture on April 19 thusly: “I don’t believe you can learn by passive interaction with the material. Learning can only take place in the active examination of the materials you read next to your own living…” (19). She continues: “It will be necessary for us to know each other and who we are as we look at this work,” (19) orienting her students immediately to the discernable distances and differences among them that will ground her approach to the lectures. She also upsets their prior beliefs about learning. She asserts that her students will have to “hyphen” ideas “through their living” (33)—not merely imbibe them.
In my first-ever philosophy class at Spelman College taught by my first-ever philosophy master-teacher, Al-Yasha Williams, we were told to purchase Deleuze & Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? I don’t recall whether we ended up discussing it, but I do remember cracking it open and trying to understand it and not making it past the first page during my freshman year. These days, as a tenured philosophy professor, when I have an especially challenging class and begin to wonder what I am doing in this discipline, I sometimes pick it up, hoping to gain some insight into the essence of the philosophical endeavor from those more knowledgeable than me. Deleuze and Guattari describe philosophy as “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (2) and assert that philosophers seek to acquire “knowledge through pure concepts” (7). While Lorde’s poet sees understanding as the handmaiden of knowledge and knowledge as that which is produced by virtue of feeling, Deleuze and Guattari see the philosopher as he who authorizes the concept. They write, “Conceptual becoming is heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form; sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression” (177). According to this model, the philosopher gathers the differences and makes them absolute, which distinguishes his work from the poet/artist. The poet captures the singularity of experience, but the philosopher is tasked to universalize. Deleuze and Guattari write (humbly?) of this effort: “The first principle of philosophy is that universals explain nothing, but must themselves be explained” (7).
In the lectures, Lorde criticizes the myth of the Universal. She rejects the idea of a universal poet or poetry out of hand, asking her students if they “have ever seen [a universal] walking down the street?” (89) Her point is that the (western philosophical) injunction to seek (aesthetic and other) universals is merely an attempt to “bypass the fact of difference” (43). For Lorde, the fact that the poem emerges from and depicts the world of feeling of a specific persona (and Lorde is clear that her students ought not view a poem as an autobiographical artifact), does not limit its ability to connect to the world of feeling of the reader nor its ability to reveal truth. She tells them, “Because there are truths it does not mean there have to be absolutes, and the fact that absolutes do not exist does not relieve us from decision. It only makes our decisions more difficult and crucial. If you follow the concept of goodness long enough, you may bring it to places where it no longer functions” (111).
Here, the commitments of the philosopher and the poet meet. As teachers, many of us share a belief in the practice of considered dialogue. Lorde, because of her Black feminist commitment to survival, further illuminates the promise of developing a classroom environment for such dialogue. She implores her students, “We must be in training for speaking, this is one of the things that should be happening in a place like this” (88). While dialogue may unearth difference and friction, she tells them, “We forget how endangered we are and where real dangers lie” (29). The classroom for Lorde, like bell hooks (another one of my theoretical master-teachers), is a space for the practice of freedom, a training ground to examine unspoken ideas and agendas, to bridge difference. Most philosophers share this sentiment—that it is worthwhile to question and reconsider hegemonic, cliched, and underexamined ideas.
Furthermore, many of us entered into the discipline as students because we had teachers who introduced us to texts that in some way helped us make better sense of the world. Lorde tells her students, “I am here because I want to examine a body of literature, which has been vital to me, in conjunction with the rest of you…. I am here because I am greedy, and curious” (20). As teachers, we hope to model to our students our approach(es) to relating to ideas and concepts.
During my graduate studies at Temple University, I learned from another philosophy master-teacher, Lewis Gordon, who tells of how he entered into the discipline of philosophy itself because of an interest in the philosophy of education in his book Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. In the text, Gordon criticizes disciplines for losing “sight of themselves as efforts to understand the world” and collapsing “into the hubris of asserting themselves as the world” (8). For Gordon, the antidote to this decadence is “when a discipline suspends its own centering because of a commitment to questions greater than the discipline itself” (34). He suggests that when philosophers do this, they breathe new life into philosophy.
Gordon, reflecting on the contributions of one of his master-teachers, Africana philosopher Paget Henry, raises the question, what happens to the philosophical enterprise when it is indelibly altered by the critiques of those whose thinking resists and challenges western European ideological hegemony? In other words, if we are to take seriously not only what we can abstractly extract from the thinking of Black feminists, but also enact the radical, liberatory promise of their ideas, then this means that the shape of how we practice and how we teach philosophy (how we internalize the insights of these thinkers and hyphen them through our philosophical lives) must also alter to reflect not only our theoretical, but also our practical, understanding of what we are contributing to and teaching within our discipline.
During the May 3, 1984, class session, Lorde tells her students, “In order to live we must synthesize thought and feeling, yet we have been raised to respect only our ideas” (33). She goes on to clarify: “I did not say ideas are worthless, I said they do not alter our lives until we flesh them with ourselves, with the substance of our living” (34). Lorde relies on a Black feminist onto-epistemological standpoint that allows her to distinguish between which aspects of (imperialist white supremacist ableist capitalist hetero-patriarchal) ideas are usable to her and which should be discarded. In this way, Lorde’s hope to make her students “self-conscious”—feeling thinkers, thinking feelers, situated and particular—is a return to philosophy’s supposed roots, a recapitulation of the Socratic examination of living.
The upcoming academic year promises to be its own master-teacher of sorts. We and our students have now watched nearly a year of a genocidal war live on our phones and televisions. An upcoming Presidential election looms upon us. Higher education remains one of the most contested political arenas. Lorde warned her students in 1984: “Our ideas will not argue to save us” (32). But maybe, if we philosophers of today teach Lorde and other Black feminists faithfully—if we train our students to mitigate against the separation of thinking and feeling, to have the capacity to confront and bridge difference—they just might.
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.
Qrescent Mali Mason
Qrescent Mali Mason is Associate Professor of philosophy at Haverford College, 2020-2022 President of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society, and Co-Associate Editor of Hypatia. In 2021, she won a Leeway Foundation Grant for her multimedia art installation, The Self-Translation Cycle. Her writings include “Swimming in Moonlight: On Viewing Black Masculinity Differently with bell hooks,” “Uses of Ambiguity as Tool: A Black Feminist Phenomenologist Reflects on the Year 2020 (and Ambiguous Futures),” and she is currently working on two books: On Ambiguity and Seducing Simone, which imagines a third bell hooks memoir as a conversation amongst hooks, Beauvoir, and herself.
