Caroline Wall is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University who works in ethics, value theory, and 19th-century history of philosophy. She has published on Nietzsche’s account of value creation, and her current projects draw from figures such as Hegel, Scheler, and Cavell to respond to contemporary work in ethics.
Link to your website: https://www.caroline-wall.com
What are you working on right now?
Too much. The main project right now is the dissertation: I’m trying to make the case that we should be concerned with cultivating not just human or universal virtues, but also individual virtues. My argument for this has three basic steps. First, having any ethical virtue involves, as a constitutive part, perceiving a relevant range of values correctly (e.g., part of being courageous is ascertaining what really is fearful, threatening, etc.). Second, values depend in part on what we are like as subjects. Third, and last, there are more specific kinds than humankind to which we belong that bear on what we’re like as subjects.
I’m on a few other sidequests at the moment. One paper I’m workshopping uses a passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit to give an account of apologies and forgiveness. I have a paper on value perception in combat sports that I’ve been meaning to draft up for a while. And the next project I’m planning to outline is sort of a critique of the social sciences—I’m trying to compare cases where some “science of human behavior” seems to degrade our freedom (in the German Idealist sense) to cases where that freedom might be enhanced.
Which books have changed your life? In what ways?
The Gay Science was a really big one. I took Bob Pippin’s Nietzsche course as an undergrad, and the first day of class he told us, “Nietzsche doesn’t want to win an argument. Nietzsche wants to change your life.” Well, he did! There’s nothing like letting Nietzsche walk all your moral commitments backwards for three books, getting all torn up about it, and then he gives you Book IV: St. Januarius. “I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them!” “We want to be our own experiments!” You’re a whole new dog.
If you could wake up tomorrow with a new talent, what would you most like it to be?
The head says Platonic statesmanship, the heart says automotive repairs. Or a knack for hydraulics. I think the highest form that will to power can take is probably something like fixing a Boeing 747.
What’s your personal philosophy?
We are what we love! At least in part. I think our tastes and inclinations run a little ahead of ourselves. I used to believe pretty thoroughly that I was a shy bookworm (which, if you didn’t know, contributes substantially to being a shy bookworm). I think we escape from this kind of dogmatism about ourselves by grasping how good other people are. My mother, for example, has a real gift for making people comfortable and helping them enjoy each other’s company. Loving that quality in my mother was a precondition for wanting to take after her (to the very modest degree of which I’m capable). Hospitality, athleticism, adventuresomeness—there are a lot of qualities I’ve thought were irrelevant for me, but as soon as the right friend put it on display, boom, it’s in my greedy little bucket of aspirations. I think the things we love about our friends, or even strangers or characters in fiction, reveal our broader selves to us. We become acquainted with ourselves from the outside in. I’m not even sure if it’s a metaphysical claim to say the individual’s good “transcends” her in this sense.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I grapple three days a week, meaning: I play Brazilian jiu-jitsu in the gi, meaning: I roll around on the ground with people in thick cotton kimonos while we try to choke each other with the collars, do joint-locks on each other, etc. You can roll without the gi, too, but the people and the mats get too slimy for my personal taste. I like lasso guards, knee cuts, and triangles.
(Side note: you would be astonished at how many philosophers love BJJ. Just went to a fantastic workshop at the intersection of the two. A couple black belts at my gym are ex-academic philosophers. My gym manager puts Schlegel quotes in our weekly newsletters. It’s a hell of a Venn diagram out here.)
I also watch a lot of movies. My best friend Matt and I run our department’s film group and have a blast with it. I saw 145 movies last year, which was probably a few too many.
What is your favorite film of all time (or top 3)? Why?
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983): I heard the British and Japanese actors had two different directors, which creates this really cool formal dissonance that complements the main theme of friendship despite cultural misunderstanding, and I just generally love Bowie and Kitano.
Princess Mononoke (1997): Within the first ten minutes, the protagonist is afflicted with justified hatred. For the rest of the movie, he waits to see whether this will kill him or spontaneously disappear. Less stoic characters turn into worms. Never stops being good.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999): I love Christmas movies and the horrors of sleeping with the Other.
What will your next tattoo be?
I’m thinking about the “I’ll have what she’s having” automaton (Brandom 2008: 17), but I’d break my poor mother’s heart.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest, not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form.
Smrutipriya Pattnaik
Smrutipriya Pattnaik, is the Teaching Beat Editor at the American Philosophical Association Blog and Series Editor for the Syllabus Showcase Series. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. Her research focuses on utopian imagination and political thought in the context of modern crises. She is currently working on her first book, Politics, Utopia, and Social Imagination.
