The American Philosophical Association

Newsletter on

Feminism and Philosophy

Diana Tietjens Meyers, editor

Issue no. 95:1 Fall 1995

From the Editor of This Issue

Some of the major texts of the Western philosophical tradition assume a personal voice, e.g., Augustine's Confessions and Descartes' Meditations. The authors of the four papers in this issue explore the role of the personal voice in feminist philosophy in three main respects: 1) they demonstrate the value of the personal voice to feminist philosophy by using it; 2) they reflect metatheoretically on the uses of the personal voice in feminist philosophy; and 3) they examine some ways in which the personal voice appears in classic works of philosophy and consider whether these works serve as good models for feminist philosophy.

Bat-Ami Bar On examines the interplay between Hannah Arendt's biographical writing and her theoretical writing and argues that Arendt's autobiographical voice can be discerned in her seemingly depersonalized work. Ellen K. Feder takes up the role of the personal voice in addressing issues of group difference. Alternating between discussions of recent feminist work on this topic and her recollections of her nanny and her parents, Feder urges that writing about group-based domination changes nothing unless the personal voice is brought in. Susan J. Brison describes how her own experience of sexual assault and attempted murder led her to recognize the importance of the personal voice for feminist philosophy, and she analyzes and critiques the resistance within professional philosophy to first-person-singular philosophizing. Janice McLane stresses the role of the personal voice in individual and collective self-definition and in challenging customary and institutional constraints on women, and she highlights the fun of personalizing philosophy in this way.

I want to thank Eva Feder Kittay for her help selecting and editing the essays that appear in this issue and Elise Springer for her help orchestrating the review process.

Diana Tietjens Meyers, University of Connecticut, Storrs

Forthcoming Issues

Spring, 1996

Topic: Generations of Feminisms

Editors: Hilde Hein and Dianne Romain

Deadline for Submission of Manuscripts: June 1, 1995

Fall, 1996

Topic: Feminism and Families

Editors: Diana Tietjens Meyers and Hilde Nelson

Deadline for Submission of Manuscripts: Jan. 1, 1996

Request for Submissions for the Fall, 1996, Issue

This issue will consider how feminist philosophical examination of the topic of the family reveals diverse forms of family life and obliges us to conceive of more equitable family structures. It will also consider what implications philosophical reflection on families may have for larger philosophical issues. The editors welcome papers on the following topics: 1) given various social structures and possibilities for choice, including but not limited to race, sexual orientation, disability, class, divorce, and reproductive technology, what morally counts as a family and what should legally count as a family; 2) whether the family is a good paradigm for the novel, intimate, sometimes inter-generational relationships that people are creating; 3) the place of rights language within families and alternative moral discourses, such as responsibility, the moral pull of vulnerability, or familial love; 4) justice within families, justice when families break up, and social justice to families; 5) abuse within families, including woman battery and physical or emotional abuse of children, and the legal significance of these abuses, including the exculpation of women who kill abusive spouses and the use of recovered memories as evidence in criminal prosecutions; 6) the moral and political significance of familial relations of dependency or interdependency; and 7) the figurative import of mother-daughter relations or of sisterhood for feminist thought.

Essays should be no longer than ten double-spaced pages. Four copies of essays should be submitted, and the author's name should appear on the title page only. The deadline for submissions is January 1, 1996. Send manuscripts to Diana Tietjens Meyers, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269-2054.

Committee on the Status of Women

The Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy is sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women. The Newsletter is designed to provide an introduction to recent philosophical work that addresses issues of gender, together with up-to-date bibliographical resources for further exploration of these issues. It should go without saying that none of the varied philosophical views presented by authors of Newsletter articles necessarily reflects the views of any or all of the members of the Committee on the Status of Women, including the editors of the Newsletter, nor does the committee advocate any particular type of feminist philosophy. We advocate only that serious philosophical attention be given to issues of gender and that claims of gender bias in philosophy receive full and fair consideration.

Submission Guidelines

The Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy is sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women. Its purpose is to publish information about the status of women in philosophy and to make more widely available the resources of feminist philosophy. The Newsletter will contain discussions of recent developments in feminist philosophy and related work in other disciplines. It will include literature overviews and book reviews, suggestions for eliminating gender bias in the traditional philosophy curriculum, and reflections on feminist pedagogy. It will also keep the profession informed about the work of the APA Committee on the Status of Women.

All submissions must be limited to 10 double-spaced manuscript pages and must follow the APA guidelines for gender neutral language (APA Proceedings). Four copies of essays should be submitted. The author's name should appear on the title page only in order to preserve anonymity in the reviewing process. References must follow Chicago Manual style.

Please send articles, comments, suggestions, and all other communications both to Diana Tietjens Meyers, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269-2054 and to Hilde Hein, Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester MA 01610.

Book Reviews

Each issue contains reviews of recent publications in the area of feminism and philosophy. We encourage readers to consider reviewing books that have been received by the Newsletter (contact Hilde Hein for a list of books received). To volunteer to review a book, please send a CV both to Diana Tietjens Meyers, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269-2054 and to Hilde Hein, Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester MA 01610, and include information about your areas of research and teaching in your letter.

Advisory Board

Martha Nussbaum, Chair (University of Chicago)

Anita Allen (Georgetown University)

Carol Gould (Stevens Institute)

Sally Haslanger (University of Michigan)

Margaret Holmgren (Iowa State University)

Virginia Klenk (West Virginia University)

Christine Korsgaard (Harvard University)

Uma Narayan (Vassar College)

Feminist Philosophy and the
Personal Voice

Arendt and (Auto)Biographical Thinking

Bat-Ami Bar On

Hannah Arendt suggests that experience-based thinking is necessarily articulated in stories.1 She claims that when, as happened in her case, theorizing cannot be grounded in its traditions due to the ethico-political-which are at the same time epistemological-crises brought about by momentous changes, such as the rise of totalitarianism and the Nazi Judeocide, if one can theorize at all, then one can do that only as a storyteller. Among the stories that Arendt herself tells are biographical stories. And yet, she never publicly tells her own and thus autobiographical story. Indeed, one could easily say of her public writings, as distinguished from her correspondence, which is being published posthumously,2 what she says of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, which is that they are ". . . singularly reticent, silent on almost all the issues her biographer would be bound to raise."3

Arendt might have refrained from the writing of her autobiographical story because, like most classically trained scholars, she too was trained to separate rather than mix the personal with the scholarly. Her works, though, provide another reason for her to refrain from a personal autobiographical tale-a belief that it is the biography rather than the autobiography that not only best tells, but can tell, a person's story. According to Arendt, no person authors their own story. As she says in The Human Condition :

[N]obody is the author or producer of his own life story. . . . [T]he stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author.4

In addition, she believes that one may be more opaque to oneself than to others. She says, again in The Human Condition :

In acting and speaking, men show who they are . . . This disclosure . . . can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this "who" in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is most likely that the "who," which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others remain hidden from the person himself.5

Arendt's biographical works include one biography, Rahel Varnhagen,6 and several biographical sketches which she anthologized in Men in Dark Times.7 But, though the biographical story may be one of the most important kinds of stories that she tells, I think that the biographical writings do not exhaust Arendt's storytelling. This is since, for Arendt, what a story does is "repeat in the imagination,"8 and through that repetition and not necessarily a single repetition, connects to reality while revealing the "human" meaning of an experience.9 Thus Arendt says,

[T]he meaning of a committed act is revealed only when the action itself has come to an end and becomes a story susceptible to narration. Insofar as any "mastering" of the past is possible, it consists in relating what has happened. . . . [But] . . . as long as the meaning of the events remains alive-and this meaning can persist for a very long time-"mastering the past" can take the form of ever-recurrent narration.10

Interestingly, Arendt does not pursue her storytelling in more than a marginal manner in her most abstract long works, i.e. The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind.11 On the other hand, most of Arendt's other works-The Origins of Totalitarianism 12 is exemplary in this way-contain many stories of people or of quite delimited occurrences and specific phenomena. These are the examples from which she tries to learn about something more general for she believes that

[in] reflective judgment, where one does not subsume the particular under a concept,. . . examples lead and guide us . . . The example is the particular that contains in itself, or is supposed to contain, a concept or general rule. . . .13

Though Arendt does not tell her own autobiographical story, it is hard to read her work and not see autobiographical stories, or fragments of such stories, behind the intellectual pursuits. Picking up on what seem like threads of a personal story, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, for example, reads Arendt's biography, Rahel Varnhagen, as, at the same time, autobiographical.14 While Young-Bruehl emphasizes the politicization that Arendt undergoes while writing Rahel Varnhagen, she also sees the work as dealing with Arendt's lover's relationship with Martin Heidegger. She states,

Arendt tried to circumscribe her first love, to control it in words. [In 1925] the exorcism was not a success. Hannah Arendt had to tell someone else's story, had to write Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess , before she freed herself from Martin Heidegger's spell.15

Dagmar Barnow, less interested in Arendt's affair with Heidegger, also reads Rahel Varnhagen as a text that reveals quite a lot about its author, Arendt of the late twenties and the thirties.16 Barnow says again and again that the book is written from Arendt's perspective as a twentieth century Jewish woman and intellectual who is threatened and endangered by the rise of German anti-Semitic totalitarianism.17 She calls attention to a letter by Arendt, addressed to Bluecher, in which Arendt speaks of Rahel Varnhagen as her best friend, and points out that for Arendt this was a friend with whom she identified and from whom she distinguished herself by choosing to be a conscious pariah. Arendt's choice implies ethico-political judgment, and Barnow claims:

Arendt . . . [judges] . . . Rahel because she is profoundly angry with her out of concrete sympathy with her life as a woman and a Jew. Putting herself in Rahel's place, seeing her so clearly, understanding her so well, she wishes passionately that the other Jewish woman, living more than a century before her, could have had the courage and the encouragement to change. . . . Arendt's anger, not so extraordinary in a young observer, is so effective in this historical biography because it is informed by a social-psychological shrewdness that is indeed extraordinary. She lent her voice to Rahel, whom she thinks intolerable in her other-directed pushing, wanting, needing, scheming, lamenting fixation on herself, and lovable in her lack of prejudice, her articulate emotional and intellectual generosity, her infectious exhilaration by the "true realities of life," love, trees, children, music, to Rahel the parvenu and the pariah.18

Like Arendt's biographical work, her other and especially her earlier non-biographical work may be read as doubling as autobiographical. This is probably clearest in her very moving 1943 essay "We Refugees,"19 which one can be tempted to read as purely autobiographical because in 1943 when "We Refugees" was published Arendt was very much a refugee herself, in the U.S. since 1941 and in France from 1933 till the end of 1940. Moreover, "We Refugees" contains first-person references and this too can tempt one to read the "we" of the phrase "we refugees" primarily as a term that Arendt uses self-inclusively in order to indicate that she speaks as a person very much involved in what is going on.

But what happens in "We Refugees" is exactly the same thing that Barnow sees happening in Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Arendt's voice in this piece is a conflicted voice that not only identifies with but also separates from the majority of Jewish refugees, a voice that is very angry at them and at the same time is very loving. Her voice, then, is not only a personal voice but also the voice of the critic who withdraws just enough to be able to think and judge.

That Arendt both includes herself in the refugees' experiences and is, nonetheless, critical of the Jewish refugees is apparent even in some of her first-person self-inclusive remarks, like the following one, made while discussing the refugees' wish to forget despite being haunted:

I don't know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not look for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But, sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.20

Unfortunately, Arendt does not always keep the two voices that she uses in "We Refugees" balanced as beautifully and, consequently, poignantly as she does in the above quotation. As the essay approaches its end, Arendt's critical voice takes over and the ambiguity that marks the essay up to that point recedes. Just as she did at the end of Rahel Varnhagen, here too Arendt speaks from and advocates the position of the conscious pariah, the Jew who embraces her or his difference and tells the truth, the Jew she sees as having a very special historical role. She states:

Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of "indecency," get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from their countries represent the vanguard of their peoples-if they keep their identity.21

III

Arendt's adopting the conscious pariah's critical role has been seen by several of her critics as exemplary and the key to the logic of her ethico-political theorizing. Thus, according to Ferenc Feher,

In Arendt's presentation, the Weberian pariah, the man of resentment, appears as a rebel whose initially mystical aim, which gradually becomes a this worldly strategy, is the transformation of the religious or ethnic community into a people or political community, not necessarily in the framework of the nation state. If the pariah is a rebel, Arendt polemically argues against the mainstream of the enlightenment, then its emancipation is not a social one. A merely social emancipation gives rise to the parvenu. . . . Nor is genuine emancipation "human," as Marx had contended in On the Jewish Question. . . . Emancipation must be political and must establish thereby a political community. . . .22

By emphasizing the pragmatic end result of the conscious pariah's strivings, Feher, who sees the idea of the conscious pariah as a rebel as the moving force behind Arendt's critique of the enlightenment, seems to downplay the rebelliousness of the conscious pariah. Jennifer Ring, in contrast, takes the idea of the conscious pariah as a rebel to be of paramount importance for Arendt. Ring suggests that, as a political actor, what the conscious pariah is about is the destabilization of the giveness of political communities from which the pariah is excluded due to her or his group membership:

Almost the inverse of the public activist, the pariah and particularly the "conscious pariah" is aware of himself as outsider, aware of himself in history, or at least of the way in which history has shaped his life. He does not anticipate recognition from a group of peers. But while he does not act for a community of equals, neither does he act as an individual. He acts instead as a member of a group of outsiders against the prevailing community.23

Opposed in emphasis as Feher's and Ring's readings may be, the two readings have in common a valorization of the pariah, and, of course, particularly the conscious pariah. This is a valorization that they find in Arendt's writings and, in what seems like the spirit of the current Western interest in resistance from the margins and the outside, choose to endorse and even mimic. But, why follow Arendt here and valorize the conscious pariah? And especially why valorize in this way when the conscious pariah of Arendt's style is almost righteously univocal and Arendt herself at her richer moments speaks not only in the tone of the critic who has separated and withdrawn but also self-inclusively, hence, autobiographically and speaks in a manner that mixes the feelings of anger that separate her and the feelings of love that bind her?

I would like to suggest that Arendt be read differently. I would personally like to read her as at least bivocal, as speaking in voices that may be quite distinct from each other and may not even cohere but rather undermine each other. I am thinking about the need for this kind of reading of Arendt because while it is quite common among Arendt's critics to point out that her work is done under the sign of the enormous trauma of the rise of totalitarianism and the Nazi Judeocide, what this means is not taken very seriously in interpreting her work, perhaps due to the fear of "psychologizing explanations."

If Arendt is read as a survivor of the trauma she experienced, then one would expect her to speak bivocally in just the ways that she does. One would expect her to embrace the conscious pariah, on the one hand, because what the conscious pariah represents is the possibility of redemption, hence, of mastery of the traumatic occurrences. On the other hand, one would expect the possibility of and attempt at mastery would be disrupted by another, yet as honest an Arendtean voice. That second voice speaks unheroically and with anguish, just as Arendt does in "We Refugees," of the fear of nightmares full of losses. This latter voice is not the voice of the conscious pariah since as a harbinger of redemption the pariah is oriented toward the future and not toward a past that returns to remind one of one's trauma.

The disruption of the possibility of redemption by the unheroic anguished Arendtean voice is not valorized by Arendt or Arendt's critics, but is an experience that resembles the experience of other survivors. There is nothing steady about this kind of disruption. Lawrence L. Langer notes in his discussion of Nazi Judeocide survivors in Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory :

Testimony is a form of remembering. The faculty of memory functions in the present to recall a personal history vexed by traumas that thwart smooth-flowing chronicles. Simulta-neously, however, straining against what we might call disruptive memory is an effort to reconstruct a semblance of continuity in a life that began as, and now resumes what we would consider a normal existence.24

Allowing for a double and continuous disruption in Arendt's writings would have to result in readings of Arendt that preserve a tension between the poles of mastery and the need for keeping in focus a sense of the traumatic disruption, a tension that Arendt was immanently aware of. Such readings, I think, make it impossible simply to mine Arendt's writings for anything that may look like a grand theory whether of redemption or disruption-both themes that are turning her work into a site for critical modern-postmodern hope. This does not mean that Arendt has nothing to offer her readers. To the contrary, she has a story to tell and it needs to be understood as she understands stories, as a particular example, as one among many attempts to work through violent dark times, an attempt that domesticates and ruptures at the same time, a response that, according to James E. Young, seems more compelled than chosen. As he observes,

It is almost as if violent events-perceived as aberrations or ruptures in the cultural continuum-demand their retelling, their narration, back into traditions and structures they would otherwise defy. For upon entering narrative, violent events necessarily reenter the continuum, are totalized by it, and thus seem to lose their "violent" quality. . . . For once written, events assume the mantle of coherence that narrative necessarily imposes on them, and the trauma of their unassimilability is relieved. At the same time, however, there seems also to be a parallel and contradictory impulse on the parts of the writers to preserve in narrative the very discontinuity that is so effectively neutralized by its narrative rendering.25

Endnotes

1. There is a growing interest in Arendt's idea of storytelling. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, "Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative" Social Research 57/1 (Spring 1990): 167-196, Lisa J. Disch, "More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writing of Hannah Arendt" Political Theory 21/4 (November, 1993): 665-694, Eleanor Honig Skoler, The In-between of Writing: Experience and Experiment in Drabble, Duras, and Arendt (The University of Michigan Press, 1993), Tobin Siebers, "The Politics of Storytelling: Hannah Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem" Southern Humanities Review 26/3 (Summer 1992): 201-211, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, "Hannah Arendt's Storytelling" Social Research 44/1 (Spring 1977): 183-190.

2. See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969 (Edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, German edition, 1985; English edition: San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1992) and Hanna Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy: 1949-1975 (Edited by Carol Brightman, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995).

3. Hannah Arendt, "Isak Dinesen: 1885-1963" (1968) in Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968) p. 100.

4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago, 1958) p. 184.

5. Ibid., p. 179.

6. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. Written in the 30's and published in England in 1957 and in the USA by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1974.

7. I have already mentioned the biographical sketch of Isak Dinesen. The others are of Rosa Luxemburg, Herman Broch, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Waldemar Gurion, and Randall Jarrell. Men in Dark Times also has pieces on Karl Jaspers, Pope John XXIII, and Gotthold Ephrhaim Lessing which are biographically less extensive though similar in style to the more fully developed biographical sketches.

8. Isak Dinesen, p. 97.

9. Hanna Arendt, "Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future" in Between Past and Future (NY: Viking, 1961).

10. Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing" (1959) in Men in Dark Times p. 21.

11. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NY: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1951).

13. Hannah Arendt, "Imagination" in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 84.

14. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press, 1982).

15. Ibid., p. 50.

16. Dagmar Barnow, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (John Hopkins University Press, 1990).

17. Ibid., pp. 41-42, 45, 50.

18. Ibid., p. 70.

19. Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees" Menorah Journal 31 (1943): 69-77.

20. Ibid., p. 71.

21. Ibid., p. 77.

22. Ferenc Feher, "The Pariah and the Citizen (On Arendt's Political Theory)" Thesis Eleven 15 (1986), p. 16.

23. Jennifer Ring, "The Pariah as Hero: Hannah Arendt's Political Actor" Political Theory 19/3 (August 1991), p. 441.

24. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale University, 1991), pp. 2-3.

25. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Indiana University, 1990) pp. 15-16.

By Way of Recognition

Ellen K. Feder

Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.1

In her essay, "On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism," Maria Lugones challenges white feminist theorists to realize the distinction between what she calls recognizing the "problem of difference" and "recognizing difference" (Lugones 1991). Lugones suggests that a recognition of the problem of difference calls merely for an account of the limitations of one's analysis, i.e., it requires a kind of disclaimer intended to absolve the theorist from "responsibility for the effects of her own particular 'social and sexual' history on others" (Lugones 1991), as Lugones writes of Sara Ruddick's "Maternal Thinking." In this way, the acknowledged "omission" of others' experience functions as a prophylactic to preserve the integrity of the theory, as well as that of the theorist. What goes unexamined in this use of the disclaimer is the meaning of those limitations which the theorist has identified, a meaning which pervades not only our conception of theory, but of self.

The theorist who attends to difference only insofar as she must concern herself with securing the bounds within which she may theorize safely, sustains a structure, a "logic" which actually "emphasizes ignoring difference and acknowledging a singularity of practice, discipline, or construction" (Lugones 1991). Employed to mark the boundary within which discourse uncomplicated by factors occurring outside the boundary may take place, the disclaimer maintains a theory's illusory autonomy. Illusory, Lugones argues, because the disclaimer masks an authority operative in the theory which oversteps the limit the disclaimer has established: In demarcating a space from which to theorize safely, the white feminist theorist who disclaims her ability to speak from positions other than her own continues nevertheless to offer solutions which she imagines retain validity outside the limits she has drawn (Lugones 1991). These limits thus serve her purposes in theorizing, exist for her benefit, and can be crossed at will, while any move from 'outside' represents a transgression for which she will not assume responsibility. A description of an admittedly white, heterosexual model of maternal praxis2 in Ruddick's work, for instance, culminates in a prescription for a universal politics of peace (Ruddick 1989). Any interlocutors outside the bounds initially drawn are forced to take an ambiguous place in Ruddick's final vision. Those outside are left to create the place Ruddick would not presume to, but within the limits she has already constructed. The theory therefore exercises power over those others outside of the theory while explicitly excluding consideration of their perspective at the outset.

Disclaimers such as these obstruct the very attention to difference they purport to indicate. Disclaimers intended to locate the theorist in a position of privilege generate neither substantive recognition of those otherwise situated nor insight into the meaning of one's privilege to determine those boundaries. Such disclaimers acknowledge difference as a problem for theory to solve, but they effectively thwart the discovery of ways in which some feminist theory may change in response to its recognition. Rather than merely acknowledging the limitations of one's particular (privileged) perspective, Lugones calls upon white feminist theorists to identify these limitations as a matrix of interrogation integral to a theory's creation.

Theorists who rely on disclaimers to establish a discursive terrain unburdened by "outlying considerations" reproduce an insidious sort of segregation3 by capitalizing on the boundaries of difference. That is, by recognizing the problematic of the boundaries' existence but failing to question the significance of those limitations vis-a-vis the meaning of the theorist's own positionality, this recognition manifests itself as an instantiation of what Elizabeth Spelman describes as "boomerang perception: I look at you and come right back to myself" (Spelman 1988). Here the boundaries of difference are simply understood as the static borders of one's discourse; they are approached only to turn the speaker back from "the 'other' place" and return her. What is missing from this discourse is acknowledgment of the relationality that always already exists between the white feminist theorist and those "outside" the sphere she identifies as her own. What is missing too is the meaning of that relationality. Lugones asks that we understand these delimiting boundaries as sites of reflective questioning where interaction takes place, enabling the theorist to see herself reflected in the new perspectives she there faces: a possibility occluded by the univocal positioning that characterizes boomerang perception. That it is possible for white feminist theorists to assume such a position underscores the asymmetrical relation of power analogous, as Marilyn Frye has observed, to that between white men and white women (Frye 1983).

Lugones calls these reflections which immersion in boomerang perception so effectively averts, "mirror" images that reveal oneself to oneself as a "duplicitous being" (Lugones 1991), neither (both) the One nor (and) the Other: a multiplicity of selves. It is the acknowledgment of such a multiplicity that is constitutive of what Lugones conceives as recognizing difference. She writes:

[Women of color] are noticed when you realize that we are mirrors in which you can see yourselves as no other mirror shows you. When you see us without boomerang perception. . . . It is not that we are the only faithful mirrors, but I think we are faithful mirrors. Not that we show you as you really are; we just show you as one of the people you are. What we reveal to you is that you are many--something that may in itself be frightening to you. But the self we reveal to you is also one that you are not eager to know for reasons that one may conjecture (Lugones 1991).

* * *

It's been a long time since I've thought about Benji, since I've wanted to think about Benji. When she died-when was it?-two, three years ago, after two years in homes and hospitals, no longer remembering me, a daughter she didn't have, I only think of the small relief I felt. I no longer had to listen to my mother's complaints that Benji had lied to Medicaid about her age again, sufficiently and inexplicably aware to sign forms attesting to possession of only 62 of her 93 years. My brother would quit his self-righteous assertions of my negligence the last year, when I couldn't bear to visit her and watch her meet my no longer recognizable face. And maybe I could forget the little girl Benji read to every night, who always begged for just one more story. I almost wish I could say something sentimental like loving the rhythm of what I came to name her Jamaican accent, but that wouldn't really be true. I just thought she read better than anyone else, especially the part in Flat Stanley where his parents post him to his relatives in that huge envelope, or the one about the bird who traded body parts with other birds because they were so much nicer than his, only to find that he couldn't fly or eat decked out in his new parts. She always did read another, and I always found, the next morning, that she hadn't capitulated to my nightly demand to Keep-That-Stairs-Light-On!

It was here in my parents' house that I learned my mangled lessons about loyalty, a confoundingly singular thing which I could only offer up to one solicitor at a time: Benji or my mother, my mother or Benji. And I could have managed it except there were too many times when yielding to the demand of one meant committing an act of disloyalty to the other and really that meant either getting myself in trouble for the transgressions of one, or enabling the reproof of the other. Benji's gift of some treat forbidden my chubby little self, for instance, always carried the potential of some class of failed loyalty: Do I eat the proffered doughnut and defy my mother's oft-uttered directives not to do so? Do I refuse and risk hurt feelings or even-do I betray the gift and get Benji in trouble? To tell would be a vote for my mother-and more: for who I was meant to be. From my mother's point of view this was the right thing to do. After all, I was hurting myself in my secret alliance with Benji. But I didn't want to get Benji in trouble, nor did I want to disclose my complicity. And I wanted the doughnut.

I was the one who seemed to hold it all together, a lopsided triangle of ever-shifting proportions, where I was in the middle of two opposing points that sometimes, problematically, met at my point. I didn't always understand how they met, for a few reasons, I think. My mother's and Benji's severally oppositional relationship prevented the kind of meeting a sort of co-parenting would facilitate, leaving me always to displace one painfully with the other. I think it was very important for my mother, too, that I not name my love for Benji, even as her constant presence provided my mother with-not a less complicated life, surely, but-more space to do other things. I don't even have a name for the role Benji had in my life. In the end I guess she raised me, with, against my mother. It wasn't a very strong triangle connecting the three of us, but it wasn't meant to be, because I was supposed to grow up and take my place on just one side.

* * *

With Mary Childers in "A Conversation About Race and Class," bell hooks has suggested that a problematizing of white feminists' duplicitous position would substantially alter our notion of gender (Childers and hooks 1989) and consequently, the way in which we understand its employment as a category.4 Such a problematization would bring to the fore precisely what is precluded by boomerang perception: the interrogation of whiteness. As exemplified by the assertion that "black people are just like us" (Spelman 1988) boomerang perception obfuscates the positionality of both its agent and object by taking whiteness as unassailably paradigmatic, much the same way that masculinist theorizing has taken maleness.

To hear me tell it, my father has no place in the triangle of my mother, Benji, and me. It's true that I don't remember his ever speaking directly to Benji except to tell her hello when he returned from work. And, well, I can't say I remember his ever speaking to me except to say hello and offer his broad after-shaved cheek for me to dutifully kiss. I do remember his telling my mother when Benji hadn't arranged things to his satisfaction, and I can recall several times when my mother told me that something I or my sister had done was unacceptable to my father. On such occasions she would relate what "Daddy" thought about x or had decided about y, and I remember thinking it was strange that she called him Daddy because I don't think any of us ever called him that. It wasn't until much later that I understood that general exchange with my mother was mediated by what Daddy thought or had decided. It wasn't until much later that I understood that it went without saying: I was raised my father's daughter.

The often repeated claim, implicit in the sorts of disclaimers to which Lugones points, that "we can only speak from our experience"5 defers the recognition of difference essential for the interrogation of whiteness.

I lived with Benji for most of my life, and yet the details of her life, her history, remain opaque to me, as mine never were to her. My forgetting was thus facilitated, and remembering inhibited, for the selves that she mirrored to me were not among the selves I learned to reclaim as a feminist. I don't have a name for the role Benji had in my life because she isn't supposed to take up a meaningful place in my life that says anything about who I am.

Perhaps it is rather the extent to which we can speak from our experience that will make difference cease to be merely "a problem for theory to solve." And this neither by virtue of some imagined absolution offered by confession, nor by virtue of a "truer" representation of the relations of power (for the disclaimer is entirely "truthful" even as it is an assertion of power), but because such a speaking might fulfill the promise of transgression it entails. Turning to look in the mirror Benji has held up to me and seeing my white privilege there reflected impels interrogation of the conception of self my parents would have me simply assume, that is, a sense of (my)self severed from the meaning of my relationship to Benji. If looking in the mirror, as Lugones challenges white feminist theorists to do, exacts a measure of disloyalty-to my parents in this story-it may be better understood as a relinquishment of fealty to a singular sense of self-an essential self-predicated upon the subjective erasure of an other that is at the heart of exploitation.

Endotes

I am grateful to many for having read and commented on different versions of this essay. In particular I owe a special debt to Eva Kittay, Pam Moore, Susan Squier, Becky Thompson, and Jessica Shubow.

1. From Freedom Charter, cited by bell hooks in "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" (hooks 1990).

2. While true that Ruddick frequently and explicitly endorses "alternative" visions of the family, these alternatives appear limited to gay and lesbian households which otherwise resemble their heterosexual counterparts.

3. I use "segregation" here in a conventional way to mean that separation enforced by racial or ethnic groups to maintain these groups' hegemonic distance from "others." It is worth noting that in her essay, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness," bell hooks moves toward reclaiming the term in arguing that the margin as a "site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination" (hooks 1990).

4. For a more detailed elaboration of this point than I am able to present here, see, for example, Denise Riley's incisive analysis in Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Riley 1988).

5. In conversation with Sneja Gunew, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers a forceful critique of this assertion which stems from what she calls "chromatism: basing everything on skin colour--'I am white, I can't speak'." Spivak suggests that those who feel compelled to make it "develop a certain degree of rage against a history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced," refusing, thereby, to capitulate to an "accident of birth" (Spivak 1990). Spivak does not minimize the effects of privilege here; rather, she challenges critics situated in positions of privilege to engage in "a historical critique of your position as the investigating person . . . [i.e. to do] your homework" (Spivak 1990).

References

Childers, Mary, and bell hooks. 1990. "A Conversation About Race and Class" in Conflicts in Feminism, edited by M. Hirsch and E. F. Keller. New York: Routledge.

Frye, Marilyn. 1983. "On Being White: Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy" in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

Lugones, Maria. 1991. "On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism" in Feminist Ethics, edited by Claudia Card. Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press.

Riley, Denise. 1988. Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine Books.

Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1990. "Questions of Multiculturalism" in The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge.

On the Personal as Philosophical1

Susan J. Brison

The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge-knowledge as impersonal, as purely contem-plative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the sense, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal.

-Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy2

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir . . . .

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil3

Russell's Problems of Philosophy was one of the first philosophy texts I read and I was so drawn to the idea of knowledge as "impersonal, . . . abstract and universal" that it has taken me twenty years to come to see, gradually, the appeal of Nietzsche's view of philosophy as autobiography. I was aware that, for centuries, philosophers had written in the first person singular, but the "serious" ones, such as Descartes (as opposed to Montaigne), did so as part of an argumentative strategy to be employed by any reader to establish, ultimately, the same universal truths. They weren't really talking about themselves. As we so often tell beginning students of philosophy who attempt to defend positions by writing "I feel that . . ." or "I think that . . . ," such self-descriptions have no place in philosophical argumentation. What the reader, i.e., the professor, wants to know is not what this particular author happens to feel or think-and why-but, rather, what reasons any rational person has to accept the position in question. Those "accidents of private history," disparaged by Russell, must be put out of one's mind if one is to "see as God might see, without a here and now."

Now of course Russell, like Nietzsche, was an atheist, so it is a bit of a mystery why he thought human beings could accomplish feats of this sort which, when attributed to God, made the idea of such a being incredible. But many, perhaps most, mainstream analytic philosophers writing today share Russell's view and consider the search for timeless, acontextual truths to be the sine qua non of the philosophical enterprise. Those in other disciplines in the humanities, or with other approaches to philosophy, for the most part consider this attitude quaintly anachronistic, at best, or absurdly arrogant, at worst.

Many feminist philosophers agree with Virginia Held that "[t]he philosophical tradition that has purported to present the view of the essentially and universally human has, masked by this claim, presented instead a view that is masculine, white, and Western."4 Having accepted the personal as political, rejected the private/public dichotomy, and acquainted ourselves with feminist theorizing as it is carried out in other disciplines, we are finding the traditional philosophical obsession with the impersonal and acontextual increasingly indefensible. As we find that the "accidents of private history," especially those connected with gender, race, and class, are not only worth thinking about, but are also inevitably, even if invisibly, present in much of philosophy, we are beginning to write in the first person, not out of sloppy self-indulgence, but out of intellectual necessity.

The "accident of private history" that forced me to think about the personal as philosophical was a sexual assault and attempted murder on July 4, 1990, outside of Grenoble, France, in which I was beaten, raped, strangled, and left for dead at the bottom of a ravine. Six months later I wrote the following entry in my journal:

Today I decided to write a book on the effects of sexual violence, and on the process of recovering from it. I think it will be a deeply philosophical book, although it probably won't be classified as such. I also think I am perhaps uniquely equipped to write it (as a philosopher of law who writes on hate speech and pornography, as a feminist, as a survivor of sexual violence, and as someone who writes best when angry).

I will be told that it is not scholarly enough because it doesn't take into account the philosophical literature on the subject. I will reply that this is because other philosophers (with a few, rare, feminist exceptions) have not been able to face the fact of violence, especially violence again women. It is not because the subject is not intrinsically philosophical. The main effects of violence are the undoing of the self (a metaphysical concern); an inability to feel at home in the world (an epistemological crisis); a paradox of practical reason: I can't go on. I must go on. (a problem for action theory); and a radical undermining of trust (an ethical issue). If these are not philosophical concerns, what is?

Unlike Descartes, who had "to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations" in order to find any knowledge "that was stable and likely to last,"5 I had my world demolished for me. The fact that I could be walking down a quiet, sunlit country road at one moment and be battling a murderous attacker the next undermined my most fundamental assumptions about the world. After my hospitalization, I took a year-long disability leave from teaching and found myself, like Descartes, "quite alone," with "a clear stretch of free time" in which to rebuild my shattered system of beliefs.6

As I carried out this process of cognitive, as well as physical and emotional, recovery, I was dismayed to find very little of use to me that was written by philosophers. It occurred to me that the fact that rape was not considered a properly philosophical subject, while war, for example, was, resulted not only from the paucity of women in the profession but also from the disciplinary bias against thinking about the personal.

While I found much more useful material in the interdisciplinary field of Women's Studies, I also observed that even feminist scholars have, at times, tended to give abstract theory priority over the personal experiences of actual women, to the detriment of both their scholarship and their political agenda. I came across a startling example of this in the spring of 1992 when I was in France doing legal research to prepare for my assailant's trial, and I went to the main feminist bookstore in Paris, the Librairie des femmes. While there was an entire bookcase (with several shelves) devoted to �tudes lacaniennes, there were only two books in the store by French authors on violence against women (and one was a reprint of a 1978 transcript of a well-known French rape trial). Just as it is still, by and large, considered a mark of excellence in philosophical writing to be divorced from any concrete human concerns, in some quarters feminist theory seems to be increasingly uninterested in the real experiences of actual women. First-person narratives incorporated into feminist theorizing are essential to help counter this trend.

Through my participation in a survivors' support group as well as in the anti-rape movement, I discovered the many ways in which my race (white) and class (upper-middle), in addition to my academic preoccupations, had distanced me from the concerns of many other victims of sexual violence. While the fact that all of us in my support group (in center-city Philadelphia) had been raped meant that we shared the symptoms of rape trauma syndrome, these symptoms had a more devastating effect on some of us than on others, because of our different backgrounds. I wondered about whether I would ever be able to function well enough to resume my teaching and research, while others worried about finding housing for themselves and their children, or about getting off drugs, or about dealing with our racist legal system that does not take Black rape victims as seriously at white ones, or about supporting themselves (since they'd worked the night shift and were now too afraid to take public transportation to work after dark). We all struggled to get from one day to the next, but our struggles were not the same.

In philosophy, first-person narratives written by those who were previously excluded from the discipline are necessary to expose the gender, as well as race and class, biases inherent in, among other things, much traditional moral, legal, and political philosophy. They can serve to bear witness, bringing professional attention to the injustices women have suffered in being deprived of political representation, reproductive autonomy, equality within the family, and personal safety. They play an important part in consciousness-raising, which, as feminist legal theorist Ann Scales describes it, "means that dramatic eye-witness testimony is being given; it means, more importantly, that women now have the confidence to declare it as such. We have an alternative to relegating our perception to the realm of our own subjective discomfort."7 And they can provide the basis for empathy with those who are different from ourselves, which, as recently argued by feminist moral theorists such as Diana Meyers, is crucial for an adequately inclusive understanding of certain moral, legal and political issues.8

At other times, first person narratives in feminist writing are used simply to put on the table one's perspectives and possible biases, which of course implies the acknowledgment that such things inevitably work their way into our philosophizing, no matter how scupulously "objective" we try to be. Susan Estrich begins her book, Real Rape, with an account of the rape she survived in 1974. To justify this radical and courageous introduction to a long-neglected legal subject, Estrich argues that if the rape wasn't her fault, if she's not ashamed, why shouldn't she mention it?9 "And so I mention it. I mention it in my classes. I describe it here. I do so in the interest of full disclosure. I like to think that I am an informed and intelligent student of rape. But I am not unbiased. I am no objective observer, if such a thing exists (which I doubt; I think the major difference between me and those who have written 'objectively' about the law of rape is that I admit my involvement and bias). In writing about rape, I am writing about my own life."10

As Virginia Held observes, feminists who doubt "that anyone can truly reflect the essentially and universally human, and [are] suspicious of those who presume to do so, . . . often ask that speakers openly acknowledge the backgrounds from which they speak so that their hearers can better understand the contexts of the experiences."11 In her recent book, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, Held overcomes her own "psychological inclination" and philosophical training and describes her personal and intellectual background, acknowledging explicitly that the feminist views presented in her book are not reflective of a wider range of feminist thinking, but rather emerge from her own "philosophical background and experience."12 Likewise, in her book, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Annette Baier includes a discussion of her development in the profession as a feminist philosopher as well as a series of anecdotes about her experiences as a woman in a world in which trusting certain men can be dangerous. In her defense of these unusual philosophical moves, she acknowledges, "I know, however, that I will not convince many of my fellow moral philosophers" of their appropriateness, given that "[t]he impersonal style has become nearly a sacred tradition in moral philosophy."13 But to her credit she is not dissuaded by comments such as the one proffered by a "respected older mentor" after she gave a talk employing such anecdotes about trust: " 'This may all be great fun, but is it real professional work'."14

The above theorists who employ the personal voice all recognize a fundamental characteristic of feminist theory, which is that it takes women's experiences seriously. And we cannot know what these are a priori. We need to tell our stories, making sure to listen to those of other women, especially when they're at odds with ours.

First person narratives in feminist philosophy may seem to be of the same genre as Descartes' Meditations, but, in spite of having superficially similar narrative structures, they differ radically in their intellectual aims. Although feminists writing of their own experiences often aspire to a kind of universality and sometimes are guilty of overgeneralizing, the universality aspired to is different from that found in more traditional philosophizing. Feminist philosophers writing in the personal voice do not claim, as did Descartes, that any rational person carrying out the same line of abstract reasoning will reach the same impersonal conclusions. Rather, we are suggesting that anyone in these particular circumstances, with this kind of socialization, with these options and limitations may (may, not must) view the world in this way.

Feminist theorizing in the personal voice is not without its hazards, but I think they are avoidable. One hazard is presuming to speak for all women (something white, upper-middle class academic feminists have been all too prone to do), which can be avoided, at least to some extent, by making clear the context from which one writes and refraining from overgeneralizing in one's conclusions. Another hazard is speaking only for oneself, giving in to self-indulgence or speaking about experiences so idiosyncratic that they are not of use to others. The remedy for this is to learn about and attempt to empathize with the experiences of others, especially those one views as "different" from oneself, in order to make connections with others. A further hazard, particularly of bearing witness about sexual abuse, is the risk of having one's testimony co-opted, or "recuperated" by the media, as Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray have discussed.15 Avoiding sensationalistic accounts of sexual violence and distancing techniques such as the stereotyping of victims, as well as refraining from appearing on talk shows in which sleaze is valued over truth, can help to counter the risk that survivor testimonies will be distorted, neutralized, or, as happens all too often, turned into pornography.

Other hazards of writing in the personal voice include: not being taken seriously (as in the comment by Baier's respected mentor) and (what may amount to the same thing in our profession) not being taken philosophically. Although first-person narratives have for some time been considered academically respectable in literary and legal theory, in philosophy they are still usually dismissed as "just autobiography."

In spite of these hazards of writing in the personal voice, and in spite of repeated warnings from more seasoned colleagues to avoid it, at least until I've gotten tenure, I have continued, on occasion, to employ this methodology in my philosophical writing, since I think it is essential in discussing certain issues. I have drawn inspiration from both feminist legal theory and critical race theory in doing so, since both emphasize the importance of first person narratives in illuminating more general theoretical issues. As Martha Fineman writes, "[T]he real distinction between feminist approaches to theory (legal and otherwise) and the more traditional varieties of legal theory is a belief in the desirability of the concrete."16 And as the authors of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, note in their introduction, "Critical race theory is grounded in the particulars of a social reality that is defined by our experiences and the collective historical experience of our communities of origin. Critical race theorists embrace subjectivity of perspective and are avowedly political. . . . Critical race theory cannot be understood as an abstract set of ideas or principles. Among its basic theoretical themes is that of privileging contextual and historical descriptions over transhistorical or purely abstract ones."17 Patricia Williams also argues persuasively against theoretical legal understanding that postulates objective, "unmediated" voices and transcendent, universal truths, while disparaging anything that is "nonuniversal (specific) as 'emotional,' 'literary,' 'personal,' or just Not True."18

In feminist philosophy of law, more first-person narratives are needed to help illuminate a variety of issues, including not only sexual violence, but also pornography, sexual harassment, pregnancy, abortion, new reproductive technologies, child care, welfare, and the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. But those of us who write in the first person on such issues will, as Williams warns, have our writing dismissed as "'emotional,' 'literary,' 'personal,' or just Not True." We will be told that such testimonies are not academically respectable and that our personal experiences with these issues are not worth talking about, or even remembering.

One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery from the assault was the seeming inability of some to remember what had happened-and their habit of exhorting me, too, to forget. During my trip to France in the spring of 1992, I went to Grenoble to look over legal documents and discuss the case with my lawyer. I also met with the avocat g�n�ral, who had possession of my dossier and, with some reluctance, agreed to show it to me. It included depositions, police records, medical reports, psychiatric evaluations, and photos of my bruised, swollen face and battered body, my assailant's scratched face, neck and genitals, his muddied clothes, the disturbed underbrush by the roadside, my belt found in the woods, and footprints in the mud at the bottom of the ravine. After our discussion of how the case would proceed, as I was about to leave his office, the avocat g�n�ral stunned me with these parting words of advice: "When the trial is over, you must forget that this ever happened." I protested that forgetting such a traumatic event is not an easy thing for a victim to do. He then looked at me sternly and said, "But, madame, you must make an effort."

A year later, after my first article on sexual violence was published,19 I was told: "now you can put this behind you." But I know that I will never forget the assault and that it is a sign of recovered strength, not moral frailty or intellectual feebleness, that I am able to incorporate this awful knowledge into my life and my work. It is no longer an option for me to follow Russell's advice and attempt to think "without a here and now, without hopes and fears." Instead, when I philosophize, I try to follow the example of Audre Lorde who, as Barbara Christian recalled, wrote with an "insistence on speaking as her entire self, whatever the consequences."20

Endnotes

1. For helpful discussions of the role of first person narratives in feminist ethics and philosophy of law and for aiding and abetting my own transgressive writing in the personal voice, I thank Joan Bolker, Judith Wagner DeCew, Eva Feder Kittay, Karen McPherson, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Thomas Trezise, Patricia Williams, and Cathy Winkler. I also thank two anonymous referees for the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philsophy for their useful suggestions.

2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 160.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 13. Orig. pub. 1886.

4. Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.19.

5. Ren� Descartes, Meditations, in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, translators, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 13.

6. Ibid.

7. Ann C. Scales, "The Emergence of Feminist Jurisprudence: An Essay," Yale Law Journal 95 (1986), p. 1402. [Throughout this essay I will discuss work in both feminist philosophy and feminist legal theory. Since I work in the area of feminist philosophy of law I find it hard to draw a distinction between the two.]

8. Diana T. Meyers, "Social Exclusion, Moral Reflection, and Rights," Law and Philosophy 12:2 (May 1993), esp. pp. 125-126; Diana T. Meyers, Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994); Diana T. Meyers, "Emotion and Heterodox Moral Perception: An Essay in Moral Social Psychology" (forthcoming); Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other," in Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), pp. 154-177. Susan J. Brison, "The Theoretical Importance of Practice," in Judith Wagner De Cew and Ian Shapiro, eds., NOMOS XXXVII: Theory and Practice (New York: New York University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 222-231.

9. This is not to suggest that others should publicize a rape without the victim's consent. Such a violation of the victim's will can, obviously, be retraumatizing.

10. Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 1-3.

11. Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, p. 19.

12. Ibid., pp. 19-21.

13. Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 194.

14. Ibid., p. 328, fn. 20.

15. Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, "Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993), pp. 83-101.

16. Martha Albertson Fineman, "Introduction," in At the Boundaries of the Law: Feminism and Legal Theory, ed. Martha Albertson Fineman and Nancy Sweet Thomadsen (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. xi-xii.

17. Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence, III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberl� Williams Crenshaw, eds., Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), p. 3.

18. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 9.

19. Susan J. Brison, "Surviving Sexual Violence: A Philosophical Perspective," Journal of Social Philosophy 24 (1993), pp. 5-22.

20. Barbara Christian, "Remembering Audre Lorde," Women's Review of Books 10 (March 1993), p. 5.

The Feminist "I": Doing Philosophy in the First Person

Janice McLane

All the fun's in how you say a thing. -Robert Frost

I've been thinking hard about why first person writing is important to feminist thinkers. For it is. Some of the reasons this is true any feminist philosopher worth her salt ought to be able to figure out. There are, for example, the reevaluations of depersonalized objectivity which feminist and other challengers have made.1 Furthermore, although never entirely divorced from it, philosophy itself has become more explicitly situated within the individual voice from Descartes onward.

But while all these elements should be written and talked about, they are only partly what I am concerned with expressing here. For I am drawn to first person philosophy-both as a reader and a writer-because it is fun.

Fun seems to me to be an excellent reason to do anything, given all the decent caveats about not hurting anyone or being sloppy and inaccurate in one's work. Of course, fun cannot bear the entire weight of why feminists-or anyone-would write in the first person. But as a contributing factor, it is worth consideration. Nevertheless, in claiming such a thing flat out I run the risk of not being taken seriously, since the academic mentality seems often to conflate being thoughtful with being solemn.

Reflective writing, however, is not identical to somberness. Rather, it is writing which focuses attention. It causes us to perceive, think, or feel what would otherwise be passed over in distraction or habit. For example, good first-person writing is reflective in two specific ways: it focuses attention on the person speaking, and it emphasizes the dual character of what she says as both particular experience and general communication.

To accentuate the person writing and her experience is to communicate (among others) the following things: the writer's existence is important; her particular experience is important; the very process of articulating a single experience is valuable, as is discovering commonality between particular experiences; individual experience applies to more than just the individual; and one way commonality emerges is in the interaction of specific voices.

I do not have space in this article to do much more than list these points. However, it is worth noting that feminism as a political and intellectual endeavor is vitally interested in all these things. Feminism is based on the emergence of different women's voices, on establishing connections between women via their like and unlike experiences, and on the possibility of creating community through these connections. To put it another way, it should come as no surprise that a movement whose roots are in consciousness raising should find first-person writing a valuable mode of intellectual expression.

But what then of fun: the reason that at the beginning of this article I claimed to be so significant? Even if the ideas just expressed are true, what does fun have to do with them?

I have stated that first-person writing focuses attention both on who is talking and what is said, and how each informs the other. But what this bare-bones description leaves out is the adventure and, often, exuberance of finding a voice and a community. Think for a moment of these passages:

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.2

Both "philosophy" and "feminism" are broad terms covering a variety of activities and subject matter. Each identifies an area of central concern to me: I frequently tend, in fact, to define myself in terms of them. . . . But, more and more, I find myself wondering just how compatible these two interests are. They often seem to present different, and conflicting, demands.3

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.4

I have a very personal stake in investigating this topic. Playfulness is not only the attribute that was the source of my confusion and the attitude that I recommend as the loving attitude in traveling across "worlds," I am also scared of ending up a serious human being, someone who is just someone who has had the fun constructed out of her. I am seriously scared of getting stuck in a "world" that constructs me that way. A world that I have no escape from and in which I cannot be playful.5

This is the poem to say "Write poems, women" because I want to

read them, because for too long, we have had only men's lives

or men's imaginations wandering through

our lives, because even the women's lives we have details of

come through a male approval desire filter which diffuses

imagination, that most free part of ourselves.6

Some of these passages (and others like them) are labeled "philosophy;" some "literature." But as good feminist first-person writing, all contain the exhilaration of people using their own single voice, connected and speaking to others they know will listen and speak in return. There is a tone of emerging, of being there, which was heretofore unlikely to be heard. It is this quiet exultation in proclaiming one's existence that makes first-person writing so appropriate for feminist philosophy.

And that emergence is fun. This is true whatever else it might be: serious, frightening, difficult, or in its more negative incarnations, sloppy and repetitive, awkward in melding first-person writing and third-person academic traditions. It may also give witness to conflicts within the feminist community regarding who speaks and who listens and who is (still) silent-as in, for example, Lorraine Bethel's poem, "What Chou Mean We, White Girl?"7 Still, to be a person who finds a voice, however imperfectly, is to participate in a collective feminist carousing upon which patriarchy frowns.

Which brings me to my next point: part of the fun is in doing what we ought not. For women are still raised to be silent.8 When we speak in the first person, we not only speak, we make it absolutely clear that we speak as women. We therefore overturn the Western traditions, both philosophical and more generally cultural, which demand women be silent and which punish female speech. First-person female writing clearly challenges the cultural command for women to be silent. As Alicia Ostriker says, "Where women write strongly as women, it is clear their intention is to subvert the life and literature they inherit."9

And one kind of fun is always about breaking the rules, isn't it? Or setting them aside for a while, suspending the traditional "is" and "ought" in favor of playing at what might be. Again quoting Maria Lugones:

[T]he playful attitude involves openness to surprise, openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction and to construction or reconstruction of the "worlds" we inhabit playfully.10

Reconstructing the world is what feminism does. To do it, we must retain a sense that change is possible. This sense requires not only strength of purpose, but a certain lightness and flexibility in our approach to the world. Otherwise, what do we do but unconsciously reproduce the heavy and domineering insistence that one (our) way is right and all others wrong? To break the rules of patriarchy, we must retain our ability to question others and ourselves. When properly done, first-person writing does just that. It is not what Thomas Nagel has called the "view from nowhere."11 It requires close attention to experience as it is, and not as an internally or externally imposed rule says it must be.

Finally, first-person writing is particularly important given the ambivalence women philosophers have. The way into the philosophic tradition itself is both so desirable and so dangerous. That is, as a feminist philosopher, I have always been divided. I am a woman, I am a philosopher. I am female, I am a trained thinker. Which one should I call the real me? Even nowadays, this culture identifies mind as masculine, while femaleness is thought to be bodily and emotional.12 When I stand in front of a classroom, when I sit at a computer writing, what am I? I am both philosopher and woman, of course; but that "of course" hides a great deal of struggle about these two culturally contradictory beings who are in fact my one self. I may be a platypus, a mammal that lays eggs; I may be a bird, a reptile that flies. I may be some unthought-of animal, who, along with her companions, is creating a new species for us to be.

But whatever this "I" of the female philosopher is, she creates herself through what she does. Here I agree with Aristotle, Leibniz, Merleau-Ponty: it is in its action that a being is defined. This includes human beings. No wonder, then, that in writing, that notable intellectual act of self-presentation, I find it most important to bring that "I" front and center.13 For this approach makes it possible for a philosopher both to philosophize, and, simultaneously, make her self real and present to herself and to the people who read her. In every first-person piece of philosophy, both these things happen emphatically and undeniably, at the same time and in the same act.

More generally, we might say that for philosophy to exist, there must be a way into it. That is, for a tradition of knowledge and truths to go on, there must be a way for individuals and groups of people to become part of that tradition. But a person, a group, cannot join a tradition if she or they do not exist. Therefore it should be expected that many women will do those forms of philosophy which are not only rigorous examinations of the world, but which in their very writing and speaking, establish and validate the existence of women. Women must create their own way into philosophy, not only by doing philosophy, but by authenticating the very female persons who philosophize.

Again, the first-person voice does exactly this. The woman writing not only creates a philosophical investigation, but a self who has this identity: woman philosopher. The act of writing in the first person allows both of these selves to come to the fore, be explicit, without contradiction. Even if what is being explored is the contradictory nature of being female and a philosopher, the act of writing in the first person synthesizes the two, and goes a step further in creating this new and unusual species.

Thus, there is a pleasant rediscovery every time a woman philosopher writes in the first person. It is the discovery that she exists, and that we exist alongside her, and that philosophy exists through us, too.

Those people who belittle such motivations and methods-and by this, I most emphatically do not mean those who write differently; I mean only those who sneer at the very idea that one can write from the first person and still do philosophy-those belittlers, I argue, are people who have been provided with affirmation and social reality from an early age. They can afford to deride such struggles because they, socially, exist. They are not divided into two separate beings by their culture; they are not considered to be non-existent because they simultaneously think and are female. Either that, or they are people who hope to pass.

This does not mean that philosophers who write in a detached or omniscient voice are necessarily wrong or inappropriate: far from it. There is little that is more exciting, philosophically speaking, than Merleau-Ponty or Kant. Nor are first-person accounts necessarily good or interesting; if they are done badly, they are excruciatingly dull.

Nor is it in any way to say that "real" feminist philosophy ought always to be first person. As Thoreau once said (about stylistic rules for English), "Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it." That first-person writing is important to feminist thought is without question; that it is the sine qua non of a feminist approach is nonsense. Feminism is one of the means by which first-person approaches have been shown to be an important part of intellectual work. However, as feminists, we will always need variety within our community, from the most personal to the most abstract and impersonal of approaches. In fact, to require a first-person stance in feminist philosophy would destroy the power it holds, by making it an externally imposed requirement rather than freely chosen intellectual expression.

Furthermore, since I am talking about fun, it may seem that I think speaking in the first person is all a lark. It is not. When a woman philosopher talks about the philosophic meaning of rape: what rape is, what it means as an expression of power, the evil of it that she knows because that evil was visited upon her one morning when she walked down an open road-that is not fun.14 It is extremely offensive to say such a thing.

But such writing is power. It is, as I have argued, the power of defining one's own life through the articulation of that life. And it occurs to me that such self-definitions, like any other human activity, are about making life worth living. The power a woman feels in articulating her experience in a disciplined intellectual format is not about mouthing important-sounding words. It is about doing something which makes it possible to get up in the morning and say it was worthwhile to do so. And life is not worth living-life is not, in the most profound sense of the word, fun-without power. The power to wake up, act, think, create, speak, relate to human beings and to the rest of the world; the power to make a difference to oneself and others through one's own activities.

So whatever the subject matter, whether its readers and listeners feel emotionally wrenched or seized with laughter, the first person voice in feminist philosophy provides a way to say my life is worth enjoying.

That is why I began this writing with the epigraph from Robert Frost. All the fun is in how you say a thing. For how you say a thing is also what you are saying. First person philosophy takes the strengths of an inherited tradition-two thousand-odd years of argued analysis-and melds it with the immediacy of personal experience. Thus the existence of female selves and the philosophic tradition are synthesized in the very act of writing. Simultaneously, such writing affirms that philosophy must express female as well as male experience. I would like to put this another way. What we, feminist philosophers, are saying through the first-person voice, is that we are accounting for our own truths, our own lives, and that we are delighted with ourselves for so doing.

Endnotes

1. See, among others, Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity (New York: State University at Stony Brook Press, 1987); Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990); Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death (New York: Routledge, 1992); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Alison Jagger, "Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology," in Gender/Body/Knowledge, ed. Alison Jagger and Susan Bordo ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979).

2. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984), 57.

3. Susan Sherwin, "Philosophical Methodology and Feminist Methodology: Are They Compatible?", in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 21.

4. Adrienne Rich, "Diving Into the Wreck," Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 23.

5. Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 286.

6. Honor Moore, "Polemic # 1," Write Poems Women, ed. Honor Moore and the Women of the Write Poems Women Workshop (New York: Write Poems Women Workshop, 1976), 9.

7. Lorraine Bethel, "What Chou Mean We, White Girl?" Conditions: The Black Women's Issue, no. 5 (1979), 86-92.

8. See, among others, Carol Gilligan, "Women's Psychological Development: Implications for Psychotherapy" in Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance, ed. Carol Gilligan, Annie G. Rogers, and Deborah L. Tolman (New York: The Haworth Press, 1991), 5-31; Myra and David Sadker, Failing at Fairness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), especially 42-50 and 168-173; Dale Spender, The Writing or the Sex? (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989), 7-23.

9. Quoted in Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 148-49. Boland's book is a brilliant examination of her struggle to find a female poetic voice within the tradition of Irish poetry.

10. Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," in Women, Knowledge, and Reality, 288.

11. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

12. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

13. In other cultures, in which "self" is differently conceived, what is brought forward might be different. Thus, where self is understood more as part of the community than an individual, the "I" that comes forward may in fact be the "we" of the community. I recognize that who writes or speaks may vary for dissimilar cultures, while not backing off my claim that in this culture, it is important for women to speak as individual selves.

14. Susan J. Brison, "Surviving Sexual Violence," Second Opinion 20, no. 2 (October, 1994), 11-23.

Reports on Conferences

Report on "The Role of Advocacy in the Classroom"

Pittsburgh, PA

2 - 4 June 1995

Hilde Hein

Sixteen organizations of the professions and higher education, including the American Philosophical Association, combined to co-sponsor this conference to discuss the contentious issue of political and cultural advocacy in the context of education and intellectual inquiry. Proponents and opponents aired their views in plenary sessions and break-out panels relating to area studies, standards of quality, professionalism, suppression of dissent, marginalized voices, the fact/value distinction, student expectation, legal constraint, the goals of higher education and a variety of related issues. With a choice of ten concurrent sessions for each time slot, my observation is limited to a small sample supplemented by accounts garnered from other attendees.

The tone was set by an initial set of questions posed by J. Dennis O'Connor, Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and Professor of Biology, and Myles Brand, President of Indiana University, Bloomington and a philosopher. Probing the definition of advocacy, as distinct from proselytism, they upheld standards of rationality and non-coerciveness, but also defended rights of free expression and inquiry and the merits of substantive commitment. These ground rules were complexified in the ensuing program as speakers multiplied and subdivided their interpretation, addressing the need for and consequences of extended agency and proliferated perspectives. The presence of new faces and new voices in the educational sphere was recognized, but the extent of its influence was disputed, and especially at this conference lamentably unrepresented. Participants ranged the slopes of the bell curve, only a few at its conservative or left-wing edges. The heuristic of equal representation of all alternative positions governed both panels and plenary sessions; the problem being that "all alternative positions" is a liberal term of art that begs the question.

A panel organized by the APA featured Felicia Ackerman (Brown University), Harry Brod (Delaware), and Peter Markie (U. of Missouri, Columbia). Ackerman affirmed the legitimacy of the generally held view that professors have an obligation to teach their subject matter and not something else. They should certainly not abuse their power and authority by demanding that students conform to patterns of behavior beyond those required by the intellectual and methodological constraints of their field. On the other hand, she acknowledged that preferences and choices are inevitable in the selection of courses, of professors and of schools. Why not endorse these openly and, bearing in mind the immaturity and vulnerability of students, encourage exchanges among explicitly partisan points of view?

Harry Brod argued against the received view that advocacy is pernicious. Admitting the impossibility of doing justice to all possible views, he urged giving priority to marginalized minority views, arguing that this is consistent with the principle of democratic education. It is the denial of ideology that is pernicious, he said; the pose of neutrality being not merely false, but falsely political. Rather than disputing whether or not advocacy is permissible, he contended, we should engage in empirical enquiry to determine what the "dominant ideology" is, not in order to undermine it, but to articulate criteria for the assessment of its legitimacy.

Peter Markie listed a number of conditions that must be fulfilled in order for a teacher to advocate a position responsibly. S/he must not fail to teach the prescribed content of the course, replacing it with material unrelated to that content. S/he must create an environment in the classroom that encourages open discussion and dissent by students. S/he must not advocate beyond the limits of her/his own expertise. S/he must promote rational criticism, in some instances explicitly offering alternative positions and/or arguments against her/his own position. He acknowledged the difficulty of fulfilling these requirements and therefore concluded that advocacy is rarely permissible.

Members of the audience expressed doubts about the desirability of proliferating positions. Does it not produce sheer adversarialism (when our task should be to build rational conviction)? Does it not encourage irresponsible choice and the absence of commitment? On the other hand, does so-called neutrality fare better as a means to sound thinking? Moreover, a contingent question, if we give priority to the subject of our own research (as professors commonly do with impunity if not indulgence), are we not engaging in advocacy? And is such intellectual selectiveness any less presumptuous or less reflective of cultural and political values than those ideological positions arrived at by other means? At this point, the very preeminence of reason is subject to doubt, a slippery slope for philosophers and one whose gravity dominated discussion throughout the conference.

Most of the panel sessions concentrated on more pragmatic matters: What sort of factors is a college permitted to bring to bear in assessing sexual harassment charges? - Teaching style? A syllabus? How have the courts defined advocacy, and how have they adjudicated between the possibly conflicting rights of students not to be indoctrinated and teachers to free speech? How, in turn, are these rights reconciled with the prevailing view that schools should impart certain fundamental values that are necessary to the maintenance of a democratic society? How, in contrast, are such values to be reflectively reconsidered? In particular, where they are embedded in law, as with religious institution and homosexual practice, does the critique of such values comprise incitement to unlawful conduct?

Some panels were historically retrospective. A session on Feminism in the Academy brought together three "generations" of feminist experience, that of Carolyn Heilbrun (Columbia emerita), Helene Moglen (UC Santa Cruz), and Carol Sternhell (NYU). Heilbrun's tale was one of startled coming to consciousness, her own, and the perpetual awareness of its absence in respected others. Moglen conveyed a sharp political conviction and a heady remembrance of intellectual and social obstacles met and overcome. She distinguished between the "politicized" classroom, in which students are drugged into submissive repetition of dogma, and the "political" classroom, where advocacy is open and also open to dispute. Feminist classes, she said, are the most contentious of all. Sternhell was the only panelist who came of age in a time of feminist legitimacy, and she expressed her disenchantment with some of its recent turns.

In the discussion that ensued, the issue of "balance" in the curriculum was repeatedly raised. Since feminist perspectives are generally absent (e.g. in a standard epistemology course) and given prominence in a course in feminist theory, is one or the other course lacking in balance? An accumulated animus against cultural feminism emerged in this panel and even a broader impatience with religious advocacy. That issue raised some alarm in subsequent sessions where established (or fundamentalist) religions' interference with freedom of advocacy for contending views came in for considerable criticism. At the same time, there were some who found the prevailing secularism and agnostic preference for evenhanded rationality a bit excessive.

The session with the greatest extremes of difference played against one another featured Michael Root (U. of Minn., Philosophy), Whitney Davis (Northwestern, Art History/ Archaeology), Gertrude Himmelfarb (CUNY Graduate Ctr, History) and Louis Menand (CUNY Graduate Ctr, Comparative Literature). Root argued against neutrality as an impediment to open discussion. The enemy is not partisanship, he said, but dogmatic presentation which pretends that there can be no alternative to the view offered. Himmelfarb lashed out against postmodernism as the biggest booster of irresponsible advocacy in its rejection of truth and reality and of the rigorous discipline and methodological care of the "old" history. Today, everything is personal, she complained. Political activism approaches narcissism (as in consciousness raising among feminists), and everything is possible and without purpose. Whitney Davis agreed that, indeed, everything is personal, but inferred responsibility from that condition. Declaring the "decisive refutation of Marxism" in 1989, he welcomed a generation of Post-post-structuralists who do believe that "self-cultivation" has displaced all traditional cultures and replaced them with a "new ethicism" based on a generalization of aesthetics and biography. It was a regrettable circumstance that Himmelfarb was unable to remain for the discussion so the audience was denied the opportunity to know what these two contenders might have to say to each other. Instead, we were rewarded with the wise and witty charm of Louis Menand who cautioned us not to confuse advocacy with unprofessionalism. Professors have always advocated, he said. That is what they do. They present the material they have to discuss in whatever manner they believe is most interesting and illuminating to their students. There may be shifts and changes of fashion in what is presented and how, but whatever the variations, their professing of it is advocacy. It does not follow that it is ideological. Moreover, where a text is ideological, to point that out is not to be an ideologue. As Menand saw it, we were assembled for the wrong reason. Advocacy is not a problem; bad teaching is. Disciplinarity makes us stupid. As a sort of rigor mortis, I suppose he might think of it as a prolongation of normal science.

Those of us who took part in the session organized by the American Society for Aesthetics (Peg Brand, U. of Indiana; Hilde Hein, Holy Cross College; Lambert Zuidervaart, Calvin College) were surprised to discover the vitality that remains in normal science. Compelled to reconsider the merits of the doctrine of disinterestedness in aesthetics, each of us found that, notwithstanding our own political convictions, there were good reasons not to abandon the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness as a distinctive part of aesthetic discourse. Moreover, like other proponents of advocacy at this conference who saw no contradiction between pluralism and intellectual respectability, we found that aesthetic merit does not presuppose hewing to a single party line, but it does entail the capacity to absorb or abstract from self-preoccupation. It remains to be seen whether or not that capacity is equivalent to what Davis characterized as "ironized opportunism."

In a final review session some unforeseen ironies became evident. The absence of student participants in a conference dedicated to their real and imaginary persuasion was one. As Maria Lugones pointed out, such omission is tantamount to silencing and to the erasure of the absent other. Lugones admonished that as teachers we must keep in mind not only who we are, but who we wish to become, which introduces an affective dimension that had been, by and large, neglected throughout this conference. Ironically, silence, whether an expression of docile acceptance or a sullen act of resistance, was not considered. Advocacy, like teaching, was represented as a monological relation, and thus its connection with authority (among other things) was not fully explored. In fact, amongst the protestations that we seek only to imbue the student with the skills of critical judgment, there was only the slightest indication that conversion of others to our causes might be a measure of competence-in our own eyes, if not in the protocols of our institutions.

Participants who came for pyrotechnical battles of wits may have been disappointed in this conference. It was an academic affair of read papers and polite rejoinders. Nonetheless, it brought together an unusual assortment of academic practitioners, dedicated to their calling and troubled by the attacks upon it. They struggled within and amongst themselves to come to terms with a complex situation, partly a product of their own creation, that currently degrades and diminishes them and threatens to undermine the project to which most of us are committed. There will be few rewards for this participation apart from some revitalized friendships and some intellectual stimulation. These are the satisfactions of academic life whose benefit we transmit to our students. In the struggle for recognition and dignity, we should not lose sight of the objectives that drew us into the profession. Neither should we cease to advocate on behalf of its continuity and worth.

Transforming the
Philosophy Curriculum

Liberation Ethics

Linda H. Damico

One way to attract minorities to the discipline is to teach courses that take seriously the concerns of minority students, that use empowering teaching techniques, and that show a willingness to listen rather than to preach. A course that I offered several years ago was quite successful in meeting the challenge of teaching a diverse student population. The syllabus for that course is given below:

DESCRIPTION:

Moral philosophy has traditionally been the work of society's privileged few. Their theories of moral agency have often excluded those of the underclass, racial minorities, and women. This course attempts to present a different view. Moral theory from the perspective of the poor and oppressed is explored with the hope of formulating a unified ethics of liberation. In pursuing this goal, the course will:

1. Critique the social conditions of oppression and the ethical ideology supporting those conditions.

2. Present the moral thinking of those oppressed groups (women, African Americans, Native Americans, Lesbians/Gays, Religious Minorities, Children, the Elderly, the Poor, the Differently Abled, etc.) who have usually not had a voice in the shaping of mainstream ethical theory.

3. Explore the possibility of a unified liberation ethics theory, both in the context of the concrete project of liberation and in the vision of a post-liberation society.

BOOKS:

Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta, GA: Scholar's Press, 1988).

Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York, NY: New American Library, 1964).

Eva Kittay and Diana Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987).

ESSAYS:

Anonymous, "Must Homosexuals be Jewish Outcasts?" Homosexuality and Ethics, ed. Edward Batchelor, Jr. (New York, NY: Pilgrim Press, 1980).

Mary Hunter Austin, "The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman," The Basket Woman (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1904).

George Clutesi, "Ko-ishin-mit and the Shadow People," Son of Raven, Son of Deer (Sidney, British Columbia: Gray's Pub., 1967).

James Cone, "Is Black Power a Form of Black Racism," Black Theology and Black Power (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1969).

_____. "Liberation and the Christian Ethic," God of the Oppressed (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1975).

_____. "On the Creation of New Values," Black Theology and Black Power (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1969).

Marc Ellis, "Notes Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation," Churches in Struggle, ed. William K. Tabb (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1986).

Paulo Freire, selections from Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans. Myra Ramos (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1970).

John Haddox, "American Indian Values," Chicanos and Native Americans eds. Ralph O. de la Garza and Z. Anthony Kruszewski (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973).

Beverly Wildung Harrison, "Misogyny and Homophobia," Making the Connections, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985).

_____. "The Older Person's Worth in the Eyes of Society," Making the Connections, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985).

_____. "Theological Reflections in the Struggle for Liberation," Making the Connections, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985).

Will Herberg, "The Divine Imperative: Ethics and Religion," Judaism and Modern Man (New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1959).

_____. "Justice and the Social Order," Judaism and Modern Man (New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1969).

Andrew Hermequaftewa, "The Hopi Way of Life is the Way of Peace," Red Power, ed. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 1971).

Carter Heyward, "Sexuality, Love, and Justice," Our Passion for Justice (New York, NY: Pilgrim Press, 1984).

Sarah Lucia Hoagland, selections from Lesbian Ethics (Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988).

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, "Toward an Understanding of 'Feminismo Hispano' in the U.S.A." Women's Consciousness, Women's Conscience, eds. Barbara Andolsen, Christine Gudorf and Mary Pellauer (New York, NY: Harper and Ros, 1985).

Joanna Macy, "Awakening to the Ecological Self," Healing the Wounds, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Pub., 1989).

Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots," Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York, NY: Pathfinder, 1989).

Russell Means, "Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth," Mother Jones (December 1980), pp. 24-38.

Onora O'Neill, "Children's Rights and Children's Lives," Ethics 98 (April 1988), pp. 445-463.

Judith Plaskow, "Anti-Semitism," Women's Consciousness, Women's Conscience, eds. Barbara Andolsen, Christine Gudorf and Mary Pellauer (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1985).

Holmes Rolston, "Values in Nature," Philosophy Gone Wild, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989).

Rosemary Radford Ruether, "From Machismo to Mutuality," Homosexuality and Ethics, ed. Edward Batchelor, Jr. (New York, NY: Pilgrim Press, 1980).

Peter Singer, "All Animals are Equal," Animal Liberation (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1975).

Starhawk, "Ethics and Justice in Goddess Religion," The Politics of Women's Spirituality, ed. Charlene Spretnak (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1982).

_____. "Feminist Earth-Based Spirituality," Healing the Wounds, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Pub., 1989).

Susan Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability," Hypatia 4 (Summer 1989), pp. 104-124.

REQUIREMENTS:

There are no examinations in this course, but this does not mean that little will be required of you. You are asked to do a considerable amount of writing in preparation for the seminars. Each assignment should show thought, effort and seriousness.

Attendance and Participation:

This course strongly emphasizes student input, so attendance, participation, and interest in the content and process of the course plays a major role in determining the grade.

Ethics Notebook:

To prepare for each week's seminar, the student is required to keep a notebook which should contain the following:

1. A brief summary of the major ideas in each article assigned for the week. (Special attention to the ethical content-values, principles, concepts-should be given.)

2. An evaluation of the ethical themes of the article from a liberation perspective. (Does the article adequately represent the views of the oppressed group about which it is written? Is there other information that should be included? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the article?)

3. A list of questions raised by the article, which you want discussed in the seminar.

4. Any reflections on the process and content of the course.

Notebooks are collected each week for which we have a seminar.

Short Writing Assignments:

In addition to the notebook, each student is required to write three short (2-4 pages) reviews on articles not in the course syllabus. Each review must include a summary and ethical evaluation of the article that you choose.

Research Paper:

Each student is required to write a ten-page paper on a topic relevant to the theme of this class.

GRADES:

Attendance/Participation 25%

Notebook 25%

Short Papers 25%

Research Paper 25%

WEEKLY SCHEDULE:

Monday: Lecture

Tuesday: Seminar-Sharing Our Experiences (Small Groups)

(What has been our experience of oppression? What are the structures, systems of oppression? Can they be changed? How do I help maintain these structures/ systems? What can I do to help change them?)

Wednesday: Seminar-discussion of articles.(Small groups)

Thursday: Seminar-discussion of articles. (Large Group)

Friday: Lecture-summary of week's discussion.

THE SEMINAR:

The seminar is an opportunity to actively work with the issues and ideas of the course and the reading material. It is not a lecture. It is a group work session. The success of the seminar depends on the involvement of all its members.

READING ASSIGNMENTS:

WEEKS I & II: INTRODUCTION

Readings:

(Freire) Chapter 1, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

WEEK III: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERATION ETHICS

Readings:

(King) "The Negro Revolution"

(King) "The Sword that Heals"

(King) "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

(Malcolm X) "Message to the Grassroots"

(Cone) "Liberation and the Christian Ethic"

(Cone) "Is Black Power a Form of Black Racism"

(Cone) "On the Creation of New Values"

WEEK IV: JEWISH LIBERATION ETHICS

Readings:

(Ellis) "Notes Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation"

(Herberg) "The Divine Imperative: Ethics and Religion,"

(Herberg) "Justice and the Social Order"

WEEK V: FEMINIST LIBERATION ETHICS

Christian

Readings:

(Harrison) "Theological Reflection in the Struggle for Liberation"

Secular

Readings:

(Gilligan) "Moral Orientation and Moral Development" in Women and Moral Theory

(Held) "Feminism and Moral Theory" in Women and Moral Theory

(Meyers) "The Socialized Individual and Individual Autonomy" in Women and Moral Theory

(Ruddick) "Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason" in Women and Moral Theory

(Harding) "The Curious Coincidence of Feminist and African Moralities" in Women and Moral Theory

WEEK VI: FEMINIST LIBERATION ETHICS (cont.)

Black Womanist

Readings:

(Cannon) "Introduction" in Black Womanist Ethics

(Cannon) "The Black Woman's Moral Situation" in Black Womanist Ethics

(Cannon) "The Black Woman's Moral Situation in the 20th Century" in Black Womanist Ethics

(Cannon) "The Black Woman's Literary Tradition as a Source for Ethics" in Black Womanist Ethics

Jewish

Readings:

(Plaskow) "Anti-Semitism"

Pagan

Readings:

(Starhawk) "Ethics and Justice in Goddess Religion"

Hispanic

Readings:

(Isasi-Diaz) "Toward an Understanding of 'Feminismo Hispano' in the U.S.A."

WEEK VII: LESBIAN/GAY LIBERATION ETHICS

Readings:

(Hoagland) exerpts from Lesbian Ethics

(Heyward) "Sexuality, Love, and Justice"

(Anonymous) "Must Homosexuals be Jewish Outcasts?"

(Ruether) "From Machismo to Mutuality"

(Harrison) "Misogyny and Homophobia"

WEEK VIII: NATIVE AMERICAN LIBERATION ETHICS

Readings:

(Means) "Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth"

(Hermequaftewa) "The Hopi Way of Life is the Way of Peace"

(Haddox) "American Indian Values"

(Clutesi) "Ko-ishin-mit and the Shadow People"

(Austin) "The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman"

WEEK IX: ANIMALS AND OTHER EARTH CREATURES

Readings:

(Singer) "All Animals are Equal"

(Macy) "Awakening to the Ecological Self"

(Starhawk) "Feminist, Earth-Based Spirituality"

(Rolston) "Values in Nature"

WEEK X: OTHER MARGINALIZED PEOPLE

Readings:

(Harrison) "The Older Person's Worth in the Eyes of Society"

(O'Neill) "Children's Rights and Children's Lives"

(Wendell) "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability"

Notes on Contributors

Bat-Ami Bar On is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her work focuses on violence, and her work on Arendt is part of her work on violence.

Susan J. Brison is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, where she teaches and writes in the areas of philosophy of law, social and political philosophy, and ethics.

Linda Damico is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kennesaw State College. She is the author of The Anarchist Dimension of Liberation Theology (Peter Lang). Her current interests are feminist philosophy and liberation philosophy.

Ellen K. Feder currently teaches ethics and political theory at Vassar College.

Janice McLane is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Morgan State University. She is currently at work on a book examining how women are drawn into, and strategies some women use to overcome, internalized oppression.

Announcements

Calls for papers:

Social Identities: A Journal on Race, Nation, and Culture

Submissions are invited that fall within the scope on this new international journal (two issues per year, first issue, January 1995). Please submit to either Abebe Zegeye, Centre for Modern African Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CY4 7AL, Britain, or to David Theo Goldberg, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287-0403, USA.

Recent years have witnessed considerable worldwide changes concerning social identities like race, nation, and ethnicity, as well as the emergence of new forms of racism and nationalism as discriminatory exclusions. Attendant to these changes is a new body of academic work appearing in a wide range of journals. The aim of Social Identities is to furnish an interdisciplinary and international focal point for theorizing issues at the interface of social identities. The journal is especially concerned to address these issues in the context of the transforming political economies and cultures of postmodern and postcolonial conditions. The journal is intended as a forum for contesting ideas and debates concerning the formations of, and transformations in, socially significant identities like race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and class, their attendant forms of material exclusion and power, as well as the political and cultural possibilities these identifications open up.

The journal will include a Current Debate section involving concise critical contributions on controversial issues concerning social identities. Submissions to this section are welcome also.

Books for review should be directed either to Julia Maxted, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, Britain, or to Nahum Chandler, Department of English, Duke University, Durham NC 27708, USA.

Orders for members of the APA: Subscriptions for individuals who are members of the APA are $20 per year. APA members should make their checks payable to Carfax Publishing Company and mail them to Professor David Goldberg, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287-0403, USA.

Institutional subscriptions are $98 per year. Regular individual subscriptions are $44 per year. Orders for non-APA members should be sent to Carfax Publishing Company, PO Box 2025, Dunnellon FL 34430-2025, USA.

Rereading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Jean Paul Sartre. Papers reflecting a range of feminist styles and approaches to Sartre's philosophy are sought for a volume to be published in the Penn State Press series, Rereading the Canon, edited by Nancy Tuana. I am interested in critical feminist discussions of any major aspect of Sartre's philosophy from his early existential writings and notebooks on ethics, to his Critique, biographies, novels, and plays. Papers that address the significance of Sartre's work for feminist theories of social transformation are particularly welcomed. Deadline for submission of completed manuscripts is June 30, 1997. Send inquiries, proposals, and two copies of manuscripts to: Prof. Julien Murphy, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME 04103.