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Fall 2007
Volume 07, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Familiar Thinking: Reflections of a Mother, Philosopher, Philosopher’s Wife, and Philosopher’s Daughter

Rebecca Kukla
Carleton University

Becoming a philosopher was a matter of continuing the family business. My father is a philosopher of science who recently retired after thirty-five years of service at the University of Toronto. My husband is an epistemologist who is tenured in the same department as I am. My little sister attempted to rebel against familial destiny by becoming a Rabbi, but she spends much of her time writing scholarly papers on the relative conceptual priority of ontology and ethics. My five-year-old—who is years behind his peers in learning to ride a bicycle and zip up his own coat—asked me last year whether I thought there was any difference between the real and the actual, and told me last month that he had noticed that his kindergarten classmates did not have as many “theories and arguments” as he did. Hence for me, philosophical discourse and family discourse are one and the same—a situation that I think contains an interesting paradox. For one of the central tropes of philosophical discourse is a distancing from the familiar; we philosophers seek clarity and depth through scrupulous abstraction away from all of the messy empirical details of daily life, often setting our examples on distant planets or in imaginary worlds in order to help us carry out this mental act of what we might call defamiliarization—an act that non-philosophers find perplexing and difficult. Consider a classic example such as early 20 th century sense-datum theory, which held that what we saw most immediately were not worldly objects, but meaningless, alien configurations of patches and flashes. Sense-datum theory asks us to reach into the unfamiliar to recover our own perceptual experience, and then struggle to infer our way back to the everyday world we left. Since childhood, such defamiliarizing discourse has been the medium in which I have negotiated my most intimate relationships and my mundane daily activities.

My father was trained at UCLA in the ‘60s, by Carnap and other logical positivists. As he is fond of telling me, he took introductory philosophy of science from Richard Montague, who opened the class by announcing that “scientific theories are sets of ordered quintuplets.” Furthermore, he was a Holocaust survivor and a secular, diasporic Jew, for whom unfamiliarity and lack of roots in any concrete environment were second nature, and for whom the ability to live in alternative, imagined worlds was a crucial survival skill. My father had nothing resembling an ordinary childhood and almost no contact with his parents, who were taken to concentration camps, so he had to figure out parenting without models, from first principles. He interacted with his daughters in the tongue he knew and loved—the tongue that had finally given him a permanent home when he showed up at UCLA speaking English as a fourth language—and this was the defamiliarizing language of philosophy. When we were children, my father encouraged an ongoing family competition to see who could spot infinite regresses the fastest, and we had a little song we would sing when we found one. At bedtime, my sister and I would clamour for a “rap” instead of a traditional story. In our family parlance, a “rap” was a quick explanation of a famous philosophical puzzle or argument. Thus, in my pajamas and well before puberty, I learned about Hume’s and Goodman’s problems of induction, Descartes’ argument for dualism, and Cantor’s diagonal proof of the existence of different orders of infinities. We would beg him to tell us about such things again and again—they formed our family mythology.

When I became a philosophy major in my father’s department, we went to colloquia and sat in on seminars together, the way other parents and their kids go fishing. When I was nineteen, he and I coauthored my very first publication—a little article in Analysis on Fodor’s critique of meaning holism. I kept it a secret from my parents when I betrayed my Vienna Circle heritage by signing up for an existentialism course. Soon after, I left for graduate school in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, along with a whole cohort of children of University of Toronto philosophy professors, who had a tradition of sending their kids to that program. Ten years later, as 1999 came to an end, my father called to ask me if I wanted to come home for New Year’s Eve and watch the emeralds turn from grue to bleen with him.

When I grew up and married a philosopher, philosophers’ discourse became the everyday medium of adult domesticity in our household. Quite unselfconsciously, my husband and I discuss our restaurant options in terms of biconditionals and nearby possible worlds, and accuse one another during domestic squabbles of inappropriately demanding necessary and sufficient conditions. Our wedding vows cited both Heidegger and Wilfrid Sellars. When I was pregnant, our friends teased us that our child would be able to say “Geist” and “being” long before “cow” or “chicken.” The abstract and excruciatingly precise rhetoric of philosophy is so deeply built into our tongue that even when we feel like we are being utterly mundane, bank tellers and waiters often ask us what the hell we do for a living anyhow.

You might think that given my childhood and my home life, I would have had an easier time than most other people turning my professional philosophical voice to the concretia of everyday domestic life. But in fact, I think just the opposite might be true. Whereas most of my colleagues returnfrom the peculiar, intentionally alienated discourse of philosophy to the familiar when they go home for Thanksgiving, or negotiate family business with their spouse, I almost never leave that discursive space. But the thing is, philosophical discourse does not merely eschew or abstract from the familiar—it fears it, and seeks the alien for comfort. We philosophers see the concrete and quotidian as a stain upon the purity of our work—we worry that it is too messy, too contingent, too complicated to allow the conceptual clarity we seek. If we must think about something as concrete as abortion, we would rather do so by imagining women hooked up by tubes to full-grown violinists than by talking about women frightened by poverty trying to take care of their children while soaking through maxipads after their operations. For me, philosophical discourse and its defamiliarizing tropes and themes feel safe, authoritative, and legitimizing. Like a true child of the Diaspora, I am most at home in unfamiliar and alien territory.

But I was launched into the familiar when I had my son. I found the experience of becoming a mother so bizarre, interesting, overwhelming, and transformative that I absolutely could not help but devote myself to thinking about it carefully, and of course the only thinking tools I had were philosophical ones. I wanted to think about the nature and meaning of privacy, the retention or loss of identity through profound transformation, how to articulate a robust notion of love that did not presuppose equality or reciprocity and yet was not patronizing or usurious, how love could coexist with anger and resentment, the ethics of dependency and nurturing, and the phenomenology of having one’s own body split slowly but inexorably from one person into two. And I did not want to use my mothering or my child as a springboard for thinking about these issues abstractly—rather, I wanted, even needed, to think through them with direct reference to my lived experience right then and there.

When my son was first born, I poured my thoughts and writing energy around these topics into fiction, scrupulously avoiding any philosophical writing. Interestingly, I not only felt that these were not properly philosophical thoughts that I was having, but also that doing any philosophy so soon after his birth would somehow be a betrayal of my newborn son and a blemish on my commitment as a new mother. I churned out 250 pages of what was likely a very bad novel about bodies, intimacy, privacy, medicalization, home, and breaches in people’s identities and self-conceptions. But eventually, as I gained confidence as a mother and began to reflect critically upon my inherited assumptions about what counts as philosophical discourse, I decided that I had to try to write about these issues in a professional philosophical voice.

Although I had long been aiming to finish a book on either of the two research projects that I had pursued since graduate school—one on the nature of objectivity and the other on Rousseau’s metaphysics and aesthetics—my first book turned out to be about mothers’ bodies, pregnancy, and infant feeding. In order to write the book, I had to spend a lot of time learning about anatomy, medicine, prenatal care, nutrition, the history of wet nursing, and many other mundane topics to which philosophers rarely turn their attention. I now spend a big chunk of my professional time talking to obstetricians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and others who find the defamiliarizing style of philosophers utterly bizarre and incomprehensible. I am slowly and laboriously learning a language in which I can converse productively with these new colleagues.

I have made this transition into thinking philosophically about the familiar with trepidation and self-doubt. I have had a hard time convincing myself that this new work counts as “real” philosophy. I still find myself defensive about my new interests among my old epistemology and history of philosophy buddies—I am always anxious to explain to them how I am still doing my old stuff too, and how I am actually still talking about familiar philosophical problems. Indeed, I am particularly defensive in my conversations with my father and my husband, even though they have been supportive of my work at every turn. Although I have recently found a happy professional niche for myself, in a philosophy department that seemingly welcomes and values my quirky constellation of interests,[1] this situation did not come easily. Along the way, I faced concrete professional penalties for the direction my work took. For example, when I was up for a senior position in a top department a couple of years ago, the chair of the search committee told one of my referees that they would have wanted to hire me on the basis of the quality and quantity of my work in epistemology and history of philosophy alone, were it not for all that weird feminist and mommy stuff cluttering up my vita. At the same time, I still feel unsettled in academic spaces that do not belong to the discipline of philosophy. I do not actually have any interest in leaving philosophy entirely behind—I want to enrich its discourse and its field of vision from within, as best I can. I want to give philosophy matter and flesh, to force it to confront the contingency and concretia of the everyday. But this is still unfamiliar territory for me—a skill my father never taught me.

What have been the costs of such defamiliarizing discourse to the discipline of philosophy itself? Of course, it has made it harder for many of our students to grasp why philosophy is interesting, and it has made us less than popular at interdisciplinary conferences, when we start talking about the inhabitants of twin earth and about people-seeds drifting in through window screens. It has made it easier for us to teach and use the texts by the great philosophers who also feared the familiar, such as Descartes and Kant, compared with those by the few who did not, such as Heidegger and Rousseau. I suspect that it has also helped to maintain the paucity of women in the field; for whatever reason, women often seem more compelled to turn their intellectual attention to the familiar than men, and we have not generally found professional philosophy to be hospitable to such work. But these are external roadblocks—I want to explore briefly how our fear of the familiar has damaged philosophical thinking itself.

This fear has generated at least one fallacy endemic to philosophy. This is the fallacy of inferring, without further argument, from what is true of fringe or marginal cases to what is true of central cases—or, correspondingly, assuming that because an account or distinction does not hold up at the far edges of its applicability, therefore it does not hold up in the central or paradigm cases either. The fact is, sometimes margins work the same way as centers, and sometimes they do not; and likewise, sometimes consideration of fringe cases can bring clarity, and other times it can mislead. So for instance, in the wake of Gettier, it took philosophers a long time to climb their way back to the idea that even if justified true belief does not constitute knowledge in an unfamiliar town filled with carefully constructed barn façades, this does not mean that justified true belief does not constitute knowledge in the course of normal perception.[2] There is no good reason to think that the real, proper account of how knowledge works—the one that philosophers should care about—is one that can give us complete certainty when our environment is a strange one designed to deceive us, rather than one that can account for the good-enough knowledge that gets us through the day.

Consider another example. Quine and Davidson developed careful and eloquent accounts of how we could understand other people’s language through “radical interpretation”—that is, interpretation in the face of a complete lack of familiarity with the grammar or the meaning of their language or the culture surrounding it. How, they asked, could we achieve a hermeneutic meeting when confronted with the utterly alien? Where do we begin when “natives” about whom we know absolutely nothing shout “gavagai!” at us? This is a fair enough question. But why should we think that it is this type of limit case that best illuminates, or provides us with the essence somehow, of what goes on in everyday interpretation and conversation between people who kind of understand what the other person means, and kind of do not?[3] And even if Davidson is right that his theory of radical interpretation has as a consequence that there are no such things as radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, then why should this take the bite out of the philosophical importance of the partial divergences between our conceptual schemes—the ones that can be bridged imperfectly, with work? (My husband and I have fought about this particular bit of Davidson so many times that we have instated a permanent moratorium on discussing that particular Davidson article with one another.) Philosophers are masters at using fringe, borderline, and alien cases in order to generate counterexamples that reveal the weaknesses or limits of our intuitions about more typical cases. However, we are novices at the reverse skill: using explorations of the familiar and the everyday in order to provide checks on our confidence in our reasoning at the fringes of imaginative accessibility.

I think that our fear of the familiar has also resulted in our inability to fully articulate and absorb certain arguments. For example, philosophy since at least Wittgenstein has been rife with detailed arguments designed to show that we cannot properly understand meaning, morality, autonomy, identity, or knowledge without carefully attending to the contextual and the particular, and to interpersonal relationships. Such arguments have come from phenomenologists, feminists, pragmatists, Aristotle scholars, and others. Usually, the arguments themselves are conducted in an abstract and impersonal voice that remains at the meta-level; that is, they tell us, in the same defamiliarized language whose severe limits they hope to show, that such language is insufficient to the project of philosophy. As my father pointed out to me decades ago, most philosophers who argue against metanarratives are in fact spinning meta-metanarratives. Few philosophers actually go on to philosophically mine the particularities to which they plead with us to attend. We feel the need to offer such arguments again and again, but they neither live up to their own standards, nor succeed in compelling a real change in philosophical practice.

Most people already have to make a defamiliarizing leap away from the discourse of their childhood in order to pursue professional philosophy in the first place, often to the bafflement of parents who are doctors, office workers, etc. In contrast, philosophy is my mother tongue—the language of home and family—and hence there is no defamiliarizing distance built in from the start. But at the same time, if I challenge the hegemonic discourse, methods, or topics of philosophy, I challenge my father, my childhood, my husband, and perhaps even my diasporic secular Jewish heritage. I have only recently realized the extent to which my personal identity and self-esteem are built around my legitimacy as a professional philosopher. However, I intend to continue to try to force philosophy to attend to the familiar. I do so out of fidelity to my intimate relationships and daily activities, which demand and deserve my caring philosophical attention, and out of fidelity to the discipline of philosophy, which deserves to be enriched from within.

Endnotes

1. Thanks in large part to the support and hard work of my friend and new colleague Joanne Waugh, whose story also appears in this issue.

2. See John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard 1994), for this point, and my thanks to my husband, Richard Manning, for making the point clear to me.

3. I thank Rob Stainton for first raising this question clearly for me.

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