Philosophy and the Protection of the Personal. (Articles) (2001)

This article is concerned with mapping out what has all too often been excluded from knowledge, everyday and its interpretation. The author argues that attention to is particularly necessary for that depend on and teach abstraction in service of knowledge. These disciplines have much to gain from adopting vigilant critical practice that is alert to the complexities of expression. Cet article entreprend de cartographier ce qui se voit trop souvent exclure du savoir, soit l'experience du quotidien et l'interpretation qui en est faite. L'auteure postule que l'attention portee l'experience est d'une importance particuliere dans les d'etudes qui dependent de et enseignent l'abstraction au service du savoir. Ces champs d'etudes profiteraient beaucoup s'ils adoptaient une pratique vigilante et attentive aux complexites de expression. Personalizing Philosophy In this paper I use my as feminist philosopher with an interest in emotions to reflect on how abstract theory about our lives is an interpretation of those lives that may affect how we can find our own meaningful. I want to begin by juxtaposing two encounters with philosophy. Susan Haack, logician, epistemologist, and philosopher of science came recently to my university to describe and defend philosophy as branch of inquiry, not into special objects of various branches of science, but into everyday experience. (1) She wanted to contrast philosophical reasoning with sham reasoning (politically motivated philosophical theory) and fake reasoning (philosophy that we undertake in playful literary spirit, not seeking truth). Genuine philosophizing, she argued, is disinterested truth-seeking about everyday, pursued from desire for truth and using method appropriate to good inquiry. Her description of method, taken from American pragmatist Charles Pierce, focussed on an ethics of terminology or proper use of concepts. She argued that philosophy, because it is concerned with everyday experience, must have body of terms or concepts of vague signification which throughout course of inquiry are replaced by precise, technical vocabulary. The philosopher then communicates view as explicitly, directly, and plainly as possible to other philosophers. Haack was fond of quoting Pierce that in order to be deep, it is sometimes necessary to be dull. During question period, graduate student asked about perhaps necessary recourse to literary spirit, use of narrative, in some areas of philosophy, philosophy of emotions for example. Haack replied that ideal way for philosopher to communicate an ideally developed theory to an ideal audience would be through discussion of precise, well-defined concepts with no recourse to narrative. This was her answer as to how best philosophical theory understands everyday personal experience, including emotional experience, that philosophers, when doing philosophy, should aim to understand this and to present this understanding using precise, well-defined terms. In 1992, I defended thesis, now book, entitled Interpreting Personal: Expression and Formation of Feelings, (2) in which I claim that our feelings, one of most personal aspects of our experience, are partly formed through interpretive practices of others. My work was an inquiry into everyday and an interpretation of this through philosophical theory. One of appraisers of dissertation stated that reading this view had caused her a sense of panic and loss of prized privacy. In preparing this paper, I have twice encountered, in feminist discussions of personal, Teresa de Lauretis's gloss on notion of experience as: process by which...subjectivity is constructed....Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality, and so perceives and comprehends as subjective (referring to, even originating in, oneself) those relations -- material, economic and interpersonal -- which are in fact social and, in larger perspective, historical. …