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Issue VI Personal Essay
Issue VI Personal Essay
INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK
I solicited the essays we’ve included in this issue, all written by philosophers or philosophically-minded writers. The essay is protean. It has been the form of choice for writers offering an examination of the trade-offs between aesthetic pleasure and animal suffering (David Foster Wallace: “Consider the Lobster”), a meditation on pain (Eula Biss: “The Pain Scale”), a defense of atheism (Bertrand Russell: “Why I am Not a Christian”), and thoughts on customs (Montaigne: “On The Custom of Wearing Clothes”), not to mention moths, shadows, and fatherhood. The essay can capture shifts among topics; can show the ways that experiences illuminate principles or rules; can reflect the ruminations of the author, who might be said to “think on the page.”
The personal essay, a subcategory of the essay proper, is marked, according to Philip Lopate, by a tone of intimacy. In “The Date”—one example of the personal essay—Brenda Miller talks to the reader as if she is a friend, telling us how she prepares for the arrival of a man she’s invited to her house for dinner. In the process, she reflects on what her house might look like to a visitor, what’s on her refrigerator (and what he might think that says about her), the appeal of living alone and of independence, and the complicated nature of desire and waiting. In “Blindness,” Jorge Luis Borges reflects on his experience of becoming blind just as he was appointed to the directorship of a library. Amy Tan describes the shame she felt about her mother’s poor grasp of English but also how she came to think of her mother as the audience for her stories in “Mother Tongue.”
The personal essay can have a confessional tone, or it can reach for something that is common to the human experience. The best personal essays manage to do both: to use the personal voice to illuminate human experiences, human failings, and the challenges—both small and large—that people face as they try to make lives for themselves. It is marked by a conversational tone, by candor, and its own unique signature—a particular voice, a particular person, speaks to us, not as a scholar or an expert, but as another frail human being facing the complexities of being alive. We are reminded that the author is, like us, a living, breathing person with a particular past, and we are invited to think alongside that particular person about things that may seem small but which become doors that open us to new ways of seeing.
Every essay in this issue is driven by the author’s self-disclosure or personal experience: each of the authors is telling us about something that happened in their lives, and each uses that to illuminate larger social, political, and philosophical issues. Carol Moody’s essay, “My Parting Shot” is a meditation on coffee, but also about temptation, desire, and rule-breaking. Frances Howard-Snyder, Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington State University, uses her college experiences to reflect on questions about what we mean by sexual assault in “Drunken Sex: Then and Now.” Todd Franklin, the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of Africana Studies and Philosophy at Hamilton College, writes about Emmett Till’s mother, his own mother, and protest in “A Mother’s Tears.” Raja Halwani, Professor of Philosophy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, writes about another mother relationship—the one he had with the Palestinian refugee, Khadijah, who lived with his family in Beirut during the civil war in Lebanon. Eunice Tiptree, a writer from Chardon, OH and a former journalist, writes about baseball cards, connections, and our contemporary plague. James Wetzel, The Augustinian Chair and Director of the Augustine Institute at Villanova, writes about Augustine, a Brazilian psychiatrist, and his father in his personal essay “Angelology,” which also examines the ideas of the prodigal son, time, immortality, understanding, and faith.
The personal essays included in this volume use the tools of literary art to reveal and examine philosophical themes. How might the pursuit of one’s loves and passions—of self-determination—lead to alienation from the people we love? And how do we live with that exchange? How do we understand ourselves and others and the categories of harm that we and others might cause? What role might chance play in life, and how do we think about that? How do our own personal experiences—living in a particular time or place, with particular people—provide us with the materials for self-knowledge?
In her book about evil, Susan Neiman argues that philosophical thinking in the Enlightenment period was not the professionalized pursuit of solutions to puzzles, but rather a series of sustained attempts to grapple with problems about evil that appeared in the lives of everyone. Our present focus on a version of philosophy that is housed in academic departments has, according to Neiman, impoverished our understanding of philosophical thought and perplexity. My hope is that this issue goes some way to freeing philosophy from the constraints placed on its writing by academic and professionalized rules. In these personal essays, we find philosophy and philosophical thinking in cups of coffee, in civil wars, in Walmart, and in personal experiences with living, breathing people.