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Finding (Your Own) Philosophical VoiceAuthor(s): Edward S. CaseySource: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 84, No. 2(November 2010), pp. 27-44Published by: American Philosophical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25769933 .

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Finding (Your Own) Philosophical Voice

Edward S. Casey

State University of New York at Stony Brook Presidential Address delivered before the One Hundred Sixth Annual Eastern Division Meeting of The American Philosophical Association in New York, New York, on Tuesday, December29,2009.

"We always arrive in the final analysis at the human voice, which is to say we come up against the human being."?Mikail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and the Chronotope of the Novel" (in Michael

Holquist, ed. The Dialogic Imaginations

"Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd." - Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

"...each voice is a dynamic hybrid." - Fred Evans, The Multivoiced

Body

Michael Williams, in his introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ends his spirited tribute to this pathbreaking book by saying that in it "we hear one of

America's most distinctive voices coming fully into its own."1 What does it mean for someone's voice to "come into its own" as "distinctive" in

philosophy? This is something that philosophers rarely consider as such,

yet it guides, forcefully if quietly, their perception of others' work in the

field and sometimes their own. If there are moments when we comment on this topic, we certainly never teach it. Many of us hope to come by it by hook or by crook?and leave it at that. But I take it to be a serious

subject worthy of philosophical reflection on certain occasions. Such is the present one.

Coming into our own as a philosopher means finding one's own voice in the company of contemporaries and forebears. This is not the same

thing as hitting one's stride or getting up to par: these are expressions of

professional pacing involving an at least implicit scheduling aspect?an academic calendar of sorts. They reflect the world of institutional standards and collegial expectations, as embodied in talk of "writing your tenure

book" or publishing "a decent number of articles in the right journals."



28 Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 84:2

In this discourse, the question of the quality of the book or the articles matters less than the quantity and the timing of such publications. Even as we act upon these standardized measures of accomplishment in our

profession, at a more reflective level we suspect that they are not sufficient. Measurable they may be, but they rarely measure up to what we want to achieve in philosophy. For they do not have to do directly, much less

necessarily, with finding our own philosophical voice. But what is such a voice? How does one find it?

Finding one's own voice can be attained without this voice being widely recognized. We can see this in the case of Charles Sanders Peirce (whose genius may have been fully appreciated in his lifetime by only one person:

William James) or Friedrich Nietzsche, who said famously (and correctly) that his renown would come only 100 years after his death. Finding one's own voice is something a philosopher must herself experience: she must

realize, in her philosophical heart and mind, that she is saying just what she wants to say and as she wants to say it. In this respect, philosophical voice is "subjective" in some significant measure.

The word "subjective" does not here mean merely a matter of

personal feeling?say, of feeling good or bad about one's work: these are

notoriously fallible judgments. Nor is it a matter of discovering something located deep within yourself alone. It may be difficult to ignore the lure of St. Augustine's counsel: "Do not lose your way outside. Return within

yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man."2 But the ancient skeptics and Hume and Husserl have shown us the fragility of a strictly introspective consultation with passing ideas within us, including ideas of what we have

truly accomplished. Finding one's own voice often involves a conviction that one has in fact found it, yet it is not reducible to this conviction.

What, then, does it mean to find your own philosophical voice?

I

The poet W.S. Merwin remarks that "poetry begins with hearing."3 The same could be claimed of philosophy, which is oral in its historical origins and remains so in its teaching and much of its transmission. Indeed, there is no

voice, poetic or philosophical, except one that can be heard in principle, whether by oneself or others. When it is spoken out loud, I can hear it

acoustically with my organic ear, providing I am in the right proximity. When I engage in "inner speech," I may hear no actual sounds, but I do have the sense of quasi-hearing phantom words that are the emblems of what I am thinking. In this circumstance, I also have the sense of being on the inner track of my thought and of being able to judge the truth of what I am saying to myself. Such self-hearing as a privileged path to truth?its

"overhearing"?is the premise that the early Derrida found lurking in the ancient Greek roots of Western metaphysical thought. According to this premise, the authoritative voice of intellect overhears itself thinking and then broadcasts the truth it claims to know from within to all who are in earshot.



Presidential Address - Eastern Division 29

Philosophical voice, however, is not equivalent to speaking out loud or to announcing the thought that emerges in inner speech. These are

expressive modalities of this voice, its articulation in actual sounds? sounds that may well accompany such voice and yet are not required for it to exist. At stake here is the voice of thinking?thinking one's own

thoughts in the pursuit of truth. This voice is implied in Plato's claim that

"thinking is discourse,"4 where "discourse" (logos) signifies the vehicle of a properly philosophical voice, whether it be spoken or written. Such a voice is not just internal to the finite human subject, nor is it confined to the deliverances of inner speech; it constitutes the thinking core of this

subject, whatever its chosen expressive medium may be.

Given the varieties of this medium (which also include the abstract

symbolism of formal logic), why do we continue to speak of "philosophical voice"? I believe that we employ this term because of the extensive range of pitch and volume as well as the nuances in tone, mood, and timbre, of which the human voice is capable?and because of our capacity to take in this range and to hear these nuances once we are attuned to them. It is as if these sensed features of a sounding voice were designed to carry the inflections and subtleties of meaning of which philosophers are so fond, even if these nuances need not be literally heard or inwardly overheard on

any given occasion.

II

Once we grant that philosophical voice can be written (or otherwise

symbolized) as well as heard, we need to remark that there are various

ways we do not want to think of finding one's philosophical voice. For one

thing, it is not necessarily found all at once: it may happen gradually, over time?sometimes taking decades, as with Heidegger's later philosophical voice, which is quite different from the voice of the author of Being and Time. For another, such a voice is neither discovered as such nor created

outright: it does not lie there to be revealed, as if it pre-existed in whole cloth (the model of "hearing voices," however apt in religious life, does not work in philosophy), nor do we grasp it in one fell swoop, whether in intellectual intuition or in immediate inference. It takes time?at the

limit, a lifetime?to find one's voice. It is gained gradually, even if there are moments of accelerated insight that may lead to radical reorientations of

philosophical thought: as happened with Wittgenstein at least twice in his career.

We must also set aside the idea that the voice we find in philosophy is tantamount to one's individual voice, a voice that is unique to oneself. In A Pitch of Philosophy, Stanley Cavell refers to "the first essay I wrote in

philosophy that I still use, that is, the one in which I found my philosophical voice, or the track of it."5 He is referring to the title essay of his book Must

We Mean What We Say?; about this essay he remarks that "it is explicitly a defense of the work of my teacher Austin against an attack that in effect dismissed that work as unscientific, denied it as a contender in the ranks of philosophy at all."6 Cavell also affirms that he came to write on Emerson and Thoreau in much the same spirit?to retrieve them as challenging




philosophical thinkers for our time. Here we have a situation in which

finding one's own voice consists in appreciating anew the voices of others and re-expressing them in one's own words: putting what they had to say in another key, as it were. No claim to originality is here made, nor is it needed. By his own account, Cavell found his voice in giving new voice to certain admired figures: re-voicing them. But readers of Cavell know that his own voice is nevertheless quite distinctive even as it takes its cue from

predecessors he admires: he gives them a new voice in and through his own voice, even as this latter voice is deeply informed by theirs.

This sets the stage for the question that will preoccupy me in this

essay: Is what I take to be my philosophical voice really my own?in the

beginning or in the end?

Ill In the wake of massive ancient and medieval attempts to link voice to the impersonal workings of intellect or reason, in the modern era it becomes very tempting to hold that I find or forge my own voice as mine? as somehow belonging to me by the dint of my own labors, as the very trademark of my thought. In other words, the voice sought in philosophy is

something singular. By "singular" I do not mean literally "unique," where this implies belonging to me alone in my empirical or historical facticity.7 Nor do I mean "particular" if this signifies an instantiation of an essence or universal, its exemplification. It also cannot be called something "individual," if this latter term is taken to suggest an autonomy located

wholly outside of the community or world in which one lives. Rather, the

singularity of philosophical voice is univocal?not in the sense of strictly unequivocal but, more generously, as being "one voice" in a sense that

rejoins that of the closely related idea of "being of one mind" on some issue or question. Unlike the particular, the univocal does not instantiate the universal but joins up with it in a tightly bonded relation. Univocality exhibits, in Deleuze's phrase, the "universality of the singular," or, in Husserl's nomenclature, an "eidetic singularity."8 The link to the universal

helps to explain the fact that philosophical voice, whatever its roots in the

idiosyncrasies of a personal life, also has something impersonal about it, as when we speak of "getting it right." This impersonal character of

philosophical voice has everything to do with its claim to a level of truth that cannot be equated with empirical truths about one's personal self.

In a philosophical voice that is univocal in tenor?that says truth as one?the singular has universal import. I and other thinkers say (or attempt to say) the truth: different as we may be as singular thinkers, we express

what is true for many, perhaps even for all. What Kant says of Nature holds also for philosophical voice: "Nature makes its universal laws specific."9 This allows us to construe the proposition "thinking is discourse" as saying that thinking (which, according to Plato, is thinking the universal in the Form) makes itself specific in the discrete tokens of speech. For discourse occurs first of all as speech, as pronounced voice, in the way in which

we say the universal in spoken words, in the various turns of phrase we

employ with diverse inflections. Each of us as philosophers says differently




the very truth upon which we come to agree. We set out to uncover THE

truth, as if it existed in and by itself in pristine purity; but we find it only as mediated by certain idioms of thought and various byways of speaking and writing: we can only express what we find to be true in the written or

spoken voice by which we utter it, singular to each of us as thinkers.

This suggests a much more general point: instead of finding out the truth itself by some audacious leap of intellect, the truth philosophers seek is articulated in certain concrete and distinctive modes of expression. This

would obtain for ancient as well as for modern philosophers; the bond that links voice in both eras is irreducibly singular even as it appeals to differential models of truth and evidential sources as well as privileging certain expressive media.

Let us agree that finding your own voice in philosophy is not finding out

something of strictly personal significance; nor is it something so abstractly true as to leave the actual self who is doing the thinking altogether behind. It is rather a matter of finding your way to a singular voice by means of an expression that you can claim as yours even as its content exceeds

anything that can be said to be "mine." You make thought or truth?the

thought of truth?present to yourself in and by your own way of doing philosophy: your way of saying it in speech or writing. In the process, you compose the singularity of your own voice.

Such singularity is hard-won. It is very rarely found all at once. When this does seem to occur?in moments of sudden insight?one is rightly suspicious in philosophy, wondering if these moments may be merely

mantic. Philosophical truth is analogized to a "spark" in Plato's Seventh

Letter, but this is a spark that flies between concrete and discrete discursive

signs; it is not a flare in the ether of unmediated intuitional space. Cezanne is reported to have remarked that "a painting should be complete at every

moment even if it is never finished." So too in philosophical work: we gain our voice not just at the end but at every stage along the way, granting that the exact form of this voice may have been far from obvious at earlier

moments of our trajectory. Our evolving voice is singular at each phase? from the most inchoate to the most fully and finely articulated?even if the

expression of the singularity stands to gain in precision and force in later

stages.

I am not saying that the singularity of philosophical voice consists merely in the exact expressions I give to it. Thinking this way leads too quickly to the idea of philosophical style, which is important for recognition value and

literary merit but which is not necessary for the singularity of philosophical voice to appear. Voice is distinct from style insofar as the situation of singular voice is more complex than the notion of "style" conveys. What matters is not the idiosyncratic stamp I give to my thought, my own faqon de parler. The true singularity at which I aim as a philosopher is that of a thought that has become fully present to me as a thinker while also being appositely expressed in my own way of saying it. If the thought is indeed my own?

something I have reached by dint of my own cogitations?then my way of saying it will be my own, too. As Merleau-Ponty shows in his work on




expression in language, thought does not precede the speech or writing by which I set it forth but is, rather, accomplished through these modes of discourse. That is to say, the distinctiveness of my expression embodies the truth of my thought. This is why we cannot imagine Deleuze writing differently than he does in the densely brilliant prose of Difference and

Repetition or Davidson's breakthroughs being expressed other than in his own inimitable essays. Each finds his voice in the characteristic prose by which his thinking comes to be realized. Essential to finding your voice in

philosophy is finding your own way to say it: one finding requires the other.

IV

What I have been pursuing thus far is a bare description of philosophical voice in its actual occurrences and characteristic expressions. But putting the matter this way risks leading us back into the abyss of subjectivism by

way of an all too modernist sense of "coming into your own." To continue on this perilous path lands us quickly to the subjectivist view that the more inward we can go and the more individual we can get, the closer we shall come to finding the truth. With its root in St. Augustine, this view

plays itself out in very diverse ways in early twentieth-century thought, whether as the turn to pure consciousness in Husserl or, for that matter, to the unconscious in Freud. Such subjectifying moves may well take us to

aspects of truth not otherwise accessible; but the premise that sanctions them remains one-dimensional in its exclusive emphasis on the efforts of the individual human subject?in effect, a philosophical extension of the Protestant ethic. In the insistent search for singular voice we may fall

abruptly into inauthentic egocentric existence?a state that, on Heidegger's assessment, is nonetheless the concrete condition from which we must start ever and again if we are to find authenticity of self, including (I would

add) our authentic philosophical voice.

A telling symptom of the modernism in which we become so easily mired is found in the very phrase "your own"?as in the seemingly innocuous phrase "your own voice," or in the parallel expression "coming into your own." The owning to which these words allude suggests the

gaining of property (as that which I properly own, as on Locke's labor

theory of value). It is as if to get an authentic voice is to acquire a piece of intellectual property: in short, a species of ownership (lending itself all too often to showmanship). As this is not the occasion to do a conscientious

critique of the acquisitional entitlement to which we are all too often prone in the modern era in the West, I suggest placing the phrase "your own" into the brackets I have employed in the announced title of this talk so as to

signal the problematicity it imports into the face of its very attractiveness.

The truth of the matter is that my philosophical voice, however singular it may prove to be, is not fully or finally my own, much as I might like to claim it to be. Not even the voice I come to over many years of being a

philosopher?my "mature voice"?is my own. This voice includes, and is

actively constituted by, the voices of many others. What I fancy to be "my own philosophical voice" is composed of a chorus of voices: even to the

point where (as Cavell observes) "all my words are someone else's."10




What I confidently consider to be my own voice (as this is expressed in

my spoken or written words, including those of inner speech) is made

up of others' voices?by what Fred Evans calls an "interplay of voices" in his recently published major work, The Multivoiced Body. These voices, interacting, constitute this "body," that is to say, my speaking or writing body considered as "an arena of intersecting voices."11 My words, my voice, my body, my very thoughts: these are not simply "mine to be."12

They are also yours and hers and his.

We become philosophers not by concerted introspection?by "the aginbite of inwit" (Joyce)?but by a process of incorporating and

transmuting the voices of others. These voices include those of other

philosophical thinkers, but they are also those of other others who have affected us at every stage of our lives down to the present moment.

Everyone we have met and known, and many we have never met and will never know, are ingredient not just in our personal but in our philosophical voice: they have become that voice, animating it, with the result that this voice is as much theirs as ours. Or better: it is ours, having been theirs; theirs has become ours. The sooner we are willing to acknowledge this fundamental truth, the more honest shall we be in understanding how

we have become the philosophers we now are?and the less will we be

tempted to claim credit for philosophical voice as our own possession, our own private property. "Each voice," adds Evans, "is a dynamic hybrid [of others' voices]."13

V

Each of us started our philosophical lives in some delimited larval circumstance: reading some particular book, having an encouraging parent or aunt, being in some scintillating class of philosophy by chance, having an extraordinary teacher. The first book I read in philosophy, well before taking my first college course in the subject, was Santayana's Skepticism and Animal Faith, which I certainly did not understand but which intrigued me greatly. My first teacher was Richard Bernstein, who

possessed a special genius for bringing the voices of other thinkers right into the classroom, as if he were convening them expressly to talk with

sophomoric novices.

Notice that even at these early stages of my own induction into

philosophy a medley of voices was in play: the writing voice of George Santayana, at once eloquent and elusive; the intensely inquiring voice of my Socratic teacher, always asking the searching question I could not

imagine I would ever be able to answer; and the challenging voices of those authors I first studied under Bernstein's tutelage: Kant, Kierkegaard, Peirce,

Wittgenstein. From the pack and welter of these disparate influences, I

began to get a sense of what having a philosophical mind was like, though as of yet I had no wish to find my own voice or any notion as to what such a voice would consist in. You, I suspect, have some such story to tell about

your own early entry into the field. The story is one of a plurality of voices, some spoken, some written?but certainly not only one voice, no matter how inspiring it may have been.




Eventually, many of us who took philosophy seriously enough to stay with it began to ask ourselves if we could ever find a voice of our own vis-a-vis the magisterial mix of philosophical voices that constituted a full throated chorus that became increasingly diverse as our studies proceeded.

At some point, often difficult to date exactly, we felt we had something to say, however marginal or modest it might be. We were philosophical pipsqueaks, to be sure; but we were beginning to say what we thought in words that seemed increasingly apt and that others might notice. In other words, we were beginning to find a voice by which to express our

philosophical ownmost thought. The search for it was typically indirect: never was there an assured or straightarrow route to such a voice, since there is no such thing as a Perfect Philosophical Voice nor did we have an exact idea of just what we were seeking. Indeed, philosophical voice is something of a will-'o-the-wisp: as difficult to define as it is to attain.

Nevertheless, it draws many of us to try to reach it; and we assuredly do

recognize it in others who have achieved it. Not a few of us have wondered

along the way if the search would ever pan out, given the formidable difficulties of making significant progress in the field by way of finding our own voice there.

Before finding such a voice we had to find our way around, and most of us sought to do this by joining up with some specific pattern of thought. At the least, we wanted to create a niche for ourselves within a chosen tradition. This meant discovering our own philosophical identity in the terms of that tradition?or else creating it by rebelling against it: which is, of course, only another way of acknowledging its deep hold upon us.

Putting it this way begins to sound very much like a personal struggle to attain individuation: to become someone different within the massive sameness of a dense and continuous tradition. I want to argue, however, that finding one's way to philosophical voice cannot be confined to laying hold of an individuated voice if this means a private voice echoing in the chamber of a cloistered study or what is articulated in the peculiarities of some unique style of writing or speaking. For the philosophical voice I seek is not only my own, not just my invention, much less my personal possession. Others' voices are part of my voice, and this is so no matter whether we are doing philosophical thinking alone or in the company of others. The manyness of voices is already present in our initiation into the field, and then in making one's way professionally, and eventually in

teaching others. At none of these constituent moments of becoming a

philosopher do I speak as a strictly solitary soul, solus ipse, even if in the process I am becoming ever more distinctive in what I have to say and how I say it.

It is true that a certain solitude may be required for generating the level of thinking to which many philosophers aspire. But to philosophize in solitude is not to philosophize alone. Even to be in extreme seclusion of the sort that Descartes sought in Holland or Heidegger in his Hutte is still to converse with others, however indirectly. Most of us tend to talk

philosophy in more overtly social circumstances: in the classroom, at




meetings of professional societies to which we belong, with colleagues in our department, and nowadays in email correspondence or on Facebook. In fact, as we mature in the profession increasingly more of what we do is interlocutory. Anything else is taking up a position of splendid isolation, perhaps gaining gratification from the involutions of our own cogitations? but ignoring the role of others to whom we not only may but (sooner or

later) must speak.

The mix of voices that nurtured us to start with changes with time and is encountered in ever new circumstances?in each of which our

increasingly singular voice rejoins the ongoing voices of others. We enter a pool of voices that are decidedly not our own?often not even like our own (and the more unlike the better: the more we are likely to learn from

them). I call this the "othering" of one's singular philosophical voice: not in the current sense of regarding others' voices as alien to our own, to be

kept apart, but in the sense that my voice comes to reflect their otherness, learning from it in such a way as to alter my own identity as a thinker.14

Such othering of my own voice I take to be essential to becoming a philosopher. It can be viewed as having two phases: inculcation and address.

(i) In inculcation, I am forever changed by the voices of those others from whom I learn and whom I seek to emulate. I take in these tutelary presences?current or ancient?thanks to the philosophical equivalent of what Karl Abraham called "incorporation": I internalize them to the point where their voices come to resound in mine. They become integral to

my emerging philosophical identity, and this can happen at any phase of a career in philosophy, not just at the outset (think of Rorty's critical assimilation of Heidegger and Derrida well past mid-career; or Derrida's

continuing engagement with Austin). This process often assumes the form of a specifically philosophical "anxiety of influence" (in Harold Bloom's

term) in which we may feel overshadowed if not overwhelmed; but the task is to deal with it creatively?rather than being crushed by it. A compromise position consists in identifying with a certain school or style of philosophy while refusing to stake out our own path within it. But as Deleuze says archly, "As a general rule, you'd be right to think you've wasted your life, if

your only claim was: 'I belonged to this or that school.'"15

Dealing with such anxiety of philosophical influence constructively? surmounting it and transforming it?is one way of characterizing what it is to "find (one's own) philosophical voice." It contributes to, rather than detracts from, the singularity of philosophical voice. For we come to such

singularity not despite but because of the panoply of philosophical voices to

which we have been exposed in our early and continuing immersion in the field. With these voices we hold conversations, sometimes more imagined than real. They often occur in the form of "talking with philosophers in our

heads," in which our own role may be more that of eavesdropping than of

actively participating.




(ii) In address, I turn the tables on the very educational process on which I have depended. I turn back to others what I have received in my own philosophical Bildung: having been othered by others in the phase of inculcation, I become other myself to and for still other others. How I address others ranges from Russell speaking out passionately in Hyde Park

against nuclear weapons to modeling for students what it is to think out a philosophical problem. A philosopher friend of mine relates how Rorty, then a fledgling instructor at Yale, changed his life when Rorty insisted to his class that every philosophical problem, and by extension any human problem, can be solved?without exception. Rorty, like Russell, was addressing others, whether these others be students, workers, or

people on the street. Both, in very different circumstances, were othering themselves to those who were willing to take in their distinctive voices.

The two processes I here outline, address and inculcation, concatenate in the end, forming an ongoing cycle of influencing and being influenced, becoming one's singular philosophical self and making that self available to others who have not yet found (and may never find, or wish to find) their own singularity of voice. This is something more than dialogue or dialectic in the customary, classical sense, for it is not restricted to the discourse of the citizen elite of ancient Athens or of scholars at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. If anything, it is more like the polylogue that all of us maintain at all times in ordinary speech situations?as Wittgenstein so

clearly discerned. (At their best, this is what the satellite groups that now

populate the program of the APA also accomplish: a polylogue on topics of common concern in which one's views can be compared with those of others on a given figure or topic, thereby honing one's philosophical voice. This circumstance is situated somewhere between inculcation and address.)

To be othered and to other in turn?to become myself through others and to encourage others to become themselves in turn?this is the cycle of voice in philosophy. If singularity of voice is irreducibly intra-psychic at one level?achieved by an internal struggle with one's philosophical obsessions?such singularity is at the same time literally inter-subjective: not just my voice alone, self-encapsulated, but the voice I struggle to gain situated in the midst of the voices of others.

In exercising philosophical voice, we need to give in and we need to

give back: to give in to the most compelling influences of other thinkers and to give back to others that which we have singularized in our own

voice?others, moreover, who may not be professional thinkers at all, just people willing to listen to us for a while, as we once listened (and hopefully still listen) to voices other than our own.

If I can say regarding my singular philosophical voice that (as Walt Whitman put it) "I am multitudes,"16 this is neither evasive nor Utopian. It

is a very good thing. As I strive to be a philosopher, I acquire a complex, compounded voice?not unlike Freud's composite dream images, constructed of many figures condensed and displaced from one's infantile and recent past. This is a voice that is more resonant and responsive than a




voice cultivated in camera. In becoming a philosopher, I have taken others' voices into my own, such that my voice is in truth the voice of many, albeit transmuted into my melody and modulated in my key, following my own chosen harmonics. Such a voice is more open and resilient than a voice that seeks to say only what it thinks, allowing discussion only on its own terms.

Philosophical voice, then, is singular yet not solitary. Gaining this voice does not require going to exotic places or having an education at the most prestigious universities; it is already happening, all the time, in one's

teaching and writing, just as earlier it occurred in one's learning from the voices of teachers and other esteemed figures in the very place?in

whatever backwater?where one first fell for philosophy.

In other words, the singularity of philosophical voice not only benefits from the ingression of others' voices but requires them and prospers from

them; and it is a stronger and more salient singularity for having been

forged in the crucible of these other voices and for addressing itself to still other such voices in turn.

VI

You may be asking yourself: What is truly special about philosophical voice? Is not the double-edged process I've been describing?a process of inculcation and address?true of every field in which gaining a distinctive voice is at issue (not only disciplines that are explicitly language- or

symbol-based but others such as the fine and performing arts)? What

distinguishes finding philosophical voice from what it means to make a notable contribution to these other endeavors?

Philosophical voice is special in that it is the voice of thought. This is not equivalent to "the voice of reason" {die Stimme der Vernunft) that Kant invokes in the Dialectic of Pure Reason. The rarified voice of reason is

emblematically that of the Enlightenment, and it includes a commitment to formal universalism and the ideality of rational norms of thought and conduct.17 Nor is the voice of thought exclusively that of a System of

exfoliating forms, as in Hegel's Science of Logic. Much less is it the voice of

particular beliefs or ideologies?doxologies of every sort. Instead, it is the

voicing of thinking itself, its very activity. Not, however, "thought thinking itseir as in the nous noein that characterizes Aristotle's First Mover. The

thought here at issue, in this respect not unlike everyday thinking, is thought about something other than its own production ; it aims at something other than itself, namely, its specific content.

Philosophers are adept at examining this specific content, which they label variously "Being," "presence," "the just," "the good," "the beautiful," or "fairness." They do so in ways that are not just idiosyncratic but eminently and openly dialogical. A given philosophical voice, however densely expressed (one thinks of Whitehead in Process and Reality), invites other voices to join up with it: to dispute it, to improve upon it, to surpass it even.

The result is something quite distinctive?the engendering of intense interlocution wherein people think together: think a topic through, think




it out, to and for oneself but very much in view of what others think and

say.

I take as exemplary the way in which my colleague Eva Kittay has come to find a philosophical voice that is at once reflective, other-directed, and dialogical. For more than two decades, she has devoted herself to

understanding neglected aspects of severe congenital disability. In this

work, she is only in part informing those without experience of such

disability as to what it is like. Mainly, she is conveying a new and better

understanding of what the condition entails. In particular, she attempts to rethink this condition in such a way as to "reconstrue problems that at first blush look like they are immune from considerations of how we usually think about disability."18 This means that she is thinking afresh about

dauntingly difficult situations: situations that spell confusion and despair for

many families. She is inviting us as her readers to consider what it means to comprehend what had previously seemed to be incomprehensible in the lives of those who lack even the most rudimentary symbolic capacities or basic motor skills.

In particular, she challenges us as philosophers to give our own

thought to these troubling circumstances: to think, and to think differently, about something that, left to itself, fiercely resists thought. She asks us to reflect on what it means to be severely disabled in the light of basic

philosophical issues that are at stake in this state of extremity: what not

being able to think in certain standard patterns, or act according to given social conventions, signifies for those who are subject to such disability; as well as what consequences ensue for those, often women, who are

charged with their care.19 Emerging from her work and others is a new field of philosophical research, that of severe disability studies. In the

process, Eva Kittay has found her own philosophical voice?a decidedly singular voice of thought.

VII How did she get to this remarkable result? By listening to her subjects, beginning with her own daughter Sesha, who is deeply impaired cognitively. Eva Kittay's exemplary activity points to a dimension of philosophical voice I have so far neglected: listening to others, especially others who have been considered as having nothing to say?certainly, nothing to teach

philosophical inquirers.

Jean-Luc Nancy holds that philosophers have been for far too long preoccupied with "understanding" at the expense of "listening": yet listening is prior to understanding as well as to overt speech. Although we do overhear ourselves speaking, we almost never listen to ourselves: this is why friends and family members sometimes have to ask us to "listen to

what we're saying." All too often, alas, we do not listen to others either; yet it is their voices, above all, that call for our intent hearing. In Nancy's phrase, we need to "prick up our philosophical ears" to hear their voices so that we can give our thought to the thought that they are expressing.20




This suggests that philosophical voice?before being a voice of

compelling argumentation?is a listening voice: a voice that listens as well as speaks, indeed that listens both before and while it speaks. Yet the imperative that we must listen to others escapes most philosophers' notice?as if it were too obvious or too trivial to point out, despite the fact that it has enormous consequences for a fuller conception of philosophical voice. For this voice is not just ours; it belongs in its genesis to others (our instructors and favorite authors) and it comes to be addressed to others

(colleagues, students, readers, citizens, non-citizens).

This model of voice will short-circuit if we do not take into explicit account listening to others' voices at each stage. Without doing this, giving back my voice to others will court the danger of being arbitrary or

hegemonic, since I will then be saying just what / want to say to others, whatever they may think or say. In a word, I will risk becoming monovocal:

being high-handed in the very circumstance in which I should be open to what others are saying?and thus thinking. I will be putting myself into the

position of a self-absorbed First Mover, for whom it is only my thought that thinks itself, proclaiming only my view. Doing this is a very serious obstacle to the kind of intense dialogue that is our life-blood as philosophers. For it is making ourselves deaf to what others are saying rather than hearing

what they have to say?hearing them out, hearing their saying, "hear

saying them" in Nancy's striking locution.21

Socrates listened to his contemporaries?he listened very carefully, not just to detect logical or epistemic fallacies in how they spoke, but so as to hear the truth in what they said. Taking a leaf from Levinas, we may say that he listened to what they were saying in what they said (the dire in the

dii), that is, what they meant to say in and through the words with which

they chose to express it. This part of the Socratic method we too easily forget. Yet it belongs to the essence of the philosophical enterprise. It is

present at every stage I have outlined above: being a student and having mentors, reading breakthrough works (for reading is a mode of listening too), teaching students, talking with colleagues?and becoming attuned to what people outside our profession are saying as well: politicians and

people in the street, painters and poets, as well as those challenged by disability and illness, and those burdened by gender inequities or suffering from other injustices.

It is not a matter of listening to everyone all at once, but to those who

cry out to be heard?even if the cry itself is barely audible or less than

fully articulate. We can choose whom or what in particular we will listen

to, but listen we must: or else we will end up offering mindless mantras to the already convinced. We ought to establish Listening Circles in the term used by Nez Perce Native Americans to designate communities of

listeners. Such Circles signify that we are more effective listeners when in the actual presence of others whose precise tone of voice we can

hear: hear saying. To start with, we need to listen to the voices of those

bypassed or neglected in our own communities: in our own academic

settings (for example, women colleagues who have been systematically




discriminated against in our own department) but also people outside these familiar settings (for instance, those undocumented workers who are now being held in overcrowded and unlivable for-profit prisons and detention facilities all across the United States).

In the last decade the APA has taken the exemplary step of setting up and supporting officially recognized groups of marginalized philosophers? African Americans, Asians and Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, Women in the Profession?thereby welcoming diversity within its

historically elitist membership. It's almost as if the APA has endeavored to set up its own Listening Circles in moving beyond the inner circles of earlier phases of our collective history: a process inaugurated by the

pluralist movement in the later 1970s and now going forward on its own

energies. A comparable step needs now to be undertaken byway of paying heed to those situated outside the arc of our own specialisms and closed

professionalisms. These are people from whom we have much to learn by attentively listening.

In this spirit, we should distinguish between the listening to that we do when we attend to teachers and esteemed figures in the field?as we have all done when riveted by a talk in philosophy that seemed to say something definitive about a given topic?and the listening into that we do when we are paying attention to those who do not speak our familiar tribal language.

The Delphic oracle enjoined us to "know ourselves" (to which Nietzsche retorted: "[but] we knowers are unknown to ourselves"), whereas in fact we cannot know ourselves except by knowing others? and this latter requires listening to them first of all: and then again, and

many times more.... Only by listening intently will we begin to understand that they have something to say; just as it is only by such listening that we can respond to them in an effective way. Eva Kittay listened into what her

daughter was trying to say, often more by facial expressions and gestures than by words. Such listening is not extra-curricular?it is not something

we should do besides being professional philosophers, on weekends.

Rather, it is part of our profession?part of what we are called upon to do as thinkers with a voice that is more than merely private in its import and with minds that in their rigor are more than rigorous. Beyond listening to each other, we must find ways to take into account and respond to the voices of those who are not philosophers. The best way to do this is to listen to such voices carefully: to listen into them with care as well as discernment.22 This does not exclude listening to them critically as well; but it is to listen in an especially attentive manner; and it is to give thought to what we hear being said.23

Just as we first came to philosophical voice by listening to our early instructors, so this voice, once incorporated, has to be continually re created?as does the listening on which it was first based. Philosophical voice is forged and re-forged as we admit new voices as well as new thoughts into our Listening Circles. We also need to re-listen to familiar voices (such as those of the ancient Greeks) and re-voice them in view of (or rather,




in the hearing of) unfamiliar voices: both, in intense succession. And we must listen to ourselves as well as to others.24 Just as thinking constantly alters its course, so the philosophical voice that articulates thinking is itself

continually changing?its very singularity mutating over time. Intrinsic to such singularity is listening to expanding sets of alternative voices, whole choruses of them, many of which are not situated in the academy but

elsewhere, in quite different domains to which we extend ourselves. The more diverse and expansive our sources?the more heterovocal they are?the more singular our own philosophical voice will come to be: the

denser, the deeper, the more receptive.

The more we reach out in this way, the more completely shall we come into our own as philosophers: an "own" that belongs more to others than to ourselves.

vm

Why should we as philosophers listen to those who are not? Many of the

philosophers we admire listened most intently to other thinkers. Rorty listened to Quine and Sellars and Dewey, just as Cavell pricked up his ear to hear Thoreau and Emerson and Austin; and as Heidegger attended to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Schelling, and Deleuze to Hume and Kant and Bergson. It is indeed to other philosophers that most of us in the profession of philosophy are expected to listen most of the time; we are attuned to them, acculturated into their presence. Why should we go outside this charmed circle?

Basic reasons for doing so include learning things we would not otherwise know when we hearken only to ourselves as well as correcting misguided concepts we may have of areas of human experience that are not usually in our ken. At another level, listening to non-philosophers allows us to attend to those who are in definite need, beginning with the need to be heard?to be heard said (not just by us, of course, but also by others willing to lend them an ear). I contend that we shall not find the full

scope of our own philosophical voice, or to what alternative uses it can be put, until we set about listening to and listening into the various voices of those who intersect our lives, including the voices of our children and our neighbors, those who live in de facto segregated parts of our own

cities, and (extending our reach into the present moment) those who are

trying desperately to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, those who are homeless on our own streets, or (for that matter) those animals who are astray in our own backyard.

Nothing short of such diversified listening will do?not if we are to

begin to understand the plight of those in very different circumstances from our own. In such listening, we come to think thoughts (and experience

feelings) that are otherwise unknown to us, and transform ourselves in

the process by coming to understand others and their suffering better? thanks to welcoming them into our Listening Circles. In such Circles,

we will not only hear voices to which we have been previously deaf, but we shall also listen to ourselves better, enabling us to learn about our




own unacknowledged biases and the limits of our empathy, as well as

discovering deeper wishes as to how we may rejoin the conversation of humankind?a conversation that must include both those familiar to us and those who are not.

IX

Sartre said that "what matters is what we make of what others have made of us."25 Put in the idiom of my talk today, we must make ourselves voice. In other words, we have to singularize the multiple?to express, each in our own way, the many voices to and into which we have listened in our

differently configured philosophical lives. But we must also multiply the

singular to make sure that the expressive singularity of our philosophical voice inflects what we have learned, and are still learning, from these

many voices, and then to transmit the quotient of what we have been able to grasp to those who listen to us and with us in turn.

As philosophers, we posit and discuss responsibilities of many kinds, epistemic as well as ethical; but we shall not pin down these responsibilities,

much less be able to formulate and act effectively on them, until we allow our singular philosophical voice to echo with the voices of the other members of the life-worlds we share, letting our diligently acquired voice reverberate with a medley of voices, including those of animals (for they, too, must be listened to). If it is true that we must go into ourselves in the search for philosophical truth, we also need (we much more desperately need) to go back out of ourselves to join up with the voices of disparate others, whatever their provenance?whatever may be their melody and in whichever key they are singing.

This means to form a multivoiced body and mind that make common cause with those, human and other-than-human, who inhabit the earth

with us?so that our distinctive philosophical voice resounds with their

multiple voices. The singularity of this voice, for all its intense incubation, will be carried forward in a profession of listening to the voices of the many others who come to our attentive notice whether they are located in the

academy or elsewhere. In this way, we shall be thinking and feeling with these others as well as acting among them. Then, just then, we shall come to the philosophical voice that matters: a voice that is far from entirely our own.26

Endnotes

1. Michael Williams. "Introduction to the Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition."

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. xxix.

2. St. Augustine, De Vera Religione 1.39.72. (I owe this reference to Brady Heiner.) These words are cited with approval by Husserl and with regret by Merleau-Ponty.

3. W.S. Merwin, remark in conversation with Bill Moyers: "I think that poetry begins with hearing. Prose you don't have to hear. I mean, you can read it off the front page of the Times and not hear a thing. But you can't read a sonnet




of Shakespeare without hearing it." (Transcript available online: http://www. pbs.org/moyers/journal/06262009/transcriptl.html; retrieved July 1, 2010)

4. Oukon dianoia men kai logos tauton {Sophist 263 e). 5. Stanley Cavell. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 9.

6. Ibid.

7. For Cavell's bracketing of the "personal" as less than the "autobiographical," see A Pitch of Philosophy, pp. 4-5, 10. On a genuinely philosophical autobiography?which is what Cavell accomplishes in this book?see also William Earle, The Autobiographical Consciousness: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1972), as well as his Evanescence:

Periphenomenological Essays (Chicago: Regnery, 1984), esp. pp. 7-10.

8. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to A

Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, tr. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), pp. 25, 27, 30, and 168-9; Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 1. See also his claim that "Being is univocal," presented as a gloss on Duns Scotus: ibid., p. 35.

9. The full clause from which I extract this proposition is: "nature makes its universal laws specific (Das Gesetz der Specifikation der Natur) in accordance with the principle of purposiveness for our cognitive power" (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. W. Pluhar [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987], p. 25).

10. Stanley Cavell. This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), p. 74.

11. Fred Evans. The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of

Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 74.

12. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. E. Robinson & J. Macquarrie (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 68: "In each case Dasein is mine to be in one way or another."

13. Evans, The Multivoiced Body, p. 63.

14. By "current sense" I refer to the way that I can be othered by those who dominate me?treated as abjectly alien. Such othering is described tellingly by Franz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks.

15. Gilles Deleuze. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995

(New York: Semiotext(e), 2006). I owe this reference to John Lysaker. 16. This line is from Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. See also Deleuze and

Guattari: "I am legion" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 239). See also ibid., p. 251:

"people your desert."

17. David Kleinberg-Levin has recently written a powerful critique of such a voice

in its many guises. See Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), passim.

18. Eva Kittay, email communication of July 5, 2010.




19. See Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).

20. "Here we want to prick up the philosophical ear. to tug the philosopher's ear in order to draw it toward what has always solicited or represented philosophical knowledge less than what presents itself to view?form, idea, painting, representation, aspect, phenomenon, composition?[and that] arises instead in accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound." (Jean-Luc

Nancy, Listening, tr. Charlotte Mandell [New York: Fordham University Press, 2007]), p. 3; his italics. We can add that by thus paying attention to nuances of voice our customary thinking, our usual premises, can be clarified and

challenged in ways not otherwise likely to happen. 21. See Nancy's discussion at ibid., p. 6, where he notes the striking convergence

of entendre ('to hear') with entendre ('to comprehend'), suggesting that this same verb means 'to hear say': "Entendre, 'to hear', also means comprendre

('to understand'), as if 'hearing' were above all 'hearing say' (rather than

'hearing sound'), as if in all 'hearing' there had to be a 'hearing say', regardless of whether the sound perceived was a word or not."

22. Eva Kittay adds that her listening into her daughter "was not so much at first to do philosophy as it was to care for her. In my mind listening is importantly connected to caring" (email communication of July 5, 2010).

23. Consult here Mary Watkins, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (Putnam, Ct: Spring Publications, 2000). I owe much to conversations with this author for insights into the character of listening to others.

24. On the importance of listening to one's own voice, especially in adolescent

girls, see the pioneering work of L. Brown and C. Gilligan, Meeting at the Cross-Roads (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992) as discussed in Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. pp. 184-87.

25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

26. I wish to thank Andres Colapinto, Fred Evans, Travis Holloway, and Mary Watkins for their close readings of a recent draft of this essay. I am indebted to Brady Heiner and Calvin Schrag for comments on an earlier draft.

