Rebecca Kukla: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why is it important? I feel like almost nobody but me understands how important it is. [laughs] Rousseau is probably my favorite writer from the entire history of philosophy. One of the things I most love about Rousseau and that has been really influential on me is that, for him, the style of writing and the mode of writing is not separable from the content of what he wants to convey. He wrote dialogues. He wrote traditional philosophy works. He wrote books composed entirely of letters — epistolary novels. He wrote operas. He wrote autobiographies. He wrote in pretty much every genre. Each of those genres is designed to make certain kinds of philosophical points possible. They’re not separate from the content of what he has to say. Reveries of a Solitary Walker — there’s more to say about it than I’m going to be able to say here. But the most notable thing about it is that it’s a special kind of autobiographical book that I don’t think anybody had written before, where he’s autobiographising, as it were, as he moves through space, as he walks. He’s reflecting on how his own relationship to what’s around him, and his own movement through space, shapes who he understands himself as being, what he can see, what he can’t see. I think that this idea — that place and location and movement have a constitutive impact on what we can think, what we can see, how we can philosophize — is an incredibly deep and moving insight. Just to see why this is important, compare it to somebody like Descartes, who starts his meditations famously by saying, “I want to do good philosophy, so what I’m going to do is, I’m going to lock myself in the room, and I’m going to close the windows, and I’m not going to move. I’m going to make sure I can’t see anybody else who’s going to distract me, and that I can’t hear anything. Because I just want a completely blank, solitary environment so I can think clearly.” That’s a very specific kind of location. There’s all kinds of fascinating assumptions built into the idea that you do your best thinking when you’re sitting still in a blank room, not talking to anybody else. I think, for hundreds of years, most philosophers never even thought to question the basic shape of Descartes’ idea there — that, basically, philosophy was a thing you did when you weren’t distracted by the world or other people, and everything was staying the same so that you could just have your abstract thoughts. Rousseau comes along and very intentionally and explicitly inverts Descartes and says, “I can only do philosophy when I’m moving through the world and noticing things, like my feet hurt when I go up this hill. And that guy over there won’t talk to me because he thinks I’m weird. What’s that about?” [laughs] This kind of responsiveness to the world around him, and to the other people around him, and to his motion as he travels, is integral to the philosophy he can do. It’s a much deeper inversion of the Cartesian solitary model of thinking than people notice. When you talk with your graduate students, do you sit down with them? Or do you go for walks with them?…

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