Writing What Comes Naturally?

As a young philosopher, I was taught to keep my life out of my scholarly work. Who you are was not supposed to make its appearance in what you wrote. Shortly after I was promoted to full professor, however, and for reasons that will appear later, much of my philosophical work became explicitly autobiographical. I wrote about raising my children, about being from a working-class background, about experiencing a temporary disability, about being middle-aged, about being a writer, about teaching as a feminist, and about being a feminist scholar. I put my life—or at least my version of parts of my life—on the page for other philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, to hear and to read about.

It's not the only way I do philosophy, but it is one of the ways. I feel I've learned much from it, and readers tell me it has been useful to them. But is autobiographical philosophy something I'd recommend to other feminist philosophers? What are the pleasures and the perils of autobiographical philosophy? I'm going to explore these questions by trying both to write about autobiographical philosophy and simultaneously to do some autobiographical philosophy. And I'm going to proceed by first talking about bad reasons for doing autobiographical philosophy and then talking about some good reasons for engaging in autobiographical philosophy.

The first bad reason for using autobiography while doing philosophy would be the belief that I'm representative—an exemplar of some broader population, whether it be persons of my sex, my race, my class, my age, or my sexuality. I probably am not. As an academic, I belong to a tiny fraction of the population. I'm more educated and more privileged than most; and because I am neither a graduate student nor an itinerant adjunct academic, I am also wealthier than most.

Thinking of themselves as representative (or, more likely, just assuming it) is a mistake that many of the early- and mid-twentieth-century philosophers often made, even in work that was not explicitly autobiographical. They addressed their readers as if we were all men, just like them; they used examples involving their girlfriends, their wives, or their middle-class lives; they believed the issues that concerned them were also of concern to everyone. This had an intimidating effect on some would-be philosophers in their various audiences—would-be philosophers who, if they did not recognize themselves in the writer, may have concluded that they could not be "real" philosophers.

A second bad reason for autobiographical philosophy would be the belief that I'm fascinating. This assumption doesn't usually work in video art, it doesn't work in literature, and it's not likely to work in philosophy, either. Despite the current fad for memoirs, autobiographies, documentaries, and reality TV—all of which one journalist calls "auto-emissions" (Caldwell 2004, R14)—I'm probably no more fascinating than anyone else. So, if I'm going to write in the first person, I'd better have a strong writing style and interesting ideas to draw upon, along with the ability to analyze my experiences and use them philosophically in ways that are compelling.

A third bad reason for doing autobiographical philosophy is one I'm closely familiar with: I may be afraid to do any other kind of philosophy. This was the quandary I found myself in during the early nineties. As a conscientious but somewhat diffident feminist philosopher, I had tried to pay careful attention to the feminist debates about identity and the gradual exposure of the tendency of some early second-wave feminists to assume all women are alike. Feminists like me received a rude awakening when women of color, disabled women, and queer women made it clear that they did not always want to be included within the broad generalizations made by (mostly) white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual feminists. This revelation was a problem for me. I wanted to write about women and what I thought of as philosophical issues pertaining to women. But I no longer felt any confidence in my capacity to write accurately...