Philosophers as Unreliable Narrators
The notorious distance between many academic writers’ on-the-page personae and their in-person personalities is widely thought to be a good thing. If, in person, many of us are quarrelsome, neurotic, egotistical, oblivious, thin-skinned, competitive, self-aggrandizing, and self-indulgent, yet on the page we appear gentle, thoughtful, courageous, well-informed, and touchingly vulnerable, then at least the research has not been contaminated by the personality. In daily life, we may or may not want to know the person behind the prose as a friend, colleague, boss, neighbor, lover, or presiding judge, but in our studies we expect to hear from a distinctive writing persona, someone calmer, more reliable, more open-minded than most of us ordinarily are. As philosophers, we are supposed to aspire to a higher writing self.
Performing Philosophy of Education "Whitely": Reliable Narration as Racialized Practice
In this essay, building upon Audrey Thompson’s analysis in “Philosophers as Unreliable Narrators,” I am interested in exploring how reliable narration lends itself to the performance of “whiteliness” through the creation and policing of racialized borders that dictate what can be said and by whom. That is, I wish to ask: how might reliable narration function within some philosophy of education discourse as part of a project of white identity formation? Furthermore, what might be the investments in and effects of structuring philosophy of education scholarship in such a way as to eliminate or assimilate the unpredictable, the “unruly,” the unknowable, in an attempt to claim civility and rationality for oneself? How might philosophy of education be narrated in a way that more adequately avoids the reproduction of racist discourses?
Relativism, Radical Pedagogy, and the Ideology of Paralysis
We have to try to keep in mind, that in a healthy society this maintenance of a particular level of culture is to the benefit, not merely of the class which maintains it, but of the society as a whole. Awareness of this fact will prevent us from supposing that the culture of a "higher" class is something superfluous to society as a whole, or to the majority, and from supposing that it is something which ought to be shared equally by all other classes. It should also remind the "higher" class ... that the survival of the culture in which it is particularly interested is dependent upon the health of the culture of the people. (Notes 35)