by Irami Osei-Frimpong
The barriers to good writing in my discipline seem to be both intellectual and attitudinal. Intellectually, the concepts are often foreign to the students, and even if the concepts are familiar, the concepts are sophisticated in themselves. With the attitudinal obstacles, traversing those barriers requires students to engage a quality of self-inclusion and self-transparency that is not commonly called for in conventional college essay writing.
Students seem comfortable writing about themselves. Students seem comfortable writing about objects that have an independent existence that is not related to themselves. But the concepts at issue in my classes often occupy that uncomfortable space of being about the student, yet not under the unilateral control of the students’ wills. This kind of exploration can be received as invasive for students who are unprepared to be fundamentally transformed through the course of following an argument that they themselves have developed through their interaction with a text. The act of writing down the arguments makes the self-transformation that is part of learning so much more determinate. That it is done by the students themselves renders the process an act of self-determination: students make themselves who they are by their interpretation of arguments that are also about who they are. Except unlike the students processing their self-conceptions through writing a journal, writing a philosophy essay about concepts that are inextricably tied to their being is primarily not guided by their passions, as much as by their willingness to interact with the concepts interpreted in the text at hand. In this way, writing is an act of self-determination as well as a form of surrendering to the mutuality of the relationship between the students and the argument in the text they are interpreting.
Writing is an act of self-determination as well as a form of surrendering to the mutuality of the relationship between the students and the argument in the text they are interpreting.
With these barriers in mind, I write relatively concrete prompts, e.g., “On pg. 10, Foster concludes that X. What premises does he use to come to this conclusion? Are the premises for this conclusion found explicitly in the text, or is the author presuming the readers will supply unstated content for the conclusion to follow from the explicit premises?” I write prompts this way for at least two reasons. The first reason is that I want students to develop skills in identifying arguments embedded within the text and grow the skill of putting those arguments on the page in their own words. I strongly suspect that having students identify arguments in the text and rehearse the argument in their own words enables them to grasp the meaning of a given passage. The second reason for the relatively concrete prompt is that I suspect that a disciplinary liability in philosophy is that students are overwhelmed with the amount of wisdom required to write a text from a more abstract prompt.
Since the discipline fundamentally concerns what it is to be, and being underlies everything that is in a way that cannot be abstracted from the specific kind of thing a being is, asking a poorly formed question can easily be interpreted as an expectation for students to know everything’s relationship to everything else before the students know what any particular thing means. For example, say I ask the question, “What is psychology?” It’s not enough to describe the methods that happened to be practiced in the discipline of psychology; you have to know, with a sense of necessity, why psychology is what it is relative to other disciplines because that relation to other disciplines can be expressed as a property of psychology.
This is not obviously clear. However, consider the way that my relationship to my kids can be expressed as a property of me. I am related to my kids, so I am a father. My relationship with them brings them in unity with me, and that relationship can be expressed as a property of me. If you try to separate me from fatherhood, you have an inadequate and distorted account of who I am. Psychology’s relation to political science or English or biology can be expressed as a property of psychology. This means that in asking them to write about anything philosophically, I run the risk of overwhelming them with the seeming mandate to have to know about everything, and how everything relates to the explicit object at issue in order to grasp the meaning of the object of inquiry.
The broader point is that this business of responsibly writing for meaning is stressful. Thankfully, the students at UGA seem to be uniformly blessed with passable writing mechanics. I am not one to lament that fundamental grammar of the students; however, I am keenly aware of how the quality of effort the students have had to put forth to win themselves a spot in these classrooms has not necessarily called them to interrogate their being before an indifferent text as a disciplinary mandate, especially if the text’s reason leads them to write an argument that may alienate them from more familiar conceptions of who they are. In this way, I try to write prompts that cultivate their bravery towards doing this work of self-determination. I do not pretend that the work of reading and writing is fun, or even enjoyable, but rather, working through these arguments and committing to your relationships with them through your interpretation of the text is meaningful in a way that may infuse with dignity certain other activities that are more obviously fun and enjoyable.
Irami Osei-Frimpong is supporting PHIL 2400 Philosophy, Science, Nature & PHIL 2010 Introduction to Philosophy this year as a WIP TA.