Engaged Philosophy and the Public Philosophy Network are partnering to present a special interview series that highlights the work of public philosophers who will be presenting at the 2019 PPN Conference Oct 17-19, 2019.
Noëlle McAfee is a professor in the Department of Philosophy; affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and in the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute; and director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program and Emory University. A co-founder of the PPN, her scholarly work centers on understanding and improving political life.
Did you have an experience as a student or in your life that led you to embrace public philosophy?
When I was an undergraduate history major, I spent a week canvassing for a presidential candidate. One day I approached a woman in a very run down home in Davenport, Iowa, where there were a bunch of kids playing in the dirt-packed yard, and I started talking with her about the campaign. She rose up and screamed at me really loud: “I don’t care about politics. It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference in my life and never will. Get out of my yard!” I was shaken. Surely if anyone needed to pay attention to politics, at least by the looks of her circumstances, she did. Later after getting a master’s degree in public policy and working for a public interest group in Washington, fighting the good fight, that woman kept haunting me, both for her anger at politics and her seeming false consciousness about her own situation. I started worrying that no amount of this work might make any difference if people were neither interested in nor capable of self-government. I decided I needed to figure out this problem before I could continue this work. Though I’d only taken a few philosophy courses, I decided that philosophy could help me think through the problem. So, I went off to get a philosophy PhD.
Did studying philosophy help? What did you figure out?
After a bit of searching, I found that American pragmatism and the early Frankfurt School were tremendous resources. American pragmatism, especially through John Dewey, was articulating a conception of how a seemingly apathetic public could become democratically vitalized and engaged. And the first generation of the Frankfurt School was taking up questions about false consciousness and social pathologies and using psychoanalysis to understand them. Those were my early bread crumbs, and I’ve been following them ever since. But I might have easily gone down a rabbit hole of philosophical introspection were it not for another part of my education. When I was in DC I started doing some work for the Kettering Foundation, a research organization trying to understand how democracy could work better—the very same questions that were animating me. Through Kettering, whose journal I still edit to this day, I came to know more deeply the ideas of John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Mary Parker Follett, and contemporary thinkers like Harry Boyte, Benjamin Barber, Dan Yankelovich, Hal Saunders, Elinor Ostrom, and Vamik Volkan. But more importantly I got to know up close the National Issues Forums, a loose network of community groups holding public deliberations on political issues. And I helped develop training materials for moderators to take these discussions through a process of working through the pros and cons of each choice, avoiding bifurcations of thinking that one solution was perfect and the other evil. This work started even before “deliberative democracy” became a thing. We didn’t even have a term for it. But what we were doing was promoting practices for groups to work through the costs and consequences of various courses of action. It was a framework for deliberation that greatly informs my own thinking, especially in contesting the rationalist framework of much deliberative theory.
How would you describe your public philosophy work?
I work to develop concepts and theories that are useful for understanding and improving actual political experience, ranging from what goes on in a deliberative public forum to what is happening with the rise of virulent nationalism and populism. This involves engaging the public as sources of knowledge; the engagement is more of a horizontal relationship than the usual vertical one of expert to audience. Early on that work involved teasing apart the meanings of “deliberation,” from what philosophers thought it was to what democratic publics can teach us that it really is. More recently I have turned to pathologies in the public sphere, including the rise of populism and Manichaean thinking. I never feel constrained by whatever is supposed to be philosophy proper; I look for whatever resources will help, and lately that has been psychoanalytic theory. This calls for a lot of latitude, taking a theory aimed at individuals and broadening it to understand social groups. See for example my latest book, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, in which I explore the roots of social pathologies and the kinds of democratic practices that can help people work through them.
You were one of the founders of the Public Philosophy Network. How did that come about?
The first step toward the PPN was the creation of a committee on public philosophy formed by the American Philosophical Association, at first an ad hoc committee; ad hoc because the APA leadership likely had no idea where public philosophy was going. I was on the first committee, and then Sharon Meagher quickly came on board, along with many others who are now part of the PPN. We did a lot of good work, but at first it was largely restricted to sponsoring sessions at the division meetings, and after three years members would rotate off. Then Sharon Meagher and Ellen Feder convened a meeting of about 30 philosophers doing public work to think about what public philosophy might be and where it might go. And after that, we formed a loose network and started holding big conferences. I served as co-director from 2010-2016 and helped convene the meetings in DC, San Francisco, and Atlanta.
In what ways does public philosophy inform your teaching?
I love teaching courses where I have the students take up pressing political matters, especially those wicked problems that seem to defy solution. I introduce students to concepts and processes that might be of use in addressing them, and when the students have these tools, they do amazing work. It is exhilarating. I’ve done this in courses on sustainability, on philosophy and the city, and on politics and psychoanalysis. And even though the students aren’t studying a lot of philosophy proper, they are becoming philosophers themselves; that is, they are developing new ideas and ways of thinking that can both understand and change the world.
In retrospect, was going into philosophy the best way to address public problems?
I’m glad I didn’t know at the outset that—even though we equate ancient Greece with the birth of democracy—the most famous ancient Greek philosophers were actually opposed to democracy. Whitehead said all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Maybe public philosophy is the best footnote, taking seriously the challenges of democracy but using philosophy to improve its prospects—rather than trying to displace democracy with philosopher kings. Public philosophy is revolt against any such monarchical rule.
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