The Importance of Having Teachers
I am a first generation philosopher. All of my grandparents and my mother were immigrants to the United States from Denmark. In immigrant neighborhoods in those days, occupations tended to go by nationality.
Both of my grandfathers drove trucks, and made their living collecting garbage and delivering ice. (My paternal grandfather and I share a name, and you can see his garbage truck with an Americanized last name in the picture below.)
My mother would have liked to go to college, but there was no question in her family of college for a girl. My father could have gone to college, on the G. I. Bill, after World War II, but I don’t think he even considered it. He had gone to California during the depression to pick fruit to supplement his family’s income, and when he returned he took some business courses at Northwestern and attended Grand View, a two-year college. When the war broke out, and he and my mother married, and then didn’t see each other for several years. When he returned, they were eager to start their family life together.
Nevertheless, we were a family that valued books and education. My mother had immigrated at the age of eight, when she knew no English. The way the school system dealt with that was simply to place her in the first grade, where the other children laughed at her because she was older than they were and couldn’t even speak English. By the time she reached high school, she had caught up with the others by skipping two grades, and was the editor of her high school’s literary magazine. We were readers. Every Saturday we went to the library, and came home with an armload of books.
I was good at academics, but I did not come from that part of the social world in which college is considered inevitable. It was a real decision whether to go, and I decided that I did not want to. My picture of college was basically that it would be four more years of high school, and my experience of high school did not make that appealing. Instead, I wanted to be an autodidact. So I bought myself a set of “great books” and began plowing through them. When I reached Plato and Nietzsche, I knew I was home. At that point I had been thinking about philosophical problems for some years, and occasionally even writing down what I thought. But I had no idea that it was a discipline with a name, and that other people did it. The discovery was thrilling.
My parents said that if I were not going to go to college, I must acquire some sort of job skills, so I took a secretarial course, and eventually got a job as a secretary at the American Bar Association, right across the midway from the University of Chicago, where I would later work for eight years as a philosophy professor. The other woman who worked in the office was the wife of a Chicago law student, and they gave me a different picture of what it would be like to go to college. At the same time, I was trying to teach myself philosophy, and increasingly realized that it was just too hard. It’s not a good idea to be an autodidact. I needed teachers. So I went.
And teachers are what changed me. I started college at Eastern Illinois University, but eventually transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana. Although it is a large school, David Schwayer, Dick Schacht, B. J. Diggs, Lou Werner, and Tom Nickel had all the time in the world for me. It would never have occurred to me to go to graduate school without them, much less to try for a place at Harvard. But that’s what I did, and my run of luck with teachers continued when I became an advisee of John Rawls.
Although I went to school and started my career at a time when women were not always welcome in the profession, that has never been a problem for me. A third of the graduate students in the Harvard Philosophy Department were women, and that had been true for a long time. But being first generation was something else again. Several of my fellow graduate students used to find it extreme piquant to say, “So, you went to the University of Illinois. Isn’t that the place that has a cornfield right on campus?” It was the place—it was an experimental cornfield operated by the Agriculture Department, but some of my fellow students just found this hilarious. One of them took me aside to say that he thought I must find it extremely intimidating to go to school with people like him who were from colleges like Princeton. This bothered me a little, but I was too happy to have found my way into a good place in this wonderful profession to let it bother me much.
Does it help the profession to have people in it who are first-generation students? I do not believe that philosophical talent is common, so it helps the profession to be open to anyone who can do it. At the same time, however, I believe that the audience of philosophy is every human being, for every human who thinks about their situation is subject to philosophical perplexity, and every human being shares the desire for understanding, meaning, and moral clarity. These are desires to which philosophy ought to speak. It seems likely that people who do not come from an educated background have some advantages in trying to reach that wider audience, of which we ourselves once formed a part.
This essay is based on Christine Korsgaard’s Dewey Lecture, “Thinking in Good Company,” published in The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Fall 2022.
Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Research Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.
