It had been two decades since, as a college sophomore, I, Krzysztof, was in Professor Farred’s class “Richard Wright to Toni Morrison” when I came across
’s allusion to Prof. Farred’s short book:
I read it and was delighted by the way my old professor was thinking about what thinking (and living by means of thinking) means, and how to do it beyond our normal understanding of what thinking usually, unthinkingly, entails.
Professor Farred writes:
“Thinking cannot be divided into ‘native’ and ‘foreign,’ indigenous or imported, proper or improper (sign and signified), Self and Other, white and black; thinking is indefatigably, resolutely, mischievously, indivisible— it leaves out nothing.”
And later:
“The joke is on the Nazi philosopher, because it is his insistence on thinking that enables the black man to rebut the white woman. Heidegger, the anti-Semite who invokes the “Senegalese negro” as a pedagogical prop, puts me, the black man from Southern Africa, in a position to counter a racist question. What could be more paradoxical than that?”
Dr. Farred was beyond generous to record a conversation with Dale and his former lowly B+ student. Here it is for your enjoyment— nay, for your encouragement to think about thinking.
Quotes from our conversation:
It seems to me that the remarkable thing about being a teacher is that one has the opportunity to expose one student, not only to what they don't know, but what the teacher does not know.
But what I realized in retrospect is that having written myself into a corner, I was now free to liberate myself from that corner.
We do not know when we are thinking, so I'm not sure when I'm thinking, but I always have to guard against not thinking, which means that as a teacher, I have to be thinking as somebody who is trying to write as I do frequently on an almost daily basis, I have to be thinking about whether or not I'm thinking… What else is there to do? Or in more explicitly philosophical terms, if I'm not thinking, how am I in the world?
Our work is not to affirm our students, our task, the responsibility imposed upon us, is that we have to allow them to come into thinking. We have to help them to come into thinking. We have to continue to think about thinking by ourselves. And most importantly, we have to ask them this question again and again: How are you to be in the world?
Morrison, as you point out, is a truly remarkable thinker on race. But Morrison's strength, I would argue, derives from the ways in which it is never an explicit object.
I refuse to be circumscribed in my cannons…. So I don't have to make a choice between Morrison or Baldwin on the one hand and Heidegger on the other. There is too little time to do work to be insisting on those distinctions.
But what he wants from us is thinking is an openness toward the world. And that's why… the answers are, as you say, not calculative or prescriptive or preordained. They're unknowable in advance.
I wonder if we haven't, as a profession, lost the joy of not knowing and we're so called upon to be experts all the time, and we're so interested in being, God knows, what's this ugly term? Public. A public intellectual… How about the self, the act of self confrontation?
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