Echo's Curse: Finding a Voice
When I first started university, I was surprised by how seriously they talked about plagiarism; I remember in the first few weeks there were multiple notices about how severely it was treated, how it threatens the chances of completing a degree, and so on. I had never (and have never) felt the desire to plagiarise, but hearing these notices so many times gave me the anxiety that I might somehow do it without realising. In my second week, in the first conversation I had with a lecturer outside classes, I expressed this anxiety and, mostly as a joke, wondered if it would be possible to write (or speak) at all without plagiarising, since the words we use aren’t actually our own. Don’t we have to borrow in order to mean anything at all? (This is like Echo’s curse in the Metamorphoses, ‘to parrot the last few words of the many spoken by others.’1)
Although I am motivated in studying philosophy, I also find myself being held back by what I’d call a kind of stubbornness. I mean that when I am asked to read something that does not ‘speak’ to me, I find it difficult to engage with it at all. And by ‘speak’ I mean to resonate with me, that is to provoke thoughts that feel like possible expressions or extensions of my own self, rather than something I ought to entertain for a moment, just because someone else had entertained them and then thought to write them down. (I wrote before that philosophy is born from a desire, and I suppose that this is a consequence of that fact, namely that philosophies must be desirable.) The same goes for writing: while it is one thing to say something that is true, it is another to say something that is ‘true to oneself’. When I write, I feel a risk of embarrassment at saying something that, while true, is not actually what I myself think.
As I understand them, that anxiety, that stubbornness, and this embarrassment are all concerns related to finding a philosophical voice. The anxiety of plagiarising, for example, is not really about a genuine possibility: my chances of accidentally copying an existing essay are like the chances of a million monkeys accidentally typing out the works of Shakespeare. Rather it is an anxiety over the ownership of my words, or at least the thoughts the words are meant to express. Weirdly enough, in Plato the philosophical voice comes from the outside and does not belong to the philosopher; when Socrates defends himself, he attributes his philosophising to a voice which he takes for a ‘divine or spiritual sign’ that, we might imagine, speaks down to him.2 The voice is a stranger and always instructs Socrates to turn away from what he was about to do. This does not look like self-ownership. Still, it is on the basis of this voice that Socrates is accused of creating new gods and rejecting the old ones, so it at least carries with it a disobedience to conformity.3
There is another way of thinking of philosophical voice as a ‘sign’ without thereby making it divine. Consider what Thoreau says on the first page of Walden:
In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.4
In one way he is right: a lot of writing forgets that, even without the word ‘I’, it necessarily comes from someone and is therefore in the first person in some regard; I take this kind of forgetting to be part of the bad faith of academic philosophy’s devotion to a disinterested, neutral style of communication. At the same time, it is strange that Thoreau should use the word ‘speaking’ given that he is writing; since, when someone speaks, we see their mouth move or hear their voice coming from their body, it is primarily in writing—where the author does not need to be present—that the first person is more easily forgotten. So Austin explains in How to do things with Words that, when the pronoun ‘I’ is not given, speech refers to its speaker ‘by his being the person who does the uttering’ and writing refers to its writer ‘by his appending his signature’.5 My suggestion is that we might understand Socrates’ ‘sign’ in terms of Austin’s ‘signature’, in other words that we might understand philosophical voice as a thread that runs throughout writing and marks it as my own.
Another metaphor that occurs to me is from Kant, who wanted to ensure that experience was consistent enough for us to be able to think things about it, and in so doing argued that
It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.6
And doesn’t the phrase ‘I think’ work like a signature here? Unlike Socrates’ divine voice, which comes from outside and pulls him away from his intentions, Kant’s voice, or the voice he ascribes to us, is absolutely personal (at least as much as the word ‘I’ is) and does not redirect our intentions but rather conditions them. Without this ‘I think’, he explains, my thoughts ‘would be nothing to me’. (It is incriminating, then, that Emerson should say that the modern individual ‘dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.’7) Without my voice, my thoughts are nothing to me because they might well be anyone else’s, and there is thus nothing to make them consistent. When I hope to find a voice in philosophy, then, I am hoping for this kind of ‘I think’ to accompany everything that I say.8
But why? If what I am saying is true, why does it matter in whose voice I am saying it?—This objection counts only if being ‘true’ refers just to the content of what I’m saying. As I said before, finding a voice is concerned with another kind of truth, namely with being true to oneself. Like the truth of content, truth to oneself has a demand on us insofar as we have the ability to say anything we like. If I could not lie or be mistaken, and if I could not help but speak in my own voice, I would not feel the pressure of truth. This pressure must be part of what George Steiner calls the ‘enigmatic enormity’ of our freedom to speak and write how we like, and which he regards as constitutive of who we are:
In root distinction from the leaf, from the animal, man alone can construct and parse the grammar of hope. […] I believe that this capability to say and unsay all, to construct and deconstruct space and time, to beget and speak counter-factuals—‘if Napoleon had commanded in Vietnam’—makes man of man.9
Is it just that freedom makes us human, and that language is the most obviously free thing about us (since, though I am free to move, for instance, I can’t just move anywhere)? Or is it that, since with language we ‘construct and deconstruct’, since we make fictions with it, it takes us out of our natural immediacy and thus makes some—equally fictional?—distinction between animal and human? It seems that, in its invention of hypotheticals and counterfactuals, language gives rise to a need for doubt—which modern philosophy has put right at the middle of human existence—and thus to a need for self-reliance. (Because, as in Descartes, doubt only comes to an end when I rely on the self.) To have my voice, my own ‘I think’, running a thread through everything I write, is to be reliant on myself, and thus not to be incriminated by Emerson’s observation that I quoted above.
Of course, Emerson also—more famously—said that ‘foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’.10 And didn’t I myself refer to finding my voice as making myself consistent? But consider what Emerson actually says: foolish consistency, he explains, leaves a person with nothing to do. In the fear of contradicting what they said yesterday, they keep themselves from saying anything at all today. Foolish consistency is the fear of being misunderstood—of being taken to be wrong. If I contradict what I said yesterday, I accuse myself of being wrong yesterday. I take this to mean, therefore, that a ‘foolish’ consistency is a consistency of the first kind of truth I named—the truth of content, of facts. If I am true to myself, however, I am consistent in my voice; everything I say will carry my ‘signature’, so to speak. To have a consistent voice means that, when I am right (with regard to content and the facts), I mean it wholly; so Emerson says that, when someone is lacking in self-reliance, ‘their every truth is not quite true.’11
So, when I was anxious about accidentally plagiarising, I take it now to mean that I was thinking of philosophy only in terms of what it says, and not of who says it (and why they choose to). And I take my frustration with a lot of academic philosophy to be its neglect of this dimension of writing, which I want to call an ‘ethical’ dimension of writing insofar as it is so concerned with the obligations of honesty and self-relation. At the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel opposes a kind of philosophy that would result in a mere ‘aggregation of little bits and pieces of information’.12 The alternative that he suggests is ‘scientific’, systematic philosophy. I don’t think we have to go so far: philosophy can achieve the kind of consistency and concern and commitment that makes it valuable—and prevents it from being a monotonous accumulation of little arguments and conclusions—by finding its distinct voice, or at least trying to. I am thinking of philosophy as not just written, but underwritten.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), line 361.
Plato, Apology, 31d.
Plato, Euthyphro, 3b.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: Norton, 1966), 1.
J.L. Austin, How to do things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 60.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), B131-2.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’ in Essential Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 142.
Béatrice Longuenesse’s book I, Me, Mine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) makes this line of thought a little more complicated. In the Blue Book Wittgenstein made a distinction between using ‘I’ as a subject (for instance in ‘I have tooth-ache’) and as an object (‘I have a bump on my forehead’), wherein only the second kind of use leaves room for mistakes about who the ‘I’ in question is, about which person it belongs to. Longuenesse thinks the Kantian ‘I think’ is not only of the first, subjective kind, but also that it is even deeper, that it expresses a kind of self-awareness that all uses of ‘I’ as subject involve. In concerns of voice, however, I am concerned because there is room for me to be mistaken, and thus I seem to be taking even ‘I think’ as a use of ‘I’ as an object. Maybe this because of some alienation from oneself—maybe a kind of alienation that occurs in writing—but either way I hope I am excused by using Kant’s idea only analogously.
George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 56.
Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, 138.
Ibid., 137.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §1.